By instinct and necessity, daily newspaper reporters are democratic, inquisitive, and therefore easy to talk to. But there is, as they say, another side of the story, and, wow, was it ever on display last week in two big New York Times profiles of Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman, both of which read as if written by Lieberman’s Senate campaign. Lamont seems likely to lose on Tuesday, and since I’m a Lamont partisan, you’ll assume I’m writing this from sour grapes. But no. Good journalism and civic-republicanism matter more than the outcome of this one contest. Judge for yourself how they’re doing in this one.
According to the two big Times profiles, Ned, “a son of privilege,” can’t be a grounded civic-republican who taught awhile in an inner-city school; and Joe, an independent thinker toughened by the scourging of leftist bloggers and activists who’ve taken over the Democratic Party, can’t have voted for the worst aspects of the Iraq War, the detainee bill, or the mauling of Terry Schiavo. At least the profiles don’t break out of their own fixed ideas enough to report any of these facts.
Lamont, rather, “raised in a well-connected family” and “schooled in training centers of power,” has been “flirting with the possibility of running for major public office” for some time, the Times tells us. But what does that mean? Don’t most Exeter and Harvard grads actually become dray horses for corporate power who, by age 30, can barely finesse a civic-republican idiom? Lamont’s family legacy and personal decisions stand in rather admirable contrast, as I found last month.
The Times profile chose not to understand this and instead rode the “Greenwich millionaire” stereotype relentlessly. I’d told one of its writers to call The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who shared a Vermont farmhouse with Lamont decades ago as they and others worked on a weekly newspaper there. Mayer’s is the one admiring quote that’s not from a “country-club” friend of Lamont’s, but the reporters, apparently obsessed with how many cars he has owned, make clear that he was driving an Audi even in Vermont. Somehow they don’t discover that much more recently he taught poor, nonwhite kids in Bridgeport, for two years, although that may be corrected in a small item between now and Tuesday.
The Times’ Lieberman profile is straight out of the playbook of his old advisor Carter Eskew, who’s quoted twice. Lieberman’s rejection by Democrats has “freed him to do and say exactly what he felt,” reporter Janny Scott tells us. But the question of what, exactly, Lieberman does feel is obliterated by quote after quote asserting that lockstep leftist Democrats have left him, because Joe thinks for himself:
“‘He’s always done whatever he wants to do. Why would anyone expect him at this point to become a good soldier?'”
“‘To his credit, he did run in the primary. And, to his credit, he didn’t trim his sails.'”
“‘The last thing I would have predicted was that, to me, this genuinely spiritual, genuinely likeable guy would arrive at a point at which so many of the leaders of his own party felt insulted by him.'”
“‘I think he came away with a resolve to answer to his country first and his party second.'”
These are representative, from four different speakers. And the other view? Reporter Scott offers that herself, sort-of: “[Lieberman] has long chosen to describe himself as ‘independent-minded’ rather than moderate. That quality has surfaced at every stage of his political career, apparently the product of a combination of upbringing, intellectual orientation, religion, experience, perhaps expediency. Where admirers see a man of deep principles, detractors see an opportunist.”
And the supporting quote from someone to buttress that last assertion? There is none. Anywhere.
But what does Lieberman think when he’s doing all this independent thinking for himself? Not only are there no Schiavo or detainee positions here; there is no evidence Lieberman thinks of anyone besides himself. No reporter asks him how many Connecticut soldiers have died in Iraq, as a Times editor did ask Lamont over dinner. Caught by surprise, Lamont didn’t know. Lieberman must, because a staffer sends out condolences and keeps a list; but would he really be able to answer, if asked on the spot? The Times doesn’t tell, because it didn’t ask.
What’s going on here? A “news side” rebellion against the editorial-page’s Lamont endorsement? An effort to anticipate Lamont’s likely loss to Lieberman? Not at all. Harried reporters, trying to think big, are reminding us that their “first rough draft of history” tends to see breaking news through the rear-view mirror of premises they haven’t time to examine. They work under rushed conditions that prevent them from thinking beyond conventional story lines and cultural mindsets; rather, they have to play to them, collapse things into them, to write something equally rushed readers will understand.
Times journalists didn’t sit in some room wondering, “How can we take down Lamont?” If anything, it was “What makes this guy tick?,” and then they ran around trying to make a horse by committee, grasping at some concept – “son of privilege”; “hardened independent” – that gestures at something in each candidate but buries much of what’s true.
Really these two profiles should be read in their entirety and taught in journalism schools for years to come. They probably won’t be, not least because Lamont may lose, for reasons actually unappreciated in the profiles. For one, Lieberman, in public office since he was 28, feels to many Connecticut residents like an uncle or a comfortable old coat. “I know Joe,” they’ll say, still touched that he patted them on the back once fifteen years ago.
By comparison, Lamont was dry as a stick in debates, even if very decent and principled. He’s been a jejune campaigner, than which there is no greater sin to a savvy reporter. He doesn’t balance an instinct for the avuncular with an instinct for the jugular that would have shredded Lieberman’s folksy charm by hammering on his positions. When Lieberman called last month for doubling the number of troops in Iraq, it seems not to have occurred to Lamont to demand to know if Lieberman was calling to reinstitute the draft, which Joe somehow avoided back in 1967, when he was of age and the Vietnam War was raging.
“Lamont admits he wasn’t ready” to mount that kind of attack. ‘I watched [Lieberman] with Cheney,’ he says of the vice presidential debate six years ago. ‘It was all “My worthy adversary, my esteemed colleague.” It was right out of the House of Lords. Some people say I should have pushed back a little harder, but my nature is my nature.’
“Asked if maybe obnoxious just isn’t his style, he rolls his eyes a bit. He knows where nice guys finish, and it isn’t in the Senate. ‘Oh, I can see the headline now,’ he says. ‘Ned Lamont: Too Decent for Politics.’”
But the preceding two paragraphs are from a Washington Post profile, by David Segal in the paper’s Style section, from back before Lamont won the Democratic primary. Maybe the Times will get there by November 8.
Two events in 2009 suggested a transition from one conversation about the American republic to another. The old conversation, often little better than a shouting match or a dance of snarky repartees, petered out with the passing, at 89, of Irving Kristol, the “godfather” of neo-conservatism. But a different conversation was renewing itself, in a voice coming from the center of the old republic, thanks to Nicholas Thompson’s gripping, stirring book, The Hawk and the Dove.
Writing about the half-century-long rivalry and friendship of arms-race “hawk” Paul Nitze and Cold War strategic “dove” George Kennan, Thompson shows that even bitter antagonists can remain friends if they care more about the civic-republican spirit that is the secret of this country’s true strength than they do about themselves or their grand strategies.
It’s not an obvious or easy truth, but it comes to life thanks to Thompson, a grandson of Paul Nitze, the preeminent arms-race “hawk” of the Cold War. In the 1970s, Nitze strode arm in arm with neo-conservatives in their Committee on the Present Danger, inflating the Soviet threat out of proportion to reality at a time when, as we now know, the USSR was beginning to implode. If Thompson were a tribalistic, filopietistic neo-con himself, he’d launch into a pugnacious defense of his often-militaristic forebear. And he would cast George Kennan, the apostle of Cold War “containment,” as the sinister, anti-American foil that many neo-cons did make of him and others who opposed their grand plans.
Irving Kristol made foils of liberals this way even while writing about Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist hysteria in 1952. He acknowledged the senator’s vulgar demagoguery yet added darkly that “the American people” knew well that McCarthy, “like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they know no such thing.”
Nicholas Thompson has something deeper in mind and at heart than writing such shaming, insinuating prose, which became a hall-mark of neo-conservative propaganda, as it had been of the Communist variety in Kristol’s youth. Thompson is intent upon telling a truer, more instructive story of two patriots, each annealed in a civic-republican discipline stronger and more supple than anything Kristol ever truly absorbed.
While Nitze grew up in comfortable circumstances (his father was a distinguished philologist at the University of Chicago), Kennan grew up almost poor after his mother died when he was an infant. Yet both men attended civic-republican training schools (Kennan the Midwestern St. John’s Military Academy, Nitze the elite Hotchkiss preparatory school in northwestern Connecticut) whose brooks seemed to bubble with moral instruction and whose eight-man river rowing taught that self-denial for the common good requires first a self that has been made strong enough to deny.
These schools encouraged self-scrutiny, plain living and high thinking, an understated felicity of expression, a quiet readiness to shoulder responsibility without reward, and a capacity to bear pain with grace (if only because spiritual grace was thereby assured.) A characteristic self-deprecating humor deflected others’ envy. The term “character” is ridiculed these days as shorthand for elite breeding, but these lean, bonded boys honed not only the bookish but also the kinetic and moral intelligence that counts for more than the mere “merit” or distinction whose attainment so preoccupied so many neo-conservatives.
Neither Kennan nor Nitze really took his civic training to heart while undergoing it: Kennan was rather too introspective and bookish, Nitze boisterous and rebellious. But something of these schools’ pedagogy took root and tempered each man’s pride and resentments in ways that would benefit the country: It left each man knowing throughout life that his strategic differences with the other weren’t as profound as their shared commitment to a republican strength that no “national defense” policy can nurture or ultimately even defend.
“They often inspired or enraged each other with their ideas,” Thompson writes. “They did, however, greatly respect each other and admire each other’s seriousness of purpose, demeanor, and dedication. They realized they shared an uncommon endurance. They also shared a similar fate: neither reached his ultimate ambitions, while many lesser men reached the positions of influence [Secretary of State or Defense] to which they both aspired.”
“My research revealed two very different men who nevertheless shared a commitment to the United States and to their very different ways of serving it,” Thompson also notes, and he carries that commitment forward himself in a way that gives it brighter prospects.
Such a commitment need not be elitist or naive, as aristocratic indulgences often are. A civic republican resists “solidarity” with either left or right yet draws from both, knowing that both have valid claims to certain truths: The left knows the necessity of public planning and sustenance for the village that raises the child; without it, the individual dignity and traditions that conservatives cherish would never flourish. The right knows the equally important truth that without irreducibly personal responsibility and initiative, even the best leftist social engineering can turn people into clients, cogs, or worse.
A good society, like a healthy person, strides on both feet — the left of social provision, the right of personal responsibility — without worrying whether all its weight is on one or the other foot at any given instant in a balanced stride. But ideologues of the left and right try to strengthen one foot at the expense of the other until it swells, each side clinging to its “own” truth until it becomes a half-truth that curdles into a lie, leaving it right only about how the other is wrong.
Thompson understands this, and he illustrates it by describing the somewhat-unlikely tributes Nitze and Kennan tendered each other, after decades of strategic rivalry, when Nitze dropped his arms-race work for a day to attend Kennan’s 80th birthday party in 1984, at one of the tensest moments in the arms race.
Raising his glass, Nitze said, “George Kennan taught us to approach issue of policy, not just from the narrow immediate interest of the United States, but from a longer-range viewpoint that included the culture and interests of others, including our opponents, and a proper regard for the interests of mankind.”
As Thompson tells it, “Kennan rose to respond: the main lesson he had learned from Nitze, he said, was that when one disagreed with government, ‘it may be best to soldier on, and to do what one can to make the things you believe in come out right.'”
Kennan wasn’t counseling a lockstep or “old school” loyalty without integrity. He was invoking a subtler, more tensile strength that’s necessary to sustain both realism and principle in a world of imperfect institutions. But how and when to do that? Reading Thompson reinforces my belief that Kennan, although he was no democrat, understood better than Nitze that power flows not from top-down command but from bottom-up cooperation and from a voluntary acceptance of necessary authority that comes from democratic deliberation itself.
Thompson’s account also shows that both men understood that the discipline that citizens bring to their deliberations can come only, if at all, from a civic culture that doesn’t rely on statist surveillance and coercion. Rather, it nurtures people’s trust in one another and trains them to cooperate in ways that become second-nature.
If, in contrast, a society has to rely on state enforcement to preserve “freedom,” and if it surrenders its deliberative disciplines to a seductive, predatory consumer marketing and dog-eat-dog materialism, its freedom will be lost and, with it, the strength to take a blow from outside. Neo-cons are constitutionally unable to see this, because so little in their own historical memories, and therefore their temperaments, seems to confirm it.
Reading Thompson, I’m also drawn to Kennan’s peculiar convictions, and writerly temperament — and even to some of his insecurities, prejudices, and Gibbonesque despair of the republic — though not to his anti-democratic biases. I also understand Nitze better and respect his record at least marginally more than I did before.
I’ve been able to reach these conclusions because Thompson’s rendering of Kennan is as compelling, fair, and even sympathetic as is his portrait of his grandfather, whom he knew and loved until his death, when Thompson was 24. This book, then, is more than an effort to give a grandfather his due (or, as some will see it, more than his due) by pairing him with Kennan, whom people like me are inclined to admire more. Thompson is willing to risk my concluding that his grandfather suffers a bit in the comparison, because his true purpose is to present each man’s interaction with the other — and with world events and powers — in a way that strengthens the civic-republican culture that is the real if elusive protagonist of the book:
“The two men were equally influential and equally important, yet vastly different. Nitze was the diligent insider, Kennan the wise outsider; Nitze the doer, Kennan the thinker. Kennan designed America’s policy for the Cold War, and Nitze mastered it. With respect to America’s ability to shape the world, Nitze was an idealist and Kennan a realist. In their old age, Nitze still wanted to win the Cold War, and Kennan wanted to be done with it. Their views overlapped at strange and crucial moments; but for most of their working lives, they disagreed profoundly. In [a] <em>New Yorker</em> article published just before his eightieth birthday party, Kennan had indirectly criticized Nitze — who marked the piece up vigorously and also sent a letter to a mutual friend complaining that the argument showed a ‘complete separation from fact and logic.'”
