The declining political currency of outrage,Part II: Is the media literacy of younger generations obviating the culture wars?

This post proceeds from the spot at which Part I left off. Contrasting his persona and rhetoric with that of President-elect Obama, I characterized Former President Bill Clinton as follows:

Clinton demonized his enemies and inflated the scurrilousness of their charges and tactics, in effect shoring up support from 'his side', but simultaneously enraging and radicalizing his opposition. ... People sided with Clinton because he was needy of our attention and our love; he needed us to prop him up against the mean bullies who were out to get him.

Clinton's presidency coincided with eight years of particularly cacophonous culture-war waging: the far-Right devoted itself to fighting and re-fighting ad nauseum the same perceived 'social'-political battles that were seen to have sprouted during the oh-so-turbulent late 1960's and early 1970's. The battle lines were drawn not around the big issues of the period -- Vietnam, the Draft, the incendiary fretwork of Jerry Garcia -- but around some fairly slight stuff like whether or not the sexual mores portrayed in prime time television programming reflect those of everyday Joes in the Heartland. (A textbook opportunity for Heartland outrage, considering that any such television show enjoys high ratings specifically because millions of viewers in the Heartland tune in week after week, whether they're honest about it or not.) This has been the dominant cultural divide of the past thirty years; not coincidentally, it centers almost exclusively on the opinions, values and resentments of Baby Boomers, in relation to those of other Baby Boomers. The rest of us were mere spectators.

The duration of Clinton's two terms was a period during which the far-Right sated its appetite for pandering to, fueling and masterminding the direction of a host of 'anti-elite' resentments. This masterminding of direction was accomplished not only in the service of galvanizing political support, but in making loads of money. Rush Limbaugh's barely occluded racism, anti-semitism and general bigotry were pilfered from Father Coughlin's bag o' tricks. But what's most shocking of all is the amount of money the fat douche has been able to make by yelling into a microphone at millions of other fat douches.*

William Jefferson Clinton was the perfect focal point for this good-old-boy outrage, in no small part because he already in fact was an outrageous figure, every bit as invested in dusting off and utilizing the codes, metaphors and assumptions of the 1960's culture wars as was Limbaugh. Clinton practiced the politics of division every bit as shrewdly as Karl Rove would do subsequently, especially when he managed to assemble the coalition that handed George W. Bush the second term that he unquestionably didn't deserve. Clinton knew how to rally his coalition to his side; he knew how to draw people in. His travails became ours.

Enter many of the tropes, habits and labels of contemporary campaigning in our heavily (basically: psychotically) mediated lives. Entertainment and news are difficult for the common man (of which there is one somewhere inside all of us, lest you think I'm being elitist [although, I guess I sort of am, but indulge me]) to distinguish from one another.

In Part I, we talked about a form of political theater that uses outrage as its jet fuel: taking umbrage. What a useful tool! We describe the media circus between the Clinton Administration and the Right in terms of lobbing accusations and insults back and forth. But the culture wars wouldn't have gotten under our skin were it simply about slamming the other guy. In contradistinction to the NBA, playing offense is itself not a good enough spectacle. I mean, attacks are exciting, but as they escalate, they become increasingly unmemorable. They blend together. After all, as outrageous as they might be, they're still just words. And if you're going to have a war of words, you may as well have it over policy issues, because words are going to bore people anyway. And debating policy issues is no good for national politics; it turns too many people off.

So it's not about offense but defense. The culture wars of the 1990's got under our skin because we identified with the participants. We took sides. We were divided up into two teams. We lived vicariously through personalities. Bill Clinton was a stand-in for you. He was on your side, advocating for you; honoring your memory and experience, and your belief in the unwavering moral imperatives that your experience taught you to hold dear. On the Right, there were a succession of demagogic good-old-boys to identify with, including politicians like Newt Gingrich and proliferating numbers of ideological profiteers who took a cue from Rush, and began yelling their outrage into microphones for some fast cash.

We observed in Part I that President-elect Barack Obama has a tremendous knack for staring-down and -- in effect -- minimizing ludicrous character attacks. This has the further effect of making the person who utters the attacks look like he is about two feet tall. It's an exhilarating part of Obama's appeal -- and one for which the Zeitgeist could not be more receptive -- that he is an adult. I would add that it is by striking this chord of responsible, intelligent (even cerebral), savvy and -- let's face it -- exceedingly cool adult-ness that Obama stands to unite the country. United in the very real sense that a majority of the country (by a mind-bendingly substantial margin) wants a leader with these very qualities.

I know what you're thinking. What's all this hippie bullshit about 'uniting the country'? You don't actually believe that stuff, do you? The answer is that I do believe it, but maybe not in the way that triggered your incredulity mechanism. What I mean is that when Obama speaks in a language that addresses rhetorically the entire nation, he is in effect -- and to precisely the extent to which his rhetoric is successful at performing this feat of unification -- uniting the country.

By contrast, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush -- both of them Baby Boomers -- were culture warriors, each of whom therefore (by definition) thrived on a rhetorical model that to a lesser or greater extent, pitted one population against another. It's possible that there'd have been no other way in which a Baby Boomer could govern (or, perhaps: no other way in which a Baby Boomer Democrat could govern and/or win an election). It's even more certain that both men are products of their time: that there's something about their personalities, certain (and contrasting) forms of Doublespeak, certain (and contrasting) forms of smugness that are in part generational timestamps. I guess the word would be immaturity.

Both Clinton and Bush are juvenile figures in exactly the sense that Obama is an adult figure. As we've discussed, as a candidate, Obama stared down the sophomoric slime-balling, whisper campaigns, race-baiting and neo-McCarthyist tactics of the McCain/Palin campaign, making their attacks them look like puny spit-balls, thrown by tiny, desperate and mediocre men. Which is exactly what they were. Both Bush and especially Clinton had talent for doing precisely the opposite: taking small problems and made them big. Each constituency identified with 'his struggle' because each constituency identified with its guy and what he 'stood for'.

Each president's constituency was united more or less by the common experience of having lived through the late 60's/early 70's cultural-political climate; a climate that was mediated in an unprecedented way and to an unprecedented extent. And that period of skyrocketing media- and advertising-saturation was distinguished by -- as much as anything else -- the magnification/amplification of small, inconsequential, abstruse and even fictitious phenomena. And, to an unprecedented extent, instantaneously! This was the period of Bush's and Clinton's halcyon youth. These phenomena are what the culture wars are all about: fashion, lifestyle, taste.

By the way, I'm not saying that this historical fact is good or bad; I'm just drawing our attention to it. I mean, an inarguable example of this explosion of commercial media is also something that is unarguably good: The Beatles, for instance. Its sudden popularity and huge influence hinged entirely on some hype and one appearance on one television show.

Media have changed. We docile consumers have too. Can you even imagine a 2008-equivalent to a phenomenon like The Beatles? Although, I suppose it was equally unimaginable in the early 1960's.

Obama grew up at a time during which people had already become acclimated to television and radio. He is a member of the post-Baby Boomer generations, in which all of us are, to a lesser or greater degree, habitually savvy media critics. Watch video footage some time of Tricky Dick Nixon. It's not -- I don't think -- merely the benefit of hindsight that makes him such an obvious phony. It's that we know instinctively how to read media; we're equipped with conceptual tools and interpretive devices that simply could not have been available to the vast majority of Boomers. Is it any surprise that so many people from that generation and older fell for George W. Bush's ludicrous I'm-from-Texas routine? Or that slime ball neocons were able to manufacture a groundswell of support for the Iraq War out of a combination of half-truths, Doublespeak, fear tactics and 'patriotism' talk?

Among all of the voters who participated in the presidential election of 2008, the only so-called demographic of which a majority supported John McCain was white people over the age of 65. The generations that fall under that heading are going to hold on tight and continue voting for the duration of old age. They're likely to become really really old, too. They have most of the money, they have huge numbers, and they represent myriad special interests to which elected leaders will continue to be beholden. Try as they might, they probably don't have the best interest of younger generations in mind.

The way to curtail their power is to continue making progress on what was started with the Obama's electoral and popular majority. How much do you want to bet that the divide will over time cease to be cultural and will become generational. That means that if we're smart, we can continue electing candidates cut from the same cloth as Obama. Candidates that resist and even condemn demagogy, that speak plainly, practically and in a manner that respects the electorate.

If the Republicans continue confining themselves to the backward, resentful, provincial niche they have carved out for themselves, the Democrats have a real opportunity for continued dominance. Now that we've seen that it can work, the new Democratic coalition can only become stronger. If the Republicans wise up and drop their weirdo social conservatism/pro-racism platform, it might save their party, but it would do so in a way that -- we can hope -- has a chance of pulling the country back from the dangerous precipice upon which it currently finds itself perched.

