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.
Wallace declared in interviews his interest in devising strategies by which to appropriate the irony and subversive politics of postmodern smart-asses like Pynchon, but to fashion from this raw material a kind of fiction that could be evocative of the human experience (if not necessarily linear), morally engaged and emotionally resonant. And as Wallace's early novella 
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