Thompson doesn’t rest with this quasi-poetic and perhaps pat balancing act. He complicates it with nuances and unexpected details as he unfolds each man’s life. He never polemicizes or debates. He draws contradictory currents of perception and principle together, not as Kristol or Norman Podhoretz would, in order to swamp their enemies, but to show how the currents actually converged and buffeted one another in historical tides that always confound ideologues who think they can channel them.
Writing a book such as this takes formidable civic-republican strength, even a steely, sometimes chilly courage. It’s a strength young neo-conservatives lack because their faith in the republic is over-matched by their insecurities. Thompson’s writerly strength is palpable in spare, unadorned prose that is the more eloquent for declining to call attention to itself — an old WASP virtue that runs back to the poetry on the 18th-century gravestones standing a hundred yards from me as I write this on a weekend in western Massachusetts, where Kennan’s ancestors settled in Puritan times.
Thompson’s rendering is so well balanced (and maybe also ironic) that he even gives us a younger and wiser Norman Podhoretz’s observation in 1968 — in a rare moment of agreement with Kennan, who’d just written a condemnation of student militants and hippies — that Kennan’s voice is “an old-fashioned voice: cultivated, gentlemanly, poised, self-assured. There is strength in it, there is serenity in it, there is solidity in it, there is authority in it – but not the kind of authority that can easily be associated with repressiveness.” That’s not the kind of authority that Podhoretz’s own more clamorous and churlish writing has ever achieved.
Thompson not only appreciates Kennan’s quiet authority; he radiates it himself. He’s not yet Kennan’s equal as a writer, and I’m not an historian of the period who can second-guess his decisions about what to show us and how. But Nicholas Thompson has delivered a book that’s not just a labor of love; it’s a vindication of a tradition of civic-republican comity that can’t be coerced but is quietly stronger than anything the republic’s noisier claimants offer in this frightening, polarizing time.
I’m not satisfied with public discussion of the Tuscon horror. Years ago, I learned from another such massacre, on the Long Island Railroad, that deranged loners like Jared Loughner may be tuned in more acutely than the rest of us to a society’s subliminal signals and that when those undercurrents of fear and hatred are surfaced by impresarios of ethno-racial grievance, the deranged may be only the first to act on them.
I don’t know a lot about building construction, but I do know that, even in this wireless age, new wiring is still being woven into “smart buildings” in ways and for reasons most of us never see or think about. That’s true, too of a society’s subliminal currents — its fears, hatreds, its not-so-grand narratives: They’re always being channeled, sluiced, and tapped into by people who ride and weave them in ways most others don’t stop to imagine.
That’s why Pima county Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was right to say, apropos the Tuscon massacre, that “the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous.”
Those last four words matter: While no good prosecutor would posit a legal connection between the unwired delusions of Loughner and the routinized delusions of Sharon “Second Amendment remedies” Angle or Tea Party demonstrators at congressional town meetings, the truth remains that deranged loners, though separated from us in many ways, are bound into our subconscious hatreds and fears more intimately than the law can acknowledge and most of us care to admit.
Yes, reporters and pundits often draw such connections too quickly. “When disaster strikes,” notes T. A. Frank in The New Republic, journalists “have to …. take mental shortcuts, calling up established narratives… for new and more ambiguous facts.”
I noted similarly almost 15 years ago, in Liberal Racism, that reporters, “[p]lunged daily into a torrent of actors and events out of which they must make some sense on a deadline,… use whatever story lines or narratives are already in their heads or easily at hand.”
But while Frank is criticizing liberal journalists for taking a cue from Sheriff Dupnik to blame Loughner’s hatred on conservatives, I was criticizing them for letting well-worn narratives of black victimhood eclipse a more direct connection: between the 1993 shooting rampage of deranged black loner Colin Ferguson against 25 white Long island Rail Road passengers, six of whom died, and a black radio station, WLIB.
Ferguson was an avid listener to the station, whose morning talk show hosts were spewing so much racial bile at that time, including metaphorical death threats against white journalists, that Nat Hentoff wrote station owner Percy Sutton to ask if he’d ever thought what would happen if some deranged loner took the rhetoric seriously. Sutton didn’t respond and the rhetoric rolled on.
So far, we’ve seen no similarly likely connection between Loughner’s delusional fear that government is controlling our grammar and Angle’s call for “Second Amendment remedies” or Tea Partiers’ delusional demand that government take its hands off their Medicaid. But those of us who aren’t actually prosecuting Loughner and want to track the Tuscon massacre’s extralegal undercurrents or wiring don’t need to prove a legal or policy connection.
All we need to show is what Dupnik showed: that our public sphere is crackling with incitements to violent hatred of government and that Loughner probably picked up such signals in his own weird way before ranting against and then shooting government officials.
In 1985, the black poet Julius Lester noted presciently, nine years before Colin Ferguson shot those commuters, that violent rhetoric such as Louis Farrakhan’s at that time was “subtly but surely creating an atmosphere in America where hatreds of all kinds will be easier to express openly, and one day, in some as yet unknown form, those hatreds will ride commuter trains into the suburbs. By then it will be too late for us all.” (Lester’s comments and mine are on the second item on the pdf I’ve linked here.)
Ferguson’s deed underscored the extra-legal truth that — again — some psychotics are tuned in more acutely than the rest of us to a society’s subliminal signals and that, if those undercurrents of fear and hatred are surfaced by impresarios of ethno-racial grievance, the deranged may be only the first to act on them. That truth was also bared in the lethal rage of former Brooklyn resident Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer on the West Bank only months after Ferguson’s rampage.
The violent congressional town hall meetings of 2009, too, reminded me of some violent white leftist (as well as segregationist) histrionics of the 1960s. In his book The Sixties, Todd Gitlin recalls some young radicals’ belief 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….”
Including, as I recall quite vividly, anything having to do with government.
“No alternative theory or action crystallized from the murk of the collective despair,” Gitlin wrote. “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?” By Gitlin’s estimate, 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.”
What matters now isn’t that we establish lethal symmetries among leftist terrorists, black or white, and right-wing militias, or that we prove Loughner was glued to Fox News. What matters is public recognition that, in all such cases, a politics that turns on allusions and provocations to killing portends the death of politics.
The angels of that death aren’t always as composed (or, as “heroic”) as Weatherman member Kathy Boudin or the racist militia-bomber Timothy McVeigh. Just as often, they’re as fallen and tormented as a Charles Manson, a Colin Ferguson, or a Jared Loughner. It’s they whom Angle and Palin are provoking, intentionally or not.
Palin and her enablers — one of whom, William Kristol, once applauded warnings like mine against the smooth-talking fanatics who handed Colin Ferguson his bloody script — can’t dodge all blame and self-scrutiny. Nor, I should think, can anyone deny that there are capitalist and spiritualist dimensions to that wiring beneath the law that will have to be reckoned with in ways that neither left nor right have done all that well.
No institution or movement is so wise and effective that it doesn’t need scrutiny and self-criticism, and, returning from a month in Tel Aviv, I feel an irrepressible need to offer TPMCafe a bit of both. Of the last 200 posts here, which take us back to early April, 43 are about Israel. (Three of them are mine.) But just one, by Jon Taplin on June 7, is about a little war in Afghanistan that’s draining our country’s strength and morale at least as much as AIPAC and Benjamin Netanyahu are endangering it.
My own last post on Afghanistan was in November and was basically just a link to a prescient Dissent magazine piece about neo-cons’ doe-eyed raptures over Washington’s promises to do more for civil society in Kandahar and Kabul than it has ever done in New Orleans or Detroit. The American venture in Afghanistan has become a blood-sucking folly that’s running deeper than even the hypocrisy of Max Boot and David Brooks, who’ve discovered noble success in our nation-building strategies there that they’ve never found in any such strategies here.
To its great credit, TPMCafe’s contributors on the domestic front have overwhelmed the neo-cons’ ignorance and dishonesty about America’s economic and social crises. Just scroll down and look. But notice also that, in foreign policy, it’s almost all Israel, all the time. I don’t say that our 43 posts on Israel shouldn’t have been written. I simply ask why there haven’t been 43 on Afghanistan, too. The situation in Israel is dangerous, indeed, fateful, for the United States and much of the world. But there are other, equal dangers, not least in the Muslim world, where a solution to the Israel-Palestine problem would actually solve far, far less than we tend to think.
Let the self-correction begin with the following words by Bob Herbert from yesterday’s New York Times. I don’t agree with him that we should just leave Afghanistan, but I do share his anger at our neglect of what this war has been doing to our fellow citizens and our civil society, not to mention to our foreign-policy options in the Middle East. Why isn’t all this pulling more of us at TPM into debate about the war in Afghanistan as powerfully as something else is conscripting some of us into Israel’s conflict with Palestine and America’s with Israel?
The heart has its reasons, and some of them are deeply compelling, even urgent ones that I certainly don’t need to reprise here. Moreover, everyone is entitled to his or her own interests and areas of expertise. Many contributors have earned it, the hard way, and they have valuable insights to share. Still, the stark disparity here at TPMCafe may be worth noting and its consequences worth weighing. Here is Herbert:
“There is no good news coming out of the depressing and endless war in Afghanistan. There once was merit to our incursion there, but that was long ago. Now we’re just going through the tragic motions, flailing at this and that, with no real strategy or decent end in sight.
“The U.S. doesn’t win wars anymore. We just funnel the stressed and underpaid troops in and out of the combat zones, while all the while showering taxpayer billions on the contractors and giant corporations that view the horrors of war as a heaven-sent bonanza. BP, as we’ve been told repeatedly recently, is one of the largest suppliers of fuel to the wartime U.S. military.
“Seven American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on Monday but hardly anyone noticed. Far more concern is being expressed for the wildlife threatened by the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico than for the G.I.’s being blown up in the wilds of Afghanistan.
“Early this year, we were told that at long last the tide had turned in Afghanistan, that the biggest offensive of the war by American, British and Afghan troops was under way in Marja, a town in Helmand Province in the southern part of the country. The goal, as outlined by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our senior military commander in Afghanistan, was to rout the Taliban and install a splendid new government that would be responsive to the people and beloved by them.
“That triumph would soon be followed by another military initiative in the much larger expanse of neighboring Kandahar Province. The Times’s Rod Nordland explained what was supposed to happen in a front-page article this week:
“’The goal that American planners originally outlined — often in briefings in which reporters agreed not to quote officials by name — emphasized the importance of a military offensive devised to bring all of the populous and Taliban-dominated south under effective control by the end of this summer. That would leave another year to consolidate gains before President Obama’s July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing combat troops.’
“Forget about it. Commanders can’t even point to a clear-cut success in Marja. As for Kandahar, no one will even use the word “offensive” to describe the military operations there. The talk now is of moving ahead with civilian reconstruction projects, a “civilian surge,” as Mr. Nordland noted.
“What’s happening in Afghanistan is not only tragic, it’s embarrassing. The American troops will fight, but the Afghan troops who are supposed to be their allies are a lost cause. The government of President Hamid Karzai is breathtakingly corrupt and incompetent — and widely unpopular to boot. And now, as The Times’s Dexter Filkins is reporting, the erratic Mr. Karzai seems to be giving up hope that the U.S. can prevail in the war and is making nice with the Taliban.
“There is no overall game plan, no real strategy or coherent goals, to guide the fighting of U.S. forces. It’s just a mind-numbing, soul-chilling, body-destroying slog, month after month, year after pointless year. The 18-year-olds fighting (and, increasingly, dying) in Afghanistan now were just 9 or 10 when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked in 2001.
“Americans have zoned out on this war. They don’t even want to think about it. They don’t want their taxes raised to pay for it, even as they say in poll after poll that they are worried about budget deficits. The vast majority do not want their sons or daughters anywhere near Afghanistan.
“Why in the world should the small percentage of the population that has volunteered for military service shoulder the entire burden of this hapless, endless effort? The truth is that top American officials do not believe the war can be won but do not know how to end it. So we get gibberish about empowering the unempowerable Afghan forces and rebuilding a hopelessly corrupt and incompetent civil society.
“Our government leaders keep mouthing platitudes about objectives that are not achievable, which is a form of deception that should be unacceptable in a free society.
“In announcing, during a speech at West Point in December, that 30,000 additional troops would be sent to Afghanistan, President Obama said: ‘As your commander in chief, I owe you a mission that is clearly defined and worthy of your service.’
“That clearly defined mission never materialized.
“Ultimately, the public is at fault for this catastrophe in Afghanistan, where more than 1,000 G.I.’s have now lost their lives. If we don’t have the courage as a people to fight and share in the sacrifices when our nation is at war, if we’re unwilling to seriously think about the war and hold our leaders accountable for the way it is conducted, if we’re not even willing to pay for it, then we should at least have the courage to pull our valiant forces out of it.
1. The more the Roman Catholic hierarchy resembles a Congregation for the Propagation of Coercive Fondling, the less credibly it clothes what the late Father Richard John Neuhaus called “the naked public square.” The next time some politically presumptuous bishop says he won’t give communion to a pro-choicer (like John Kerry in 2004), ask him if he’s stopped letting child molesters give communion to anyone else.
2. The longer that Israel is held hostage by the Bible-thumping, “full Israel” zealots in Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, the more the slogan “Never again!” will remind us that, in peace-making with Palestinians, today’s Israelis never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
So much for religion in politics, eh? Well, not quite. These are tragedies, not occasions for the tongue-clucking and schadenfreude that some of us secular liberals are quietly indulging. Here’s why it’s too easy to survey the would-be theocrats in Rome, Jerusalem, Gaza, Tehran, and Kabul and say, “So much for religion.”
We’d also have to survey how the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., a seminary student named John Lewis, and poor, black churchgoers managed to walk, trembling, into Southern squares, dressed in their threadbare Sunday best, to face fire hoses, dogs, prison, and, for all they knew, death.