If voters continue to send a message that they won't fall for totalitarian, neo-McCarthyist, fear-mongering shenanigans, then politicians will respond by getting in line. We need to keep demanding that the Constitution be respected and not distorted, that the Bill of Rights is not negotiable in times of 'war', that we won't stand for declarations of war against vaguely defined enemies, with no discernible objectives. In other words, if younger generations hold firm to their media literacy, the message it sends to politicians is clear: don't fuck with us, Old Man. Don't fuck with our rights.

(Heh heh heh.... I think I just had to get that out of my system. Which is, after all, the point of having a blog.....Don't mind me....)


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* For the benefit of readers uninitiated to urban slang: the term "douche" is here used as an abbreviation for "douche-bag."

Did populism collapse the house that WFB built?Some thoughts as to the wheres, hows, whens & wherefores.

I. The "Palin farce" & Republican populism.

An article that should be required reading for the George Wills of the world appears in today's Wall Street Journal (which I spotted by way of Media Nation). Penned by a certain Mark Lilla, it's one of the bitter pills that I'd advise self-respecting Republicans to swallow:

The Palin farce is already the stuff of legend. For a generation at least it is sure to keep presidential historians and late-night comedians in gainful employment, which is no small thing. But it would be a pity if laughter drowned out serious reflection about this bizarre episode. As Jane Mayer reported recently in the New Yorker ("The Insiders," Oct. 27, 2008), John McCain's choice was not a fluke, or a senior moment, or an act of desperation. It was the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future.

And not just any intellectuals. It was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. ...

... So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It's a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an "adversary culture of intellectuals." It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with "ordinary Americans" whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that "populist paranoia" was "subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government." But by the mid-'80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the "common sense" of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by "our disoriented elites," which is why "so many people -- and I include myself among them -- who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism."

The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

... Back in the '70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about "radical chic," the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their "struggles." But "populist chic" is just the inversion of "radical chic," and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. ...

The article has something to say, namely that any portion of the educated Right should know better than to keep mum when a force like Sarah Palin is unleashed upon us, in the name of conservatism. And secondly, any conservative that should have known better but didn't, and who therefore didn't condemn Palin should now be ashamed of himself. (He -- predictably -- isn't). They should also be embarrassed. If they're not, then it's their loss, not the Left's. The less equipped these Palin-apologists are to spot the myriad internal contradictions in which the GOP identity is mired, the more likely it is that the USA can continue electing actual adults to national office.

II. However.

Not so sure I'm ready to buy into the premise that it wasn't until the 1980's that the Republican Party started playing the 'populist' (in both the euphemistic and straightforward senses) card. Or that it somehow wasn't until that shiny-chrome decade that the movement realized that, if it were to survive, it needed to appeal to racists and bigots. True, that commie-hating, loony-toony apologist for extremism Barry Goldwater failed to create an effective political alliance combining Northern industrialists with Southern segregationists. But it wasn't for lack of trying! His mistake? Perhaps he was a bit too forthright in his trigger-happy xenophobic militarist extremism?

III. How 'bout let's just say "the silent majority," wink wink?

Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon, et al., perfected the much-ballyhooed 'Southern Strategy' in 1968. This maneuver capitalized on the widespread Southern opposition to Lyndon Johnson's having masterminded the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Southern Strategy is an object lesson in Machiavellianism that the GOP milked for all (and I mean all) that the once-venerable, nominal "Party of Lincoln" could. And while I'm not aware that Nixon was specifically hateful toward black people, Tricky Dick earned his very nickname as a consequence of his use of bald-faced lies, smear-campaigns and McCarthyism in order to get elected to the House of Representatives. And, let's face it, everybody knows that Nixon was anti-semitic (a prejudice that then as now appears to walk hand-in-hand with pandering to the militarist far-Right fringe of the Zionist Movement, perpetuating dishonestly and dangerously a reprehensible ideology that equates 'good' Judaism with radical-Right-wing Zionism [See also: Hagee, John, John McCain's onetime anti-Catholic, anti-semitic pastor. See also: Kristol, William]).

Obviously, where Nixon benefited from the strategy electorally (with the exception of getting his ass handed to him by Jack Kennedy), it was with eight years of Ronald Reagan that the Goldwater Republicans could finally take their hatchet (the one that another Arizona politician, John McCain apparently inherited from them) to the public infrastructure, dismantling it limb from limb. Americans who so much as noticed -- it was, after all, the Spielberg 1980's -- greeted this carnage with either approval or indifference.

As impressively cynical a feat as Reaganomics turned out to be, perhaps even more striking was the unlikely election of George Herbert Walker Bush to the White House. People sometimes refer to Bush Senior's administration as the "Third Reagan Term." Uh...fair enough. But anyone who really wants to understand how the elder Bush managed to get elected had better come to grips with the singular, twisted genius of Lee Atwater. About whom: be sure to catch this documentary, which aired recently on PBS and will no doubt show up as a rerun in the near-future. Maybe Atwater was no Joseph Goebbels or Leni Riefenstahl. He was a Karl Rove, only times infinity.

Whereas Karl Rove's talent in the area of fascistic disinformation-peddling is damn impressive -- even if it may now look rather quaint, now that it's failed miserably in 2006 and especially 2008 --, Atwater was a natural where Rove is a tables-and-figures man. Atwater was a blues-guitar-playing (literally) opportunist who made a deal with the Devil -- and paid for it dearly. Rove is an Adolf Eichmann-figure. Savvier and more clever than Eichmann, of course. But possessing precisely the deficient capacities for reflection and critical thinking for which history has fated that Eichmann shall forever stand as a one-man morality play.

IV. Lee Atwater & the election of 1988.

Anyway (what's a blog if it doesn't veer off onto wild tangents?): Atwater cobbled together a presidential campaign -- that is, that of Bush Senior, in case we've forgotten -- whose unlikely success was fueled by the mere exhaust fumes of decades of slow-burning resentments and fears. Pure Southern Strategy, straight out of the Nixon playbook. Except in a way that plumbed new depths of dishonesty, race-baiting, demagoguery, shamelessness, and -- most importantly -- the whole discourse it imposed upon the presidential race was pure theater.

Unlike Nixon, who was promising, in effect, "law and order" to Southern and suburban whites who were scared of the rebellion of black nationalists and civil rights demonstrators, unlike Reagan, who lowered taxes, Bush Senior wasn't offering anything serious in return for handing him your vote. The Atwater strategy of playing upon accumulated conscious- and subconscious racism, xenophobia, neo-McCarthyism, anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism was nothing but manipulation that had previously been the province of beer commercials. It was all just to (1) slime the other guy and (2) scorch, as it were, the earth underneath the election such that many people became so turned off by the tactics and rhetoric that they (a.) failed to look closely enough to see that it was all being generated by one side (the GOP), and (b.) therefore didn't bother to vote. And they didn't. That's it. It was shameful and mendacious and mean-spirited even by the standards of the McCain campaign.

V. Back to Buckley: forgive him not for his McCarthyist high jinks.

Ever seen the video footage, shot during the political conventions of 1968 in which William F. Buckley offers to smack Gore Vidal in the face, calling him a 'fucking queer' (or something like that)? Which...to give Buckley his due, was not an inaccurate statement. It wasn't, nevertheless, all that relevant to the discussion at hand, which was the Vietnam War. (I'm not even sure that it rises to the status of ad hominem. Sorry, if that's harsh, Bill; may you rest in peace.)

Sure, our few remaining thoughtful conservatives here in the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand and Eight have every reason to light a candle in gratitude to Buckley when attending high mass. Not so much for leaving them with The National Review, whose quality has plummeted at an astonishing rate since the exceedingly stupid Rich Lowry took the helm. (Rich Lowry is an idiot. In case I wasn't being clear about that.) No, these remaining thoughtful conservatives should venerate their forefather for his well-calculated move of severing the overt ties of the conservative movement to anti-semitism and the John Birch Society. But let's not forget that this same Bill Buckley was a huge supporter of Joseph McCarthy, that he embraced Jim Crow.

VI. Conclusion

In other words, I'll allow that the 1980's saw the anti-intellectual and anti-'elite' streak beginning to gobble up the Republican Party, such that this strain has now come to define the GOP in its totality. But don't let it off the hook that easily. Buckley and the early neocons, etc., may have been intellectuals, but they were also strategists, and cashing in on resentments -- particularly the Southern varieties -- was always a matter of chief concern.

Great article on Obama's "Fake Transparency"

The Obama transition team has announced its plans to release on the Internet a weekly video address in which soon-to-be President Obama will communicate directly to we citizens. In a press release, it claims that this will, in effect, "make the White House and the political process more transparent."

Not so, says Slate's political reporter and columnist John Dickerson, who points out that "snazzy new technology" alone won't be "enough to bring transparency to the White House." His tough but fair-minded (by which I mean, of course, soberly pro-Obama...) assessment of things seems fairly dead-on-the-money:

During the campaign Obama was transparent—but only up to a point. Unlike previous candidates, he released the names of fundraisers who raised big chunks of bundled donations, a move not required by law. But he stopped short of declaring the precise amounts and affiliations. When it came to releasing the names of his small-dollar donors, his campaign used technology as an excuse rather than as a tool to increase transparency. One of the big acts of technological transparency during his campaign was inadvertent, when it was discovered that his Web site language had been changed to remove criticism of the troop surge in Iraq.

