Yiannopoulos was invited to speak at the CPAC. He is, as Fullwood points out, "an unlikely hero for the conservative political action group," in part because "he’s an openly gay man" and the CPAC organizers "had previously defended offering Yiannopoulos a platform as a matter of robust free speech and an effort to attract young conservatives to the convention," but then then controversy erupted, surprise! when "a purportedly conservative media site called The Reagan Battalion posted an inflammatory video of Yiannopoulos on its Twitter page, letting loose a fresh round of vitriol toward him. In the video, which almost immediately went viral, Yiannopoulos suggested support for pedophilia, defending sex between men and boys as young as 13." And that "was a bridge too far." He had crossed a line unacceptable to even his conservative supporters, and CPAC unfriended him. Why? Keeping him on the roster, despite the public vitriol, would have make for an even more robust defense of free speech, so the issue was not free speech after all. As we all more or less know, those who make their name by being "transgressive" face a problem of escalation, the old transgression becomes old snooze rather quickly and each successive transgression must push the line a bit further, and a bit further, and a bit further. It can all be defended as a matter of free speech, until it can't, but in the meantime it's more a matter of direction -- is the line being pushed to the left or to the right? It's not a question of transgressing "mainstream social conventions," as if there were a set of social conventions observed by each and all, but more a question of whose "social conventions." He transgressed liberal aka "politically correct" social conventions, and with each transgression, pushed the line further and further to the right, until he couldn't, and CPAC had to punt. The same dynamic works for those pushing to the left, and for those who like sports metaphors, who want to see it as a great contest, it's fairly apparent that liberals fumbled the ball during the Obama administration. The conservatives have come up with possession and we are now pushing back toward their goal posts.
All this by way of saying, I less concerned with who has outraged whom, who has hurt the feelings of whom, than I am by the so-called "post-materialist" tenor of the game itself. I am thinking of an earlier post, where I talked about Thomas B. Edsall and his editorial piece in the NY Times, "The Peculiar Populism of Donald Trump." He begins his piece, with the simple assertion that "All wars have unintended consequences, including culture wars, " and his basic tenant is that
liberal victory in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s, with its emphasis on so-called postmaterialist values — personal fulfillment, openness to new ideas, and support for previously marginalized populations — had its costs, which political analysts have been reckoning. Those costs have become particularly evident in the eruption over the past year of the Brexit vote in Britain, the increasing power of anti-immigrant parties across Europe and the ascendance of right-wing populism in America.
There is nuance with this, as with all, arguments, but taken at face value, Edsall quotes Inglehart’ s 1977 book, “The Silent Revolution,” and argues that, “when people grow up taking survival for granted it makes them more open to new ideas and more tolerant of out groups.” We have heard the basic premise before in Emerson, who wrote, in Self-Reliance that "the nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature." Edsall goes on to write, again quoting Inglehart, that "in effect, postwar prosperity in America and in Western Europe allowed many voters to shift their political priorities from bread-and-butter issues to less materialistic concerns, 'bringing greater emphasis on freedom of expression, environmental protection, gender equality, and tolerance of gays, handicapped people and foreigners.'” Even granting the premise, I am not sure that the nonchalance of boys is either healthy or that it necessarily leads to the more salutary effect of "support for previously marginalized populations." There is something very man-childish about Milo, described above, or even more chillingly man-childish about Dylann Roof. As described by Edward Ball in the recent NYRB, Roof was a product of his immediate cultural milieu, but he successfully absorbed a toxic stew of racist rant from a variety of white nationalist internet sites before embarking on a killing spree, shooting to death nine people in the basement of a church. His values were no less post-materialist. He was certainly open to new ideas, and could express an ideology where "black people are killing white people every day on the streets, and they rape white women, a hundred white women a day," and took it upon himself to address what he believed to be this American carnage. "I had to do it," he said, "because somebody had to do something."