We’d have to ask how hundreds of fire fighters and cops on 9/11 — many of them brought up in Catholic Youth Organization sports teams, with an old parish sense of right and wrong – could rush toward death, not to take lives but to save them, at the risk and cost of their own. I suspect that some of these people’s hearts are breaking over the church scandals and that they’re feeling demoralized and outraged.
We’d have to ask about the courage and impressive dignity in the multitudes who took to the streets of Tehran last June to strip bare the pretensions of theocrats. They were able to do it because, like our civil rights marchers and Gandhi’s followers, they meant to redeem their faith from ecclesiastical overlords who have broken their hearts, too, as well as their bones.
But not their spirits. “This paradoxical relation between the possible and the impossible in history proves that the frame of history is wider than the nature-time in which it is grounded,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, who ran as a socialist for New York State Senate in 1932. “The injunction of Christ – ‘Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul,’ (Matthew 10:28) neatly indicates the dimension of human existence which transcends the basis which human life and history have in nature.”
In his compelling and profoundly moving A Stone of Hope, the historian David Chappell notes that King absorbed Niebuhr’s writings as a divinity student in the early 1950s. Both knew that Marxism’s secular eschatology claimed a similar transcendence; many died for it. But Communism became even more Power-mad than the Church. (I reviewed John Patrick Diggins’ book, Why Niebuhr Now?, in Bookforum in 2011.)
“How many [military] divisions has the Pope?” Stalin once quipped. Stalin’s ideological heirs got an answer in 1989, Pope John Paul II landed in Warsaw and was met by a million people, who soon brought down the regime. More recently, though, the Polish parliament underscored the underside of religion in politics by passing a resolution declaring Christ the country’s king.
The operative lesson, as I wrote here during the marches in Tehran last summer, is that while religion is dangerous and odious when it tries to rule in states, it often proves indispensable as an inspiration to a body politic, especially to insurgencies against tremendous odds. Without its strength, republics falter, but when faith oversteps its bounds, they are lost.
Let me say a bit more concerning Israel and the Jews. Judaism is the religion of an inflected nationalism that often rejects some of what nationalism usually claims – namely, sacred ties to “blood and soil.” The Hebrew word ivry–close to the Hebrew word for Hebrew–means “he crossed over,” denoting Abraham’s separating himself from all he’d loved in response to God’s command.
Abraham’s loneliness — smashing his community’s old idols, preparing to sacrifice his son — sometimes approached existential grandeur. But, taking the sublimity of man’s distance from God straight up, the ancient Hebrew liturgy turned natural beauty into a metaphor of man’s futility: “He is as the fragile potsherd, as the grass that withers, as the flower that fades, as a fleeting shadow, as a passing cloud, as a wind that blows, as the floating dust, yea, and even as a dream that vanishes.” (Yom Kippur liturgy.)
Where Hellenism united love and beauty with nature in timeless cycles and embraces the world as it is, Judaism forces the imagination away from graven images and toward action for ends that haven’t been attained yet on earth. It finds beauty in the arc of the deed that pursues justice across time.
As the Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel puts it, the human subject begins to identify its own purposes with the transformation of a world that is not indifferent to its efforts. Abraham’s grandson Jacob wrestles with an angel all night, trying to wrest truth from God; at dawn the angel names him Yisrael, which in Hebrew means, “He wrestles with God.”
Many of us do something like that when we seek a trans-historical significance in our deeds. Puritans did it all the time, seeding the American experiment by emulating Hebrews explicitly. (Hence the Hebrew on the seals of Yale and Dartmouth, which they founded.)
But to cope with the vast unknown it had opened between man and God and between present and future, the ancient Hebrew religion fostered the nationalism of a people pursued by a mysterious, irascible Interlocutor. In the Bible and subsequently, Abraham’s nation is sundered early and often from its Promised Land because its territorial claims turn out to be contingent on keeping a covenant to pursue spiritual and moral ends.
That gives this inflected nation a strange, new orientation on earth: “The Jewish nation is the nation of time, in a sense which cannot be said of any other nation,” observed the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich:
“It represents the permanent struggle between time and space. . . . It has a tragic fate when considered as a nation of space like every other nation, but as the nation of time, because it is beyond the circle of life and death it is beyond tragedy.
“The people of time . . . cannot avoid being persecuted because by their very existence they break the claim of the gods of space, who express themselves in will to power, imperialism, injustice, demonic enthusiasm, and tragic self-destruction.
“The gods of space, who are strong in every human soul, in every race and nation, are afraid of the Lord of Time, history, and justice, are afraid of his prophets and followers.”
Tillich is noting that, from its biblical beginnings, this tribe coheres through its unprecedented negation of what’s usually tribal and through its imaginative, sometimes brilliant defiance of what the lords of space and power demand.
By that truly biblical standard, the Jewish religious zealots who are grasping at power and molesting Palestinians gratuitously through Netanyahu’s government are preparing to sunder their people from the land again. They charge that Israel’s secular liberals have broken the covenant. But so have they, like the ancient temple priests, like the Roman Catholic priests, and like the mullahs in Gaza and Tehran.
Yes, there are many differences. But my operative principle holds: While religion is dangerous and odious when it tries to rule in states, it’s indispensable as an inspiration to the body politic, especially to insurgencies against what seem overwhelming odds. Without its strength, republics falter, but when it oversteps its bounds, they are lost.
The growing disgrace and isolation of Israel’s blindest supporters and the Church’s most arrogant priests should be understood as an overdue corrective, but it’s nothing for us liberals to celebrate or be smug about. You don’t have to be a Puritan to understand that it reflects a corruption in the human heart that we have to fight all the time.
As we try to make sense of the Republican presidential candidates’ debate, and of Barack Obama’s long belated, once-bumped, high-stakes speech on jobs – it might help to read George Soros’ frightening assessment of the American public sphere. Too few noticed his warning when he published it last June, perhaps because he made the tactical error in burying the best of it a self-referential account of his early life and philanthropic goals.
I did notice it, though, because only a month earlier I’d published my own account of the collapse of our public sphere, “American Journalism in the Coils of Ressentiment, in a post that many also missed because I, too, made the tactical error of burying its best insights in a long review of William McGowan’s New York Times-bashing book.
Fortunately, Justin Peters, managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, rescued my essay from blogoblivion. Heartened, I sent it to Soros, whose minions responded with a form letter explaining that he’s preoccupied. No matter; now you can ponder these excerpts about the scary predicament we’re all in:
________________________________
George Soros, New York Review of Books, 6/2011:
“The United States has been a democracy and open society since its founding. The idea that it will cease to be one seems preposterous; yet it is a very likely prospect. After September 11, the Bush administration exploited the very real fear generated by the terrorist attack, and by declaring “war on terror” was able to unite the nation behind the commander-in-chief, lead it to invade Iraq on false pretenses, and violate established standards of human rights….
“The war on terror forced me to reconsider the concept of open society. My experiences in the former Soviet Union had already taught me that the collapse of a closed society does not automatically lead to an open one; the collapse may be seemingly bottomless, to be followed by the emergence of a new regime that has a greater resemblance to the regime that collapsed than to an open society. Now I had to probe deeper into the concept of open society that I had adopted from Karl Popper in my student days, and I discovered a flaw in it.
“Popper had argued that free speech and critical thinking would lead to better laws and a better understanding of reality than any dogma. I came to realize that there was an unspoken assumption embedded in his argument, namely that the purpose of democratic discourse is to gain a better understanding of reality. [But] if thinking has a manipulative function as well as a cognitive one, then it may not be necessary to gain a better understanding of reality in order to obtain the laws one wants. There is a shortcut: “spinning” arguments and manipulating public opinion to get the desired results.
“Today our political discourse is primarily concerned with getting elected and staying in power. Popper’s hidden assumption that freedom of speech and thought will produce a better understanding of reality is valid only for the study of natural phenomena. Extending it to human affairs is part of what I have called the “Enlightenment fallacy.”
“As it happened, the political operatives of the Bush administration became aware of the Enlightenment fallacy long before I did. People like me, misguided by that fallacy, believed that the propaganda methods described in George Orwell’s 1984 could prevail only in a dictatorship. They knew better. Frank Luntz, the well-known right-wing political consultant, proudly acknowledged that he used 1984 as his textbook in designing his catchy slogans. And Karl Rove reportedly claimed that he didn’t have to study reality; he could create it.
“The adoption of Orwellian techniques gave the Republican propaganda machine a competitive advantage in electoral politics. The other side has tried to catch up with them but has been hampered by a lingering attachment to the pursuit of truth.
“Deliberately misleading propaganda techniques can destroy an open society. Nazi propaganda methods were powerful enough to destroy the Weimar Republic. Different but in some ways similar methods have been used in the United States and further refined. Although democracy has much deeper roots in America than in Germany, it is not immune to deliberate deception, as the Bush administration demonstrated…. .
“How can open society protect itself against dangerously deceptive arguments? Only by recognizing their existence and their power to influence reality by influencing people’s perceptions. People’s thinking is part of the reality they need to understand, and that makes the understanding of reality much harder than the philosophers of the Enlightenment imagined. They envisioned reason as something apart from reality, acting as a searchlight illuminating it.
“That is true for natural science but not human affairs. In political discourse we must learn to give precedence to the understanding of reality; otherwise the results will fail to conform to our expectations. Karl Popper took it for granted that the primary purpose of political discourse is the pursuit of truth. That is not the case now; therefore we must make it …. an explicit requirement for open society to prevail.
“I thought I had a convincing argument in favor of the truth. Look at the results of the Bush policies: they were designed to demonstrate America’s supremacy, and they achieved the exact opposite; American power and influence suffered a precipitous decline. This goes to show, I argued, that it is not enough to manipulate perceptions; it is important to understand how the world really works. In other words, the cognitive function must take precedence over the manipulative function….
“The election of President Obama in 2008 sent a powerful message to the world that the US is capable of radically changing course when it recognizes that it is on the wrong track. But the change was temporary: his election and inauguration were the high points of his presidency. Already the reelection of President Bush had convinced me that the malaise in American society went deeper than incompetent leadership. The American public was unwilling to face harsh reality and was positively asking to be deceived by demanding easy answers to difficult problems.
“The fate of the Obama presidency reinforced that conviction. Obama assumed the presidency in the midst of a financial crisis whose magnitude few people appreciated, and he was not among those few. But he did recognize that the American public was averse to facing harsh realities and he had great belief in his own charismatic powers….
“Consequently, he was reluctant to forthrightly blame the outgoing administration and went out of his way to avoid criticism and conflict. He resorted to what George Akerlof and Robert Shiller called the “confidence multiplier” in their influential book Animal Spirits. Accordingly, in the hope of moderating the recession, he painted a rosier picture of the economic situation than was justified.
“The tactic worked in making the recession shorter and shallower than would have been the case otherwise, but it had disastrous political consequences. The confidence multiplier is, in effect, one half of a reflexive feedback loop: a positive influence on people’s perceptions can have a positive feedback in its effects on the underlying economic reality. But if reality, for example the unemployment rate, fails to live up to expectations, confidence turns to disappointment and anger; that is the other half of the reflexive feedback loop, and that is what came to pass.
“The electorate showed little appreciation of Obama for moderating the recession because it was hardly aware of what he had done. By avoiding conflict Obama handed the initiative to the opposition, and the opposition had no incentive to cooperate. The Republican propaganda machine was able to convince people that the financial crisis was due to government failure, not market failure….
“The Republicans had good reason to take this line: it is a half-truth that advanced their political agenda. What is surprising is the extent of their success. The explanation lies partly in the power of Orwell’s Newspeak and partly in the aversion of the public to facing harsh realities.
“On the one hand, Newspeak is extremely difficult to contradict because it incorporates and thereby preempts its own contradiction, as when Fox News calls itself fair and balanced. Another trick is to accuse your opponent of the behavior of which you are guilty, like Fox News accusing me of being the puppet master of a media empire. Skillful practitioners always attack the strongest point of their opponent, like the Swiftboat ads attacking John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. Facts do not provide any protection, and rejecting an accusation may serve to have it repeated; but ignoring it can be very costly, as John Kerry discovered in the 2004 election.
“On the other hand, the pursuit of truth has lost much of its appeal. When reality is unpleasant, illusions offer an attractive escape route. In difficult times unscrupulous manipulators enjoy a competitive advantage over those who seek to confront reality. Nazi propaganda prevailed in the Weimar Republic because the public had been humiliated by military defeat and disoriented by runaway inflation. In its own quite different way, the American public has been subjected to somewhat comparable experiences, first by the terrorist attacks of September 11, and then by the financial crisis ….. With the rise of China occurring concurrently, the shift in power and influence has been dramatic.
“The two trends taken together–the reluctance to face harsh reality coupled with the refinement in the techniques of deception–explain why America is failing to meet the requirements of an open society. Apparently, a society needs to be successful in order to remain open.
“What can we do to preserve and reinvigorate open society in America? First, I should like to see efforts to help the public develop an immunity to Newspeak. Those who have been exposed to it from Nazi or Communist times have an allergic reaction to it; but the broad public is highly susceptible.
“Second, I should like to convince the American public of the merits of facing harsh reality…..
“But improving the quality of political discourse is not enough. We must also find the right policies to deal with the very real problems confronting the country: high unemployment and chronic budget and trade deficits. The financing of state and local governments is heading for a breakdown…..
“We need to undertake a profound rethinking of the workings of our political system and recognize that half-truths are misleading. The fact that your opponent is wrong does not make you right. We must come to terms with the fact that we live in an inherently imperfect society in which both markets and government regulations are bound to fall short of perfection. The task is to reduce the imperfections and make both private enterprise and government work better. That is the message I should like to find some way to deliver.”
