I began my last post with a brief synopsis of history:
Toward the end of his study -- American Sphinx: the Character of Thomas Jefferson -- Joseph Ellis reiterated the historians reticence to see too much of the past in the present. He quotes a familiar line -- that the past is a foreign country, with its own distinctive mores and language -- then goes on to say "all efforts to wrench Jefferson out of his own time and place, therefore, are futile and misguided ventures that invariably compromise the integrity of the historical context that made him what he was" (350). Jefferson's and my own world are very different things, and Ellis sees four successive waves of change that wiped out the Jeffersonian legacy, the first of which was the Civil War, which "destroyed slavery, the political primacy of the south and the doctrine that the states were sovereign agents in the federal compact" (352). The second, "really a series of waves," struck in the three decades between 1890 and 1920. Demography is destiny of a sort, and the 1890 census "revealed that the frontier phase of American history was over," while the 1920 census reported for the first time that "the majority of American citizens lived in urban as opposed to rural areas," along with a "huge influx of European and Asian immigrants that permanently altered the previously Anglo-Saxon character of the American population" (352). All of which, taken together, transformed "Jefferson's agrarian vision into a nostalgic memory, his belief in the resuscitative powers of the West into a democratic myth, and his presumption of Anglo-Saxon hegemony into a racial relic." The third wave came after the crash of 1929 with Roosevelt's New Deal, which was "the death knell for Jefferson's idea of a minimalist government," while the fourth wave, the onset of the Cold War, provided nails for the clean up crew's coffins. A minimalist government requires, if you will, a minimalist military, but with the Cold War "the United States committed itself to a massive military establishment," a military-industrial complex that "embodied precisely the kind of standing army (and navy and air force) that Jefferson abhorred." Other nails for the coffins sealing the Jeffersonian legacy came in the 60s, with Johnson's Great Society, with its "entrenched military establishment, its dedication to the welfare state, its extension of full citizenship to blacks and women," all of which "represented the epitome of political corruption in the Jeffersonian scheme, as well as the repudiation of racial and gender differences that Jefferson regarded as rooted in fixed principles of nature" (353).
Since Ellis was focused on Jefferson and his legacy in American conservatism, he didn't quite come out and say that each of the successive waves represented an incremental, and hence imperfect, step in the direction of social justice. Richard Rorty began his short study, Achieving Our Country, with an exhortation to national pride, suggesting that "national pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement." There is a lot to unpack in that short sentence, and I will come back to it, but for the moment I think Rorty would agree that, in each of the successive waves, the American left "should be able to see, as Whitman and Dewey did, the struggle for social justice as central to their country's moral identity," and that "justice" need mean nothing more exalted than "decent wages and working conditions, and the end of racial prejudice." Of course, decent wages and working conditions imply that one is employed, and we would probably want to add "health benefits" to the list, in part because the real access, not just putative access, to modern medicine has increasingly become a necessary condition for a decent life. Then too, we would probably want to add, along with racial prejudice, the end of ethnic and gender prejudice along with the sorts of systemic prejudice experienced by those with disabilities. Still, each successive wave created an improvement on the conditions that existed before, and we have reason, not only to take pride in the improvement, but also to hope for further incremental improvements in the future.
So, again, national pride is a necessary condition for self-improvement. The first thing to note is that Rorty's conception of "pride" is tinged with humility. I always found the "love or leave it" mentality somewhat difficult to understand. We should not mistake narcissism for pride, even an excess of pride. Narcissism is a pathology -- a form of self-loathing that must -- must -- mask itself, if not in the adoration of others, at least in their envy. The narcissist seeks power, not so he might do good in the world, but because power provides the immediate gratification of sycophantic envy. The narcissist with power is dangerous. When the adoration does not come freely, the narcissist will coerce it, and we have not come close to having exhausted the means of coercion. I do believe that, in Trump, we have elected a narcissist to our highest office, much to our peril and shame. I loath Trump and all he represents. Nevertheless, I do love my country, and I have a life dedicated to military and public service to demonstrate that love, but my love is not contingent upon some notion of its perfection or infallibility. I can love my country, take pride in it accomplishments, and still recognize its failures and hope those failures are not fatal. My love is not contingent on its perfection, and I am too much a sceptic to believe, even for a moment, that it is infallible. I can love my country, and recognize that it isn't, nor can it ever be, beyond reproach. There is, and always will be, room for continued improvement.
