Thank God it's not Fascism

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.  

Inherent Weaknesses

The other day, I read an article on the inherent weakness of personality-based, authoritarian regimes like Putin's Russia.  The difficulty, it suggested, was the inevitability of death and the consequent need for succession.  Because political power is centered on a single individual, the regime really cannot plan for succession without undermining the power structure.   The regime may lumber along successfully until the great leader's demise, at which point it degenerates into a squalid scramble for power among the "second best."  Our constitutional government doesn't particularly have that problem.  Though I doubt that many would agree with the statement that follows, it is disdainful of individuals.  It outlines a process for succession that, on the one hand, formalizes the squabble for power, makes of it a "game," played frequently enough to be familiar and accepted.  I suspect Trump wants, with every fiber of his being, to become a personality-based, authoritarian leader like Putin, but the pesky constitution and the almost perpetual squabble for power that it guarantees will prevent him from fulfilling his heart's desire.  Given the way things are going of late, I suspect it will crush him, and I for one will not shed a tear when it does.

The article did not, however, completely reassure me. I began to wonder what the "inherent weakness" of our constitutional regime might be. I'm not entirely sure, and I would be open to counter-arguments, but it strikes me that our constitution, not unlike other documents of extreme faith, is a product of its time.  Thinking narrowly, for example, of the first amendment and our "freedom of the press," it strikes me that the framers could not have anticipated the emergence of social media.  Although the first amendment was adaptable enough to accommodate the emergence of mass media, specifically broadcast media, it was able to do so in part because mass media, radio and television, were quantitative changes more so than qualitative changes.  Social media, or so it seems to me, represents a qualitative change.  The recent flap over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is a case in point.  To put a human face on it, Lora "unfriended" several people on Facebook recently because they were re-posting mean-spirited political memes, the same sort of targeted meme used to bolster Trump in the recent election.  Here, one might ask, "what is the point of Facebook?"  For Lora, it was simply a tool to remain connected to family and friends, but I suspect that Facebook sees itself as a tool to generate personal data which can be exploited for "product advertising," but as Cambridge Analytica has demonstrated, one such "product" can be n insidious political hack.  Is it "free speech" when a third party uses my personal data to bombard me with memes that are designed to reinforce and intensify my likely prejudices?   The differences between the users view of Facebook and Facebook's view of themselves deserve a book of their own, but one thing seems clear enough.  The vast interconnectivity of "social media" has not done much in the way of "bringing us together" as a human family, but has on the contrary intensified our "factional" divisions and represents a threat to civil discourse.   Perhaps the First Amendment will prove resilient enough to accommodate the likes of Facebook, but that remains to be seen.

Thinking more broadly, however, there is another fissure along what might be called "the economics of national identity."  Consider, for example, the following statement recently published by Aja Romano in Vox:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged this much in recent public statements regarding the Cambridge Analytica data breach — but what needs far more acknowledgment is that Facebook has far outstripped the moniker of “social media.” If we think about the internet as a global system, then Facebook is a global world power, and it’s high time we acknowledge that such global power comes with monumental social responsibility. That requires major global leadership and oversight, as well as increased self-scrutiny and accountability from Facebook itself.

The acknowledgement centers on the impossibility of "just quitting" Facebook, in part because they exercise a sort of monopoly power over an Indira's Web of interconnectivity that far outstrips anything any one user might imagine.   In the case of the Cambridge Analytica data breach, as the issue at hand, a particular app developer offered a personality quiz through Facebook that garnered personal data not only from those who signed up for the quiz, but all their on-line "friends" as well.  The data this generated was then sold to a third party, Cambridge Analytica, who in turn used it in support of the Trump campaign.  A good deal of money was at stake in all of these transactions, and consequently it's not altogether credible when Zuckerberg claims that he will prevent such abuses in the future, writing "I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community."  What is remarkable in this statement, however, is neither the fleeting public accountability nor the lack of credibility in the corporate response, but the first person, the "I," the amount of power vested in a single, somewhat questionable individual.

I bring this forward, not to bemoan the fact that "Facebook has far outstripped the moniker of 'social media'" or to excoriate Mark Zuckerberg, but simply to point out a few things, not least the decentering of economic and political power.  We can more or less acknowledge that each has "influence" on the other, and this "balance of power" is implicit to, if not explicit within, our constitutional system.  Some hint of this can be found in the yet unresolved Jeffersonian/Hamiltonian dispute which asked, in effect, where in the constitutional system should political power be exercised over the economic power?  It depends, of course, on what one sees as the center of "economic power," whether agrarian or manufacturing, et cetera. We could go on arguing this point, and we probably will.  The current flap over trade policy is retrogressive to discussions that permeated much of our earliest national history, but the discussion misses the point.  One assumption behind this question, of course, is that both economic and political power are national.   What does it mean when Romano writes that "Facebook is a global world power?"  Facebook, clearly, is not a world power in the "sovereign" sense that, say, "Russia" or "China" is a sovereign world power.  Nor is it a national world power in the sense that, say, the Hudson Bay Company was a national world power representing a particular sovereign colonial power.  To say that Facebook has "monumental social responsibility" might be true, but forgive me if I don't quite trust Mark Zuckerberg to provide "global leadership and oversight," in part because the governing intentionality of a "private business" is not to fulfill as yet undefined social responsibilities, but to make money.  If Zuckerberg is wallowing in mea culpa, it is not because he feels the burden of global leadership, nor because he is engaging in "self-scrutiny" but because he believes his actions will help Facebook continue to make money. 

I am reasonably convinced that we don't quite understand what it might mean to call Facebook "a global world power, except perhaps that the "balance of power" has tipped toward the economic, and that the centers of economic power exists outside national boundaries in ways that the founders could not have imagined when the ownership of land and the so-called "means of production" created the centers of economic power.  So, I'm suggesting the paranoid right-wingers are in some respects correct. A new world order is emerging and it is eroding national sovereignty, but again, please don't misunderstand me.  I do not think that getting rid of the UN will do one damn thing to reverse the trend, nor do I think that there's a secret cabal of any sort plotting for world dominance, at least not in the comic book version of world dominance.   If Facebook represents a near monopoly, and as such has become a center of real economic power on a global scale, there will be those who threaten to "disrupt" Facebook.  It's in the nature of power to be challenged. Indeed, Emily Parker, writing for CNN, has suggested that the answer to one technology is, of course, a new and better technology. She writes,

In their new book, "The Truth Machine," Michael Casey and Paul Vigna describe how companies like Uber, Airbnb and Facebook have become examples of entrenched monopoly power. Blockchain technologies "aim to do away with these intermediaries altogether, letting people forge their own trust to build social networks and business arrangements on their own terms."                

Such thinking is ultimately utopian.  I might suggest that, just as more guns are not a likely solution to gun violence, another technology is not a likely solution to the disruptions of technology.  I suggest this in part because it wasn't all that long ago that Facebook was touted as a way of "letting people forge their own trust to build social networks," and we have seen where that leads.   If not Mark Zuckerberg playing us for a sucker, it will be someone else, and if I don't quite trust Mark Zuckerberg or his disrupter to provide "global leadership and oversight," who then can I trust?