________________
And why do so many Americans want to be deceived? Soros gives part of the answer. Here’s another part:
Jim Sleeper, Talking Points Memo, May 11, 2011:
“The word ressentiment (in French it’s pronounced “ruh-sohn-tee-mohn”) refers to a syndrome, a public psychopathology, in which gnawing insecurities, envy, and hatreds that had been nursed by many people in private converge in public, presenting themselves as noble crusades in scary social eruptions that diminish their participants even in seeming to make them big.
“In ressentiment, the little-big man seeks “easy” enemies on whom to wreak vengeance for frustrations that are only half-acknowledged because they come from his exploitation by powers he fears to face head-on. Ressentiment warps the little-big man’s assessments of the hardships and opportunities before him. It shapes the disguises that he tries on in order to pursue vindication without incurring reproach — at least until there are enough of him (and her, of course) to step out together en masse, with a Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin.
“Whether ressentiment erupts in a medieval Catholic Inquisition, a Puritan or McCarthyite witch hunt, a Maoist Cultural Revolution, or nihilist extremes of “people’s liberation movements” or political correctness, its most telling symptoms are paranoia and routinized bursts of hysteria. These gusts of collective passion touch many raw nerves under the ministrations of demagogues and an increasingly surreal journalism that prepares the way for them by brutalizing public discourse.
“These movements’ legitimate grievances often goad them to a fleeting brilliance, but they soon curdle and collapse, tragi-comically or catastrophically, on their own cowardice, ignorance, and lies…. Surreal journalism… — sometimes smooth, sometimes loud — softens up the public sphere for something much worse. Both left and right have credible claims on certain republican truths, and, at any historical moment, one side’s claims may be the more liberating in its uphill struggle against the other side’s institutionalized premises and cant. But each side tends to cling to its own truths so tightly that they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other is wrong.
“Usually, these one-sided surges crest with the support of less than a majority of the population, and then they recede. They certainly recede in a basically sound society, which, like a healthy person, strides on both a left foot and a right one, without stopping to notice that at any one instant, all of the body’s weight is on one and not the other. A good society needs a left foot of social provision for equality — without which neither the individuality nor the communal values that conservatives cherish could flourish — and a right foot of irreducibly personal liberty and responsibility, without which even the most brilliant social engineering would reduce persons to clients, cogs, or worse.
“When left or right get stuck in their imagined upswings, it’s because those who’ve been harnessed to them out of ressentiment clamor to shift all the society’s weight onto one foot until it swells almost beyond repair. The morphology of one’s mindset doesn’t change with this kind of “flip” from left to right, or vice-versa: The real problem, George Orwell wrote, is “the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.”
“That’s what accounts for the uncanny resemblance of so much American conservative opinion journalism to the Stalinist kind that Orwell exposed when he wrote Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, and 1984.
“The tactics and tropes of today’s neo-conservatives mirror uncannily those recounted with rueful humor in The Age of Suspicion, by my cousin James Wechsler, an anti-communist liberal who graduated from Columbia in 1937 and edited The New York Post during its liberal heyday, until 1977, when Rupert Murdoch took over and turned it into a daily reminder that Australia was founded as a penal colony.”
Well, there you have it. Republican presidential candidates don’t like to sound as if they’re trying to stir ressentiment, but they’re doing it, along with Fox News and the radio talk-show blowhards, who’ll have a devil of a time focusing Americans’ resentments on the Democrats now that the Republican candidates have to go after one another. Obama tries not to stir ressentiment at all, ever; but he’s its target twice over, as a black man and as an Ivy Leaguer.
And when we think about America’s becoming more Orwellian about national security, both at home and abroad, and about the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer -bamboozling wrecking ball that the global economy has become – again, at home and abroad — I don’t see the Obama administration escaping Soros’ charge. Pasting Obama’s or Fareed Zakaria’s face on that wrecking ball won’t humanize it or save the republic.
“Who is Obama? Now We Know,” read the sub-headline on a May 5 column in Commonweal magazine by the liberal and beneficent Washington Post pundit E.J. Dionne, exulting over the “hard blow” that the killing of Bin Laden had dealt to American war-mongers who’d been calling the president weak.
The same muscular interventionists had also characterized Jimmy Carter as weak and even Ronald Reagan as having lost his nerve in his second term. But nattering nabobs of “national security” have to be taken seriously in Washington, and last week, Dionne was ready, brandishing that most formidable of Beltway weapons: Inside Knowledge:
“[A]s one of [Obama’s] close aides told me long ago,” Dionne tells us now, “there is inside [Obama] a very cool, tough, even hard man. Obama is not reluctant to use American military power. He was not at all queasy about authorizing the killing of an American enemy and the disposal of the body at sea to ensure that there would be no memorial to rally bin Laden’s followers.”
No, indeed! This is the kind of leader the Amur’cn Peeple want: John Wayne, or the Decider, high in the saddle at high noon.
Mind you, I’m glad we got Bin Ladin. As I wrote here at the time, I’m impressed by how it was done. I’m even impressed by the gem-like hardness and brilliance, burnished by Inside Knowledge, with which Dionne reveals that “[A]nyone who doubted our willingness to project our might as we see fit will have second thoughts after the events in Abbottabad.”
Dionne also understands, as sagacious pundits do but as neo-cons and other muscular interventionists do not, that decisive actions are best nourished by long deliberation. So he instructed us — or at least those of us who may still be recovering from George W. Bush — that while decisive leadership sometimes matters, as it did in nailing Bin Ladin, sometimes it just doesn’t matter so much. Patiently, he explains the difference:
“The fact that Obama is not a moralist has led to many of the frustrations vented about him over the last twenty-seven months. Liberals don’t get why it takes him so long to get around to taking on the Right over the fundamental purposes of government and the requirements of social justice….. and why he was so guarded in his initial response to the Arab Spring.
“Supporters of a muscular and interventionist American foreign policy suspect him of believing that the decline of the United States is unavoidable and of seeing himself primarily as a steward whose task is to manage our steady loss of influence.”
Dionne reminds us, or whoever it is he thinks needs to hear this, that muscular interventionists’ suspicions of Obama “took…a profound blow when…..[ he ] chose the riskiest option involving a face-to-face confrontation with American commandos–on the orders of the president of the United States.”
OK, E.J., I hear the trumpets and the drums. But I have a question: What about the claim that this president is just a damage-control steward of American decline here at home? Where is the “profound blow” to that perception?
Dionne’s answer is that “Obama’s conceptual complexity means that he rejects the idea that there are just two alternatives…. Binary choices are not for him.” Behind the cool, tough, even hard man who is not reluctant to make the binary choice to use American military power against Bin Laden, there’s a deliberative, nuanced thinker — at least if the enemy is Lloyd Blankfein and not Osama Bin Laden.
Lloyd Blankfein is definitely an enemy of the American republic, and maybe we’re in for something better from Obama than anything he’s done gives us reason to believe.
But all I heard last month, eve as the orchestra of high-minded opinion trumpeted Obama’s big deficit speech and played its familiar medley, “This Is The Best of All Possible Worlds,” was a speech inadequate almost unto emptiness. Obama didn’t tell Americans enough of the truth about our situation to raise what George Washington called “a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.”
The truth that Obama couldn’t or wouldn’t tell us,” let alone rally us to address — the truth he even tried to disguise by assuring us that Joe Biden would work with Washington’s naked emperors on a budget plan — is that the Congress and much of the rest of the federal government are bought and paid for by bottom-lining corporations that, by law and their own charters, are non- citizens and non-persons, whose profit-maximizing standards dovetail only marginally, and often only perversely, with those of citizens and the republic.
This truth used to anger even Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt. Why can’t Obama even mention it now that our casino-finance, corporate-welfare, military-industrial, consumer-marketing juggernaut is so patently illegitimate and unsustainable?
Why doesn’t it bother Obama that his own economic advisers, alongside the corporate-welfare and banking lobbyists who infest Congress, are doing to America what termites do to a building, leaving us with real estate that’s unreal estate, nothing but a castle in the sky?
I don’t expect Obama to tell us that we are undergoing what Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris has called aptly a “creeping coup d’etat,” three of whose moves have been
a) the Citizens United ruling, which, as I’ve explained here several times, strengthens the real electoral clout of fictional corporate “speakers,” including those from other countries;
b) the recent, coordinated attacks by Republican governors on public-sector unions as scapegoats for other workers to blame for their dispossession; and
c) the Republican congressional delegation’s framing of the budget terrain in Washington, as they’re doing again now with the debt-ceiling.
To tell us all this, Obama would have to become like Teddy Roosevelt when he denounced the country’s “malefactors of great wealth” and admonished the bought-and-paid-for Congress (and future Supreme Court justifiers like Anthony Kennedy and John Roberts) that
“All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law; directors should not be permitted to use stockholders’ money for such purposes; and, moreover, a prohibition of this kind would be… an effective method of stopping the evils aimed at in corrupt practices acts.”
Judged by that standard, Obama, who ran promising “Change we can believe in,” has yet to show the great leadership E.J. Dionne is hymning. He has accomplished less than zero by crooning bipartisan ditties alongside a few criticisms of the House Republicans, whom he also goes out of his way to praise while admonishing the left wing of his own party as if it were as powerful as the Tea Party.
The truth he can’t or won’t tell us is, again, that the big-business corporations that increasingly own both parties are, by law and their own charters, mindless in any serious civic-republican or social sense and therefore incapable of deliberating seriously about the good of the country, because their personnel are truly forbidden to consider it, on pain of losing maximum profit and hence their jobs.
That’s why the great economic engines we’ve created have to be regulated and reined in more strongly than they have been before. I don’t suggest that Obama can go around just shooting off his mouth about this. But where’s the flash of that cool, hard hand Dionne was telling us about after the Bin Ladin killing?
Using military strikes to distract attention from capital strikes is a familiar but decreasingly viable governing strategy. Why don’t connoisseurs of great leadership remind us of that, as the confrontation over the debt ceiling looms, instead of pirouetting like Hapsburg courtiers in Vienna in 1914?
(A talk I gave at the University of Oklahoma in March, 2011, in the heat of the moment when the Citizens United ruling depleted my respect for The Supreme Court and illuminated my doubts about the viability of American jurisprudence. The talk was arranged by Professor of History David Chappell.)
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
As you all know, about 14 months ago, in Citizens United, Appellant v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court invalidated most federal restrictions on what has been called corporate “speech” in election campaigns. Although the ruling removes restrictions on campaigning by all kinds of corporations, including labor unions and other non-profit advocacy groups across the political spectrum, the Court’s conservative majority made amply clear, during the oral arguments and in the ruling itself, that it was especially eager to liberate for-profit business corporations to dive into election campaigns. Business corporations are quite different from municipal corporations and private, non-profit corporations; and they’re relative late-comers to the Constitutional landscape.
I’m not a lawyer, or even what you would call a student of law. And I’ve never started or run a for-profit corporation, although my father did just that in a small business he kept going for almost fifty years. The only for-profit corporations I’ve worked for in my own adult life have been “the press,” which is the only kind of business that is named explicitly in the First Amendment for protection from any government abridgement of its freedom of speech. So what can I bring to a discussion of the so-called “speech” of non-media business corporations?
The short answer is that I hope that I can shed some light on who are the “speakers” that the First Amendment’s framers intended to protect, because I spend a lot of time engaging with speakers of speech that isn’t constrained by the focused professional expertise of lawyers or the focused material resources of commercial interests – ordinary citizens whose primary interests aren’t professional or commercial but republican — with a small “r” and who therefore have the least resources or protection, especially if the First Amendment itself is interpreted to privilege more powerful interests that are only posing as citizens and whose principals these days, aren’t necessarily even Americans.
I’m going to argue that corporations that justify their existence as maximizers of returns to swirling agglomerations of abstract shareholders aren’t persons whose rights to freedom of speech the First Amendment was meant to protect; they’re not even aggregations of persons the way, say, the National Rifle Association is. Yet, for late-comers like me to this discussion, the Citizens United ruling was like the thirteenth chime of a clock that not only startles you but makes you question the integrity of the previous twelve chimes and, indeed, of the clock itself. I mean that the ruling exposed for me and some others a century of jurisprudence on corporations that is little more than a record of how this country has lied to itself about the contradiction-in-terms that it was becoming as a liberal capitalist republic that is also a corporate state. As a way of thinking about these tensions, corporate law has been as self-encapsulating and delusional as the thinking of the Hapsburg Court, circa 1914. It has obfuscated the essential republican claim that we need freedom of speech in politics because we are conflicted beings who have to juggle incommensurable values and priorities – such as wealth and stability. Politics is the place we discuss and provisionally settle these conflicts, but the price of admission to political discussion has to be an acknowledgment of the conflicts, within oneself as well as within the world. By law and charter, a business corporation cannot acknowledge those conflicts, much less reckon intelligently or responsibly about them.
Since the United State is or claims to be a republican “nation of laws, not men,” lawyers like to think of themselves as guardians of the republic, and businesspeople like to think that they are its enablers, not only materially but — if you believe business idealists like George Gilder — creatively, inspirationally, and even pedagogically, in that they teach us all the virtues of self-government – the private virtues, that is, like self-discipline, frugality, and planning, without which there would be no resources for cultivating public virtues such as the ability and inclination to deliberate with others and even to rise above one’s immediate self-interest and find a higher and better self in contributing to the common good.
The founders called the republican citizen of this type “disinterested,” meaning that he served no interest but that of making public deliberation itself go well. This wasn’t as saintly as it sounds to us now because it was understood to be a real and pressing necessity because, unlike monarchies and theocracies, which are rooted in sacred, mythic ties of blood and soil and in pre-market traditions of honor that offer a stable if limited dignity in return for loyalty and obedience, the republican ethos and identity are staked on an individualistic, vaguely Protestant, almost gnostic liberal experiment in self-governance that locates dignity in personal autonomy and in purely voluntary self-sacrifice to a common good. But a liberal capitalist republic’s jurisprudence gives much higher priority to individual freedom from public obligations than it does to meeting those obligations and even to cultivating the public virtues that are necessary to meet them.