Personally, Obama has grown more opaque about his thoughts. As a journalist I get vertigo thinking about how great it would be to hear Obama talk as openly and honestly about his views as he did in this 2004 interview about his religion that was released this week. That he no longer talks this freely is undoubtedly part of the reason he won. I don't see any sign that he's going to change his behavior, and I'm not sure he should. If the press is going to sound-bite a president to death, why should he open up too much?

Obama will show he is transparent not by delivering his message in some new way but by conveying actual information. He's got to tell the truth, yes, but he's also got to have something to say. His most powerful statements during the campaign were not conveyed through an Ethernet cable but from a stage, alone, with a microphone, the way it has been done for 100 years. If the promise of transparency and candor never arrives but the hype continues, his campaign will have produced the political equivalent of vaporware.

The declining political currency of outrage,Part I: The Taking of Umbrage

For the duration of the recent -- for a while, seemingly interminable -- election season, the day-to-day coverage of the cable news-ish punditocracy was dominated by discussion and analysis of a blow-by-blow succession of statements, gestures and reactions, usually embodied by the candidates themselves, whether on 'the stump' or in a television studio, and sometimes simply written-up in a press release in rapid-fire fashion.

Some examples. Criticisms and denunciations: 'Senator McCain strongly criticized Senator Obama for his tax plan, ridiculing it as "socialism"'; 'Senator Obama's campaign shortly thereafter fired back, releasing a statement denouncing Senator McCain's allegations as "more smear tactics from the Karl Rove playbook.'" And, of course, the 'gaffes', the 'favorability ratings', 'raised questions about', etc. That kind of thing.

My favorite of these gestures, by a landslide, was umbrage-taking. It was at once among the most frequently cited gestures on the campaign trail and easily the most ill-defined. It often seemed simply to be imaginary. You were never quite sure who it was who was taking the umbrage, and on whose behalf. Nobody ever announces himself as having 'taken umbrage'. He just takes it!

In fact, it almost has more to do with what you don't do than with what you do, in fact, do. After The New Yorker ran its inscrutable cover portraying Senator and Mrs. Obama as black-power activists/terrorists/Muslims/whatever -- and by the way, re that cover: yes, of course we 'got' that it was an attempt at parody...the trouble is that that's not the same as it actually being funny -- Obama's campaign released a statement denouncing the cover as being in poor taste. But the denunciation was worded vaguely, if with all requisite rhetorical passion. And Obama himself didn't seem to personally care all that much about it, soon thereafter going on the record saying that it wasn't really a big deal.

This is leading me to a couple of points which foreshadow the meatier portions of this discussion (which will follow when I post Part Two):

Despite the near-constant perceived and actual taking of umbrage that occurred throughout the campaign, neither McCain nor Obama were all that convincing about it. It's almost like they were going through the motions. I think that in McCain's case it was unconvincing because he was bullshitting us, and McCain -- despite having tried repeatedly to the point of embarrassing himself and everyone else during his weird campaign -- has never been a good bullshitter. By contrast, in Obama's case, I think that the minimizing of umbrage-taking was part and parcel of the political and rhetorical values on which his campaign was based.

It's not that Obama undertook so lofty and impractical a goal as to transcend the tit-for-tat politics of ridiculing the other guy and taking umbrage when he tries to ridicule you. If you think that either Obama's campaign or his nascent administration contains so much as a speck of the impractical, you're ignoring all available evidence. No: the aspirational aspect of Obama, his espousal of our nation's founding principles and his articulation of the dream of achieving better future, this is not pie-in the sky idealism. Rather, it represents specifically the undercutting of the assumed and unquestioned antimonies between our capacities and our ideals.

One of the practical methods by which Obama undercuts these polarities is encapsulated in my final observation in this post: the difference between Obama's style of umbrage-taking and that of Former President Bill Clinton.* Clinton's style was to make his critics look bigger and meaner and more sinister than they already were**, in effect garnering the sympathy and support of the electorate, or anyway of the slight majority of it that was in his camp.

Clinton demonized his enemies and inflated the scurrilousness of their charges and tactics, in effect shoring up support from 'his side', but simultaneously enraging and radicalizing his opposition. Obama's style is exactly the opposite. He deflates the scurrilousness embedded intentionally in the rhetorical excesses of his opposition (of which, lest we forget, there was tons of the most reprehensible and even dangerous sort imaginable). Instead of demonizing his opposition, he stares it down, as though the would-be demon is revealed to be nothing more than shadows in the bedroom of a child afraid of the dark.

People sided with Clinton because he was needy of our attention and our love; he needed us to prop him up against the mean bullies who were out to get him. People side with Obama precisely because he doesn't need a babysitter to watch over him. We are drawn to him not because he needs us, but because we need him. And when it comes down to it (and part of Obama's brilliance is that he recognizes this even when many of us fail to), we don't need him because he's Barack Obama.

We need him because he's an adult.

Think that's small beans? Not if you consider that the last three decades -- and, arguably, the last half century -- has placed us under the leadership of whiny, needy children.

In comparison to Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton and Bush Junior, Barack Obama is not only an adult, but he is a paragon of practicality. Think about it. How many things can you name that are more juvenile, more pie-in-the-sky/fantasy than:

• "Star Wars" (aka: Strategic Defense Initiative)
• "trickle-down economics,"
• "a thousand points of light,"
• "the era of big government is over,"
• "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,"
• "Ownership Society,"
• "Mission Accomplished,"
• "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
• "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job,"
• "No one anticipated the breach of the levies,"
• "We do not torture"....

.... ??

I rest my case. Part Two of this item, coming up.



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* And actually, during the primary, Hillary perfected a style of umbrage-taking that was -- adjusted for constituency, gender and political climate -- taken straight from of her husband's playbook.

** Although, to be fair, among many of his critics, certain GOP gadflies and thugs, Clinton's characterizations of them proved prophetic and even tame. Ken Starr, for instance. What a weaselly little motherfucker that slight, puffed-up specimen of grandiose Bible-Belt foppery turned out to be!

Filmaker Eugene Jarecki, author of The American Way of War: Tavis Smiley interview

Tavis Smiley interview with filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, who directed, among other things, The Trials of Henry Kissinger.

Jarecki's book, titled The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril, is a historical account of the United States military establishment, its accumulation of political and economic influence in the wake of World War II, and its relation to American foreign policy adventures, the drastically increased power of the Executive Branch and the curtailing of the civil liberties of American citizens.

I have no idea whether or not the book is any good, and it's not that Jarecki is necessarily the most articulate person in the world. What I like is that he is straightforward and unpretentious, and he describes clearly and succinctly the problems and and possible solutions. I believe that the possibility of political change emerging from a bottom-up movement hinges on whether or not you can explain to your aunt what's at stake in two short sentences. Jarecki speaks in a way that your aunt can understand (and yes, I'm bored out of my mind at work):

Tavis: And what I mean to get to is this -- we were talking about the Bush doctrine a moment ago; this whole notion of we strike first if we think you are going to do something to us -- we'll ask questions later on. There hasn't been, to my mind, at least, a whole lot of criticism of that. He got pretty much what he wanted from this Democratic Congress, so I've not seen -- there have not been hearings.

For all the complaining about George W. Bush and he's got to go and eight years is enough, there's not been a lot of talk, as you know, about this Bush doctrine and whether it's wrong for America. And the reason why that concerns me is because no president ever -- I can't think of a single president who wants to give back executive power.

If one executive grabs a hold to it, the next one surely is going to hold on to it. You see where I'm going with this?

Jarecki: You're asking an extremely important question, and I'll say for the record that my book looks at what the Bush administration did in a historical context. So to some extent, when you read the book, it's not a Bush-bashing book; it's a book that really says here's the Iraq war, and in fact a lot of it is new that happened but a lot of it is not so new.

Some of it is an extension of things that came before; a slippery slope that sort of started around World War II and has led us on this path to sort of permanent war making, the way we're finding ourselves. But at the same time, I have to say that the reforms that I seek, and the book talks about some of the reforms that I think are crucial, none of them can happen unless the Bush administration is held accountable for the crimes and wrongdoings and errors of the past eight years, and it is a moral failure in America that not more people are talking about that.

It's a moral failure that the church and that the general clerical community is not talking about it, and it's an obvious failure of Washington that Washington has so lost its moral compass that these kind of transgressions can happen, from torture to a misbegotten war, to people dying, people getting maimed, and we're sitting here not having those national conversations.