      

   

Pat Buchanan Puts Out the Good China

Mr. Xi’s emergence as a strongman has driven home the disappointment among American policymakers that China has not become more open and democratic as it has become more wealthy.   NY Times -- Jane Perlez -- 28 Feb

I read the above statement with some incredulousness the other day, partly because American policymakers were likely surprised, partly because of the underlying assumption that blinkered their predictions -- that is to say, the equation of wealth with an open and democratic government, or that wealth in and of itself leads to an open and democratic government.  There is plenty of evidence to suggest that wealth, amassed in few hands, leads to plutocracy.  I am defining plutocracy in the standard way, without embellishment, as a form of oligarchy where the government and society is controlled by a small minority of the wealthy.  Having said that, plutocracy always presents itself as a wolf in sheep's clothing.  The plutocrat will operate within the parameters of his or her own interests, and within a plutocracy, government becomes the protector and enforcer of the interests of the wealthiest few.  Their actions will be justified against and within any number of ideologies, but they are always a "realistic" betrayal of the "idealism" expressed within that ideology.  For the Chinese, it is a betrayal of the "economic equality" of communism.  For us, of course, it is a betrayal of "democracy."

On the latter, before I go on, let me make a couple of side-bar comments.  First, do not equate the plutocrats for the government officials.  While it is possible for the plutocrat to become a government official, and conversely while it is possible for a government official to amass sufficient wealth to become a plutocrat, for the most part our government officials are hired guns.  Even operating on the assumption that our elections are open and fair, it takes a considerable amount of money to mount an effective campaign, and a good deal of that money is provided by the plutocrats.  Second, I am not suggesting a "conspiracy theory" of government.  I am not talking about a conspiratorial cabal where a few men meet in a secret cave hidden under the artic ice to conspire for world domination.    Two very wealthy men may have competing interests, and contribute disproportionately to one party or another within the political system -- i.e. the Koch brothers and George Soros -- though it does "err," so to speak, on the conservative side.  The reason for this is straight forward.  These are men who have amassed wealth within the world such as it is.  While they might seek enhancements of the current order (e.g. tax cuts) they don't necessarily want to overthrow the order that provided them with wealth, along with the power and prestige that comes of wealth.  Headlines like The Week's "How Senate Democrats rolled over for Wall Street" are simply a case in point.

Having said all that, let me make an admission.  I no longer really know what I mean by "democratic."   In a pure sense, we are not and never have been a "democratic" government, and I'm not even sure that a purely democratic government is a good thing -- that is to say, a government built on and reflecting a majority public consensus.   We could, for example, hold a public referendum for those issues that are particularly nettlesome for the American political system -- e.g. guns or abortion or gay rights -- and insist that public policy reflect the general consensus.  There is, however, nothing sacrosanct about public opinion, nor is public consensus necessarily right, either in a moral or a practical sense.  Public consensus is remarkably pervious to various forms of demagoguery, not to mention the suasion of various Russian meme factories, and then there is what the founding fathers called "factionalism."  The authors of the Federalist Papers may have had something else in mind when they wrote of "factions" as a threat to their proposed form of government, though I think the more modern forms of "tribal Protestantism" are a reasonable analogy for the difficulty.  The public consensus might well decide, for example, that we are a Christian nation, moreover a Protestant Christian nation, but  the moment we must enact this consensus we are confronted with many devilish details.  From there, I imagine, it would devolve quickly into disputes over doctrine and dogma, some of which do and some of which don't have much tangible effect on the daily lives of human beings, but all of which seem to turn fractious nevertheless.  Which storefront "Christian" church represents the true church and who would decide?  An unreasonable question, when we all know, with the absolute certainty of faith, that the FLDS church represents the one true form of "Christianity" and Warren Jeffs should decide.  I'm being facetious, but you get the drift.       

While I'm at it, let me make a secondary admission. I no longer know what I mean by an "open" society either. I could distract myself with a lengthy discussion of Bergson and Popper, but we tend to get this wrong as well.  The core concept is the "closed" society, or a society predicated on a "comprehensive" world view.  By this I mean simply a "society" predicated on a given truth that cannot be contravened or questioned.  Societies predicated on religions, for example, are inherently closed societies because all religions have core tenants of faith that cannot be contravened or questioned.  There is a long argument behind all of this, but for the moment, suffice it to say that closed societies tend toward one or another form of political authoritarianism, in part because there must be someone or something to interpret the "given truth" within mutable circumstances, in part because there must be someone or something to enforce adherence to the dictates of the truth, ostracizing or punishing those who exhibit one or another form of apostasy. The first Amendment rights -- the freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and the press -- are the first things to go.  In a certain respect, all societies, insofar as they are recognizable as a "society," are closed societies.  Even in America, one could go through a long list of those ostracized or punished for one or another form of dissent -- in our case, dissent against a presumptive "majority opinion" -- but the protection of first amendment rights has ultimately marked a significant difference, perhaps the significant difference.  It assures the presence of dissent, which in turn opens up, so to speak, the political authority not only to critique, but the possibility of a "new normal" that accommodates the critique.    

Pat Buchanan gets it right when he suggests that the current political climate --  the rise of "Trumpism" -- is "the tribe."  As he puts it, "the common denominator is that the nation comes first, and that political system is best which best protects and preserves the unique character of the nation."  Or again, as he put it "nationalism trumps democratism."   The pun, I think, was intended, but it begs the question, "what exactly is the unique American character" that must be "protected and preserved?"   In Buchanan's world, China seems to have broken the code, not for us, of course, but for themselves.    As he puts it, "China may be a single-party Communist state that restricts freedom of speech, religion and the press, the defining marks of democracy."  Though it seems more than a bit presumptuous to set himself up as the spokesperson for the Chinese people, yet he goes on to say, "Beijing has delivered what makes the Chinese people proud — a superpower nation to rival the mighty United States," and "Chinese citizens appear willing to pay, in restricted freedoms, the price of national greatness no modern Chinese generation had ever known."  There are a number of assumptions within this statement, however, that many Americans might find questionable, not least the glaring assertion that "restricted freedoms" are "the price of national greatness," along with the implied assumption that, in order to achieve greatness, one must accept a political authoritarianism, if not a "one party Communist state," then a one party Republican state.  One wants to ask "isn't our freedom of speech, religion and the press," not just the defining marks of democracy, but also one of the most significant markers of "our unique character as a nation?"