How does one account for the likes of Milo, or Dylann? Edsall's standard response reverts to a materialist, even quasi-Marxist, explanation, pointing out that "not everyone experienced this new found economic security, however, and the number of those left behind has grown steadily. Those who do not experience the benefits of prosperity, Inglehart and Norris write, can see 'others' — 'an influx of foreigners,' for example, as the culprit causing their predicament." I too want to believe this is true, and some of my previous posts have made similar arguments, and yes, we do need to do something with the disposables, those who have been rendered superfluous to the emerging economy, those Americans who have been displaced by a profit seeking global exploitation of cheap labor and more insidiously by advances in digital technologies. I want to believe it's true because it poses a problem that can be solved, albeit not easily, but nevertheless the materialist view expressed by Edsall falls neatly within a secular rational frame of reference. If the lack of "economic security" is the problem, the solution seems obvious. We must insure that everyone is economically secure. But then economic security, at a basic subsistence level, has not been a problem for some time, at least not in the developed world of the west. There are plenty of jobs to be had that will provide at least a subsistence living, a roof over one's head and food on the table, even if the roof is not in the best of neighborhoods, and the food is loaded with sufficient sugar and fat calories to keep one going down the path to obesity and diabetes. Beyond that, while there are the perennial complaints about the ineffectual and lazy who take advantage of the system, the various provisions of the social safety net nevertheless more or less assure all of at least a dinner.
So, no, perhaps the problem is not economic security, per se, but rather, as Pankaj Mishra put it, "the much advertised promise of happiness through material comfort." Or perhaps more precisely, the induced illusion of happiness through material comfort. My wife describes the promise, and its failure, with a simple thought experiment. Imagine that you covet a new car, and you finally relent, go into debt, and purchase it. How long, she asks, will it make you happy? How long before it becomes just your car? Will it make you forever happy? Initially, yes, there is a dopamine rush in the fulfillment of desire, and perhaps too the satisfaction of your friends' envy, but the rush wears off, and one needs the next rush, and the next, and the next -- until, that is, we grow weary and realize that by this perpetual cycle of getting and spending we have laid waste to our powers, to paraphrase Wordsworth and we retreat into a contemplation of nature -- or, much more likely, until the credit runs out and we realize that the next real fix is right there, advertised at every turn, but just out of reach. I want to say that an unrestrained consumerism is the real opiate of the people, and too many are experiencing the first signs of withdrawal, and it isn't pleasant.
Pankaj Mishra, in his new book Age of Anger gets it essentially right. His book can be read as an extended critique of an enlightenment version of secular rationalism, to include the secular rationalism that provided the core consensus for the American experiment in "liberty." They imagined a "new society," one "free of irrational old hierarchies," particularly a monarchy and its attendant aristocracy," and posited instead a meritocracy, which was meant to be free, but it wasn't "meant to be democratic," not exactly. "Liberty primarily meant freedom for social mobility," and those who would be most mobile were "men of talent." Liberty provided "the means, as Rousseau blunted stated, of 'acquiring without obstacle and possessing with security.'" They imagined a society dominated if not exactly by a Hobbesian war of all against all, then certainly an openly competitive society that would arrange itself into natural hierarchies as individual win/loss records placed people up and down the economic scorecard. As a moral imperative, this works, but it works if and only if we assume that there is something that approximates "equal opportunity" -- that is to say, in the foot race of life, that all men start from the same line, at the same time, and only native ability and the determination to win puts one in first, second, or third place. One could, in this way, justify the resulting inequality. Those in first place, in short, deserved to be in first place because they were superior, and because they were superior, they deserved preference as those best qualified to lead. The meritocracy had displaced the aristocracy, but the demos, the plebeian mob, up and down the ladder of material success, were no less expected to submit to their "betters" who knew what was "best" for them. The assumption of equal opportunity, however, is absurd, and it takes only a fraction of a nano-second to realize that we do not start from the same line, at the same time, and two men of equal talent and equal drive, begin, and consequently end, the race in quite different positions through no desert or fault of their own. The assumption becomes even more absurd as economic disparities grow ever wider, and it becomes ever more clear that they have in actuality been given, as Mishrah put it, "a society dominated by a war of all against all, in which most people were condemned to be losers" -- as it becomes ever more apparent "this much advertised promise of happiness through material comforts was deceitful" since only a small and smaller minority can actually achieve it, and at great and greater expense of life.