Nevertheless, our progress has been interrupted, and despite the momentary reprieve of the ACA, there are signs everywhere that we may be marching in the other direction. The evidence is ubiquitous. For example, I came upon the following article in the Washington Post: "Disabled, or just desperate? Rural Americans turn to disability as jobs dry up." Let me get an obvious irony out of the way. The Post article focuses on the plight of a demographic segment of the US population. These are people who voted for Trump, if they voted, and they did so because they believed, at least in part, that he would restore not only their self-respect, but a sense of national pride. They did so for all the wrong reasons -- a person's self-respect is not and should not be contingent upon the sadistic humiliation of racial and ethnic minorities and foreigners -- nor is our national pride contingent upon what Rorty dubbed a "simpleminded militaristic chauvinism" -- attitudes pervasive in the culture of the rural conservative. Clinton was right, I believe, to call such attitudes deplorable, but being right, as I am fond of saying, is only half the battle. The Post points out that "In the 2016 presidential election, the majority-white counties voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, whose rhetoric of a rotting nation with vast joblessness often reflects lived experiences in these communities." Let me get another obvious irony out of the way, the animating force behind the Post article, the demographic segment fell for a con, as will slowly be revealed to them as nothing much changes for them -- except perhaps further erosion of their "benefits" -- but they were correct in avoiding Clinton. Her disinterest in their plight and, on occasion, her disgust with them personally was palpable. Although one cannot imagine a starker contrast -- the rural red neck set beside the NY plutocrat wearing a poorly fitting bubba hat -- at least Trump showed enough interest to con them.
They are, clearly, illiberal in their attitudes and behavior, and their support of Bannon and his presidential acolyte makes Rorty seem prescient when he writes, "one thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out." Although I am not sure I would call it jocular, Trump's own "contempt for women" seems to have mattered little in the election, and there seems to be an upsurge in hate crimes throughout the nation, actions which aren't necessarily condoned, but only tepidly condemned by the current administration. It does appear that "all the sadism which the academic left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come fighting back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners" -- not to mention their racial, gender and sexual attitudes -- dictated to them by college graduates" has found an outlet. If the core tenant of liberal faith is "social justice," they have sinned mightily. Moreover, at least from a liberal perspective, they have sinned not only against liberalism, but for reasons virtually unfathomable to the liberal faithful, they have ignored their own self-interest. They have empowered a party that makes few bones about cutting, even eliminating, the very sorts of Roosevelt era benefits they have come to depend upon. Though one hasn't heard "disability" as a specific target, the social security administration that supports it has been targeted of late. If indeed "the number of working-age adults receiving disability climbed from 7.7 million to 13 million" -- if "the federal government this year will spend an estimated $192 billion on disability payments" -- you can be certain that the parsimonious GOP will find the tax burden required to support those disability unconscionable, particularly since the $192 billion is "more than the combined total for food stamps, welfare, housing subsidies and unemployment assistance." They have sinned not only against social justice for others, but against themselves by electing a party that is almost certain to further immiserate them.
I do think Rorty is correct when he writes that "the adoption of attitudes which the right sneers at as 'politically correct' has made America a far more civilized society than it was thirty years ago," but it has done so by vilifying a rather hapless segment of American society. As Rorty recognizes, there is an even deeper, self-defeating irony for the left. The so-called new left, or cultural left, or academic left, that emerged in the 60s and absconded with the democratic party, by vilifying the racial and gender and sexual attitudes of the deplorables, pretty much gave up on "what Richard Sennet has called the 'hidden injuries of class.'" The academic left sneers at the bigotry and xenophobia of those who inhabit the rural backwaters of our nation, in the south and the fly over states, and have focused their energies on people who are "humiliated for reasons other than economic status." Rorty, I think, is correct, "when the right proclaims that socialism has failed, and that capitalism is the only alternative, the cultural left has very little to say in reply" because their focus been on the educational genocide, if not of the deplorables themselves, then certainly their bigotry and parochialism. Genocide might be too strong a word, but one need only read the missives of the extreme right to see that's precisely how the most deplorable of the deplorables sees the threat against "their way of life." For the more average joe, however, the question is more "what about me?" The top down initiatives of the post-60s left seem to have benefited everyone but them, particularly "people of color," and the reason, of course, is two fold. They are the villains of the historical narrative, and they're not "other" in a relevant way. They have the same skin color and European ancestry as those who inhabit the top 1%, and to be "other" in a relevant sense "you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness." Although Rorty doesn't say as much, he implies, I think, that "during the same period in which socially accepted sadism has diminished, economic inequality and economic insecurity have steadily increased," in part because the elites of both parties share a similar attitude toward the humiliations of the unemployed resident of the trailer park which might be summarized bluntly as "it's their own damn fault."