Clearly, however, he means something else by the "unique character" that must be protected and preserved. There is another subtle difference, however, implicit in the moniker "the Chinese people."  It marks not only a people defined by political boundaries, but also a people defined by race in ways that the corresponding moniker "the American people" cannot.  Societies predicated on the "unique character" of race or ethnicity are even more tightly closed societies, because it creates a paradigm for inclusion and exclusion that cannot be contravened or its value questioned.  Although I'm relatively certain that a little scratching at the surface will reveal that the "Chinese people" are not as homogenous as we in the West might assume, the original sin of slavery nevertheless insured that the "American people" would never be racially homogenous.  And, oh by the way, we in the West (meaning the Western US) have had our own historical Chinese problem, the coolies imported to provide labor, adding a specifically Chinese vein to the heterogeneous American bloodline.  It's not difficult to surmise that the "unique character" Buchanan so wants to protect and preserve has nothing whatsoever to do with the constitutional guarantees of the first amendment, rather a whole lot to do with the hegemony of the racially white, religiously Christian state.  

We could ask the American people the question more directly -- that is to say, are the American citizens willing to pay, in restricted freedoms, for the "greatness" promised by Trump and his acolytes?  Which leads me to a question that has bedeviled me since the election, what exactly counts as greatness?  Being a "superpower nation?" which just begs the question at one remove.  What then constitutes a superpower nation?  Military superiority?  Economic superiority?  Probably both would receive a nod, though ultimately I suspect it's about neither, really.  Reviewing a book by Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, Sean Illing summarizes that "rural Americans are less concerned about economic issues and more concerned about Washington threatening the social fabric of small towns and causing a "moral decline" in the country as a whole."  Because it is "never quite clear what that means or how Washington is responsible," Illing suspects that "fears about America's 'moral decline' are really just a cover for much deeper fears about race and demographic changes."  Wuthnow wants to add nuance, but he doesn't disagree, noting that "they feel threatened if they perceive Washington's interest being directed more toward urban areas than rural areas, or toward immigrants more than non-immigrants, or toward minority populations instead of the traditional Anglo population."   As many have noted, however, this sense of threat, and the resentments it engenders, leads them to vote against their interests, particularly their economic interests, and  I am reminded of Milton's Satan, who would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.  I suspect, in other words, that many American citizens are willing to pay, in restricted freedoms, not for a sense of national greatness, but to protect and preserve their place within the traditional racial and religious hierarchies.      

Ultimately, there are two great fears associated with democracy -- tyranny of the majority, and the redistribution of wealth.   The current conservative party is dominated by both fears.  On the one hand, to say that many of Trump voters actually voted against their economic interests is to say that many voted against the party that would, through progressive taxation, redistribute the accumulated wealth of the very wealthy in their direction, though that redistribution would also, perhaps disproportionately, benefit "undeserving" minority populations.  They voted against their economic interests, at least in part because they feel threatened by "demographic changes," the very real sense that we are rapidly becoming a "minority majority" country, and the very real fear that those "minorities" will exercise (some would say, "are exercising") the same sorts of "tyranny of the majority" that the Anglo population has traditionally exercised.  They voted for the party that would protect and preserve the "unique character of the nation," aka white Christian privilege. 

On the other hand, of course, not all Trump voters actually voted against their economic interests.  They voted for the party that would protect and preserve true minority rights -- aka their property rights against progressive taxation.  It helps, of course, that the so-called 1% tend to be white and privileged, and they seem perfectly willing, at least in the political arena, to dog whistle the baser instincts of the republican base.  Still, one suspects issues of race and ethnicity are largely irrelevant to them.  While it's merely impressionistic and anecdotal, if one is attentive to advertising stemming from the largest global corporations, they more and more are featuring "diversity," to include clearly inter-racial couples.  They do not particularly fear a "minority majority," so long as they form an amenable "market," but an "economic majority turned political," the 99% that might one day rouse themselves and actually vote for their economic interests.  They walk a very fine line.  They depend upon the baser instincts of the republican base to maintain their political position, but at the same time they do not want to alienate their "markets," which of necessity includes the burgeoning minority populations.  At the end of the day, one suspects they are envious of the Chinese plutocrats, whose political position is secure, who can operate more or less autonomously to secure their economic interests without the pretense of "democracy."  

When Tyler Cowen writes that "no, fascism can't happen here" for Politico, I suspect he's right, in a limited sense:

My argument is pretty simple:  American fascism cannot happen anymore because the American government is so large and unwieldy.  It is simply too hard for the fascists, or for that matter other radical groups, to seize control of.  No matter who is elected, the fascists cannot control the bureaucracy, they cannot control all the branches of American government, they cannot control the judiciary, they cannot control semi-independent institutions such as the Federal Reserve, and they cannot control what is sometimes called the "deep state."  The net result is they simply can't control enough of the modern state to steer it is an fascist direction.
                   
The sort of collapse that one saw in 1930s Germany, or that one sees currently in Venezuela, probably won't happen here.  Those who see a white nationalist future for America, with a red cross displacing the swastika, are bound to be disappointed.  No matter how strict the immigration quotas, no matter how repressive the gerrymandering, the pressure of demographics is just too great.  And while our constitutional system is biased toward the rural, we are nevertheless an urban and increasingly urbane nation.  Rural civilization and its discontents, no matter its bucolic appeal, cannot hold complete sway.  The real danger is not fascism, per se, but the increasingly anti-democratic (in both senses of the word) plutocrat.  Cowen cites China as an example to support his argument, telling us "these days, the Chinese central government is more bureaucratized, there is a value-added tax, and the government has been evolving toward the bureaucratic structures found in the developed world, albeit with the nondemocratic backdrop of the Communist Party."  One might suggest that, as China evolves to look more like us, we are devolving toward the nondemocratic political structures found in the emerging world, albeit within the bureaucratic framework of modern Capitalism.  Just saying.    

How Democracies Die: Guns and the Emergent Culture of Cruelty Revisted

A confluence of three things: the latest mass shooting at Parkland High School, reading the introduction and initial chapter of How Democracies Die, and the news cycle.  First things first, the school shooting at Parkland hit home, or perhaps more precisely, very nearly hit home.  The Parkland school district is contiguous with our grand daughter's school district, and Bella had just recently engaged in a color guard competition with them.  On the day of the shooting, our son had felt it necessary to call, fearing that my wife, Lora, would think it was Bella's school and become frantic.  Unlike many of the other mass shootings, this one had the aura of a catastrophe barely averted.  It's a cliché, of course, to say that "I can't imagine the anguish of the victim's parents and grandparents," because I can, of course, imagine it, but for many reasons simply choose not to do so.  Perhaps because this was a catastrophe that nearly struck home, perhaps because she simply cannot help herself, Lora does imagine it and the shooting colored her mood for two days running.

There is a question of just how to understand the shooter.  The major news outlets tend to psychologize the shooter's motives -- I don't have a better term for it than "psychologize," but it is the attempt to find "explanations" for the shooter's present actions in his past, an abusive childhood being the hands on favorite explanation, the second favorite being social changes -- e.g. the emergence of violent "shooter" video games.  The difficulty with all such explanations is that they're not "causal," not in the sense that an explanation in physics or chemistry or even physiology is causal -- a sense of this enters the common parlance in statements like, "not every abused child grows up to be a school shooter."  At best, there are statistical correlations, and they don't allow us to predict the emergence of school shooters in individual cases.  We would have to say, this individual has had an abusive childhood, has indulged excessively in violent shooter games, along with other so-called "risk factors," and so has an xx% chance of becoming a school shooter.  Even accepting the notion that our predictions are not "causal," but rather "statistical correlations," it is questionable whether we could act on the predictions.  What degree of predictive "certainty" would be necessary to elicit a social response, a cure if it can be cured, incarceration if it can't?  80%?  90%?  99.99%?