It is not economic insecurity, per se, that has led us to this particular juncture. It is the madness of withdrawal, or the fear of withdrawal, that is driving us mad, and Trump is a pure representation of that madness. Before I indulge my Trump fascination, however, I should point out that withdrawal has traditionally led to the left, and we saw some of this in the ascendence of Bernie Sanders during the campaign. If the previous paragraph outlined a failed secular rationalist agenda from the right, so to speak, the corrective comes from the left, and indeed much socialist thought can be seen, less as a repudiation of secular rationalism itself, more as a repudiation of the commercial-industrial form secular rationalism took through the 18th and 19th centuries. The socialists too imagined a new society, one free not only of irrational old hierarchies, but also the new ostensibly "meritocratic" hierarchies that buttressed their castles with accumulated capital. It too was an experiment in liberty, and it wasn't exactly intended to be democratic either. Liberty meant freedom from "want," and the only way to actually free men from "wanting" was to eliminate the invidious distinctions of class, particularly the distinctions of economic class. It was presented as the counterpoise to what Mishrah described as the "aggressive new individualistic culture, in which human beings suddenly seemed to have no higher aim in life than diligent imitation of the rich." It held forth an equally aggressive collectivist culture, in which human beings had no higher aim than a diligent contribution to the community. As a moral imperative, this works, but it works if and only if it produces something that approximates "equal results" -- that is to say, while it is recognized that there are differences between people, some smarter than others, some stronger than others, all would contribute in their own way to the common good and the results of their labor would be distributed equally to all. One could, in this way, justify the resulting state appropriation. The demos, the lumpenproletariats, were expected to submit to the state, which would in turn look to the common good and the distribution of an ever-increasing store of material comforts. Here again, however, the assumption of equal results is absurd, and it takes only a nano-second to see the moral hazard. When the lazy and ineffectual are rewarded in the same way as the diligent and effectual, where is the incentive to be diligent and effectual? Moreover, we quickly realize that hierarchy may well be the natural state of mankind, and hierarchy in an authoritarian state is a petrie dish for the sepsis of individualistic ambition and corruption. The hierarchy maintains its authority, in part through outright oppression of the gulag, but in larger part through bribery and the distribution of favors. The assumption becomes even more absurd as the distance between the privileges of state authorities become ever more distant from the actual condition of the people. Consequently, it shouldn't be surprising that Russia eventually shook off both socialism and an American style capitalism, and transitioned quickly and easily into an oligarchy. It was already an oligarchy. Ironically, as it turns out in reality, soviet style socialism provided a quicker and more effective path to end-state, monopolistic capitalism, a society fully under the authority of extreme wealth.
There is, of course, a strain of post-materialist thought that rejects material superfluity altogether, whether the individualist rejection of Thoreau, who retreated to his cabin by Walden Pond, or the more collectivist rejection of the Amish, who retreated within the closed boundaries of their community. It is possible, in short, to reject the advances of modern technology and a consumer society, but for most individuals the cabin in the woods may be inviting temporarily, for spiritual renewal, but then only so long as there's a signal for the cell phone and access to live streaming to relieve the boredom. Then too, on a national scale, we're faced with a whole other ball of sticky wax. A small group of people can fence themselves off and declare themselves irrelevant to the world, and actually be irrelevant. Even a small nation -- think Bhutan -- can close down their borders because, well, they have little or no strategic value and actually are irrelevant to much of the world. But the US? Clearly, a rejection of modern technology, particularly the sorts of technology produced within the military industrial complex, would be a suicidal invitation to exploitation by those who have not modern weaponry. So again, it's not just individual economic insecurity that has led us to this particular juncture, it is our collective insecurity as well. The possibility of kicking the habit seems limited to a particular personality type (what my son calls the "granola") and irresponsibly delusional about the "real" risks out there. We are thoroughly addicted, and we know it, and yet we are coming to resent the dealers -- the leaders in higher education, as well as business, politics, and the press who are selling us the drug -- in part because it is increasingly clear that neither equal opportunity nor equal results are real possibilities. Neither the red pill nor the blue pill completely fulfills its promise of happiness, but they are the only pills available, and when one fails to produce the promised high, we turned to the other to counteract the effects of the former, and the see-saw seemed to work. Secular rationalism remained the consensus beneath both parties, and the principle concern of both parties was the material well being of the people, and something resembling a democratic process maintained the balance between the two varieties of materialist experience as each rose and fell in succession.
