I watched a video the other day of a pundit explaining the difference between the left and the right, it being the "size" of government with the left ostensibly desiring a big government that regulates all aspects of life while the right supports a small government that promotes individual freedom. It was an advertisement that popped up before a YouTube video I wanted to watch, so there's no real stable link to the video, so my apologies if my immediate comments seem too pat. The advertisement itself was an attempt to stake out an ideological difference between the left and the right, or as Damon Linkin has put it elsewhere, "a uniform galvanizing ideology." I will say right up front that the big government/small government dispute is a false dilemma. If we think in terms of a particular issue -- "guns" -- it's relatively clear that the left desires greater government intervention and regulation. If we think in terms of another particular issue -- "abortion" -- it's relatively clear that the right desires greater government intervention and regulation. Suffice it to say, in these two issues at least, it's not so much a question of the government's size, or whether the government regulates an aspect of life, more a question of which particular aspect the government regulates.
As an aside, I might add it's also a question of who the government regulates, and the answer almost always comes back to the relative poor. Money, of course, is a great facilitator, and anyone with sufficient money, should they feel the need for a gun or an abortion, could obtain one safely even if they were illegal. Tim Murphy makes the case eloquently for political and moral hypocrisy when it comes to abortion, so I don't need to dwell on the issue. The rich are indeed different, and "people of quality," as my grandmother used to refer to the local burgher's, have always felt themselves to be an exception to the rules that govern others. Just saying this, however, puts me on the left side of the horseshoe, as one of the relative poor, in part because those on the right seem eager to accuse the left of fomenting "class warfare." Perhaps so, but at the moment it seems mostly just a war of words, or more precisely a war of attitudes between what might be called the cultural left and the cultural right. It's all those other "differences" that help form the attitudes -- the highly educated vs the modestly educated, the urban vs the rural, the ecumenical vs the religious fundamentalists, and the list could go on. I'm really sick unto death of the culture wars, but if I had to stake out territory, I'd like to see myself as a Woody Guthrie populist, a left leaner empathetic to the plight of those who live in the fly over states and the drive by towns, but my empathy is wearing thin. I have a vague suspicion that, if Woody were alive today, he'd be singing about getting drunk on a plane to Cancun.
I want to say that the culture wars, the attitudinal posturing on the left and right, is mostly a side show irrelevant to the real show, but I'm not sure I can make that claim unequivocally. Attitudes toward the hot-button issues do matter to the quality of life. There are significant reasons why, for example, a black urban female might hold different attitudes toward guns than a white rural male. A few moments of reflection would reveal the circumstantial differences, and a few pundits have taken the time to notice the racial implications of the current "pro-life" youth movement calling for more stringent regulation of guns. Almost all of the hot button issues have "racial implications," and we have yet to deal effectively with those "racial implications" in part because "race," in the most trivial way possible, transcends attitude. You can be as right wing as Ben Carson, but if you're black, at the end of the day you're still black, and for altogether too many people that's the one thing that matters All else sorts from there.
Still, I want to say that the culture wars are mostly a side show irrelevant to the real show, but of late, particularly with the "right" politically ascendant in the on-going battles, it has become the principal show. Consider, for example, one hot-button issue in the emergent culture wars -- Trump himself. It's reasonably clear that Trump ran on a platform, if one can use that word, of hot-button culture war issues, most significantly those that touch most significantly on racial anxieties. As the recent spate of sexual misconduct claims have once again revealed, he has lived a life diametrically opposed to the values espoused by evangelicals, but they continue to support him because he continues to support their side on the hot button issues. One could go on, but the price of being a cultural icon on the right is the fear and loathing of those on the left. As the NY Times put it, "Polls and every recent election show that Mr. Trump has galvanized liberal and moderate voters — especially women and those with college degrees — to oppose his party. Yet at the same time, personal loyalty to the president is increasingly the most crucial litmus test for Republicans." They go on quote Mr. Costello, the representative not running for re-election in Pennsylvania, who noted that "Mr. Trump’s persona did not just fuel liberal activism — it also made it nearly impossible to talk about Republican policy goals. 'He blocks everything out,' Mr. Costello said of the president. 'What fuels the energy isn’t the issues. It’s the personality.'" The left unwittingly or haplessly plays along because the "cultural" issues seem to determine who wins or loses elections.
Having said all that, there is a general sort of consensus that the left is winning the culture wars while the right is winning the political wars. Perhaps so, but both sides remain alarmed at the others "ascendency" while the country wallows in a moral sewer. The Stormy Daniels affair is a case in point. Writing for The Week, Damon Linkin asks "Have we learned anything from [the Stormy Daniels affair] that we didn't already know?" He answers, not really. Most of Trump's sexual escapades were well known before the election. There is the possible exception that the "Daniels lawsuit has revealed to the public that Trump's entourage of sycophantic knuckleheads act like what they so manifestly are -- members of a criminal syndicate issuing threats of physical violence and other forms of intimidation in order to safeguard the Boss." Perhaps so, but even that was known, and "anyway, isn't this a large part of what the President's most loyal supporters (white evangelical Christians) liked about him in the first place?" Not the sexual escapades, which are an embarrassment and must be prayed away, but that "he promised to serve as their strongman protector willing to play rough and dirty in order to keep them safe from the coercive hand of the liberal state?" If Trump's thuggish behavior energizes the left, equally it energizes the right, and he sits at a 10 month high in the polls after the Daniels story broke.