There is also a felt sense that abusive childhoods, violent video games, and all the other risk factors serve less as "explanations of," more as "excuses for" the behavior.  They tend to imply that the individuals are the way they are because of factors outside their control, and so are not morally or ethically culpable for their actions.   Indeed, such "explanations" tend to suggest, if nothing else, that the shooter is as much a victim of unfortunate circumstances as his targets -- that we should look at the whole incident in much the way we look at any other "natural" disaster. We do not blame the hurricane for its devastations, nor should we "blame" the shooter.  Both are unfortunate, but also, heavy sigh, both are unavoidable.  For many, this amounts to "letting the shooter off the hook," along with the felt sense that he should "held accountable" for his actions.  We want to believe, in other words, that individuals have "free will," that they make "choices," and consequently that the shooter could have followed another path.   Even if the individual  himself, as such, is not evil, his actions were nevertheless evil and he should suffer retribution for his crimes.  Our legal system is more or less predicated on this notion, and of course because the shooter has "broken the law," to use the catch phrase of Law and Order, the police will investigate the crime and the legal system will prosecute the crime, all to affix culpability.

Of course, affixing culpability offers too little too late.  While it provides some social remedy and removes at least one shooter from the streets, it does nothing really to solve the problem -- if, that is, we define the problem as dead children.  In this particular case, the FBI has received some heat because they didn't follow up on leads that might have prevented the shooting.  As if to demonstrate, the media has reported on another case where a wary grandmother reported the "suspicious" behavior of her grandson, who was subsequently arrested and a "tragedy" was averted.   We have to ask, however, what kind of society would it be if we followed through on the suggestions of law enforcement, if we were all wary grandmothers reporting suspicious behavior, if all such reports were investigated and prosecuted?  On the assumption that law enforcement has other priorities and that every tip cannot be thoroughly investigated, it raises the question of what sort of tips would be investigated?  Or, perhaps more to the point, whose tips would be investigated?  It also begs the question of motivation, not only of the potential shooter, but of the "tipster."  One can easily imagine "tips" being made as a prank, as a way of bringing trouble to a rival, et cetera.  Then too, when does a threat become credible enough to merit actual  prosecution?  A few Facebook posts?   The purchase of materials and weapons to carry out the Facebook fantasy?  One might add that this particular shooter purchased his weapon legally, in full view of the world, and it is only the failure to correlate the Facebook threats with the purchase that comes into question.  We are back in the realm of predictive validity, and what degree of certainty would go beyond "reasonable doubt" to merit conviction.  It doesn't take much second order imagination to understand that it would only serve to multiply the number of accusations against law enforcement for failing to act effectively.

Lurking behind all of this is another question.  Is it better to bury two children or 17 children?  The answer is at once obvious and unsatisfactory.  Of course, it's altogether human (and humane) to respond that it would be best if we buried no children whatsoever.  No one can disagree, and so we rend our garments and gnash our teeth at the inadequacy of response after the fact and the impossibility of preventing attacks altogether.  Nevertheless, the answer is obvious.  While we cannot predict and prevent with certainty, we can mitigate the results of an attack.  One thing can be done, immediately.  We can limit access to the semi-automatic weapons that wreck havoc on a mass scale.  While it is not a perfect solution, for those who slip through the cracks of our burgeoning surveillance state, it would limit the number of casualties in any particular "tragedy."  We seem, however, politically incapable of doing so, and it begs the question why?  

One answer, of course, is money.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but Sportsman's Warehouse, for example, offers 257 different types of MSR or semi-automatic weapons for sale.  In this regard, it's no secret that mass shootings are good for business, insofar as gun sales spike anticipating that this particular shooting will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and leads to a ban.  It's not the biggest business, but it is a big enough business -- big enough that the NRA donated what?  21 million?  35 million? to the Trump campaign.  To be honest, I don't know the exact number, but I am reasonably sure it's more money than I'll ever see in my lifetime.   Before we cluck disapprovingly over the influence of money on politics, however, we should take a step back. Yesterday, my wife spent an hour "unfriending" people on her Facebook page that had immediately jumped to the defense of the guns.  One such friend had passed on a picture of a 15 year old boy holding an AR-15 rifle that, ostensibly, he had bought with money earned at his part time job.  Apparently, his father owns one as well.   All this to say, there is a demand for such weapons, and satisfying that demand keeps business booming despite the individual and social costs, and the booming business generates the excess capital needed to hire advocates like the NRA, and for that matter Trump and the other politicians who accepted the NRA donations.  If there were no demand for such weapons, there wouldn't be 257 different models available from Sportsman's Warehouse, and there wouldn't be an NRA protecting the "interests" of the gun industry, all of which begs the second level question, from whence the demand?  

That, I cannot answer.  I understand hunting, and really have no objection to responsible hunting, but the AR-15 is not a weapon designed for hunting deer.  I also, to a lesser degree, understand the felt need for self-protection, but protection from what?  invading Russians?  the encroachments of the federal government?  If the American people feel the need for the AR-15 rifle, then the paranoia runs deeper in the American psyche than even Richard Hofstadter imagined.  Having said that, I'm no doubt missing the point entirely, and I have this vague suspicion that testosterone and the psychology behind the masterbutory violence in first person shooter games.  I don't "get" first person shooter games either.  Aside from any moral objection, I find them, well, boring.   So, suffice it to say, all in all, I have no personal desire to own such a weapon, and to be honest, have little inclination to understand those who do have such desires -- those who repost Facebook memes showing a 60s style poster of Obama with a caption that reads, "How many of these shootings must I orchestrate to get rid of your guns?"  Regardless whether they believed it, or just thought it clever, it was in extraordinarily poor taste, and I wonder if they would be so quick to chuckle if they were the parents of the shooter or one of the 17 slain children?

My lack of understanding, along with my lack of any desire to understand, brings me round to Levitsky and Steven's How Democracies Die.  Though my every instinct pushes me to be "reasonable," to understand and even accommodate the views of others, to play devil's advocate even with myself, more and more I find myself a partisan as extreme as those I've been discussing above, which leads me to believe our democracy has already received a terminal diagnosis.  Levitsky and Stevens write, that "democracies work best -- and survive longer -- where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms."  They highlight two such norms, "mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives."   They go on to write:

The erosion of our democratic norms began in the 1980s and 1990s and accelerated in the 2000s.  By the time Barak Obama became president, many Republicans, in particular, questioned the legitimacy of their Democratic rivals and had abandoned forbearance for a strategy of winning by any means necessary.  Donald Trump may have accelerated this process, but he didn't cause it.  The challenges facing American democracy run deeper.  The weakening of democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization -- one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.  America's efforts to achieve racial equality as our society grows increasingly diverse have fueled an insidious reaction and intensifying polarization.  And if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it's that extreme polarization can kill democracies.