Some people will always rightly devote most of their energies to generating wealth or to making contributions to religion, art, entertainment, recreation. But citizens should care for the res publica at times. Republics need public virtues because they have “no other adhesives, no bonds holding themselves together, except their citizens’ voluntary patriotism and willingness to uphold some public authority,” as the historian Gordon Wood put it. So they rely on a mixture of pragmatism, faith, and fakery that is probably better exemplified by Jack Nicholson than by John Roberts. The early 20th Century philosopher Santayana wrote that the American is “an idealist working on matter…. There is an enthusiasm in his sympathetic handling of material forces which goes far to cancel the illiberal character it might otherwise assume,” making the American “successful in invention, conservative in reform, and quick in emergencies.”
Santayana added that because the American is an individualist, “his goodwill is not officious. His instinct is to think well of everybody, and to wish everybody well, but in a spirit of rough comradeship, expecting every man to stand on his own legs and to be helpful in his turn. When he has given his neighbor a chance he thinks he has done enough for him; but he feels it is an absolute duty to do that. It will take some hammering to drive a coddling socialism into America.” Indeed, the This American favored not redistribution of the material but inner renewal of the spiritual in ways that would temper self-aggrandizement with social obligation by re-centering the self in its commitments to advance the common good. “This linkage of American material productivity with an outpouring of the spirit over the whole world, of material with spiritual blessings, is and remains the key to American self justification,” wrote Sacvan Bercovitch, a scholar of the Puritan mission.
This is what the conservative majority of the Roberts Court sincerely believe they’re defending – or at least it’s what they tell us that they are defending. They may indeed believe it, although the oral arguments I want to cite from the Citizens United case suggest so much more fakery than faith, or else such monumentally willful innocence atop duplicity, duplicity that the Court’s reasoning is wholly un-American by Santayana’s standards, and even by Jack Nicholson’s. So my short answer to the claim that lawyers and businesspeople are guardians and enablers of the republic is that they do have critical roles to play in the republican scheme of things but that ultimately it falls to the rest of us determine at times what their roles are and are not and to remind them of those limits. One of those ultimate decision times is approaching, not least because the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has misconstrued both the law and business world so badly that it has compromised the republic in ways it may take a second American Revolution or a second Civil War to repair.
The American Revolution rejected a divine-right monarchy, of course, but it’s worth remembering that although that monarchy’s metaphysical and mercantile presumptions were fanciful and unjustified, they had long been endorsed ardently by most colonists, at least through the early 1770s. If we apply founders’ early republican standards – call it their “original intent” — to the Roberts Court’s presumptions about corporate rights, we begin to see that today’s presumptions about corporate “rights” are as fanciful as those of a divine-right monarchy and that they’re certainly as unjustified as the prerogatives of the East India Company — which, you may recall, prompted the original Tea Party and was the kind of business Adam Smith considered subversive of free markets and free men. Smith would have abhorred our regime of corporate-welfare and casino-finance capitalism, and we may need a second American revolution to reconcile it with republican ideals and entrepreneurial individualism. Our pretense that there is no yawning abyss separating republican principles from the business-corporate principles that are being enshrined in Constitutional law is the big lie of our time, and John Roberts is its Chief Justifier.
The American Civil War was fought at least in part to defend the republic against the institutionalization of human slavery in the early Constitution and in later Supreme Court rulings like Dred Scott. And even despite the Civil war it took a second civil-rights revolution, one that had to be conducted sometimes against and outside settled legal doctrine as well as within it, to get most lawyers and businessmen to what is ultimately in everyone’s highest and best interest.
But the Civil War also defended and expanded the corporate state, and it accelerated a restoration of mercantilism. The Roberts Court is driving that restoration now, and in the process it’s reducing citizenship to a fig leaf for our naked enslavement by private bureaucracies in a slippery but enveloping web of degrading come-ons, inscrutable but contractually entrapping fine print, and foreclosed political options. Many lawyers are part of this problem, some of them with the peculiarly obdurate small-mindedness that lawyers tend to mistake for an energizing discipline, and a few of them with something pretty much like malevolence. But some lawyers are larger-minded, and we need them badly, and I’m grateful to be drawing here from two professors of law, Milton Regan, at Georgetown, and Daniel J.H. Greenwood, at the University of Utah, among many others.
I would also draw distinctions among business people, this time separating the relatively small number of huge, publicly traded corporate conglomerates, which are corrupting our government and skewing our public deliberations, from the 96 percent of business corporations whose principals are like my late father and most other business entrepreneurs. Even before the Roberts Court invited the conglomerates to jump into election campaigning, as many of them will now have to do, if only because their competitors are doing it, they were already shaping Americans’ political and economic choices and hopes, first by employing so many of us and second by marketing certain habits and patterns of consumption to us in a relentless, multi-billion-dollar campaign to replace public virtues with private stupefaction and greed to foreclose political and economic alternatives that most of us no longer even imagine. As Greenwood notes, every automobile commercial is propaganda for a system of energy consumption and transportation planning that is overdue for radical reconfiguration.
But in a republic, we’re supposed to imagine such alternatives and implement some of them, not as purely self-interested investors or labor sellers but as citizens free to deliberate about the larger good. This means that we’re supposed to determine and re-determine the rules under which business corporations exist, let alone operate. As Greenwood presents the challenge,
[E]conomic efficiency is best promote by flexibility, rapid adjustments to changing conditions, and a mobile labor market. A sophisticated culture and well-raised children, however, require stable intergenerational families and stable communities. The conflict cannot be avoided: a mobile and flexible labor market requires families without strong community roots, children raised away from their grandparents (or with their parents late at work), and the worry and stress of actual or threatened unemployment…. Citizens must decide… whether the prefer the excitement and challenge of a constantly changing capitalist economy or prefer the comfort of predictability that comes with stability and decline. In a democratic society, the resolution of these conflicts – or at least their debate – is the central task of politics. To allow markets or private bureaucrats with legally determined duties to pursue particular agendas to decide when or to what degree we should be market-driven… is to coop the central task of democratic politics.
In this view, we, the people, as flesh-and-blood human beings, are the only ones empowered to deliberate about and decide these things, and our rights in doing so, including freedom of speech, are protected by the Constitution not only because we need them to deliberate freely but also because, as the brilliant and independent American historian David Chappell put it in a private letter that I came upon in my archives, “individual human beings had the weaknesses and limitations of a single mortal body that they needed protection from superhuman conglomerations that are immortal and infinitely expandable.”
To which I would add only that it’s precisely because we, as embodied, mortal beings, are vulnerable to physical and psychological pressures that we’re also uniquely driven to imagine reaching beyond that vulnerability and to deepen our strengths and dignity by finding ways to achieve goods in common, like a clean environment or truly free markets, that we cannot achieve as narrowly self-interested money makers and consumers.
Corporations can’t deliberate beyond their mandated pursuit of the bottom-line and market share. Like the computer Watson, they’re not vulnerable in the ways human being are and so cannot truly be free in the ways that human beings are, either. If corporations could freeze in winter or feel anguish when someone else is sick or oppressed, if they could be subject to imprisonment or the death penalty, then they would deserve the right to free speech. But all they really are is engines that we, the people, let some other people set up and operate for limited purposes that the corporations are constrained by law, charter, and competitive pressures to pursue single-mindedly. And the people who actually establish, invest in, or work for those corporations are constrained, while they’re engaged with them, to pursue those particular purposes within bounds that all of us have the right and power to establish. But when these corporate investors and employees deliberate with the rest of us as free citizens about how best to charter and regulate these engines and how to set limits on how they do employ some of us and reward investors, then our public discussions — including our choices of representatives to develop and implement our policies – can’t rightfuly be boxed in, inundated, degraded, or intimidated by the very entities that we ourselves set up for the vital but limited purpose of generating wealth.
Precisely because these engines haven’t our mortality or, therefore, our morality, we intend for them to treat us as abstractions in limited circumstances and for a limited purpose – to treat us, if we’re shareholders, as if we were beings who never want the company to do anything that wouldn’t maximize its returns to us as investors; or, if we’re corporate employees, to treat us only as sellers of labor to corporate managers who can direct our energies on the job solely to increase the company’s profits and market share.
To a frightening degree, this is what we truly become: Cogs in bureaucracies, couch-potato consumers at home, with all the predictably tawdry – and well-marketed — escapes and false compensations. Of course, any individual citizen can be narrowly self-interested almost all of the time, but the difference between that citizen and a corporation is that he or she has many and conflicting needs and purposes and can at least potentially be appealed to in debate to change his or her mind and priorities. But if those appeals are drowned out or foreclosed by pressing realities that corporate priorities impose on us all, political stupefaction is a consequence: As a corporate shareholder through mutual funds and retirement funds, I have no idea which companies I own this afternoon that I didn’t own this morning, and my ownership of them is driven solely by the click of a broker’s mouse based on a calculation of its stock price. If I and most of my fellow citizens decide that this single-purpose understanding of our capabilities has begun to undermine our capacity to entertain and enforce other public purposes, we have the right to restrict or disband our legally created corporate engines that have become abusive and destructive of our rights. They have no rights against us.
But they may have the power. And they may exercise it not diabolically or malevolently but mindlessly, because they do it so single-mindedly, with a kind of willed innocence. Demagogues since Thucydides’ time have always twisted the meanings and emotional valences of public words to present their murky private purposes as noble public ones. Sometimes they even fool themselves, like Muammar Qadaffi, into thinking that they are only serving the common good. Corporations do that, too, when they get into public speech that disguises their true interests, as every BP or CSX commercial I see on PBS certainly does.
The problem that Citizens United has made worse for us as citizens is that it has drawn business corporations into this game even more directly: When we’re electing fellow-citizens to make the rules under which we may be employed or rewarded as investors by large corporations or, indeed, addressed by them, the capacity of our elections to determine all this freely turns out to depend not just on what positions candidates take and which of them survives robust debate, but on how much money the candidates can spend to address millions of us, repeatedly, via commercial television, often bypassing our deliberating brains and hearts and reaching for our lower viscera on their ways to our wallets. Here is where the shift from mindlessness to malevolence begins, no matter how softly purring and gently authoritative the announcer’s hired voice.
The problem isn’t only that candidates themselves can be corrupted by the quid pro quo of campaign money for selective silence or obedience; it’s also that the public debate is itself thereby skewed or drowned out by speech that is not free but purchased. Here the medium of speech itself, the medium of expensive but effective commercial television, does conquer the message, because of what the message costs to disseminate, and I would add that by the time the Roberts Court is finished, even the internet, which played an important role in Barack Obama’s victory by stimulating millions of small contributions outside of the corporate message machine, will have become more commercial, with higher barriers to individual entry. The Citizens United ruling may be the Roberts Court’s response to the fact that. In 2008 the internet — developed originally by government, even if not by Al Gore – hadn’t yet been harnessed to maximum profit-seeking.
The question that I think that Citizens United forces us to ask is how we, the people, have gotten caught up, first, in allowing big business corporations to give or withhold enough of our candidates’ campaign money to abridge their freedom of speech, and, second, in allowing corporations to speak directly for their abstracted interests in the political arena as if they were originators of free speech and deliberation in their own right, like any other citizen, and not the over-determined purchasers of speech that they really are.
The single end that for-profit corporations are licensed and constrained to pursue is a good and necessary one. A lot of genius is harnessed into it, and, yes, when the corporations themselves are harnessed to a robust republic, that “linkage of American material productivity with an outpouring of the spirit over the whole world, of material with spiritual blessings, is and remains the key to American self justification.” But that linkage has been broken because the global pursuit of profit by corporations that have outgrown their juridical and entrepreneurial origins has actually destroyed or perverted the flesh-and-blood communities in which civic virtue might have been cultivated, and it has also undermined American sovereignty. Profit-seeking is not an end to which a republic’s other purposes can be confined or reduced without destroying the republic itself and, with it, individual citizens’ freedom and dignity.
We have many, inventive ways of assuring ourselves that this is not happening. We have let it happen because, being human, we have succumbed to the subtle and irresistible temptations of idolatry, temptations that go back to the popular worship of the Golden Calf at the foot of Mt. Sinai. The justices in the Roberts Court majority are the high priests of that idolatry, which sets up the tool as the master. To my mind, there is a special circle in Hell reserved for those priests who have every reason to know better than to worship false gods, and the sign that Chief Justifier Roberts is headed there is that, exactly one year and a day before he delivered the Citizens United ruling, he flubbed his administration of the inaugural oath to Barack Obama at the most sacred of the republic’s ceremonies.
What the Justices said in those oral arguments on September 9, 2009, was drowned out by the chatter about President Obama’s important speech to Congress on health care that same day. But the consequences of the ruling that followed four and a half months later have already been immense for the United States, let alone for Obama’s health-care hopes, and I think that there will be more consequences that the justices themselves didn’t anticipate. To compare the ruling with what the justices said in the oral arguments, you’d have to conclude that they didn’t learn anything from the arguments, because they didn’t intend to:
• Questioning Solicitor General Elena Kagan in the oral arguments as she defended the federal regulations against direct corporate participation in campaigns, Justice Antonin Scalia wondered if he was being “too cynical” to suspect that Congress had enacted those curbs on corporate electioneering to shield its own members against well-funded challengers. Kagan had to inform him that business gives 10 times more to incumbents, who can and do return the favor many times over. She couldn’t resist adding that, far from protecting incumbents, the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law “may be the most self-denying thing Congress has ever done.” That drew a few chuckles in the court, but outside the hearing that day, Sen. Russell Feingold noted that, indeed, the stench of legislative corruption by business had shamed Congress into passing such laws.
Apparently Scalia had had no idea, and the ruling just dropped the subject, asserting simply that “the anti-corruption interest is not sufficient to displace” the corporate right to speech.