Rorty's prescience was credited during the election, and I think he is correct when he predicted that we would enter into an "Orwellian world." 1984, of course, has come and gone, and while the totalitarian horror imaged in the 20th century is unlikely -- in part because the "means of surveillance" have become altogether more sophisticated than anything imaginable in 1949 -- but there will be, he suggests, an "inner party" and an "outer party." The inner party -- "namely, the international, cosmopolitan, super-rich" will, of course, "make all the important decisions." On the other hand, "the analogue of Orwell's outer party will be educated, comfortably off, cosmopolitan professionals" -- the technocrats. Rorty assumes that the readers of his monograph are members of this class, and he is probably correct. It takes a level of educated sophistication to follow his argument and its ironies, particularly when he suggests that "the job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the inner party are carried out smoothly and efficiently." He doesn't quite make the evocative statement that the job of people like us to is insure the "trains run on time," in part because the inner party isn't really interested in a "final solution," at least not in the sense that the fascist ideologues of the past were interested, for example, of ridding the world of jews. I do think Frum is correct that the modern inner party kleptocrat could care less about oppressing the innocent, but do care considerably about protecting the guilty -- that is to say, protecting the interests of their class. So it is convincing when Rorty suggests that the inner party kleptocrat needs outer party political-technocrats "who can pretend to be the political class of each of the individual nation-states," and carry on "the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference." Consequently, as Rorty goes on to point out, "they will encourage politicians, of both the left and the right, to specialize in cultural issues," the intent being bread and circus. If they can keep the rest of us busy with "ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores," core economic decisions will be made outside (though abetted by) the political process and the extractive economy will continue unabated. What does it mean when the "fed raises interest rates?" And really, who cares, when OMG! they're killing babies in abortion clinics and painting swastikas on muslim garage doors.
The difficulty with extractive economies is simple -- they always go too far. The great recession is a case in point. While one can easily get lost in the technical details of the near collapse, the proverbial bottom line is this -- the banks attempted to extract mortgage payments from people who could not afford it. They went too far, and created real anguish. They will go too far again, and create more anguish. While there is a sense of disaster averted, there is also a sense of lingering insecurity, of apocalyptic doom, just around the corner. For some, like those described in the Post article above, it is not apocalypse soon, it is apocalypse now, and there has been something of a great awakening, pun intended. Rorty sees it, or wants to see it in principally economic terms. He suggests that "member of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported," while at the same time "suburban white collar workers -- themselves desperately afraid of being downsized -- are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else," particularly not those who seem, well, so unworthy. At this point, Rorty writes, presciently, "the non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for -- someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, the tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and post-modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots." I don't know about post-modernist professors, because most post-modernists, from Heideggar and Nietzsche on, have been actual or crypto fascists, themselves in search of an authentic strongman. That's another essay for another day, but it's relatively obvious that Trump presented himself, not only as a strongman (the comparisons to Putin) but perhaps more important within an American context, as a savior (the "I alone can solve").