Of course, in the way of such things, both sides of the divide see themselves "saving" American Democracy, although the conservatives would place much greater emphasis on the "American" in American democracy, and would see themselves as the saviors of a "true" America, an exclusive white Christian nationalist version of America.   Those on the so-called liberal side, like me, would place much greater emphasis on the "democracy" in American democracy, and would take a more technocratic view -- that is to say, would see democracy as a network of institutions and programs designed to serve inclusively an increasingly multi-ethnic, multi-racial people. 

There's a back and forth implicit in this.
One article from The Federalist, for example, asks the question "what kind of society condemns people for praying after a school shooting?"  They go on to write "When it comes to mass shootings today, public expressions of sympathy and calls for prayer are increasingly answered with scorn and derision. In the hours following yesterday’s tragedy, thousands of people took to social media denouncing prayer. As of the time of this article, #ThoughtsAndPrayersDoNothing is trending."  To be fair, I have heard a bit of mocking, but it is not aimed at the prayer itself, and certainly not at the public expressions of sympathy.  It has been aimed at the hypocrisy of those who are positions of power and can do something (anything?) more than call for prayer and make public expressions of sympathy, but then do nothing.  The article hints at this, writing, "it will probably not surprise readers that most of the attacks on 'thoughts and prayers' come from the left, particularly those who advocate tougher gun laws as the primary (or exclusive) solution to gun violence."  The writer then goes on to offer a defense of religion for several paragraphs, as though the "left" were engaged in an attack on religion itself.  I won't repeat his argument, in part because it would only convince the already convinced, and ultimately he actually concedes the "left's" point, writing, "when president Roosevelt took the oath of office at his 1905 inauguration, the Bible upon which he placed his left hand was opened to James 1:22-23, which read: "but be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves."  He goes on to affirm that "we must not simply speak and hear.  We must act -- especially when it is within our power to do so."  Even granting that "tougher gun laws" may not be the primary, and certainly not the exclusive, solution -- even granting that "to act on an issue as important as reducing gun violence in America (especially mass shootings at schools) would be foolish without guidance from above" -- the article ends without affirmative solution.

In the meantime, as the Washington Post report, "the Florida House of Representatives was in session on Tuesday, considering several issues," one a "motion to consider a bill banning the sale of assault weapons," and one a "resolution declaring pornography a public health risk."  As they go on to report, "the House chose not to consider the bill that would lead to stricter gun control," but did pass "a resolution claiming that porn is dangerous."  In some respects, their inaction follows the same pattern.  Even on the issue of pornography, "a resolution claiming that porn is dangerous" is not affirmative action to mitigate that danger.  While it's easy enough to condemn pornography -- both the religious right and the feminist left would have something to say on this matter -- it's always trickier to offer a concrete action, in part because any proposed action will quickly reveal its imperfections.  Had the Florida legislature been confronted with a motion claiming that assault weapons are dangerous, they may have had some luck in passing it, but a ban on sales is an affirmative action which quickly reveals its imperfections.  No one really believes, for example, that such a ban would eliminate school shootings altogether, and its an open question whether a state ban would even help mitigate the damage, when the same weapons can be purchased out of state and imported.  Still and all, the technocratic left wants to do something, whether guidance on the issue comes from above through prayer, or preferably through research, and the inability to do anything leads to palpable frustration.  “Unfortunately, just five days after 17 people were gunned down at a Florida school, the Florida House just passed a bill that declares pornography a ‘public health risk,’” state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith (D) told the Independent. “Basically, what they have determined is that these are the Republican priorities in 2018: Wasting our time with debate and legislation that declares porn as a health threat, meanwhile we can’t even get a single debate, vote, or hearing on anything related to assault weapons." 

In some respects, I am saying both sides are to "blame" for the "extreme partisan polarization," and it does occur to me that the AR-15 (and gun stockpiling in general) was, for many extreme conservatives. a symbolic act of resistance to the increasing hegemony of the technocratic and multi-cultural state epitomized by Obama.   In this regard, the election of Trump represents a counter-coup, an attempt to reinstate the cultural hegemony of white, mostly protestant, mostly evangelical values of heartland America.  Having said that, however, there is an asymmetry that is more deeply troubling, and why, more and more, I find myself increasingly partisan in my rejection of the impulses motivating conservatives and the conservative movement.  There is another norm, foundational to "mutual toleration" and "forbearance" -- human (and humane) kindness.  Increasingly, the conservative party would extend kindness, but only to their kind.  Some of our "unfriended" Facebook friends, for example, don't really object to the technocratic state, per se -- they collect their disability, their workman's comp, their social security, their Medicare, even their Obamacare.  They do object, however, to undeserving others receiving the same benefits, and often the undeserving are blacks, Hispanics, immigrants.   Increasingly, one hears in the rhetoric of the so-called conservatives, the sort of language that dismisses, demeans, dehumanizes not only those who do not share their racial, ethnic or cultural background (which is bad enough) but also those who do not share their world view and do not offer blind idolatry to their current standard bearer.  Trump's obsessive "nick-naming" is a case in point.  One might dismiss it as adolescent posturing, but ultimately it is the rhetoric of warfare -- where the German people become "krauts," the Japanese people become "nips," the Korean and Vietnamese people become "gooks," and the various middle eastern people become "rag heads" -- and it is aimed, not at a foreign enemy (which is bad enough) but at other Americans.   It is, perhaps, not surprising that the shooting at Parkland, which is located within an affluent district, provoked student activism from the survivors, who were not content with prayers, sympathy, and counseling.   The Week, for example, reports "at far-right Gateway Pundit, Lucian Wintrich managed to ... [cast] aspersions on 17-year-old survivor David Hogg by noting his father is a retired FBI agent, and accusing him of having been coached on 'anti-Trump lines' due to being suspiciously articulate and repeating himself a few times in a taped interview."  They are calling him, among other things, a shill.  There is little in the way of mutual toleration or forbearance, much of what, under other circumstances, could at best be called bullying.
  
It's not a far step from language that demeans and dehumanizes to actions that demean and dehumanize.  Perhaps that is another understanding I've been searching for -- the AR-15 is not an instrument or tool, but the symbolic representation of an emergent culture of cruelty.   Publishing a photo of a 15 year old boy, about the age of the shooter in Parkland, brandishing the weapon that killed 17 students, expresses an indifference to cruelty and suffering.  Possessing an AR-15, regardless of one's intent for it, is a profession of allegiance to a cultural vision that, I feel, must be rejected out of hand and resisted.