Tavis: So how do you scale back, then, from the creep that the Bush administration has essentially gotten away with, this notion of the Bush doctrine? If one president can get away with this -- we hit you first, we ask questions later -- why, with all due respect to Obama, why couldn't Obama or anybody after Obama -- again, nobody wants to give that up. So how do you reel that back in, is my question?

Jarecki: Sure. Well, I think it comes from --

Tavis: Can you put the genie back in the bottle?

Jarecki: I think you can, and it comes from you and me. And revolutions throughout history have put genies back in bottles. It would have seemed impossible to tell the colonists of America that they would triumph over the British empire and put that genie back in that bottle. It would have seemed impossible to tell the black South Africans that they would triumph over a system of apartheid; put that genie back in the bottle.

So the fact is this can be done, but it's never done, as you point out very astutely -- it's never done from the executive down. Change is not trickle-down; change is trickle-up. ...

Read the transcript or watch video.

I have like three or four posts of substance that are in progress. So, soon there'll be something more interesting upon which to feast your eyes.

Sound the Death-Knell for Dixie (Part Two):David Brooks discovers GOP racism for the first time.

I'm going to talk a bit more about the politics of resentment. My reason is this: I continue to be amazed as to how simultaneously correct and naive recent comments by conservative journalist David Brooks on the future trajectory of his party have been. Brooks has predicted, both in his New York Times column and in his frequent appearances alongside Mark Shields on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer -- and I'm paraphrasing here but not exaggerating --, that it will take ten to fifteen years for the Republican Party to get its shit together intellectually and politically. The subtext of his commentary is -- and it's not as though he needs to say it -- that the GOP is being taken over by the pro-Sarah Palin 'grassroots' and all but ditched by its traditional (rich, suburban, etc.) base.

The columnist, conveniently, has failed to mention his own frequent and cloying forays into GOP-styled populism. In other words, Brooks could be said to deserve at least some of the blame for ushering in the party's new era. True, he is no Rush Limbaugh and has never sought actively to recruit the rural, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-elite, anti-intellectual, racist cadre, whose seeming ascendancy he now bemoans.

In contrast to the inbred hooliganism of Limbaugh/Hannity, Brooks -- to appropriate a device that appears in the concluding paragraphs of one of his recent columns -- commits a sin of omission. Until recent weeks -- around the time of the McCain/Palin rallies in which the GOP 'salt of the earth'-faithful screamed death threats intended for Obama, passed around an 'Obama'-labeled stuffed monkey toy and other racist knick-knacks, and called Obama a "terrorist," a "socialist," a "Muslim," and someone who "doesn't love this country the way you and I do" (oh wait, that last one was said repeatedly by Sarah Palin herself) -- I have never once seen Brooks point out that the GOP's cultivation of a mean-spirited, anti-intellectual, anti-urban, anti-elitism sentiment was beginning to lead down a slippery slope, which everyone could see in plain sight. Nope. Despite his supposed 'moderate' conservatism, not a single column inch. No, it took the advent of angry, racist mobs, televised and YouTubed for all to see, for David Brooks to level with his readers and finally admit that Palin was a cynical selection, condescending to the voters and dangerous for the country and to the office of the presidency. What gives, David?

To be fair, let's remember that for the last decade, Brooks has probably been too distracted to sound a note of caution regarding the GOP's ongoing brain drain and its inevitable consequences. Over the two terms of Bush/Cheney, Brooks has had a lot of neoconservative and neoliberal agenda-pushing to get through-- often by stealth, which eats up even more of a busy columnist's day. After all, the man's schedule was already so taxing as to include things like

• disseminating neoconservative and neoliberal ideology by masking it as snarky-but-lovable pop-sociology;
  
• applauding middle America for its unrefined taste (in more than one book whose title includes the word 'paradise');*
  
• being sure to time his fully formed policy stances in such a way as to perpetuate the illusion that careful deliberation and the measured weighing-of-options precedes their articulation;
  
• kissing the asses of Catholic people, in effect if not by design, playing 'good cop' to William's (both Kristol and Bennett) 'bad cop' in the pushing of neoconservative foreign policy adventures and the continued scorched-earth defunding of the domestic public sector;
  
• lamenting the disappearance of 1950's middle-brow reading culture, and other (pre-Palin) instances of the shameless peddling of cheap nostalgia;
  
• and panegyrizing George W. Bush's "self-confident" and "committed," leadership of the Iraq War -- as recently as July 2007, while enthusing over Bush's "unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea."

Jeez, David: you've managed to express what all of us feel deep down in our hearts, but what none of us could find the words to say: the rightness of Bush's Big Idea! So that's wherein lies George W. Bush's secret; how he pulls off being such a great and beloved president!

Brooks never had a negative word to say about Bush's neo-McCarthyist electoral strategy. Nor did he bother to wince along with the rest of us thinking human beings as we watched Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their crack squad of war criminals falsify intelligence, engage in character assassination of any/all figures of opposition, and censor dissent in the run-up to the Iraq War.

But no matter. Brooks appears recently to have updated his appraisal of George W. Bush, right about the time (early October, 2008) at which he felt compelled finally to come out and admit that Sarah Palin is BAD NEWS. Brooks made the following remarks at an event sponsored by the Atlantic Monthly, on October 9, 2008:

[Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican Party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at The National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

Brooks is none too pleased about what he calls -- euphemistically -- the 'populist' turn his party has taken. What he's describing is the Republican Party's descent -- encapsulated in the whiny and incoherent failure that was the McCain presidential campaign -- into a movement lacking entirely a vision of how to govern, in what way, and for what reason (and for that matter, whether or not governance should be dismantled entirely). In other words, it's turned -- decisively and demonstrably -- into a party that caters to resentments. And little -- if anything -- more than that.

As I remarked previously, the most recent example of this type of non-ideological, non-forward-looking politics that comes to mind is the phenomenon of the Dixiecrats, whose rhetorical dichotomies -- which are circumscribed as simple-mindedly as possible, in the interest of maximum versatility and in order to appeal to simple-minded people -- of local v. global, religious v. educated, upstanding v. immoral, are exactly the same dichotomies that McCain and especially Palin (or rather, her hard-Right/neocon Handlers) set out to tap into. What's interesting about this essential connection to Dixiecrat politics is that it's come -- in more ways than one -- full circle. I'll elaborate on this in a moment. (And this is subject to which I shall return in subsequent posts.)

You might ask: OK, Tom we've heard you sound off about the cultural politics of resentment and the GOP. And we get what you mean about the Dixiecrats: they were resentful of (1) the industrial/increasingly cosmopolitan North for everything from the Emancipation Proclamation to Reconstruction, LBJ and the Civil Rights Bill -- the latter being the last straw; (2) they hated black people and were resentful of any measure resulting in the shaking-up of the Southern caste system, particularly because measures that treated with dignity persons of color were seen as decreasing the status of poor whites. (Or whatever...those kinds of things.)

But, you ask, how does this example map onto the structure or modus operandi of the current Republican Party? I mean, we know that McCain's campaign -- particularly that shrill, none-too-bright woman who dressed to kill -- was speaking a coded -- and sometimes not-so-coded -- language of racism at rallies, and in advertising and propaganda. But, what resentments are the Republicans, specifically, tapping into?

Aha! I respond. That's just it: the great thing about resentment is that it doesn't need to be attached to something specific. This is what I was attempting to describe in a recent post, in which I pointed out that resentment is not an idea, but rather, a cluster of emotions, reactions and instinctive postures of self-preservation. And the laundry list of resentments -- particularly among rural, uneducated white voters -- to which McCain and Palin catered as -- eventually -- the exclusive centerpiece of their campaign needn't be pinned down in all that much detail in order for us to see objectively that it existed.

But just to demonstrate the extensiveness of this laundry list, let's try our hand at a thought experiment: let's just accept for the moment, arguendo, that I'm correct in saying that the racism that bubbled to the surface in dramatic fashion during the McCain/Palin rallies evidences the fact that there are lingering resentments among parts of the South (and rural north) connected straightforwardly to historical Southern secessionist and segregationist mentalities. Remember, there need only be a subconscious hint of this lingering attitude for my Dixiecrat thesis to have legs.

Now, let's take a step back and think of political attitudes that have developed more recently in the rural north and in the South (and perhaps, until this past election, in lower-middle-class [or extremely nouveau riche outer suburbs). Think of the decades of careful and well-funded Right wing inculcation and brainwashing that descended upon these areas. For instance, Rush Limbaugh, whose audience expanded considerably with the advent of the Clinton administration. More and more Limbaugh clones flood the AM airwaves across the fruited plains. Then comes Fox News. Then comes George W. Bush: even more divisive a figure, and even more than Clinton mired in the rhetoric, Doublespeak and umbrage-taking of the 1960's. (I will shortly be posting an item that fleshes out my thinking on the culture wars, particularly during the Clinton and Bush II administrations.)