Such messianic foreboding is a staple of DIY christianity, and as Garry Will points out in his review of Frances Fitzgerald's new book, there is something of the revival tent about a Trump rally, which makes him a natural for the sort of rural, republican voter who collects a disability check, and helped put him in office. As Wills put it, "he too presented himself as opposed to elites, to the academic and political and journalistic establishment, even (for a brief lying while) to banks and special-interest lobbying. He is spontaneous and improving -- 'telling it like it is' in his supporters' eyes. He feels so credentialed by his crowds that he cannot even conceive that more people voted for the establishment candidate than for his own 'authentic' ticket -- he will no doubt go to his grave thinking that any votes against him were rigged." Trump is, in every sense of the word, a populist, and it makes Rorty's suggestion that the US, like other old industrialized democracies, "are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments." Having said this, there is something of the "wanna-be" about populism, at least within the US, to include even Trump. Though he no doubt has plenty of money, his past business failures and the reluctance around his tax returns raise suspicion that he is not a true member of the inner party. Trump, of course, insists that he is, but the same narcissism that drives him to emblazon his name at the entrance of his buildings, would drive him to exaggerate and seems also to put him outside the inner party who prefer to make their decisions, if not in conspiratorial secrecy, then discretely, unobtrusively, at one remove. They do not need to suffer the slings and arrows themselves, when they can HIRE members of the political class to do so for them. Nor is he properly a member of the political class. Indeed, that he was an outsider was (and remains) his appeal. The contrast with Pence and his aura of competence is instructive. From top to bottom, Trump is crude, unsophisticated, marginally literate, but as Wills notes, "his style helped ease the godly toward this godless man. They felt he was 'talking their language -- little realizing that it was the language of Father Divine among others, of evangelicals as tastelessly rich as Donald Trump. It is the 'tastelessly' that assures them he is no snob. He's a poor person's idea of a rich person -- living in a vulgar gold splendor the poor man would embrace if he had 'made it.'"
For the moment, Trump remains acceptable to the inner party because, to put it bluntly, he won. The question shifted from what to do about Trump to what to do with Trump, and there are signs that he wants to remain acceptable. He has, quite predictably and quite quickly "made his peace with the international superrich, just as Hitler made his with the German industrialists." His cabinet picks -- Steven Mnuchin for Treasury and Wilber Ross for Commerce could be read, if nothing else, as nods to the inner class, along with many others who have spent careers in opposition to the very agencies they have been selected to lead. They promise, if nothing else, to remove both impediments to the further acquisition of wealth as well as any threats to their ability to keep it. Whether he can become acceptable as a member of the outer, political class is, however, another question. This morning's post has two relevant headlines. The first is "Trump remains the center of attention, but he's increasingly isolated politically." The writers point out that "for a second consecutive weekend, President Trump remained in Washington — tweeting in the morning, holding meetings at the White House and heading to his Virginia golf club on Sunday — all the time surrounded by aides and patrons yet, increasingly, politically marooned. Weighed down by dismal approval ratings, the president has been unable to wrangle enough support in Congress to advance his agenda and is searching for outside support to defend him from attacks coming from all sides." They go on to point out that "weeks of early, politically damaging battles over controversial policies and an ongoing probe into his campaign’s ties to Russian interference in the election also have left Trump with the lowest approval rating of any president at this point in his administration since such data was first collected, during Harry S. Truman’s presidency." The second is "Trump's budget would hit rural towns especially hard -- but they're willing to trust him." The writers point out that "the president’s proposed budget would disproportionately harm the rural areas and small towns that were key to his unexpected win. Many red states like Oklahoma — where every single county went for Trump — are more reliant on the federal funds that Trump wants to cut than states that voted for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton." It probably goes without saying that the president's disproportionately favors the rich. For many red states, The who have "already undergone years of state budget cuts, as [they have] been unable to balance increasing costs with declines in the oil industry, tax cuts and generous corporate tax credits," federal funds have become "even more vital to the city, especially for programs that serve the poor and working class." Consequently, their "excitement about Trump’s presidency has been dulled by confusion over an agenda that seems aimed at hurting their community more than helping it." The inner class expects controversy -- indeed they depend upon it, particularly around marginally economic issues like religion, guns, and sexual mores -- but Trump's braggadocio, coupled with what can only be described political incompetence, seems to be drawing attention to the wrong issues and undermining acceptable controversy. The inner class, more than anything else, wants competence from the political class, and there's little to suggest that populist Trump is actually competent, and much to suggest that his narcissism over-whelms whatever competence he might have.