          

   



     

Richard Hofstater -- The Age of Reform

I have just finished reading Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform.  I was familiar with his essays on anti-intellectualism and the paranoid style in American politics, both of which struck me as having grasped fundamental truths.  One of the concluding paragraphs of Age of Reform reads:

Much of America still longs for -- indeed, expects to see -- a return of the older individualism and the older isolation, and grows frantic when it finds that even our conservative leaders are unable to restore such conditions.  In truth we may well sympathize with the Populists and with those who have shared their need to believe that somewhere in the American past there was a golden age whose life was far better than our own.  But actually to live in that world, actually to enjoy its cherished promise and its imagined innocence, is no longer within our power.

I have often made the comment (which I may have picked up somewhere, and if so, my apologies to the original) that history does not repeat itself, but the present does echo the past. Now, about a century later, I have also commented that we are echoing the period following the civil war, reconstruction and what follows.  My basic contention would be that the civil rights movement and the national rending produced by the Vietnam War are the echo of the abolitionist movement and the Civil War proper.  Of course, the analogue is not exact, but an echo, and I wouldn't want to press it too closely because, as with all such arguments, the devil will be in the details.

That said, we are (re)living the aftermath of reconstruction.  Hofstadter characterized the general theme of "progressivism" as "the effort to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in America and to have been destroyed by the great corporation and the corrupt political machine; and with that restoration to bring back a kind of morality and civic purity that was believed to have been lost."  Though they would be aghast at hearing the label "progressive," that particular label having been appropriated by the democratic party, he nevertheless could have been describing the Tea Party, and the more populist wing of the so-called conservative party.  The "great corporation" is pivotal in all this, and renders both the conservative and the liberal arguments ironic, and I will return to it later. 

In the meantime, Hofstadter is correct when he suggests that the "American tradition of democracy was formed on the farm and in small villages, and its central ideas were founded in rural sentiments and on rural metaphors (we still speak of grassroots democracy)."  It is the "freedom" and "democracy" celebrated in country music, and their patriotism is not necessarily extended to either New York or Los Angeles, neither of which are seen as part of the real "America."  I could spend considerable time unpacking the notions of "freedom," but mostly its a notion of "positive freedom" --- that is to say, the ability to do what one damn well pleases, and if there are moral restraints on what pleases, they come mostly from community sentiment and consensus, and from religion, especially the sort of sentimental religion that we still hear celebrated in country gospel.  If there are political and legal restraints, they should be local, very local, in scope.   The more distant the "government" imposing restraint, the less tolerable the restraints become, and the more likely they are to be labeled "socialism," even if one generally might agree with the restraint.  

So far as economic individualism is concerned, the story is more complex.  Hofstadter makes a convincing case that the "family farm" or the "family business" provides the core metaphor.  If one is to be successful, it is fundamentally necessary that one "work hard," and this finds its moral imperative in old timey, and mostly old testament religion -- it's the sweat of one's brow that brings forth bread.  Hard work might be necessary, but most realize it's not sufficient, and there is a strain of popular sentiment that valorizes those who have worked hard without the reward.  Their reward, no doubt, will be in heaven.  Indeed, it seems, the more physically demanding and physically debilitating the fruitless work, so long as they don't lose faith, the greater their reward in heaven.  For those who are successful, however, it is just generally assumed that they "worked hard" for their rewards and their "hard work" gives the rewards, like those of Job, moral sanction.   They "earned" their rewards. It is also generally assumed that they had other defining characteristics that helped bring in the bread -- mostly a form of "savvy," not to be confused with "intellectual prowess" of the sort that earns PhDs and university professorships.  Quite the contrary, the popular sentiment would see "intellectual prowess" and "savvy" in inverse proportion to one another, the latter acquired through the "hard knocks" of experience.  It's the sentiment captured in the bumper sticker slogan, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

All of which might have been appropriate, when "being rich" was more modest, a time when one's riches were centered on the family farm and aligned along main street in the family business.  As Hofstadter goes on to write, "up to about 1870 the United States was a nation with a rather broad diffusion of wealth, status, and power, in which the man of moderate means, especially in the many small communities, could command much deference and exert much influence.  The small merchant or manufacturer, the distinguished lawyer, editor, or preacher, was a person of local eminence in an age in which local eminence mattered a great deal."  Of course, as Hofstadter implies here, and details throughout, there were several transformations of American life that began after 1870, not least the increasing industrialization, which generally speaking made America more urban than rural, and which concentrated more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands.  Although one could argue that the "local eminences" carried on as before, with little diminishment of their actual wealth, it was clear however that, relative to the Carnegies, their wealth was modest and that the deference and influence was limited to the local, and a mass communications revolution with the telegraph and telephone, along with new forms of journalism, reinforced their diminished stature on the national stage.  Hofstadter designated the Mugwump type, those who were "progressives not because of economic deprivations but primarily because they were victims of an upheaval in status."  These were men who "suffered from the events of their time not through a shrinkage in their means but through the changed pattern in the distribution of deference and power."

Several have made similar observations about our current situation.  Trump's brand of populism might be better seen as a new Mugwump type.  As Buffalo Springfield might have put it, "there's something happening here, and what it is ain't exactly clear," but there are echos.  Contrary to the industrialization of the late 19th and early 20th century, America is going through a process of de-industrialization.  Just as in the past fewer and fewer people were employed in agriculture, today fewer and fewer people are employed in manufacturing.  Part of this deindustrialization can be attributed to the outsourcing of labor to emerging nations, part can be attributed to the automation of labor, with the former (I believe?) giving way to the latter.  Just as the mechanization of agriculture meant fewer and fewer hands in the field growing food, it's not that manufactured good aren't being made, and sold, but rather it takes fewer and fewer hands.  This has the salutatory effect of keeping stuff cheap for the shelves of Walmart, but it also has a significant impact on manufacturing sector employment.  And speaking of Walmart, following a familiar pattern of concentration and monopolization, they have made small scale retail virtually impossible in most small towns and cities across the US.  They are welcomed because they offer "jobs," but not the sort of proprietorship that peopled main street and stoked civic pride.  Then too, Walmart may eventually be "disrupted" by the on-line sale and distribution of goods.  All of which suggests that the "new Mugwump type" is emerging as a "local eminence" that finds even its local deference and influence threatened, if not rendered irrelevant, by an emerging economy that has little use for them, and to top it off, by a new forms of celebrity influence fueled by the so called "social media," which ultimately might be bettered labeled sociopathic media.  Consequently, the yearning for a golden age (with the usual elisions of nostalgia) is comprehensible, and helps explain why the Trump voter aren't only those who have suffered actual economic dislocation, but those who feel their deference and influence in the world threatened. 