Now: think of how simple a task it would be to attach myriad contemporary political issues to the coattails of these lingering resentments. Anyone among us can rattle off the obvious themes that map onto the basic structure: xenophobia, hatreds that often come along with especially ignorance saturated species of militarism, racism, reverse classism, resentment of the educated, various forms of anti-Semitism, suspicion toward people with credentials, distrust of people with accents, anti-feminism, fear of gays and lesbians, fear of gay marriage, disdain for people who are more educated than they are, disdain of academia generally (for its supposed 'liberalism'), disdain for 'mainstream media' generally (for their supposed 'liberalism'), and finally, much-stoked militant opposition to, quote-unquote, "activist judges," a specious concept in and of itself, and anyway, a concept which very few of those who fear it have any understanding at all.

So, basically, although it seems clear to me that the Dixiecrat political posture is the one that feeds Rightist populist rhetoric, the Republican Party can and does steer it in whatever direction it wants, in the service of any in a spectrum of ideological ends that has -- per se -- no material, cultural or political relationship to anything the Dixiecrats would have recognized or even comprehended. And -- despite Brooks's apparent surprise in noticing this -- the Republicans have been up to this for a long time.

So, among the poor and lower-middle-class racists whom McCain courted, the underlying resistance to Obama had to do with nothing more than the fact that he is black and has a funny name. But McCain's henchmen didn't need to say anything close to that, and they didn't need to THINK that in order to take political advantage of entrenched racist sentiment.

I had a history professor once who said -- cornily (but pithily) -- "there are no bad guys in history." There are no 'bad guys' in politics, either. There are just 'instinctive politicians', or 'tough politicians', or 'savvy strategists'. You see? The so-called 'elites' in the press have their own euphemisms, too; rhetoric that prevents the reporters themselves from having to think of it for the ugly thing it in fact is. How often have you heard 'mainstream media' praise Karl Rove for his

acumen at tapping into our nation's overflowing wellspring of religious- and racial-bigotry, and converting this bigotry into political capital.

See what I mean? Media inoculate themselves from harsh truths more rampantly than even voters do, and to a much greater extent than to which media inoculate their viewers. And Obama was an 'other'. That is all he needed to be, and strategically that's the only slight-of-hand McCain's people needed to pull off in order to court effectively the racist vote.

'We don't know about his history and background'. 'He needs to give the full story on his relationship with ACORN'. 'Why hasn't Mr. Obama come clean about the full extent of his relationship with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, with whom, my friends, and let us make no mistake, Mr. Obama so dangerously pal-ed-around'. 'Barack Obama: too radical for America'. 'Barack Hussein Obama'. 'That One'.**

This racist side of the GOP is by no means new. Whatever the psychological tricks that David Brooks needs to play in order to convince himself that he was not a willing participant in the GOP's longstanding Deal with the Devil: tapping into the voting power of this angry mob. Sure, this mob is resentful (as it had been previously) of quote-unquote liberal ideas, espoused and propagated by the quote-unquote liberal media, and forced upon our children by quote-unquote liberal academe. But it's also resentful of ideas, resentful of media, and resentful of academe. AND IT HAS BEEN, ALL ALONG. Every bit as much as it has been racist all along.

In an upcoming post, I will continue to discuss the reasons why I feel Obama's victory might possibly mark the end of Dixiecrat politics. But just to give you a taste of the sweet elixir of victory, let's return to the dismayed David Brooks, in conversation with Mark Shields and Jim Lehrer on the November 7 broadcast of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer [emphasis is mine]:

JIM LEHRER: Both of you, first to you, Mark, end of this week, three days after the election, any lingering pieces of wisdom that you have not shared with us up until now, in other words, something that struck you that has not been said?

MARK SHIELDS: Just a couple of quick things, Jim. One is that the Republican Party is facing a real problem in those four western states of Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona. ... because the estrangement from the Latino community, which is a growing part of the electorate, and estrangement from westerners in general.

But the other thing is that the only age cohort in the entire electorate that John McCain carried were voters over the age of 65. Voters under the age of 30 voted 2 percent plus Democrat in 2000. They voted 12 percent plus Democrat in 2004 and by 35 percent in 2008. And you see it moving up the ladder to 30- to 44-year-olds, as well. So the formula I use is probably a little bit of an overstatement, but right now the Democrats, young Democrats, are moving from a room of their own to an apartment of their own hopefully to a home of their own, while Republicans are moving from their own home to the rest home to the funeral home. And...

JIM LEHRER: Oh, my.

MARK SHIELDS: And that's a problem for the Republicans.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I guess I completely agree. If you're in a shrinking group, you're probably Republican. The growing groups are Democratic. The thing that strikes me -- and this has become a big debate, especially in the Democratic Party -- what sort of victory was it? Andy Kohut was on the program yesterday, said it was a victory for the middle. The middle asserted itself. That's how I read the returns, which suggests sort of a measured way ahead for Obama. Other people, however, say, no, it was a realigning election like 1980 with Reagan. It was a liberal victory. We should pursue a more liberal agenda, and interpreting that result has become a big debate.

JIM LEHRER: All right.

MARK SHIELDS: Oh, excuse me. Just one thing. Voters do want a more active government, a lot more than they did in 2000 and even 2004.

DAVID BROOKS: I disagree. But we'll get to that.

MARK SHIELDS: Well, those are the exit polls.

JIM LEHRER: Thank you, Mark. Thank you, David. ...

______________
* If the 2004 Plotz piece to which I have referred leaves you hungry for more fun at the expense of Brooks at his pandering worst, see these contemporaneous -- roughly speaking -- pieces by Nicholas von Hoffman (whose discussion of Brooks's tendency to flatter/legitimate the ignorance of the our country's vast uneducated populations is not dissimilar to the point I keep trying to articulate about the manipulative function of resentment in politics) and Michael Kinsley, from the latter of which I cannot resist quoting:

The Brooks sociological method has four components: fearless generalizing, clever coinage, jokes and shopping lists. ... Brooks defends his generalizations as poetic hyperbole ... When he says that a store in a suburban mall is ''barely visible because of the curvature of the earth,'' that is poetic hyperbole. When he claims that it is impossible to spend more than $20 for dinner in a Red Lobster, that is just wrong, and mystifyingly so. ... [T]he difference between sociology and shtick.
At the very least, Brooks does not let the sociology get in the way of the shtick, and he wields a mean shoehorn when he needs the theory to fit the joke. Among some of the formerly young, ''the energy that once went into sex and raving now goes into salads.'' O.K., that's funny. So is essentially the same joke a few pages later, when Brooks writes that ''bathroom tile is their cocaine.'' Except that now he's referring to a different one of his demographic slices, which undermines the claim to sociology. And when another joke surfaces three times, it undermines the shtick as well. The ''16-foot refrigerators with the through-the-door goat cheese and guacamole delivery systems''? Ha ha. A large Home Depot salesman ''looking like an S.U.V. in human form''? Ha ha ha. S.U.V.'s ''so big they look like the Louisiana Superdome on wheels''? Enough already.
''In America, it is acceptable to cut off any driver in a vehicle that costs a third more than yours. That's called democracy.'' True? Funny? Wouldn't the joke work just as well the other way? ''. . . a third less than yours. That's called capitalism.'' And if it works both ways as a joke, it must not work at all as a sociological insight.

These criticisms leveled against Brooks resonated in 2004, and -- comparatively-- this resonance has expanded by several orders of magnitude in November 2008. They underscore Brooks's tendency to be noncommittal, to equivocate and change his positions in a manner that smacks of tactical shifting. Plotz's discussion of Brooks's position(s) on the Iraq War -- which Brooks supported initially, along with many chatterers who were supposedly to his left, but more-or-less abandoned wishy-washily as a cause worthy of column inches when the issue became muddled and overcomplicated. These kinds of shifts, the tendency to evade personal accountability for having supported unambiguously a policy that ended up causing international chaos, the unprecedented scaling back of American civil liberties, the deaths of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis, conforms to the kind of neocon modus operandi with which we typically identify intellectually dishonest neoconservative charlatans like the unrepentant sniffer-of-Palin's-panties William Kristol, for whose Weekly Standard the nominally and temperamentally more moderate David Brooks did, after all, write, before landing his New York Times gig.

But beyond even Brooks's occasional proclivity for baffling fence-sitting: cultural politics have sure taken a turn for the toxic (to say the absolute least) since 2004, hasn't it? His veneration of the armies of red-blooded, poor, uneducated, simple-minded "Joe Six-Packs" strewn majestically across fly-over country looks pretty fucking naive -- not to mention hypocritical and even dangerous -- in the era of Sarah Palin's shrill racism- and hate-fueled brand of borderline-fascistic populism, no?

So: David, when exactly did stoking the flames of regressive, repressive, reactionary, xenophobic, 'Know-Nothing' and (let's face it, fundamentally anti-democratic) populism switch from being optimistic/patriotic to being "anti-intellectual"?