For the moment, Trump remains acceptable to the inner class and the reason is captured in the title of the second article: "Trump's budget would hit rural towns especially hard -- but they're willing to trust him." On the one hand, even though poorly managed, his budgetary proposals are acceptable. On the other hand, the ups and downs of his approval ratings are just part and parcel of the bread and circus, and so long as he maintains enough popular support to keep their budgetary proposals moving forward, all will be well. Moreover, there is good reason to believe that all will be well. Andres Miguel Rondon wrote a brilliant short essay on "Donald Trump's Fictional America." Although it doesn't mention, it supports Frum's assertion that, if what is happening here were happening elsewhere, we'd know what to call it -- authoritarian kleptocracy. Rondon's principle thesis is that facts matter little. He writes, "If you think the postfactual world is a recent development, then you should see how Hugo Chávez was and is still mourned in Venezuela. One can safely say that the Venezuelan revolutionary, who from 1999 to 2013 presided over the largest oil boom in history in the most oil-rich country in the world, and yet left behind a hungry, ailing, economically ruined society, was a downright catastrophe for his country’s citizens. A factual catastrophe, as it were. Yet many there, especially the very poor, who are the hardest hit by Chávez’s failed policies, still idolize him as a savior. Some have even set up a religious cult around him." He is saying what I have been saying for some time: the assumption "that the scientific understanding of the world is somehow the natural route—the obvious one, the longstanding one—when in fact, blind faith was until very recently the unvarying constant of civilization. For most of our human history, we lived to survive, and when faced by doubt we were not embarrassed by beliefs that required no verification." A deep irony of American politics is not that people have voted against their interests, or that they will continue to vote against their interests, but that those of us on the left were actually surprised to find that they do so. For some time now, the GOP has positioned itself as the party of blind faith, not only in its continuing association with conservative and revival tent christianity, which sets the pattern, but also in its on-going opposition to secular, scientific rationalism. Some of it is blatantly self-serving (e.g. the debate on climate change, where the discredited scientific consensus serves the status quo interests of those who have grown rich on fossil fuels) but some of it is puzzling until one realizes that, for those whose faith is whole, discrediting one thing discredits it all and consequently serves the more narrowly defined self-interest. Rondon, however, reminds us of "the true merit of post-truthism: Its narrative coherence—an easy consistency that the behemoth of data spouted at us by the mainstream media frustratingly lacks. It is precisely this coherence, this simplicity in a world of complexity," that makes not only religion, but also the manufactured political post-factual fiction "worthier than reality" in the eyes of many.
There is an even deeper irony. Rorty writes as a post-modernist who wants to rescue 18th century secular rationalism, particularly a political agenda predicated on secular rationalism, from the philosophic onslaught of, well, both pre-modern religion and post-modernist nihilism. From that position, he is not altogether convincing. That is an essay for another time, but for the moment I will simply point out that the membership of the inner party are thorough going secular rationalists, at least where wealth is concerned. They are evidence based (not faith-based) folks when it comes to their proverbial bottom line. Moreover, the inner party of plutocrats rely on an outer party of competent technocrats to keep the machine working as it should, both politically and economically. The GOP reliance on minute parsing of demographic data and voting patterns to effectively gerrymander districts is just one case in point, a parsing that will be even more effective as more and more "personal" data is shared. They do not live in a post factual world. Rodon asks us to "Consider wealth inequality." He goes on to say, "Depending on where you read about it, and often simultaneously from the same source, you will discover that the Gini coefficient has been steadily rising across the developed world, though specially in America, because of—what? Robots? Trade with China? Reaganomic deregulation? Sheer financial depravity? Illegal immigration? Taxes? Even for an economist such as myself, the answer is unclear." One has to admit that it's complex, and the real cause will be some version of "all of the above." Looked at atomistically, however, from an inner party perspective, the questions are relatively simple: does this particular action inhibit or enhance the growth of my wealth? The technical imperative for their outer party minions is also relatively simple: find ways to grow wealth. There will always be some level of uncertainty -- that is to say, risk -- but one suspects few CEOs or their immediate minions repair to the corporate chapel and pray for guidance. They will ask what I asked, "can this be reduced to a spread sheet?" meaning of course can we develop, based on reliable and reproducible data, a projection of the costs and benefits of a particular act relative to the current status quo? Will an automated facility cost less than a heavily peopled facility? What is the market potential of China for this product? What does compliance with this particular regulation cost us? Et cetera. The inner party does not need sheer financial depravity, nor do they need concern themselves with the legal status of immigrants, though both make for good theater, but taxes, any taxes, are inherently a problem unless, of course, they contribute to the secure possession of property. Rondon has a point when he tells us that Trump offers simplistic narratives with clear villains (NAFTA, fence jumpers, muslims) but he is not offering them to the inner party plutocrats, nor is he offering them to the outer party technocrats. Neither live in a post-factual world, though it proves convenient when others do. Rondon also has a point when he tells us that "Many people have been too eager to blame post-truthism and the rise of Trump on a deficiency of education," particularly those on the left for whom "education" is itself a faith-based solution to virtually every problem. One doesn't need to read too many comment sections on Huffington Post or Salon to know that many on the left see "a stupefied populace" voting for Trump "precisely out of the stupidity of his rhetoric." Rondon is correct that this vision is offensive and intellectually lazy, and easily reciprocated with a "back at you." He asked, "what about the very human demand he tapped into?" and goes on to admonish those of us on the left who see an under-educated "army of gullible slouches and racists on sofas with guns, smartphones and a brief vocabulary." We should see "a large, disenfranchised, chunk of society that was promised meaning through social mobility, got none of it, and after almost a generation of stagnating wages still had no clear, coherent answer to the question: Why, after so many years of work, am I still suffering?"