In the end, I could give a crap about Stormy Daniels. In almost all respects, she is proving immune to Trump's shaming not because she is righteous in any way shape or form, not because she is speaking truth to power or any of the other moralizing shibboleths, but because she is the moral equivalent of Trump. It's perhaps not surprising that a porn star would be as blithely shameless as Trump in pushing her fifteen minutes of fame into what? a reality TV show and later a run for the Senate? Who knows? I would add, "who cares?" but it's almost impossible NOT to watch the lizards slither into and out of the moral sewer that our government has become. The salacious stupidity of it all is not important in and of itself, but the results are important. It is, after all is said and done, NOT a reality TV show, but our government, a "real" reality that will affect our lives in any number of ways. At the risk of being exceptionally crude, if Ms. Daniels were to post a video of her spanking Trump's bare ass or engaging in oral sex with his tiny prick (the non-sex act that almost brought Clinton down) it might add to my loathing of the man, but then not much. I already loath the man, and it's questionable how much MORE I could loath him, and even then it wouldn't change one iota how I am able and how I choose to live my own life. The boring stuff happening off to the side will, however, affect me profoundly.
In my previous post, I wondered about the inherent flaws in our constitutional form of government, and thought perhaps it might simply be that it is "timing out." There is an "end of days" feel to Trumps presidency, but that might just be my own fear and loathing. As I have thought about it, however, another aspect of our constitution has occupied my thinking -- the "de-centering," as I put it, of economic and political power. Each clearly has influence on the other, and I don't really need to detail the ways in which economic power influences political power, or the ways in which political power influences economic power, but under our current constitution they are interdependent, but they are not the same. Trump, who, despite all his wealth, occupies a position of political, not economic power. Had Trump simply evaporated over-night from the economic scene, one would hardly have noticed, and one might even have a suspicion that he felt the need to run for political office BECAUSE he lacked the reality of economic power. With that in mind, the current flap between Trump and Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, more or less demonstrates the de-centering. Jeff Bezos DOES have economic power, in part because he has near monopoly control over on-line retail, and on-line retail now represents a significant segment of the American economy. It's too big to fail, so to speak, without affecting the lives of millions. That said, Business Insider reports that "among all the leaders in tech, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos probably had the most contentious relationship with President-elect Donald Trump during the campaign. The two publicly criticized each other on many occasions, with Trump once warning that Amazon would have 'problems' if he became president." Although the relationship is contentious, it appears that Bezos is willing to make nice, in part because, as Business Insider again put it, "Amazon has grown so much in recent years that its business interests are tightly linked to government policies, across areas like sales tax, net neutrality, immigration, and shipping, just to name a few. It's one reason Amazon has significantly increased its lobbying expenditures lately." Trump, of course, is the consummate narcissist who must be at the eye of his own tornado, but it remains questionable how far he can push his personal feud with Bezos without stepping on the toes of other tech and retail leaders whose interests are also "tightly linked to government policies." For the moment, constitutionally, we are still under the "rule of law." While his elected office holds considerable power, it is exercised through regulation and the execution of the law, and the universalizing effect of both regulation and the law prevents the sort of individual targeting of the opposition that Trump craves.
Ostensibly, under our constitution, political power belongs to the "the people," a vague enough concept, and one not necessarily inclusive of all homo sapiens. Nevertheless political power flows from the will (or the consent) of the people. The "vote," for example, expresses the will of the people, and yes, there are constitutional distortions built into the "vote" that skew how the vote results in representation. The Senate itself is a distortion. As Bill Mayer has clucked, California with its 35 million people gets the same "vote" in the Senate as Wyoming with a little more than a half million people. In the representative body that perhaps counts most, the people of Wyoming get a huge markup in the power of their vote. Admitting as much, however, Connor Lamb's victory at the ballot box seems to signal pushback against the current regime, partly because he held firm on core issues like social security and Medicare while co-opting the opposition's stance on the distracting cultural issues like abortion and guns. I'm not holding my breath, but we'll see what happens during the midterm elections. Then too, so long as they are protected, of course, first amendment rights also allow for the expression of the will of the people, particularly the right to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. We saw it in response to civil rights, we saw it in response to the Vietnam war, and we're seeing it again in the response to the Parkland shooting. Indeed, if the NRA represents one economic center of power, the Parkland protests represent the will of the people pushing back against that particular center of power and they seem willing to push back at other economic centers of power. Whether or not the Parkland protests will have any real effect remains a matter of some dispute, but their exercise of collective political power did at least garner the attention of a few major retailers.