Also, in retrospect, it's too bad about the "Louisiana Superdome on wheels" line, no? I mean, it's simple bad luck, and I'm not going to pin it on him. But it's awfully poignant, ¿non?



** Heh. Look. The expression 'the other' has such a effete/academic sound to it. But, in establishing the use-value of this term as a means by which to describe identifiable, real-world phenomena, need we look any further than this weird-ass phrase that was uttered by McCain in reference to Obama at the second debate of the general election? You're not going to find a more obvious example of the othering of one's political opponent than this. I mean, it's not even 'that guy' or 'my opponent'. An entire human being, collapsed into the unadorned, monosyllabic 'one'. And not 'this one': 'that one'. Now, lest we get in over our heads in the amateur-psychology/cultural studies department, before we attach too much significance to the utterance of this mind-bending phrase, it is also important to keep in mind that John McCain is a babbling old coot.

Why...

...is National Public Radio so useless and sophomoric?

Just wondering. No reason in particular.

Discuss.

CNN.com: "Moderates to blame for GOP losses, conservative leader says"

Ha! This is hilarious. On The News Hour with Jim Leher, David Brooks has been predicting that his crippled party will likely need to endure ten-to-fifteen years of working out the kinks before it's able to get back on its feet ideologically or politically. A conservative named Tony Perkins is already proving Brooks right:

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council told CNN that conservatives need to take back control of the GOP if the party is to return to its winning ways.

"Moderates never beat conservatives. We've seen that in past elections," he said.

Rejecting suggestions that the conservative movement was viewed as being out of touch with the electorate, Perkins says the Republican Party needs to go back to basics.

"It's a return to fundamental conservative principles that Ronald Reagan showed work and that people can be attracted to," Perkins said. (Full article on CNN.com)

This is exactly the kind of dream-world nonsense Brooks is referring to. It's going to be very entertaining to watch from the sidelines as the GOP keeps this up! And as it continues to lose election after election after election....

Resentment is not an idea. Nor is resentment a means by which one achieves intellectual or moral clarity.

This thought, or some variation on it, has been coursing through the nether regions of my mind lately.

I think it has arisen in conjunction with my attempts to think through what exactly it is that fuels the continuing existence of a political party while the remaining traces of its longtime ideology -- the ideology that the party has (so to speak:) bet the bank on -- have frayed themselves into utter incoherence.

Like stray, dead leaves left over from autumn that reemerge with the melting away of blanket-upon-blanket of wet, winter snow, only to shrivel dry and decompose under the hot July sun.

A voter's resentment (conscious or not), when reproduced, amplified, refracted and echoed back to him by men and women seeking political or economic power, is his blindness. A politics that endeavors to flatter a voter for his blindness is a politics that subjugates and -- indeed -- infantilizes the voter.

To the precise extent to which a voter's resentments are flattered, reinforced and catered to, that voter becomes dependant upon the politician, and more importantly, upon the continued ascendancy of a politics that so flatters him.

It is in this respect that observing the decomposition* of Goldwater/Reagan Republicanism calls to mind a condition that could be described in terms that are not dissimilar to those that were used repeatedly by Goldwater/Reagan Republicans** in undertaking to describe the dreaded, feared, much-lambasted and -lampooned relic, the Welfare State:

paternalism.

__________________
* And if you doubt that that's what we're observing, I'm afraid that you flatter yourself. (I know, lame joke.)

** Not to mention the pathetic/embarrassing "Obama's a socialist" antics of John McCain. It's really hard to pin the 'socialism' label on the Democratic Party in an environment in which the sitting Republican Administration has enacted the most sweeping regime of the nationalization of formerly private resources in the history of the United States.

FiveThirtyEight.com: "Obama outperforms Kerry among virtually all demographics..."

FiveThirtyEight.com's poll-aggregation expert and interpreter Nate Silver describes Obama's superior performance:

Obama received a larger share of the vote than John Kerry among voters of all genders, races, education levels, and income classes, and virtually all religions. ...

...Obama markedly overperformed Kerry among parents. In a sense, it was those people who have most reason to be concerned about the future who voted for Obama: people who are young themeslves, or people who have young children at home. ...

Read more and observe FiveThirtyEight's chart, which breaks down the percentage of the electorate that voted Dem in 2004 and in 2008, with respect to an array of categories of personhood.

Sound the Death-Knell for Dixie (Part One)

Media are speculating about whether or not Barack Obama's electoral landslide represents a reconfiguration of voting alliances and the redrawing of the national political map. Is Obama's victory the end of the era of Culture War-besotted politics ushered in by Nixon's appeals to "the silent majority" (i.e. racists)? Have electoral demographics shifted such that we are putting behind us the politics of fear, hate and neo-McCarthyism behind?

Much has been made of the swift rise in populations within the ranks of the cosmopolitan, professional class in the large cities and suburbs in the Southeast and West. This population boom, combined with Obama's unprecedentedly robust ground game, are said in varying degrees to account for Obama's victories in formerly Republican-voting states like Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, New Mexico, and even in states in which Obama failed to prevail, yet was surprisingly competitive, like South Carolina and Georgia.

(Map credit: FiveThirtyEight.com [updated 11/8/08])

To be sure, there are innumerable other factors, including strong turnouts -- and strong support for Obama -- among young voters, first-time registrants and, of course, voters of color. In the latter group, we mustn't neglect to include Hispanic populations, which voted to an unprecedented extent overwhelmingly Dem. (The GOP repelled these voters with its shrill anti-immigrant turn...a hard line to which McCain eventually -- and famously -- caved.) And no doubt high turnout among black voters helped Obama pull off the feat of prevailing in the state of Indiana: something that no Democratic presidential candidate had done previously.....that is, since Lyndon Baines Johnson's resounding defeat of Barry "Crazy, Nuke-loving Cracker" Goldwater in 1964.

We'll continue discussing LBJ in Part Two of this post. But first, let's return to the demographics of Obama's victory. Crucially, Obama outperformed preceding Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and Al Gore in his support from among white male voters. Politico:

Obama performed slightly worse with white women, 39 percent of voters, than Al Gore did in 2000. McCain won the votes of white women, 53 to 46 percent, perhaps an indication of the historical [sic] candidacy of his running mate, Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska.

Obama compensated for the drop-off in white female support with the strong 41 percent support from white men. No Democrat since Carter had until Tuesday’s election earned more than 38 percent of the white male vote.

In 2000, white women split between the two parties while Republicans won white men by 24 percentage points. That white male gap was dramatically narrowed Tuesday to 16 points, a trend that began with the financial crisis, and one that allowed Obama to split the male vote overall. (Rest of the article.)

In other words, fears expressed among many in the chattering caste of the "Bradley effect" -- wherein there exists a disparity between how voters said they would vote and how they in fact did vote -- appear not only to have been misplaced, but at times reflected the reverse of what ended up occurring. In fact, in Ohio and Pennsylvania -- Obama was much more successful at capturing the white vote than any polls had indicated. Overall,

Mr. Obama lost white voters by 12 points, but that is the same margin Al Gore lost them by in 2000 and better than the 17-point margin John Kerry lost them by in 2004. (New York Times; here's the full article.)

And remember, we're talking about percentages here, not raw numbers. The expansion in nationwide participation that characterized the 2004 election, and again the 2008 election, means that by definition, the head count of Obama's support among these voters exceeds Gore's.

Where and who are these white men that are switching to the Dems? Well, the speculation to which my opening paragraph refers is in fact mostly correct. The Republicans are losing suburban and, as it were, 'ex'-urban (far-out suburbs [not 'far-out' in the psychedelic sense, but rather in the boondocky one-way-ticket-on-the-bridge-to-nowhere sense]). This trend is striking both in the newly blue states I mentioned above and in historically Democratic-yet-conservative states like Pennsylvania and Ohio.

This Washington Post piece is worth quoting at length:

Nothing demonstrates this reversal as clearly as the Democrats' ascendance in the suburbs and among the moderate, college-educated voters who dominate them. Obama won 50 percent of suburban voters, three points higher than Sen. John F. Kerry's showing in 2004 and the most by a Democrat since exit polling began in 1972, swelling his margins in a number of battleground states.

In Virginia, Obama offset losses in the rural parts of the state by not only winning Fairfax County, as Kerry did, but also the big outer suburbs of Prince William and Loudoun counties, home to many high-tech workers and government contractors. Obama visited Prince William County, which has been hit hard by the real estate bust, on the first day of his general-election campaign and the last, as well as in between. He also easily won the big Richmond suburb of Henrico County, a largely white community that Republicans had sewed up for years.

In Pennsylvania, Obama fared worse than Kerry in many steel towns around Pittsburgh. But he ran up such big margins in the formerly Republican suburbs of Philadelphia that he was able to run away with the state, by more than 10 points.

In Colorado, he gained 100,000 votes over Kerry in three big suburban counties outside Denver. In Ohio, he achieved a narrow majority in part by reducing the Republicans' margins of victory in the outer suburbs of Columbus and Cincinnati.