Rorty's post-modernism is rescued by his pragmatism. It may be that the whole of society and all that we know are simply "social constructs," but he cannot quite shake off the reality of suffering -- that it matters, relative to human suffering, how and why we construct our societies -- or to put it a bit more philosophically, that it matters how we express the moral imperative that governs our society. Implicit in the paragraph above are two visions for America -- and insofar as we are, like it or not, the beacon on the hill -- for the world. On the one side, we have the imperative to create wealth. On the other side, we have the imperative to create social justice. We are offered the two as if they were an either/or choice, but there is, of course, a fundamental asymmetry that distorts the choice. One might argue, for example, that the imperative to create wealth, in and of itself, is not a moral imperative. I would be sympathetic to that view, were it not for the obvious observation that, in a wealthy country like the US, there is quantitatively less suffering than, say in many african nations -- and yes, it is possible to reduce suffering to a spread sheet, when one considers basic necessities like adequate food, shelter, clothing, health care, and the like. The imperative to create wealth is a moral imperative insofar as it is a necessary condition for the reduction of suffering. Having said this, however, I am suggesting that the creation of wealth, is a moral imperative, not as an end unto itself, but as one means, among many, aimed at the creation of greater social justice. To say that we are a wealthy nation, when real wealth is concentrated within one tenth of one percent of the population, is to beggar the concept of a wealthy nation. We are becoming, more and more, the nation of a wealthy minority, and if wealth serves only as a hedge only against the suffering of that shrinking minority, unconcerned with the' suffering of a growing majority, then it is simply selfish and ultimately immoral by almost any humane standard. If Ketchum's characterization of Madisonian thought is correct, it is among the founding notions that our government "should insure political equality, encourage an equitable distribution of property, abstain from granting special privileges, and thereby diminish the unnecessary party strife cause by partisan measures," (329). If the government does nothing to insure real political equality and encourage an equitable distribution of property -- if it becomes obvious that government is oblivious to, or even worse a facilitator of inequality and inequity by granting special privileges to those already privileged -- then it will exacerbate not only party strife, but will threaten the very fabric of government itself as the immiserated many withdraw their consent -- a phenomenon that is becoming altogether too apparent not only on the militant extremes, but among a wider and wider swath of the American people who view our government as corrupt and/or inept -- a phenomenon memorialized in "disapproval" rates that hover around 70% of the population on a good week. I bring up Madison, in part because he represents a tension inherent to our particular constitutional government, but also because we have reached a juncture where it is once again incumbent upon us to address that tension. Madison clearly wanted a government that protected individual rights and freedom, particularly the individual's right to property and the freedom to acquire property, but as "the apostle of free government," or so Ketchum put it, Madison "had even more fundamental reasons for opposing the web of oligarchy he saw spreading through the federal government," not least that it created almost unlimited freedom for the few at the expense of the many and threatened the constitutional basis of our free government.