Something has changed, however, but what? Mishrah suggests that we are beginning to feel internally what the so called "developing world" has known all along. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the third world was left with the West and so-called Western values. They have looked up at the "developed world" and they have learned to hate us, not for our freedoms, as Bush suggested, but for our hypocrisy. We have said to them over and over again, emulate us, aspire to our way of life and all will be well for you, while knowing full well that our way of life is contingent upon the exploitation of their resources or their people. We may, for example, decry the fact that our jobs have gone to China and Mexico, but in the la-la land of the lotus eaters, they are jobs that we have traditionally disdained. Really, how many children of Appalacia and the rust belt actually aspired to jobs in the mines or on the factory floor? Really, how many of their parents said to them, "drop out of school so you can work in the mine and the factory?" We have exported the dirty jobs, the dangerous jobs, because we could, and because we no longer wanted them. We were OK with it all because there seemed to be real opportunity for those who were meritorious, who went off to school, who escaped the mine and the factory through native talent and diligence. We were OK with it all because it made our next fix here affordable, because it is built over there by a worker literally out of sight and out of mind, a worker paid a subsistence wage that no one here would accept, laboring under conditions that no one here would tolerate, degrading their environments in ways that would leave us aghast. We were OK with it all, because it provided us with a continuing supply of consumer goods, and because it provided them with a real improvement over their past conditions.
Nevertheless, it was clear, abundantly clear, to those laboring in the developing world that there was no catching up with the developed world. They would always be second class world citizens, struggling forever to catch up, unless something drastic happened, just as it slowly become clear to the parents of Appalacia and the rust belt that there no longer seems to be real opportunity, even for those who are meritorious. Though neither were really desirable options, the mines are shutting down and the factories are "scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation," and the young people, particularly young men of promise, were "educated into a sense of hope and entitlement, but rendered adrift by limited circumstances." Nevertheless, the prospects of joining the meritocracy SEEM possible, and there ARE those representative men and women who have risen to unimaginable riches, men and women worthy of emulation who gas up our dreams. Whose fault is it if I am not one of those representative men and women? Part of me cannot help but feel that it's my fault, and were I just a bit better, stronger, more committed, I WOULD be one of them, yet to the degree that I feel it's my fault, I am "exposed to feelings of weakness, inferiority, and envy," especially envy. Envy and resentment are, as Mishrah put it, "inherent in the structure of societies where formal equality between individuals coexists with massive differences in power, education, status, and property ownership." One should say, perhaps, where formal equality between individuals OSTENSIBLY exists between individuals, because those massive differences so obviously subvert the very notion of equality, not to mention the very notion of liberty, because those massive differences so obviously expand the field of action for those so endowed. Consequently, part of me cannot help but feel that I SHOULD be one of them, that I have been cheated. It is a shock to the system to be raised on aspiration, to be told again and again that you have a manifest destiny, to bask in the assurance that one need only be "strong in will/ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," only to discover that, despite your best efforts, the opportunities are rather limited. There is only one CEO of GE after all, and while many might aspire to be like Mike, few have been blessed with the talent no matter how much one might desire it and strive to achieve it. Yet still, for those who aspire, there's the "dream," the sense that I am better than this, that I have been defrauded, robbed, cheated, by whom? and so we suffer from, as Mishrah, quoting Dostoyevsky put it, "a contradiction between two heterogenous elements; an egoism extending to the limits of self-adoration and a malicious self contempt."