In Florida, he won partly by improving on Kerry's numbers among suburban voters in the Interstate 4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando and in Indiana and North Carolina, his showing with suburban voters improved by about 20 points in each state, far exceeding his gain among rural voters. Obama nearly carried the most iconic Republican suburb of all, Orange County in Southern California.

And what do these Democratic inroads in the nation's suburbs add up to for the Republicans, who'd formerly relied upon these politically moderate and economically middle-class voters to shore up their "fear of terrorism" vote and their "we're afraid of taxes" vote? Remember that even four years ago, George W. Bush continued to enjoy broad support from voters in those electoral districts. Apparently, the economic meltdown and Bush's continued neocon foreign policy shenanigans finally started to piss these people off. And good for them, say I, for articulating their displeasure.

But where did that leave McCain? Toward what audience was the fractured, intellectually and ideologically barren Republican Party of John McCain to aim its mouth-breather rhetoric and robo-calls? The Post article lays it out, and the brutal facts ain't pretty:

The Democrats appear to have built a majority across a wide, and expanding, share of the electorate -- young voters, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities, and highly educated whites in growing metropolitan areas. The Republicans appear at the moment to be marginalized, hanging on to a coalition that may shrink with time -- older, working-class and rural white voters, increasingly concentrated in the Deep South, the Great Plains and Appalachia.

That McCain (and Palin) embraced demagogic tactics, race-baiting and condescending, cynical fear-mongering wasn't -- as we all know -- an accident. The traditional GOP playbook insists that the candidate must first and foremost flatter its intended audience. And you can't flatter an audience on any but that audience's terms, irrespective of its median IQ.

As sure as eggs is eggs, you can't count on their vote unless you give 'em what they want. And if that group of voters tends to be rural, uneducated, racist, and excruciatingly provincial, well Sir, ya gotta serve up some good old-fashioned deep-fried nuggets of HATE. That's when you get all of the the Bill Ayers shit. And you know, calling people socialists and terrorists and such.

I will comment on this dynamic more fully in Part Two of this post, wherein I shall explore the Republicans' ineffective stab at creating an electoral majority out of these barely conscious redneck hordes, this strategy's rhetoric, and its persisting dialectic between "cosmopolitan snobs" and "real folks." (I shall argue that this dialectic constitutes little more than a half-baked update of the rhetoric and ideology of the secessionist -- and subsequently, segregationist, and eventually "Dixiecrat" -- South.)

One last point should be made before I conclude Part One. Although Obama's white support -- and particularly white male support -- was considerably weaker in the deep segregationist South, which is and was to be expected, Obama didn't perform all that badly among rural and blue-collar voters in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio; including in areas that are known to include communities infamous for their entrenched racism.

For example, there is much encouragement to be found in the strong support among union workers enjoyed by Obama in many battleground states. The AFL-CIO provided "key support" in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and even ratcheted up its efforts to get out the union vote in Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, according to this report:

Union voters played an important role in President-elect Obama's historic victory, delivering a critical bloc of support in swing states that helped propel Obama and other working family candidates to big wins last night, election-night polling released by the AFL-CIO today showed. Calling the victory in the presidential race and the expansion of majorities in the House and Senate a working families' mandate for broad-based economic change, AFL-CIO leaders vowed to continue the large-scale mobilization to push through broad economic reform....

...AFL-CIO union members across battleground states supported Obama by a whopping 68-30 margin, according to an election night survey conducted for the AFL-CIO by Peter D. Hart Research Associates....

So, although Obama's victories in these states had their foundation partly in his newly robust support among suburbanites, we cannot discount the impact of this refreshingly effective union activity, which anecdotal reports in Ohio and Pennsylvania declare to have actually changed the hearts and minds -- and raised the political consciousness of -- many white blue-collar workers who'd not initially been of the mind to countenance the presidency of someone named Barack Hussein Obama. That's very exciting, says me. Makes my bleeding heart bleed all the more.

I conclude Part One of this discussion with a sample of data appearing in this article on the impact of union voting initiatives:

• Obama won among white men who are union members by 18 points while losing that group by 16 points in the general public;
• Obama won among union gun owners by a 12-point margin while losing that group in the general public by 25 points;
• Union veterans voted for Obama by a 25-point margin. He lost among that group in the general public by nine points;
• Working America members voted 67-30 for Obama. Working America gun owners (33% own guns) voted 23 points for Obama; general public gun owners voted 25 points for McCain;
• Sixty percent of union members identified the economy and jobs as their top issue with 84 percent saying strengthening the economy was the most important factor in their vote.....

Nursing My Champagne Hangover...

What a time to find oneself living in Chicago.

J and I were varying degrees of sick with colds yesterday and therefore didn't venture down to Grant Park for the festivities. But nestled within the cozy confines of our humble Hyde Park digs, the city's excitement -- and reverence and awe -- was palpable. Of course, despite our colds, we just had to celebrate with a bottle of bubbly. Celebrations, cheers, cars horns honking and/or being honked lulled us to our slumber, our disbelief at what had happened still intact.

Today, the commute to work. Chicago's spirit of neighborliness and goodwill continues to pervade in the fuzzy Indian summer sun. On the bus and on the streets, back in Hyde Park and in the Loop, in the areas surrounding Grant Park. Faces speak volumes: a brand new text or a dusty text long forgotten. Where there was awe, there is now relief, a kind of basking in the moment's sunshiny serenity. Yes, it's really true; the albatross is off our back.

For one night, the City of Chicago was the focal point of the world's attention. Part of President-Elect* Obama's genius is that the focal point really was an entire city -- and, by extension, an entire nation and an entire world -- and not Obama himself. I mean, okay, obviously he was the figure of interest on the occasion of his acceptance speech. However: each and every one of Obama's communicative faculties, his body language, the content and music and resonances of his language and of his ideas, every power he summoned in the course of that speech was engaged in absorbing the enthusiasm of the entire, breathless City of Chicago, feeding this enthusiasm through his brilliant, tired mind, and returning the same enthusiasm, refashioned with elegance, finesse and sincerity.

This, by the way, is one of the most important of the myriad differences between Barack Obama and John McCain: for all of his confidence and even cockiness, Obama speaks with greatest authority about the American people and the future of this country.

By contrast, throughout his rambling, mean-spirited and at times pathetic campaign, McCain was able to speak with authority about one thing and one thing alone: John McCain.


______________
* You have to keep saying it to remind yourself that it's really true.

This is where the real fun begins:Pay attention to the Republican Party's excuses & explanations

I think that you can tell a lot about the health of the Republican Party by observing all of the excuses that its remaining apologists devise in order to explain away what appears to be a landslide victory for Barack Obama, as well as for several Democratic congressional candidates across the country. My diagnosis of the Republican Party is that it is in big big trouble.

Here's some of the spin and blame-gaming in which the Republican Party has been engaging and in which it will continue to engage:

• the voters are 'scared' about the economy, and they don't understand the economy all that well, so they're voting Dem as an act of panic;
• the media are 'liberal' and 'biased' and were 'in the tank' for Obama,
• and they never gave Sarah Palin a 'fair chance',
• and they never inquired about Barack Obama's real connections to William Ayers, etc.;
• Democrats encouraged and engaged in voter fraud;
• Democrats failed to insist upon the showing of ID cards at the polls.

This final allegation is especially infuriating and widespread, because it is essentially an index of the extent to which the Republican Party is fast hemorrhaging the cosmopolitan and suburban portions of its base.

What's left of the Republican Party at this point is, quite frankly, the Dixiecrat portions, which it absorbed into its ranks with the advent of Goldwater and then Nixon.

And, just in case anybody here doesn't know what the Dixiecrats were all about: they were the segregationists who never forgave the Democratic Party for having passed the Civil Rights Bill. In other words: racists.

Voting for Obama as the First Act in a Long Struggle

If there's any issue on which there's near-consensus among Obama's and younger generations, it's that the rights and privileges of citizenship are meaningless unless they are claimed by the citizens. American political discourse (both local and national) has, since the so-called "Reagan revolution," consisted in the main of the systematic instrumentalization of political power to the designs of economic power. This instrumentalization has occurred on every front imaginable: infrastructural, ideological, cultural and psychological. To vote for Barack Obama today is to acknowledge the necessity of reclaiming this political process for the people. It is at once an act of enormous consequence and an act whose promise will only be fulfilled if (and to the extent that) we mean what we're saying.

Barack & Michelle voted this morning in their & my neighborhood of Hyde Park, Chicago.

If Obama wins the presidency today, it represents the declared reclamation of the ownership of the political process on the part of the nation's citizens. We -- the citizens -- declare our intention to reclaim our citizenship. Simple as that. It's a cause for celebration, and I will breathe a sigh of relief if and when Obama gives his victory speech tonight in Chicago's Grant Park.