Maybe the justices’ nostrils are as blocked as their ears, but, whatever the real dimensions of corruption, the real issue here is that debate among citizens is being skewed and drowned by the simulacra of “free speech” by voices that are hired by non-corporeal entities that cannot be swayed by debate, as citizens sometimes are, to rise above their bottom lines. Real citizens can speak for business interests any time, but then others can speak back to them and have a chance of persuading them. By the way, wealthy individuals like the Koch brothers or Soros are do have unfair advantages to the extent that they amassed their fortunes under rules set up by public officials who’d been “bought” by people like themselves. But at least the Koch brothers and Soros are flesh and blood individuals who may be induced to debate and re-think their positions.
• Outside the September hearing, Feingold’s co-sponsor, Sen. John McCain, rejected “the [conservative majority’s] premise that corporations have rights as citizens” — rights to free speech, for example. But inside the Court, Scalia kept emphasizing that 96 percent of the corporations that were being “silenced” by the curbs are single-shareholder, “mom and pop” hairdressers and car dealerships” that can’t overwhelm public debate. Kagan had to remind Antonin the Innocent that a small corporation’s sole owner can use its resources to speak out as a citizen anytime in his or her own voice, without implicating or offending anyone else who may be involved in the business as a customer or investor.
But now that the curbs on outright corporate electioneering have been removed, big businesses, whose “owners” change hourly at the click of a broker’s mouse, will indeed overwhelm public elections, and to only one end: While living, breathing citizens sometimes rise above their self-interests as corporate employees and consumers to make choices for greater good, a business corporation’s charter and shareholders don’t allow it to do that. (Hence all those corporate PBS commercials pretending that they do.)
Yet this week’s ruling insists that “by taking the right to speak from some,” public regulation “deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to establish… respect for the speaker’s voice” and deprives “the public of the right… to determine for itself what speech and speakers are worthy of consideration.”
• Scalia even added, in a concurring opinion, that to “impede corporate speech is to muzzle the principal agents of the modern free economy. We should celebrate rather than condemn the addition of this speech to the public debate.”
I’ve never thought of big corporations as “disadvantaged” in speaking. And, impressed though I suppose we all should be by Scalia’s “modern free economy,” I’m reluctant to “celebrate…the addition” of corporate speech to public life. Has it really been missing? Has anyone been depriving us of our right to determine that business’ views deserve consideration? Don’t people like James Kramer and Lawrence Kudlow and many members of universities’ economics departments give us these perspectives non-stop? Isn’t that one reason why so high a proportion of every college’s graduating seniors flock to corporate recruiters every spring even in years when many other options are available?
• What’s really in short supply is truthful information about who’s in the driver’s seat. In the oral arguments, Chief Justifier Roberts fretted that the Government was being “extraordinarily paternalistic” in assuming that shareholders like me can’t “keep track “of what corporations are doing with our investments and withdraw our money if we don’t like their political positions. Kagan had to remind this Alice in Wonderland that most people with retirement plans don’t even know which corporations they “own,” let alone whether their investments are being misused. I don’t feel patronized at all by restrictions on what a corporation may do politically with my money.
The ruling four months later blandly assured us that new technology makes it easier to know and that “corporate democracy” rectifies abuses.
• In the September oral arguments, Justice Kennedy was stirred by the deep thought that bans on corporate electioneering silence those who know the most about the very industries that Congress regulates. Kagan reminded him that no law keeps corporate lobbyists from swarming all over Congress, where they even draft legislation. By barring direct campaign expenditures, she said, “we’re only separating persuasion [in lobbying] from coercion.” That struck me as a show-stopping point, but the majority ignored, it. Kennedy, writing for the majority, quoted Scalia’s claim that the legislation “muffles the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.”
Citizens United will amplify many times over the distortion of our public life by “artificial being[s], invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law,” as Chief Justice John Marshall described corporations nearly 200 years ago. We, the people, create them, regulate them, bail them out, license them for specific purposes, and have every right to bar them from using shareholders’ investments to overwhelm the democratic process.
The ruling thwarts that right with soaring abstractions (see Roberts’ concurring opinion) about corporations as voluntary associations of citizens joined in a “common cause.” This “common cause” assumption also frees labor unions and the iconic “mom and pop” corporations to campaign for their favored candidates, too. But unions and small businesses get weaker as big businesses’ power over public life gets stronger, because big business doesn’t put the public interest before profits. The justices just pretend that the two are the same -even though the biggest corporations are evolving beyond American control, in ways the Court also doesn’t mention.
Long before the ruling, the free speech that corporations already exercised so vigorously and ubiquitously as consumer marketers and trainers of labor and funders of think tanks was transforming our public life beyond anything envisioned by the framers, whose “original intent” the conservative justices invoke defensively in the ruling but can’t square with the founders’ own suspicion of corporations, as Justice John Paul Stevens showed in the Court minority’s devastating dissent. Stevens quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s admonition to Congress in 1905 that “All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law; directors should not be permitted to use stockholders’ money for such purposes; and, moreover, a prohibition of this kind would be… an effective method of stopping the evils aimed at in corrupt practices acts.”
Congress has never gotten that far, but it has tried periodically since 1907, because the stench of money in politics was so great, as Feingold said in September. He warned then that a ruling like this “would prevent us from legislating,” from regulating what we ourselves had created. Now, says Michael Waldman of New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center,”Exxon or any other firm could spend [immense] sums in any congressional district in the country against, say, any congressman who supports climate change legislation, or health care.”
Justice is properly blind, but not as blind and small-minded as the men who lifted the hems of their black robes hypocritically above the muck of political and economic life that made laws like McCain-Feingold so necessary. In the oral arguments they behaved like ordinary lawyers who, since they already know their client and the side they’re representing, ask only rhetorical questions, not open-minded ones. Judges are supposed to be better than that, but when Kagan gave the conservative Justices answers that challenged their premises and facts, they simply changed the subject.
In fairness, not only the Justices changed the subject. Even the ACLU bought the line that the ruling defends “freedom of speech” against “censorship.” But, again, nothing in the campaign-finance laws that the court eviscerated ever barred big business from inundating us with its “speech.” Nor is “corruption,” conventionally understood, the only or even the main issue. The debasement of public debate is the main issue.
Finally: A liberal capitalist republic has to rely on a critical mass of its citizens to uphold certain public virtues and beliefs that neither the liberal state itself nor markets alone can do much to nourish or even enforce, because the state and markets are committed to defend individual autonomy, in ways that make it hard for them to judge between bold civic spirits and selfish free-riders. Somehow, therefore, the citizens and leaders of such a republic have to be trained all the more intensively. That’s what the free press and liberal education are for, but when corporate and statist currents overwhelm their offerings, the republic is not far from its fall.
A note about the First Amendment: When it was framed, the only way one could exercise freedom of speech was to open one’s mouth, or write a letter, or pay or persuade the owner of a printing press to disseminate what one wanted to say. So the framers added “the press” to the Constitution because it was the only form of public speech extant beyond a person’s actually giving a speech to whoever was within the sound of his voice. But even just by specifying that industry, the framers acknowledged the importance of money to speech. And now that “the press” is often owned by precisely the kind of publicly traded conglomerate I’ve been denouncing, the question has been raised why the “speech” of other, non-media conglomerates shouldn’t be protected, too.
The answer is that media corporations agree to be platforms on which anyone can speak – sometimes they even pay the speakers for their trouble, as a newspaper’s opinion page does, but supposedly without placing limits on what viewpoints they can express. No non-media corporation will provide a platform for views antithetical to its business premises. Even conglomerate media corporations seldom do it fairly. If anything, public power may be needed to impose stronger “fairness” and “equal time” standards on these disembodied engines of profit in order to facilitate robust debate.
Daniel H.J. Greenwood: “Essential Speech: Why Corporate Speech is Not Free,” 83 Iowa Law review 995, August 1998
Milton C. Regan, Jr., “Corporate Speech and Civic Virtue,” in Debating Democracy’s Discontent, edited by Anita Allen and Milton Regan, Jr., Oxford University Press, 1998
Jim Sleeper, “Corporate Free Speech? Since When?” The Boston Globe, Sept. 5, 2008
It’s not malevolent or conspiratorial; it’s mindless, manic, 24/7, and — believe it or not — lethal to democratic life.
Most of us think of the constant cacophony of “ad-speak” as harmless or just mildly annoying. Some of us “mute” it on TV and block it on online. Neither we nor the American Civil Liberties Union have actively opposed the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that the First Amendment protects — as free “speech” — the algorithmically driven groping, goosing, titillating, intimidating, addicting, tracking, and indebting commercial speech, generated not by citizens but by engines whose managers serve swirling whorls of shareholders and private-equity managers who are civically mindless.
It’s time to stop thinking of these engines and their managers as merely annoying. They’re lethal because they make their terrific gains by bypassing our civic brains and hearts on their way to our lower viscera (of lust, of fear, of rage) and, through them, to our wallets. The great novelist D. H. Lawrence warned that “It is the business of our Chief Thinkers to tell us of our own deeper desires, not to keep shrilling our little desires in our ears.” American business leaders, and many “culture” leaders, are shrilling our little desires into our ears all the time. Some of them, such as Rupert Murdoch, are shrilling a lot that’s even worse.
This hollowing out of public (and, with it, private) speech — which I’ve described in The Baffler, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, and The Boston Globe — draws the “oxygen” out of public conversation. It’s leaving vacuums that are filled by the groping and goosing I’ve mentioned and by hostile speech that is protected by the First Amendment, except when it’s triggering violence. We tend to assume wrongly that the Constitution rightly protects the business-corporate engines that generate the public vacuums and the fabricated speech that fills Americans’ public space, thereby debasing, stupefying, demoralizing, and deranging people who are already stressed or dispossessed by those same socially purposeless engines.
In this increasingly horrifying vacuity, bereft of cultural moorings or guard rails, hapless editors and producers swing the social wrecking ball of cancel culture, looking for someone or something to punish in their pursuit of the empty “order” that governs the publications and sites that many of us visit every day.
I’m also grateful to my conversations with the legal scholars Louis Michael Seidman,Robert C. Post,Frank Michelman, and Bruce Ackerman, who helped me to think through these challenges (Seidman, Post, and Michelman are quoted and cited in the Los Angeles Review of Books essay below) and to my Yale students Aseem Mehta, Jacob Wolf Sorokin, Zachary Schlesinger, whose questions and suggestions have been indispensable.
TV Violence Can Make You… Violent!,New York Daily News, 1994. Don’t try to convince me that rising violence in public life isn’t accelerated by the degradation of public discourse in “fictional’ TV movies and videogames as much as is by “reality TV.” This column was one of my early warnings.
Republican presidential debates, and even “liberal” magazines, are drawing people eager to rail at clueless dissenters, especially if they can catch them bickering with one another.
Bernie Sanders was telling hard truths about financing and marketing back then, of course, as a Congressman and Senator from Vermont. But it was his presidential candidacy of 2012 that brought the critique into mainstream discourse, along with huge numbers of citizens disillusioned with liberal as well as conservative rationalizations for premises and practices that are no longer legitimate or sustainable.
The dynamics of news-gathering and organizing were never more interestingly scrambled than in this movement, I noted in openDemocracy and then in Huffington Post
Few if any who recall the uproar over Mahmoud Amadenijad’s appearance at Columbia University two years ago can also recall the uproar over the appearance at Columbia of Hans Luther, the first Nazi ambassador to the U.S, in 1933.
But one TPM reader could, because she’d been carried across W. 121st St. on Dec. 12, 1933 by two cops after circulating anti-Nazi handbills during the speech.
She was “a blonde, hatless, quiet, and, it seemed to me, imperturbably valiant freshman [who] stood her ground firmly but undemonstratively,” wrote James Wechsler, a reporter for the Columbia Spectator, years later in The Age of Suspicion. “I knew her name was Nancy Frankel and that her father was a Civil Liberties Union lawyer. I saw her much more frequently after that evening which, I learned later, was her seventeenth birthday. We were married the following October.”
Nancy Wechsler, who died Monday, at 93, never stopped showing how to stand your ground imperturbably in an uproar – a piece of political wisdom that grows from character and civic culture more than from intelligence or ideology.
Nancy and Jimmy Wechsler were young Communists in those dark years of capitalist collapse and fascist ascendancy, when democratic decency, principles, and courage like theirs saw few “fighting” alternatives to the left against the many betrayals of democracy in World War I, the Depression, and American-capitalist likings for Mussolini and Hitler.
Like some other leftists, Nancy and Jimmy soon saw through Communism’s tragedies, duplicities, and cruelties. But because their idealism and decency weren’t phony, but rooted in personal character and civic-republican principle, their disillusionment with the Stalinist left didn’t catapult them into the arms of the right, as it did some future neoconservatives, who mistake corporate capitalism’s mountebanks, bounders, and blowhards for carriers of republican freedom.
Jimmy, a hard-driving liberal and wonderfully literary journalist until his death in 1983, was targeted by Senator Joseph McCarthy while he was the crusading editor of the New York Post in its intelligently pro-labor, pro-civil-rights glory days, which ended in 1977 when Rupert Murdoch bought the Post and turned it into a daily reminder that Australia was founded as a penal colony.
Nancy became a prominent public lawyer, like her father and Jimmy’s brother Herbert Wechsler. Unlike them, she needed her unflappable, feisty, but disciplined manner to become one of the first women admitted to Columbia Law School and the New York Bar.
Through political and family adversities, Nancy and Jimmy sustained a redeeming, impish humor, recalling, for example, how Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a dinner at the White House, thought of nothing better to ask Nancy than whether she baked bread. They griped about each other’s driving: Jimmy hated to drive; Nancy was a demon on the road and, even this summer was still driving back and forth from Manhattan to a summer home in Westport, CT. (In the city, Nancy seldom took cabs; as late as this year, she was still taking city buses daily from her home west of Lincoln Center to her firm at Madison and E. 38th Street.)