Enter Trump. Here again, I don't want to give Trump himself too much credit. There have been Trumps before Trump, if not in the US, then throughout the world. Trump is an oxymoronic creature, a paradoxical creature. Not only is he the populist who is not particularly popular, but he inhabits other paradoxical spaces as well. I have detailed this before, but there is nothing particularly godly or religious about Trump. One cannot imagine him on the throne at three in the morning, cell phone tweet ready, asking himself WWJD, what would Jesus do? There is nothing in his behavior to suggest that he wants to subordinate himself to god's will or that he wants to emulate Christ, and much that suggests he is who he is, and what he wants to be, what he seems most to desire, is to be the representative man -- not just a representative man, but THE representative man. "The greatest event of recent times," as Mishrah, quoting Nietzsche put it, "had already occurred: the 'death of God.' With God dead or dying [or increasingly irrelevant to the daily concerns of human life] man was free to create his own values in a valueless universe." The growing irrelevance of god should, of course, be liberating, and for some it has been liberating -- for women, for those with queer sexual orientations -- but for most it has been disorienting. Let's face it, most are not particularly creative, and the thought of creating one's own values, ex-nihilo, in a valueless universe is altogether overwhelming and enervating. Where does one begin? And so, on the one hand, we have what Mishrah called "the paradox of religious fundamentalism: that it reflects the weakening of religious conviction." It's not so much that people actually believe in god, but they feel his absence, acutely, and like a grieving parent caught in the first stage of grief, they are captured by denial: "the death of god was attended by hysterical assertions that He exists," and so we have this storefront proliferation of "DIY fundamentalist versions of ebbing, if not irretrievably vanished, religious faiths." And then too, on the other hand, there is what might be called "the paradox of political fundamentalism; that it reflects the weakening of political convictions," or perhaps more precisely, a weakening of "the fundamental optimism that makes reality seem purposeful and goal-oriented." It is, of course, this faith, this fundamental belief in progress, that animates secular rationalism -- the belief that men and women of good will can come together and solve the inevitable problems that beset us -- and in the absence of this belief in collective progress, we are left at best with "angry tribalism or equally bellicose forms of antinomian individualism." It is the convergent paradox of religious and political fundamentalism that gave us Trump. He is who he is, and his acolytes repeated demand that we let Trump be Trump makes it clear that they see him as a messianic "Wild Spirit," which, to paraphrase Shelly, is "moving everywhere," omnipresent throughout the very media he disdains, at once a "Destroyer" of the false pieties of political correctness and a "Preserver" of American exceptionalism.
One suspects, however, that Trump and the GOP will be more destroyer than preserver, and my pessimism is growing by the day. On a mundane, but utterly important matter, what is one to make of a headline like
G.O.P. Health Bill Faces Revolt From Conservative Forces
This should be a technical problem amenable to technical solutions, but this headline reminds us that the sorts of snark and sarcasm of a Milo is more fun and infinitely easier than making constructive statements or taking positive actions. Or more ominously, it reminds us that pulling out a gun can assuage our rage, but it leaves nothing but puddles of blood under corpses. The shooter must face justice, but who is left to deal with the "consequences?" Perhaps the most ominous part of Mishrah's book comes at the end, when he examines the life and career of Timothy McVeigh, who, we remember, bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, leaving behind 168 dead. We would like to categorize him as a mentally disturbed lone wolf, and no doubt he was mentally disturbed, but neither he nor Dylann Roof were "lone wolves." As Mishrah put it, "a simple picture of [McVeigh's] motivations is immediately muddied by his contradictory views, many of which disturbingly converge with mainstream opinion." Let me be clear. His view don't so much converge with "mainstream opinion," as his views converge with what has become if not "mainstream" conservative opinion, then the sort of toxic stew that exists on Breitbart and other opinion leaders of the Alt-Right. The "conservative forces" have, over the last eight years, become the party of bomb-throwers or, more charitably, the party of resistance fueled by resentment. They have taken every opportunity to undermine and disparage the party in power, successfully rendering HIS government ineffectual, but in doing so they have removed the lid of pandora's box. They have gone a good long way toward undermining and disparaging the very idea of government itself, and rendering their own government ineffectual. It's indicative that Trump is eliciting the sort of reaction from the left that Obama elicited from the right (and yes, I do loath the very idea of Trump with the same visceral nausea that the most hard-core racist no doubt loathed the very idea of a black man in -- for God's sake! -- the white house) but it's even more indicative that they can't seem to set their own house in order. To do so would require men and women of good will to sit down, define the problems, and hammer out solutions that are acceptable (if not perfect) in the world we inhabit together. That no longer seems possible even within the confines of the GOP, much less the broader political spectrum. Ironically, it may turn out to be true that only Trump can solve. In the absence of a core consensus that we, collectively, can solve our problems, the door is opened to the one who can impose a solution, by force, as will almost inevitably be necessary, and at the moment he has the monopoly of power. We gave it to him.
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