Having said all that, with the centers of political and economic power "de-centered" it is less a question of large government, small government, more a question of what might be called the vectors of power. The left at its purest demands government hegemony over the economic centers of power, while the right at its purest demands economic hegemony over the governmental centers of power. For those on the economic right (to be distinguished from the cultural right) those who own the country should run the country, if not directly, then "by proxy" through political power that is nothing if not subservient to their needs. In some respects this does mean "limited" government -- that is to say, the role of government is limited to the defense of "property" rights, to include the "inalienable right" to secure greater happiness through more and more "wealth." There is some room for dispute in just what exactly that means, partly because the notion of "property," like happiness, seems rather vague in the pursuit. The recent flap with Facebook cuts to the core of this issue. What exactly does Facebook own? Intellectual property rights to a web service, yes, but a web service that collects "personal data." Who exactly owns that "personal data?" If that data was surrendered "voluntarily" to Facebook, and Facebook aggregated that data through their "proprietary" algorithms, should Facebook feel free to sell that data to whomever they please, including Russian political hacks? Should the FTC or the FCC (which?) step in and "regulate" Facebook? Or perhaps a simpler solution is at hand. If the people don't like it, shouldn't they, so to speak, "vote" with their unsubscribe clicks and leave Facebook behind? It's confusing for both the left and right, no?
Having said all that, Damon Linker is correct. A vector of power is not the same thing as a "galvanizing ideology," at least not in the 20th century sense of the word, an ideology that "could plausibly animate a centralized totalitarian state to co-opt civil society, driving out dissent by employing a combination of surveillance, repression and propaganda." Linker wants to differentiate between "the threat facing liberal politics today" and those that threatened liberal politics in the past -- particularly fascism. The real sickness of our time, he contends, "is quite different and in some ways the opposite: a rising tide of polarization and chaos in civil society driven by numerous forces, some structural (social media) but others political (right-wing disinformation, Russian meddling), that threatens to empower a form of postmodern, kleptocratic authoritarianism. That’s certainly bad, and potentially antidemocratic. But it’s not fascism."
I do think he's correct, the real sickness of our time is the rising tide of polarization and chaos in civil society, a chaos fueled by the increasingly strident, increasingly distracting, winner-take-all culture wars. Social media has played its part, and it has done so by giving free rein to those unscrupulous enough to invent "alternative facts" that prey on people's anxiety and animosities, which, more than anything else, prompts the "like" and the "share." Indeed, there is a "post-modern" feel to politics today, a world in which all realities are "socially constructed," and no reality, including the reality of science, has any more claim on the "truth" than any other reality. Perhaps it's instructive than many of the originating avatars of "post-modernism," to include Martin Heideggar and Paul de Man were smitten with fascism, which resolves the resultant chaos in the "great man," in the absolutism of a particular charismatic personality. Ultimately, one can't help but feel that Trump will prove to be too clownish even for his most ardent supporters. It's difficult imagining Trump's bare bottom being spanked with his own image by a porn star and thinking "great man." Trump may have made himself the celebrity of celebrities, but in the end he personally commands only the lurid attention of any other celebrity, with one exception. Because he is the head of state, his very presence in the office denigrates and degrades the office, and he has gone a long way toward turning government itself into the unreality of reality TV -- a vehicle for the manufacture of celebrity (on which, by the way, the likes of Stormy Daniels is capitalizing). Because it is so ineffectual, such parade of celebrities behaving badly, the base of power has shifted increasingly to the right, an economic hegemony over the political. The one act the government has effectuated has been a tax cut that is unambiguously in the interests of those who occupy the economic centers of power.
So again, I think Linker is correct, but I'm not sure how to respond. Should I say, "oh, thank God, it's not fascism?" Really? I would perhaps respond that the on-going culture wars, along with the moral and ethical degradation that seems to follow in the wake of all wars when "winning" co-opts the casus belli, has gone a long way toward empowering the right, the economic hegemony synonymous with a "postmodern, kleptocratic authoritarianism." Should the economic hegemony be complete, it is not just "potentially antidemocratic," it is inherently antidemocratic, or more to the point inherently anti-constitutional, and a "kleptocratic authoritarianism," no less than a "fascist" or "communist" authoritarianism, will employ a combination of "surveillance, repression and propaganda" to maintain its hegemony. Of course, it will take place right under our noses and likely with our "consent." We will breeze through the terms of service and click "accept." The Facebook flap reveals that Trump and his facilitators are more than willing to use "post modern" means of surveillance to achieve political power? Hasn't he already signaled his willingness to repress dissent, using violence? From day one he suggested he would "punch protestors in the face," which render the repressive threats against Stormy Daniels almost comic as gangster movie dialogue, but also plausible. Hasn't he (credit where credit is due) perfected a form of propaganda where all "news" is "fake news," even his own dictates, but it changes nothing because remains an entertainment, a shameless oligarch among the oligarchs. If all news is fake news, then really only one thing matters -- his news, not because it carries moral suasion, not because it represents anything resembling a "truth," not because it will benefit the people, but BECAUSE he is in power. Really. Thank God it's not fascism. Otherwise we'd be in real trouble.
No comments:
Post a Comment