It's important for us to remember what this declaration signifies. It doesn't mean that we've bequeathed the power to invent and pursue policy to a unilateral Obama Plan. It also doesn't mean that the wreckage that has been made of our infrastructure and political process is going to be swept away all in one fell....erm....swoop. Most importantly: it doesn't mean that we ourselves no longer bear the scars of a broken meritocratic, Cold War, my-country-right-or-wrong ideal. Our subconscious is littered with the remnants and curios of the past 30 and 50 years of narrow ideological bullshit. Embedded in our very conceptions of self are innumerable contradictions that will at times be painful and at times liberating to work at resolving.

The first step is to recognize it for what it is: to overcome the fear of seeing the shambles for what is. The second step is to declare our intention to repair what's broken.

That's what your vote for Obama means. It's no small thing, but neither is it an end in itself.

Go vote. Paddy, I'm talking to you.

A recent email exchange about Powell's Obama endorsement, veering into discussion of the unconscious assumptions that comprise American "comon sense."

Below is a recent thread of email correspondence between a friend of mine and Yours Truly. I was going to use its raw material as a basis upon which to descant, but in the interest of not wanting to go to that trouble, I have decided instead simply to reproduce it.

It is, of course, redacted, to protect the identities of those whose permission has not been sought. (Permission has been obtained. From Stephen Schlei, anyway. But the full identity of 'Kevin' shall remain, for the moment, a mystery...)

From: Steve
Subject: Powell endorses Obama
To: Tom
Date: Sunday, October 19, 2008

I'm sure you've heard about this already. Both of the videos on this page are incredible:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/19/colin-powell-endorses-oba_n_135895.html

In my lifetime I don't believe I've heard a Republican speak more eloquently.

My brother and I were talking about politics, and he brought up an interesting point. I was (am) appalled by the way Americans misunderstand a socialized health care system, and vote against their own interests to support an ideology (capitalism) that doesn't give a fuck about them. We were talking about some other stuff too, but here's what my brother had to say about it, and I think he's on to something:

My theory: people attach themselves not to the ideals and practices of what would apply to them, but to their perceived and possible future situation (that happens to be much better). They won't vote for a healthcare plan that will increase their meager benefits because they believe that they are losing the possibility of benefits that the rich can afford (which they could possibly have one day). It's the same reason no one stops gambling in Vegas, even when they're up. They don't see it as a growth from their starting position, but rather a pittance compared to a huge win.

It's why ordinary people defend big business. It's why they like trickle down economics. It's the entire foundation of the GOP's low class voting base.

I think the Republicans have been selling that dream world for a long time, where you too can be a millionaire (and who should stand in your way?) and all babies are born to loving families.

Steve


On Mon, Oct 20, 2008, Tom wrote:

Yeah, I totally agree with you and Kevin. I have become very interested over the last few years in the period in US history stretching from the beginnings of the US industrial revolution through to the Gilded Age. Part of the reason I have been investigating this period is because it contains the origins or perfection of many of the myths upon which the GOP (and really, in a wider sense, all of us, because they sit, often unexamined, in the American consciousness, I think) and its ideology are based:

• the myth of meritocracy, of 'classlessness';
• our particular American attitude toward private ownership;
• a preference for empirical and positivistic thinking over critical or theoretical thinking,
• suspicion toward intellectualism and even contempt for ideas more generally (which, as David Brooks points out, sees its apotheosis in the person of Sarah Palin);
• Social Darwinism;
• the equation of social justice with 'charity' and suspicion of 'wealth redistribution';
• the equation of everything from education to religion to friendship to governance with private consumption;
• the assumption that 'status' or wealth are earned and/or deserved, rather than conferred;
• the idea of the inexorability of progress;
• suspicion toward 'expertise'; and
• the tendency to blame oneself for one's own poverty, squalor or misfortune.

We could of course go on with such a list forever, but its upshot is that almost every one of these myths seems more or less grounded in the task of masking from view -- that is, both from the view of those who are successful/happy and those who are unsuccessful/unhappy -- the pervasiveness and power of the very structural inequalities that the myth seeks to negate. If (and to the extent that) you benefit from the system, you're living in denial of your complicity in injustice and harm done to others. If (and to the extent that) we get screwed by the system, it provides for us the means by which we acclimatize ourselves to our surroundings, to our fate.

And so it makes sense to think that some of these poor-to-lower-middle-class racists at McCain/Palin rallies are so very offended at the idea of that these myths will be exposed for what they are. They've lived their entire lives aspiring to something that the system tells them can be theirs one day, be it in the form of success later in life or in the form of success for one's children. But it's a very precise set of aspirations that they've been sold throughout their lives, and they are -- and long have been -- resentful of the idea that someone will take it away from them.

As far as I can tell, the only answer to this huge problem is education. Well, there's one other answer, which is sad, but true (sad AND true!): these people are a dying breed. They don't have the power they once had because they don't enjoy the decent middle-class wages they once had but most importantly they don't have the numbers. And the final irony is that it's the GOP which has been the most aggressive force in destroying them: it's the GOP's doing that is turning their neighborhoods into ghost towns. Thanks for the thought-provoking email. Hope all is well...

Best,
Tom


On Mon, Oct 20, 2008, Steve wrote:

Your ideas are great, and I love the way you put them. The subject deserves serious attention. This idea of the American Dream is so strong a myth that it is a reality, or a form of reality -- not the one most people would like if they could pull back the veil. ....

... Anyway, I can't believe how positive I feel about the prospect of Obama winning the election. It'll be like a great weight is lifted from this country, and I think I'll actually walk down the street differently (I'm not kidding!). McCain is down in the polls, and I'm hoping the negativity we've seen recently means they don't have anything up their sleeves which could significantly sway the election. The GOP is desperate and floundering. To me, Powell's statements have been the nail in the coffin, and have revealed to the world just how out of touch the Republicans are. We can only hope that they get so thoroughly crushed in this election that they have no choice but to start changing their party line. ...

Steve


From: Kevin
Date: Tue, Oct 21, 2008
Subject: Re: Powell endorses Obama
To: Steve

Tom precisely explains the extent to which the American Dream has served to suppress progress in this country. I just watched Sick Around the World and it's clear that the only things that have stopped us from pursuing a universal health care system are the myths that Tom listed.

Take the 'myth of meritocracy.' On NPR there was a social analyst that was researching ideological differences between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives, on the whole, subscribe to the idea of fairness in the world. The (particularly brutal) example he gave was that conservatives tend to assign blame to rape victims: that they were 'asking for it' by their attire, social activities, acquaintances, etc. Therefore the rape had some sort of logical justification. Applied to health care, it isn't that people are unjustly denied healthcare by businesses who can choose not to supply it, it's that these people do not work hard enough to earn better jobs that do offer health care. Therefore they don't deserve it - it's only fair.

On a side note, the 'suspicion of expertise' is an interesting one. A study (lost the link, sorry) has shown that people become more insistent about false assumptions if they are given proof to the contrary. For example, let's say a group of people have a 30% certainty that Iraq has WMDs. If they are given the reports and investigative results that clearly show no evidence of WMDs or WMD production, their certainty goes UP to 65%.

It explains why the GOP only has to plant ideas (which to us seem ludicrous) and they gain so much traction. If you insist that Obama associates himself with terrorists, when the campaign produces factual evidence to the contrary it works to your advantage. In this case, you have to give credit to Obama's campaign managers who have masterfully dealt with these attacks. (This also applies to the healthcare thing - those who have fears about waiting lists and expensive govt. run programs will only be more insistent after watching the Frontline episode.)

I'm curious to see if Tom's right about these people being a dying breed. I have faith in the fact that we're moving away from a television-based society to the Internet addicted information junkies of today. Multiple news sources can only be a good thing from here on out, and counters the effect made by choosing only one news source that shares your world view. But I do have fears that the strength of the temptations created by these persistent myths will only continue to fester and grow. I mean, come on. If ever the pendulum was pulled WAY out of line to the absolute limit of bad judgment, it's now after 8 years of GWB and a full on economic collapse. We should be seeing it flying the other direction, but instead we're having to push as hard as we can.

Kevin


From: Steve
Date: Tue, Oct 29, 2008
Subject: Re: Powell endorses Obama
To: Tom

Sorry, I meant to forward on my brother's response to the response you wrote that I forwarded to him. I feel like I'm moderating here. The program "Sick Around the World" that he mentions is a Frontline episode that you can watch off of their website. It's really interesting, and talks about how universal health care works in 5 or 6 other countries, so check it out.

The reason this popped back into my mind is that I was thinking about how much racism there is in this country and how standardized and widespread it is. This "American dream" fallacy supports those racist theories. African Americans aren't economically underprivileged because they're still recovering from hundreds of years of inequality that was only truly addressed 40 years ago, they're just lazy. And all the crime in the ghettos? That's because black people are morally inferior. In this country they have all the same opportunities as me, and look at where they've gotten themselves.

Steve