It wasn’t only McCarthyism that targeted her and Jimmy’s politics, though. Jimmy was also assailed by unreconstructed Stalinists who couldn’t get over his decision not to take the Fifth Amendment before McCarthy’s committee but to denounce McCarthy to his face, on the record, even while giving him the names of some old Communists who, Wechsler knew, were already on McCarthy’s lists.
He did it for reasons he explains compellingly in The Age of Suspicion, and I think he did the right thing. That book, which also describes Nancy, is especially instructive now for two reasons:
First, it’s obvious now that many leftists who assailed the Wechslers were also wrongly assailing Elie Kazan (for naming names) and defending the Soviet Union and Alger Hiss, long beyond the point where it made political, moral, or even simple cognitive sense. Jimmy’s account of how he and Nancy saw through them so early is instructive.
Second, The Age of Suspicion is even more instructive because, reading now about the Stalinists of that time, you’ll find yourself thinking of neo-conservatives who bear striking characterological, cultural, and even political resemblances, for reasons that are worth pondering.
While both left and right have valid claims to represent profound truths, both suffer from deformities of character that only a wiser balance of civil libertarianism and civic-republican discipline can offset.
Nancy and Jimmy Wechsler found their ways to that balance because they’d grown up with it in the first place, as indomitable, savvy New Yorkers who could bring the best of progressive commitments along with them toward a viable civic consensus.
Until a few days before her death, Nancy was at her firm, McLaughlin & Stern, LLP, working in that spirit on copyright cases, as she had for decades at Deutsch, Klagsbrun, Blasband. She knew that both left and right can seem morally noble when they’re going up against the more dominant side’s (and its many apologists’) institutionalized carapaces and cant. But she also knew that each side tends to cling almost tribally to its fundamental truths until they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other side is wrong.
Thus Hitler’s Nazis (“National Socialists”) seemed noble to more than a few working people while on the upswing against striped-pants capitalists who’d crafted the Versailles settlement and Great Depression. On the left, Stalin seemed noble against the fascist Franco in Spain and Hitler after 1941.
But political crises demand good judgment and sometimes humor, even when one has taken a firm and fateful stand. Because Nancy Wechsler understood this, she was a brave civil-libertarian and civic-republican, from that moment in 1933 when she handed out leaflets against Hitler’s ambassador to her last freedom-of-speech case. She would never have temporized for ideological reasons about Ahmadenijad’s Iran.
Those of us who are sometimes hard on leftists and lawyers should keep this leftish lawyer in mind. No less than conservative Southerners like that old “country lawyer” and segregationist, Senator Sam Ervin, a hero of the Watergate hearings, Nancy Wechsler remained rooted in and loyal to the American republic, when others were seeking political salvation elsewhere.
Many discouraging observations have been made about Americans, some of them clearer than truth: French observers have called us les grands enfants. The late American historian Louis Hartz rued our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind.” Those are two of the nicer assessments. Some of the more-accurate ones are scarier.Although millions of us behave encouragingly every day, often in distinctively “American” ways that I assess on this website, this is no time to congratulate ourselves. But it’s also no time to consign ourselves to history’s dustbin by writing pre-mortems for the 2024 election and for the republic itself.
The following essay is a highly personal account of my reckonings with these challenges. Before you read further here, please read “About This Site” in the left-hand column on this home-page and glance at its survey of challenges now facing an American, civic-republican culture that a mentor of mine, the late literary historian Daniel Aaron, once characterized, felicitously, as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”
I’d like to see that civic culture transcend and outlive “woke” corporate neoliberalism, authoritarian state capitalism, right-wing, racist nationalism, Marxoid economic determinism, and post-modernist escapism, all of which are responses to global riptides that are transforming humanity’s economic, technological, communicative, climatic, migratory, and other arrangements. These swift, often dark currents are driven not only by capitalism but also by human inclinations, including to greed and power-lust, that antedate capitalism by millennia and seem certain to outlast it. Neither the left nor the right seems able to block them or re-channel them, let alone to redeem us from them.
More than a few Americans actually find these currents energizing as well as disorienting. That’s partly thanks to accidents of this country’s history that have enabled its commingling of faith, innovation, fakery, and force. Americans “have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistible in a space otherwise quite empty,” the philosopher George Santayana noted. “To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a career.”
Well, maybe. The 19th-century Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck is reputed to have said that “God protects, fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” The ascent of Donald Trump and of Trumpism has reinforced that impression and made many of us doubt and even despair of “American” virtues that we’d taken for granted or dedicated ourselves to upholding. I doubted our capabilities along those lines in the 1970s and more deeply in 2014, before I or anyone imagined that Trump would run for the presidency, let alone that tens of millions of Americans would be credulous and cankered enough to elect him.
“Jim Sleeper is the Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture – and that’s a compliment,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, referring to the formidable Puritan “thought leader” of the 18th Century and to my Salon essay “We, the People, are Violent and Filled with Rage,” which you can read later on this site. With Jeremiadic woe, I’d surveyed the civic-cultural damage of the 2008 financial crisis and the run of public massacres, including in Oklahoma City in 1995, Columbine in 1998, and Sandy Hook in 2012. Soon after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I doubted America’s prospects more deeply still in “It’s Not Only a Constitutional Crisis, It’s a Civic Implosion,”a short essay for Bill Moyers’ website that you can read later on this website’s section, “A Sleeper Sampler.”
Hertzberg’s reference to my cast of mind was fortuitous, not only because the damage I mentioned has been accelerating but also because I’d grown up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a small town settled by Puritans in 1644 six miles north of the spot where, in 1741, Edwards would preach his (in)famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Some of my Longmeadow public school classmates were direct descendants of the town’s Puritan founders. A few of my teachers seemed to have been writhing in Edwards’ congregation when he preached. Whenever some of them looked at me in school, I felt them looking into me, as if arraigning my soul before something awesome.
Their residually Calvinist, “Yankee” discipline converged with two other cultural currents in my upbringing, inclining me to look into civic-republican society’s ups and downs. The Calvinist current drew on an Hebraic biblical current of law and prophecy that was my inheritance as a grandson of four Lithuanian Jewish immigrant grandparents and that was deepened in my youthful exposure to it. Neither the Christian nor the Jewish current had disappeared in me by 1965, when, at 18, I entered Yale College, founded by Puritans who’d put the Hebrew words Urim V’Tumim, meaning, approximately, “Light and Truth” or “Illumination and Testimony,” on the seal of the college, which they envisioned as a “school of prophets.” Kingman Brewster, Jr., Yale’s president during my undergraduate years, was a lineal descendant of the minister on the Puritan Pilgrims’ ship The Mayflower, and he had been born in Longmeadow.
Fooling around at 19, my freshman yearStill fooling around in Wellesley, MA, age 23, 1971
Beyond Calvinism and Hebraism, two other cultural currents, leftish and civic-republican, followed me and surfaced at around the time I turned 30, in 1977. Like many New Englanders before me, I carried some of the region’s civic and moral presumptions (conceits? innocent hopes?) to New York City, although not to literary Manhattan but to “inner city” Brooklyn, where I ran an activist weekly newspaper before bicycling across the Brooklyn Bridge every day to work as a speechwriter for City Council President Carol Bellamy. By 1982 I was writing for The Village Voice, Dissent, Commonweal and other political magazines. From 1988 to 1995, I was an editor and columnist for the daily newspapers New York Newsday and The New York Daily News.
In 1987, my essay “Boodling, Bigotry, and Cosmopolitanism” sketched New York’s changing political culture for a special issue of Dissent magazine that I edited and that was re-published as In Search of New York. The “Boodling” essay was re-published yet again inEmpire City, a Columbia University Press anthology of 400 years of writing about the city, edited by the historian Kenneth Jackson and the master-teacher David Dunbar.
In 1990, W.W. Norton published my The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. The book, a somewhat tormented love letter to the city, sparked public debate in and beyond New York. After 1999, while continuing to live in the city and writing many of the pieces referenced and linked on this site, I taught Yale undergraduates for two decades in political science seminars with course titles such as “New Conceptions of American National Identity” and “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy.”
In the late 1970s I has embraced, and I still affirm, a democratic-socialist politics that, unlike Stalinism and orthodox Marxism, has a distinctively American, civic-republican orientation that rejects Communists’ opportunistic (ab)uses of civil liberties, civil rights, and democracy. Democratic socialism in the 1970s steered fairly clear of the racially essentialist “identity politics” that many of its adepts now wrongly embrace by fantasizing about “Black liberation” as the cat’s paw of an advancing Revolution. Sample my offerings in the section “Why a Skin Color isn’t a Culture or a Politics,” and you’ll encounter my conviction that although ethno-racial identities are inevitable and sometimes enriching, they’ll never be wellsprings of social hope in America unless they’re transcended by all of us as citizens in the thicker civic culture of a larger republic, if not of the world. Precisely because The United States is more complex racially, ethnically, and religiously than most “multicultural” categorizing comprehends, Americans need work overtime to identify and, yes, instill, certain shared civic and moral premises and practices that I discuss in many of the pieces on this website.
No longer fooling around. Brooklyn, age 31, 1978
Beginning in the 1990s and ever since, I’ve taken strong public stands against ethno-racialist evasions of the civic-republican mission. In 1991 I wrote a rather harsh assessment of leftist identity politics for Tikkun magazine that was re-published in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, edited by Paul Berman. I refined and, dare I say, elevated the argument in civic-republican terms in a 1996 Harper’s magazine essay, “Toward an End of Blackness,” that identified the emptiness of American blackness and whiteness as vessels of social hope. I summarized and updated the argument again in 2021, in a Commonweal essay,“Scrapping the Color Code.” (You can find all of the essays on race that I’ve just mentioned in this website’s section on race, “Why Skin Color Isn’t Culture or Politics.”) I’ve published a lot more along these lines and debated in many public forums, some of them linked in the Commonweal essay and elsewhere on this site. (My two books on the subject are The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream (1997).
Some of this work sparked resentment among activists and academics on the left and among journalists and other writers across the political spectrum. I accused some of them of betraying a civic-republican ethos and creed that’s under assault by capitalist, neoliberal, and even radical-racialist forces, the most dangerous of them white-supremacy, but others of them are unconstructively “woke” or subtly, seductively commercial. Some of my criticisms of writers who’ve ridden these currents have been gratuitously cruel, even when they’ve been accurate.
Civic-republican strengths and susceptibilities
Although many Americans behaved admirably, even heroically, on 9/11 and in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, what matters to a republic’s survival are the little things people do daily, when no one’s looking and no digital tracking device, cellphone camera, or journalist is recording them. Essential though a republic’s wealth and military power are to its strength, they can become parasitical on it pretty quickly if people are feeling stressed, dispossessed, and susceptible to simplistic explanations. Neither a booming economy nor massive firepower can ensure a republic’s vitality, especially if prosperity and power are dissolving civic-republican norms and practices.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against this in his Farewell Address in 1960, condemning what he called a “military-industrial” complex. (An early draft of his address, well-known to historians, called it, rightly, a “military-industrial-academic” complex.) Ike, who was hardly a radical leftist inveighing against capitalism or a rightist railing against “the deep state,” was a deeply decent, heartland American who’d gotten to know the military-industrial-academic complex from within, as its supreme warmaker and then as Columbia University’s president. He didn’t like everything he saw there.
Even more than Eisenhower’s warning or Jonathan Edwards’ and the Hebrew prophets’ jeremiads, several developments since 9/11 have convinced me that Americans who are accustomed to think well of themselves would be better off convicting themselves of complicity in democracy’s decline. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the 18th century British historian Edward Gibbon noted that “a slow and secret poison” had worked its way into the vitals of ancient Rome’s republic, distorting and draining its virtues and beliefs. In our own time, faster, glaringly public poisons have been working their way into our republic. Yet most Americans, “liberal” or “conservative,” have been ingesting and pushing them without naming them honestly.
You may insist that whatever is driving Americans’ increasing resort to force, fraud and mistrust comes from human nature itself. The republic’s founders understood that argument in Calvinist terms and also from reading Gibbon’s semi-pagan assessment of human history as “little more than a record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” They tried to devise a republican system of self-government that “doesn’t depend on our nobility. It accounts for our imperfections and gives an order to our individual strivings,” as one of their legatees, John McCain, put it two and a half centuries later in one of his last addresses to Senate colleagues.
Assessed by these lights, Trump (who cruelly disparaged McCain) is only the most prominent carrier and pusher of poisons that the founders knew were already in us, even in those of us who deny that we’re carriers and pushers. In 2008 Barack Obama reinforced our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind” by staging a year-long equivalent of a religious revival rally for the civic-republican faith, across partisan, ideological, and ethno-racial lines. But he wasn’t only a performance artist. He embodied and radiated distinctively American strengths that fascinate people the world over — not our wealth and power or our technological affinities, which are often brutally or seductively unfair, but our classless egalitarianism, which inclines an American to say “Hi” to a stranger instead of “Heil!” to a dictator; to give that stranger a fair chance; to be optimistic and forward-looking; and, from those collective and personal strengths, to take a shot at the moon.
I don’t think that the American republic is sliding irreversibly into Nazi-style fascism, as some on the left fear and some on the alt-right hope, or that it will succumb to leftist totalitarian socialism. More likely is an accelerating dissolution of the civic-republican way of life that Daniel Aaron characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.” That subtle balance of divergent qualities and of the trust and comity they engender is being routed now by global undercurrents -– economic, technological/communicative, climatic/migratory, and demographic/cultural –- that are sluicing force, fraud, and mistrust into our public and private lives. A bare majority of us are holding on to common ground.
Looking across the tracks.Illustration by Philip Toolin, a film art director/production designer who’s been doing this since he was 15.