Perhaps I am being over-subtle, but it does seem that we are faced with some fundamental choices. We must decide that we are, as Rorty put it, "a real country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by government action." The historical list of "accomplishments" that began this departure -- the successive waves of "reform" that began with the end of slavery -- all point to unnecessary suffering mitigated, if not absolutely cured, by government action. To decide that we are a "real" country is to accept that we are not, never have been, and never will be the country of our idealized "dreams." To decide that we are a real country is to reject utopian "dreams" or, as Rorty put it, "immunize ourselves against the passion of the infinite." If the paroxysms of the 20th century dispelled the twin evils of fascism and communism, both of which promised paradise and delivered something quite the opposite -- thuggish, cruel, and repressive regimes justified against an unrealized, because unrealistic, ideal. Like Rorty, I was a militant anti-communist -- indeed, throughout the late 70s and into the 90s I was member of that "massive military establishment" -- whose "cold war" aims "assumed the war against Stalin was as legitimate, and as needed, as the war against Hitler." Although remnants remain, most reject the totalitarian visions of the 20th century, but that rejection has had consequences. We have not rejected our own version of a utopian dream that sees the future in the recovery of an idealized past. The Jeffersonian vision of an agrarian past, uncorrupted by urban "new york" values, cannot provide a blue print for the future. The vision of small, homogenous communities where everyone "worked hard," and "helped each other out" during times of adversity, is as much a pipe dream as the third reich or the workers paradise. Even though small and relatively homogenous communities still exist across the US, the presence of the WalMart on the hill packed with goods that come all the way from China, not to mention the rampant unemployment and "rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation," should serve to remind us that they are implicated within a large and global economy. Moreover, as Ellis reminds us, "the entire mental universe in which Jefferson did his thinking has changed so dramatically, modern science has so unmoored all the 'fixed principles' that he took for granted, that any direct connection between then and now must be regarded as a highly questionable enterprise," and even more questionable is an attempt to re-capture and re-instate an idealized vision of the past by dismantling the present state is both dangerous and misguided. Do we really want to re-capture and re-instate a time when 4 out of 9 children died before reaching maturity? Of course no one is really asking for that, but modern medicine is big medicine, and is itself implicated within complex economies, to include among many other things the complexities of infrastructure that provide for clean water and stable electricity. Nevertheless its dispensations are necessary to anything that might simply be called a decent life.
To decide that we are a "real country" is to recognize and accept the conditions of life, such as they are, that exist right here, right now, but that does not mean simple resignation or capitulation to unnecessary suffering. We can make things "better," if not once and for all, then incrementally for most. Reagan was correct in one respect when he made the Jeffersonian statement that "government is the problem." Much of the unnecessary suffering is, in fact, unnecessary because it is directly caused by or facilitated by government. The solution is not "less" government, which is often just a euphemism for government that facilitates the web of oligarchy and, as Frum suggests, protects the kleptocrat in his property rights. In the world post Citizens United, where corporations are "people" and afforded the individual rights of "people," the very notion of "individual freedom" becomes an Orwellian distortion far from anything that either Jefferson or the more pragmatic Madison might have imagined as "pure republicanism." The solution rather is "better" government, and the first step toward a better government is a substitution, as Rorty put it, of "social justice for individual freedom as our country's principle goal." We can love our country because it has shows "promise of being kinder and more generous than other countries," not because it has institutionalized sadism and selfishness under the banner of "individual freedom." Though I think "the problems which can be cured by government action," as Rorty suggests, "are mostly those that stem from selfishness rather than sadism," the boundaries between the two are often blurred. When ProPublica reports, for example, that "Minority Neighborhoods Pay Higher Car Insurance Premiums Than White Areas With the Same Risk," it reminds us that we are indeed a selfish society and that selfishness has kept us from achieving what "Avishai Margalit has called a decent society, defined as one in which institutions do not humiliate." It also reminds us that the real work takes place, not at a high level of abstraction -- who among us after all is not for a decent society, for social justice, for individual freedom, for motherhood and apple pie? -- but at a level of principled detail. We don't need John Rawl's "theory of justice" to tell us what any kindergartner could tell us -- that it isn't "fair" to charge a black or brown person more simply because they are black or brown. It is, of course, a problem that the insurance industry could solve voluntarily. Now that they know we know, one would hope they would take principled action, but if the insurance industry fails the test of social justice as fairness, what then? It is clearly a problem which can be cured by a government dedicated to rather simple ideas of fairness, not to some abstract principle where corporations, acting under distorted abstractions of "individual freedom," can do whatever they damn well please all in service to the moral imperative to create wealth unmoored from any particular idea of common decency, fairness, or social justice.
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