There is another shift regarding "work" and the "work ethic."  It's not unusual for the older generation to look at the younger and decry their lack of work ethic, but here again there's something happening, though the full outline isn't yet clear.  One of  the shifts that happened along with the industrialization of America was a shift from the economic independence of "self-employment," to the dependencies of "wage labor."  On the order of "self-employment," think of the family farm, the proprietor of a small business, or the professionals -- not the cowboys, but the doctors and lawyers and such.  Part and parcel of economic individualism was the underlying assumption that, if one worked for someone else, and if one possessed the necessary drive, sufficient savvy, a dollop of thrift, then one could parlay that work into self employment.  One could be, so to speak, one's own boss.  For the vast majority of people, the hope for fiscal independence was delusional, and the need to engage in "wage labor," to hold down a "job," became a more or less permanent condition of life.  Although economic independence was still the desired state, the wage laborer found themselves caught up within webs of dependency over which they had little influence, much less power.  As an aside, it strikes me that the incipient forms of unionism were caught within a fundamental tension, or paradox, the felt need to assert some level of economic independence as well as a modicum of deference from the "powers that be," a felt need that could be satisfied only through another form of dependency, solidarity within a class identity and a dependency on others of that class, a solidarity and dependency that rankled against the felt need to assert one's self as an individual.

As a bass line beneath, there lurked notions of accountability and responsibility.  Although Hofstadter would accuse me of overstating the case, I will go ahead and point out that the American soul is principally a Protestant soul and we have "inherited the moral traditions of rural evangelical Protestantism."  Implicit in the Protestant soul is an "ethos of personal responsibility."  Broadly speaking, it is the sense that we are primarily accountable to ourselves and responsible for our own salvation, not only in the exalted religious sense and in the mundane sense of subsistence.  While the sense of accountability may extend outward to family and from there to one's local community, the further out one goes the more tenuous the accountability.  I may have a duty to my wife and children, and I may need on occasion to be my brother's keeper, but I am not responsible for my neighbor's happiness.  If Emerson saw the greatest sin as "limitation," the petty conformity to sanctified community standards, he would agree that, for the protestant soul at large, the greatest (if not the most salacious) sin was dependence, the failure to be self-reliant.  

This "ethos of personal responsibility" works well enough for those who are self-employed -- particularly within that Jeffersonian, Jacksonian mythos of an agrarian America -- less well within an industrial America with systemic need for wage labor, where one is no longer accountable to oneself, but to an employer, who sets the terms and conditions to which they will be held accountable.  The employee meets his responsibilities and consequently behaves responsibly when he or she conforms to the terms and conditions of work and can, thereby, not only support himself, but also meet his familial obligations.  There is some autonomy associated with wage labor, insofar as it is not outright slavery, and one is bound only to the implicit contract that exchanges labor for cash.  So long as he remains working, the wage laborer avoids dependence on others -- the extended family, charitable institutions, the government -- but unlike the small stake farmer, who was dependent only on his own labor, nature, and nature's god for his subsistence, the wage laborer is unambiguously dependent upon his employer, who not only sets the terms and conditions of work, but provides the work itself.  The vast majority of wage laborers are not free not to labor, and to be without work is felt to be shameful, not only because one can no longer "support himself," but also because, having work, being gainfully employed, was an individual responsibility.   So long as there is work to be done, jobs to be had, this ethos of personal responsibility seems justified, and those without work could perhaps be accused of a character flaw, the least of which was laziness, which kept them from labor.    

While the "ethos of personal responsibility" may have had it origins in the traditions of rural evangelicalism, and while the wage laborer felt the obligation to work, the employer, subject to the imperatives of capitalism and imbued with the same ethos of personal responsibility, did not feel the same obligation to provide work, and when they did provide work, did not feel the obligation to provide necessarily "a living wage."  By the "logic of capitalism," I mean simply this:  business owners do not hire people out of a sense of largesse, or patriotism, or obligation to their employees, or because tax cuts have provided them with additional cash on hand.  They hire people only in response to demand, and then they incur the expense of an employee only when they must to meet demand.  To exact the greatest return on their investment, it is in their interest not only to keep the number of employee, but also their wages as low as possible.  The imperatives of capitalism work on both large and small business, though for the latter, caught up within and subject to a local community, the imperatives of capitalism might find it necessary to compromise within "a preponderantly rural society with a broad diffusion of property and power," not to mention the American tradition "of unusually widespread participation of the citizen in the management of of affairs, both political and economic."  As Hofstadter goes on to point out, however, "the growth of the large corporation, the labor union, and the big impenetrable political machine" were at some remove from and no longer particularly subject to local communities, or perhaps more precisely, no longer subject to the Mugwump type, those who commanded more localized wealth and influence.  While the large corporation and the labor union had competing agendas, both were subject to the same unresolved tension, both stood against economic individualism and both were "clotting society into large aggregates and presenting to the unorganized citizen the prospect that all these aggregates and interests would be able to act in concert and shut out those men for whom organization was difficult or impossible."  As Hofstadter notes, to a degree, "the Progressive movement was the complaint of the unorganized against the consequences of organization," or to put it another way, those who had lost a commanding voice in how things were organized.


There are two ironies or perhaps hypocrisies in all of this.  The first and most obvious might be called the "for me" syndrome.  The greatest of the great capitalists, of course, believed deeply in the economic individualism and the "ethos of personal responsibility" -- that is to say, they were deeply committed to their own autonomy, their own individual freedom to do as they damn well pleased to secure and increase their wealth.  They were responsible for and therefore deserving of their wealth and entitled to exercise the influence that came with it.  In other words, for the greatest of the great capitalists, economic individualism was a great thing "for me," though others should be subject to corporate economic and organizational needs.  Moreover, for the greatest of the great capitalists, the rhetoric of economic individualism was a great thing "for me," in part because it justified their wealth, in part because it justified their efforts at organizing the social and economic structures to meet the needs of the modern corporation.  Others are perfectly free to become "just like me" -- and clearly, if they had the necessary drive and savvy, they would become "just like me" -- but clearly they have failed.   They clearly lack drive and must be compelled into labor, if not by whips and chains, then by push of penury.  They clearly lack savvy and so must be subject to the terms and conditions of those who provide remunerative labor -- that is to say, accountable to the needs of the modern corporation.

The second and less obvious might be called the irony of progress itself.  As Hofstadter points out, against the wholly independent individuals, "the processes of modern technology and machine industry -- not to speak of the complex tasks of civic life (much, much, much more so the complex tasks of urban life) make organization, specialism, hierarchy, and discipline utterly necessary."  Within the agrarian world of Jefferson and Jackson, one can imagine the atomistic (or Adamistic) individual believing they were more or less a jack of all trades, the master of his own small piece of the world, subject to no one but himself, nature, and nature's God -- and so far as God is concerned, with sufficient piety, like Job, believing also that they could turn even nature and nature's God to account.  As Hofstadter points out,

It had been their tradition to believe that prosperity and economic progress came not through big or monopolistic businesses -- that is, through the gains and economies of organization -- but rather through competition and hard work and individual enterprise and initiative.  They had been brought up to think of the well-being of society not merely in structural terms -- not as something resting upon the sum of its technique and efficiency -- but in moral terms, as a reward for the sum total of individual qualities and personal merits. This tradition rooted in the Protestant ethic itself was being wantonly defied by the system of corporate organization.