In his foreboding 1941 prophecy, What Mein Kampf Means for America, Francis Hackett, a literary editor of The New Republic, warned that people who feel disrespected and dispossessed are easy prey for demagogic orchestrations of “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and, out of these three elements, a counterfeit reality to which there was a violent, instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fiction as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.”
Edward Gibbon and Jonathan Edwards would have recognized that condition in us now. Yet its causes and subtleties often escape the notice of journalists who are busy chasing “current events” without enough historical and moral grounding to contextualize them within “undercurrent events” that are driving upheavals and horrors around us and within us. I have a thing or two to say about that myopic side of American journalism (and I have some experiences to share) in this website’s sections on “News Media, Chattering Classes, and a Phantom Public” and on “Scoops and Revelations.”
The undercurrent events that many journalists mishandle aren’t malevolent, militarized conspiracies. They’re civically mindless commercial intrusions into our public and private lives that derange our employment options, public conversations, and daily aspirations and habits. They bypass our hearts and minds relentlessly, 24/7, on their way to our lower viscera and our wallets, to attract eyeballs to their ads, to maximize the profits of swirling whorls of shareholders. These commercial riptides incentivize (and brainwash?) many Americans to behave as narrowly self-interested investors and as impulse-buying consumers, not as citizens of a republic who restrain their immediate self-interest at times to enhance the public interests of a “commonwealth.” That word is still on our legal documents and pediments, but we’re losing its meaning, along with its “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free” ethos.
Decay and Renewal
Imagine a former auto worker, a white man in his mid-50s whose $30-an-hour job and its benefits were replaced a decade ago by a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart for less than half the pay and who has lost his home because he accepted a predatory mortgage scam of the kind that prompted the 2008 financial and political near-meltdown. Imagine that he winds up here:
“When the people give way,” warned John Adams (a graduate of the then-still residually Calvinist Harvard College and a self-avowed admirer of Hebrews) in 1774, “their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour…. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
In 1787, Alexander Hamilton, urging ratification of the Constitution, wrote that history seemed to have destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government through reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
In 1975, two centuries after James Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and others designed the republic with dry-eyed wisdom about its vulnerabilities, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt worried that “Madison Avenue tactics under the name of public relations have been permitted to invade our political life.” She characterized the then-recently exposed Pentagon Papers, which confirmed the Vietnam War’s duplicity and folly, as an example of the invasion of political life by public relations, of Madison by Madison Avenue – that is, of efforts to separate its public promises of a democratic victory in Vietnam from realities on the ground, until, finally, the official words lost their meaning and, without them, the deeds became more starkly brutal.
March on Pentagon, 1967 (National Archives and Record Administration)
What many Americans should have learned from that debacle, and what I’ve been learning ever since, reinforces Oliver Goldsmith’s warning, in 1777: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a’prey, when wealth accumulates and men decay.” A wealthy society may decay and implode not only because its prosperity isn’t distributed fairly but also because it’s only material and therefore weak against profit-maximizing engines such as Rupert Murdoch’s media, which prey upon the susceptibilities and resentments of stressed, dispossessed people such as the former auto worker and the Uber driver. If the manipulative engines aren’t stopped, they’ll grope, goose, titillate, intimidate, track, indebt, stupefy and regiment people, many of whom will crave easy escapes in bread-and-circus entertainments like those of Rome in its decline. They’ll join mobs that demand to be lied to with simplistic story lines that tell them who to blame for their pains and who to follow to fix them.
Perhaps with Gibbon’s slow and secret poison in mind, Alexis de Tocqueville described “the slow and quiet action of society upon itself” in the little daily interactions that matter as much as the high moments of national decision. Writing Democracy in America in 1835, he marveled, perhaps wishfully, at an American individualism that was inclined to cooperate with others to achieve goods in common that individualism couldn’t achieve on its own:
“The citizen of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety….This habit may even be traced in the schools of the rising generation, where the children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established…. The same spirit pervades every act of social life. If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare, and the circulation of the public is hindered, the neighbors immediately constitute a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned.”
This civic-republican disposition — to give the other person a fair chance and to back her up as she tries, to deliberate rationally with her about shared purposes, and to reach and to keep binding commitments — relies on the elusive balance of civic values, virtues and body language that’s ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free. You see it in a team sport whenever a player closes in on the action not to show off but to back up a teammate and help him score. You see it in how people in a contentious meeting extend trust cannily to potential adversaries in ways that elicit trust in return.
You used to see it even on Capitol Hill, as I did in 1968 while interning for my western Massachusetts Republican Congressman, Silvio O. Conte:
(That’s me in the dark jacket. standing next to then-astronaut John Glenn, who was visiting Rep. Conte (standing to his right) while planning to run for the U.S. Senate from Ohio.)
Or maybe you don’t see civic grace like that so often these days. Maybe backbiting, road rage, and the degradation of public space and cyberspace are prompting quiet heartache and withdrawal as trust in other people slips out of our public lives. Without the balance that I’m sketching here and elsewhere on this website, the United States won’t survive as a republic amid the undercurrent events that I’ve mentioned.
Civic-republican grace in writing and public life
Finding a better description of civic republicanism than I’ve offered here would require harder analysis and reportage but also more poetry, faith and, even some fakery. You can develop an ear and an eye for it, and maybe a voice for it. I’ve been following American civic republican culture’s ebbs and flows since around 1970, when I was 23, but really since World War II, because I was born on June 6, 1947, two years after the war’s end and three years, to the day, after D-Day, so and I grew up in a civic culture that seemed, at least to a child, more triumphant and coherent than it actually was or ever had been.
Some of the writing collected here records my and others’ growing disillusionment. A lot of it began for me in journalism, “the first rough draft of history” if a journalist has some grounding in history and isn’t just chasing “breaking news.” Whenever the chattering classes make cicada-like rackets over the latest Big Thing, I’ve tried to assess that noise in its historical and other contexts, remembering Emerson’s admonition “that a popgun is [only] a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.”
Contextualizing current events this way sometimes yields scoops and insights that others have missed. (See the “Scoops and Other Revelations” Section for a sampler of what I’ve found.) Some of those pieces spotlight fissures and fragilities in the republican experiment, and some assail public leaders and journalists who I believed had lost their civic-republican lenses and standards, along with virtues and beliefs necessary to wise reporting. (See also “Leaders and Misleaders”)
I’m collecting some of my essays for a book that I’ll call Somebodyhaddasayit. Some my work has prompted people to tell me they were glad that I’d written what they, too, had been thinking but were reluctant to say. Somebody really did need to say it, even when doing so made enemies not only among the “villains” but also, as George Orwell lamented, among editors and other writers who cancel honest speech that might embarrass them. “Saying it’ requires not only sound judgment and tact, but also, sometimes, courage. I’ve sometimes “said it” with too little fact or courage.
Editorial writer and editor at New York Newsday, 1992
But usually I’ve defended people who bear the American republican spirit bravely, against daunting odds. One of my pieces began in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in 2006, when I was looking for family background on Ned Lamont, then a little-known computer executive (now Governor of Connecticut) who was making a Democratic primary bid for the Connecticut U.S. Senate seat of Joe Lieberman, in protest against Lieberman’s unbending support for the Iraq War. I ended up writing not about Ned himself but about a long-forgotten uncle of his, Thomas W. Lamont II, whose young life and supreme sacrifice in World War II seemed to me a fata morgana, a fading mirage, of the American republic and of the citizenship that we’re losing, not at its enemies’ hands but at our own. (See the essay “Duty Bound” on this website’s section, “A Civic Republican Primer.”)
Being an American like Tommy Lamont is an art and a discipline. You can’t just run civic grace like his up a flagpole and salute it, but neither should you snark it down as just a bourgeois mystification of oppressive social relations. When the Vietnam War’s brutality and folly were at their worst and when official words had lost their credibility and official deeds had become murderous, the perennial socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas told protestors “not to burn the American flag but to wash it.” I took his point. I work with it. Americans who consider themselves too sophisticated for that are naïve.
Although one can’t credibly call my writing “nationalist” or “conservative,” more than a little of it has been motivated by my and others’ civic-republican patriotism. I’ve written often for left-of-center sites and journals, challenging much of what’s called “conservative” in American life. But a civic-republican compass points rightward at times, and I’ve written once or twice in right-of-center venues to condemn racialist “identity politics” and ethno-racial banner-waving that passes for progressive politics even when it only compounds a racial essentialism that fuels white superracist politics more than black-power politics.
Although American national identity was developed self-critically and sometimes hypocritically in secular Enlightenment terms, ultimately it relies on something akin to religious faith, even though it doesn’t impose a particular religious doctrine. Living with that paradox requires skill and empathy, as some leftist activists learned while swaying and singing with black-church folk against armed white men in the American South. Precisely because this country is so diverse religiously, racially, and culturally, it needs to generate shared civic standards and lenses, with help from newly potent (and therefore “mythic”) civic narratives. We don’t refuse to ride horses because they’re strong enough to kill us; we learn to break them in. Some liberals need to learn something similar about religion and patriotism instead of refusing them entirely.
How (and How Not) to Think About Left and Right
Both left and right in American life offer distinctive truths that are indispensable to governing ourselves by reflection and choice instead of by accident, force, and fraud. The left understands that without public supports in a village that raises the child, the family and spiritual values that conservatives cherish cannot flourish. But the right understands that unless a society also generates and defends irreducibly individual autonomy and conscience, well-intentioned social engineering may reduce persons to clients, cogs, or cannon fodder. Each side often clings to its own truths so tightly that they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other is wrong.
The consequent damage to the public sphere can’t be undone by clinging to the left-vs.-right floor plan that I mentioned at the outset and that still limits many people I know. Analysis and organizing against socioeconomic inequities are indispensable, but they’re insufficient. That’s equally true of conservative affirmations of communal and religious values that bow quickly to accumulated wealth that, as Oliver Goldsmith noted, preys upon and dissolves values and bonds that conservatives claim to cherish. (See this website’s sections, “Folly on the Left” and “Conservative Contradictions.”)
Ever since Madison helped to craft a Constitution to channel and deflect such factions, the republic has needed an open, circulating elite – not a caste or an aristocracy — of “disinterested” leaders whose private or special needs don’t stop them from looking out for the public and its potential to govern itself by reflection and choice. When John McCain voted in 2017 against repealing Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he admonished Senate colleaguesto “learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us…Considering the injustice and cruelties inflicted by autocratic governments, and how corruptible human nature can be, the problem solving our system does make possible…and the liberty and justice it preserves, is a magnificent achievement…. It is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than ‘winning.’”
Maybe McCain had a good speechwriter, but he believed what he was saying, even though he hadn’t always lived up to it. (See the section, “Leaders and Misleaders”.) Another flawed but sincere legatee of the founders’ Constitutional project was New York Mayor Ed Koch, whom I assailed for years until I got to know him a little better.
Many Americans still do uphold the civic-republican promise –as moderators of candidates’ debates; umpires in youth sporting leagues; participants in street demonstrations; board members who aren’t afraid to say, “Now wait a minute, let me make sure that we all understand what this proposal is based on and what it entails;” and as jurors who quiet the ethno-racial voices in their own and fellow-jurors’ heads to join in finding the truth. Truth is a process as much as it’s a conclusion. It emerges not from radical pronouncements of the general will or from ecclesiastical doctrines but provisionally, from the trust-building processes of deliberative democracy. “[A]nyone who is himself willing to listen deserves to be listened to,” Brewster wrote. “If he is unwilling to open his mind to persuasion, then he forfeits his claim on the audience of others.” In politics, unlike science, the vitality of truth-seeking matters as much as the findings.
At any historical moment, one side’s claims can seem liberating against the other side’s dominant conventions and cant: In the 1930s, Orwell sought liberation in democratic-socialist movements against ascendant fascist powers, and his sympathy remained with workers, but sometimes that required him to oppose workers’ self-proclaimed champions, especially Stalinists, as well as their capitalist exploiters. Orwell “never forgot that both left and right tend to get stuck in their imagined upswings against concentrated power and to disappoint in the end: The left’s almost willful mis-readings of human nature make it falter in swift, deep currents of nationalism and religion, denying their importance yet surrendering to them abjectly and hypocritically as Soviets did by touting ‘Socialism in One Country’ (i.e., while touting Russian nationalism) and preaching Marxism as a secular eschatology” (i.e., as a religion).
The balance that we should hold out for against ideologues is like that of a person striding on both a left foot and a right one without noticing that, at any instant, all of the body’s weight is on only one foot as the other swings forward and upward in the desired direction. What matters is that the balance enables the stride. Again, it requires both a “left foot” of social equality and provision – without which the individuality and the communal bonds that conservatives claim to cherish couldn’t flourish – and a “right foot” of irreducibly personal responsibility and autonomy, without which any leftist social provision or engineering would reduce persons to passive clients, cogs, cannon fodder, or worse.
A balanced stride can be upset by differences among individuals and by the divisions within every human heart between sociable and selfish inclinations. A strong republic anticipates such imbalances. It sustains an evolving consensus without ceding ground to hatred and violence. It remains vigilant against concentrations of power because it knows how to extend trust in ways that elicit trust and reward it in return. Being ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free, it acts on virtues and beliefs that armies alone can’t defend and that wealth can’t buy. Ultimately, and ironically, a republic’s or democracy’s strength lies in it very vulnerability, which comes with extending trust. “The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept,” Kingman Brewster Jr. wrote, in a passage that is now the epitaph on his grave in New Haven. “In common place terms it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.”
Think of Rosa Parks, refusing to move to the back of a public bus in Montgomery, presenting herself not only as a black woman craving vindication against racism but also as a decent, American working Everywoman, damning no one but defending her rights. Presenting herself that way, she lifted the civil society up instead of trashing it as irredeemably racist.
Civic grace like that is heroic, and rare. But after forty years of tracking American civic culture’s ups and downs, I believe that, ultimately, it’s all that we have.
Daniel J.H. Greenwood