Along with Thoreau, for example, they might critique the railroad as only an improved means to an unimproved end, but it nevertheless represented an improved means, and very few really want to forego the benefit of improved means.  One could say the same thing about modern medicine, that it is only an improved means to an unimproved end, but when the "end" is saving and improving lives, it would seem foolish to reject wholly the benefit of its "improved means." Within a world that includes such "improved means," it is more difficult to imagine the atomistic (or Adamistic) individual as the master of his own small piece of the world, and as Hofstadter points out, "the progressives, object though they might to the many sacrifices of traditional values that the new society demanded, did not seriously propose to dismantle this society, forsake its material advantages, and return to a more primitive technology."  Or in other words, I am suggesting that both the turn of the century "progressives" and our more current conservative radicals were and are "trying, in short, to keep the benefits of the emerging organization of life and yet to retain the scheme of individualistic values that this organization was destroying."

There is, perhaps, a third irony or paradox.  The very idea of "democracy" seems deeply connected to the Protestant ethic as well -- society seen not as a structure, but as "we the people," or as Hofstadter put it above, "the sum total of individual qualities and personal merits."  I'm not sure who said it first, but it is accepted as a truism that there are essentially two dangerous classes of people, the very poor and the very rich, those who have nothing to lose and those who have everything to lose.  To put it simply, the many who have little tend to form mobs, while the few who have much tend to form repressive regimes to suppress and control the mob.  Having few other tools at its disposal, the mob tends toward violence, which in turn is met with violence in order to maintain some semblance of social order.  The French revolution is the principle case in point, and it is often accepted also as a truism that the American revolution escaped the fate of the French because there was greater social and economic equality within American society.  Our political system can be democratic largely because the majority of people belong, neither to the very poor, nor the very rich, but rather to a broad segment of the population that could be considered "comfortable," or at least "comfortable" enough that they had no desire to over-throw the existing order of things, in part because they had the hope of joining the ranks of the "slightly more comfortable." 

Then too, it is also accepted more or less as a truism that democracy and laissez faire capitalism go hand in hand, the "market place" being the place where "the people" go vote with their wallets, where the "sum total of individual economic decisions" act as a self-regulating "invisible hand" guiding the economy.  A business competes for market share, or popular approval, and if a business succeeds (or fails) it does so because "we the people" have decided it should succeed (or fail) with our pocketbooks.   There is, however, an inherent difficulty with laissez faire capitalism and the Jeffersonian idea that government is best when it does least, when a hands off approach, benign in an agrarian society, becomes cancerous.  Within a wage earning society, where the comforts of the comfortable are contingent upon having secure employment, the imperatives of capitalism tend to work against the stability associated with the so-called "middle class," those who are comfortably neither very rich nor very poor.   The more "laissez faire" the capitalism, the more the imperatives of capitalism work against the wage earner, suppressing employment, and where that is not possible, suppressing wages.   Within a wage earning society, I probably don't need to point out that the imperatives of capitalism are ultimately self-defeating, insofar as employment and wages can be suppressed so effectively that they constrain demand, which further suppresses employment, which further suppresses demand, et cetera, into a vicious cycle of collapse.  At this point, one of two things can happen.  On the desirable side, at least from my perspective, "democracy" kicks in, not as laissez faire capitalism, but rather as government imposing constraints and mandates on laissez faire capitalism through redistributive taxation, relief for the poor and unemployed, various forms of economic stimulus, all designed to improve demand and reinvigorate employment.  On the less desirable side, "autocracy" kicks in, and exercises its monopoly of power to "protect property" -- repressive measures designed, for the most part, to protect the power and influence of the rich against the growing discontent of "the people."                          

Neither the implicit "socialism" of the former nor the various styles of  "autocracy" are particularly conducive to "individualistic values."  The former does make one dependent upon the "state," reducing the whole human individual to a set of bureaucratic criteria that determine the amount and type of "assistance" available.  The latter can "feel" more supportive, if not of "individualistic values," per se, then of certain "identity values," defined typically against race, religion, and ethnicity.  They offer, not a redistribution of wealth per se, but a redistribution of power and influence, or more to the point, a reaffirmation of the prestige of the majority race, religion, and ethnicity -- particularly when the majority "feels" the erosion of power and influence and is seeking targets of opportunity for blame. (If not the Jews, then the Mexicans and Muslims.) They offer, again not a redistribution of wealth per se, but symbolic gestures aimed at "the people" while consolidating actual wealth among the autocrats.  (The current tax cuts are a case in point, while everyone got a tax cut, they will not make a significant difference in the lives of "the people," but they have taken significant steps to consolidate and perpetuate the power and influence of the already powerful and influential.)        

At the moment, the real threat to American democracy comes from the very rich, the incipient autocrat in the white house, his facilitators in the house and senate, and his so-called base, those white male protestants who feel most acutely the erosion of their power and influence, their prestige.  At one point, Hofstadter writes that "one of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged."  At the moment, I'm not sure where the sympathies lie.  It seems clear enough that they don't lie with the "needs and sufferings of the underprivileged," else the "black lives matter" movement might have garnered more steam, and there would perhaps be a bit less vituperation directed at minorities generally.  The so-called "me-too" movement might be a point of light, focusing attention on victims of sexual harassment,  except that I'm pretty sure the movement is  less about the Hispanic chambermaid accosted in a hotel room, more about those who seek the moral affirmation of being victims while enjoying extreme forms of celebrity privilege as they "come out."   Even my wife finds it difficult to feel very sorry for the victims of Harvey Weinstein.  It's not altogether clear, however, that the sympathies lie with the "power and achievements of the very successful" either.  The sort of disdain aimed at "elites" is a case in point. Though he has in his actions come down squarely on the side of privileged, rhetorically Trump plays both sides of the fence, his "success" serving at once as sufficient evidence of his drive and savvy, while at the same time placing him outside and above the influence of the hated elites, particularly wall street and government elites who are, or so it is felt, uniformly corrupt.

There is, however, a strong consensus that we are divided, and that anything can become fodder for the war horses on either side of the divide, and that our divisions are more and more irreconcilable in part, or so I would suggest, because the core conservative ambition is simply impossible.  It's not just that we cannot turn the clock back to a golden age -- a time when America was "great."  It's that we want to turn the clock back without relinquishing the very conditions that make us want to turn the clock back in the first place.  I might echo Hofstadter, and suggest that, in order to understand today's conservative sympathetically, "it is important to think of them not as stupid or incapable men who [are fumbling] a simple task, but as men of reasonable and often indeed of penetrating intelligence whose fate it [is] to attempt, with great zeal and resourcefulness, a task of immense complexity and almost hopeless difficulties."  Having said that, however, I am not sure how much sympathy I want to extend, in part because there is one significant difference between the progressive of yore and the conservative of today.  In the past, "the Progressive agitations turned the human sympathies of the people downward rather than upward in the social scale.   The progressives, by creating a climate of opinion in which, over the long run, the comfortable public was disposed to be humane, did in the end succeed in fending off that battle of social extremes of which they were so afraid."  I have suggested elsewhere that the conservative party seems no longer "disposed to be humane," and are, as I suggested in a previous post, not only cultivating a climate of fear and a culture of cruelty, but are also actively pushing us toward that "battle of social extremes."