Let's stop acting surprised.

We're not really shocked, are we?, by instances of deceit, incompetence, greed and arrogance in the corridors of power?

Those of us who are convinced that civil liberties, free expression, free inquiry and democratic deliberation are the cornerstones of American society know quite well that lots of things are not as they should be. We know that, somehow, these essential principles and practices must be preserved, repaired and/or improved. We realize that we must continue to take these things seriously, remind one another of their importance and significance, and teach subsequent generations to preserve all that is best about the American project in republican self-governance.

We were, all of us, horrified by the self-righteous barbarity and callous disregard for the rule of law promoted, clandestinely (and then not-so-clandestinely), by former Vice President Cheney. We were dismayed to learn that various United States agencies had spied on American citizens, tortured prisoners of war (using methods borrowed from 1950s Communist China) and fabricated intelligence as a pretext for waging war. We thought the eleventh-hour first Bank Bailout, under Bush, was a bald-faced exercise in theft—that it revealed, to our dismay, the extent to which the American political system has become a fully owned subsidiary of powerful financial interests and an elite stratum of wealthy investors. And we thought that the second Bank Bailout, under Obama's watch, confirmed our suspicions about the current impotence of American democracy. To be sure, I'm not referring to its impotence in practice: we already knew all about that. No, what was confirmed was the impotence of American democracy as an idea.

So why do we act shocked when we encounter leaked footage of American soldiers in Afghanistan firing missiles at unarmed civilians? Why so surprised when Obama sells off—faster than Bush would even have dared—the American education system to a bunch of glorified loan sharks? Why are we taken off-guard when the Supreme Court overturns hundreds of centuries-old laws regulating the political spending of multinational corporations, on the basis of the notion—so argues the Court—that such laws restrict the (previously non-existent) Constitutional right of corporations to free speech?

I don't think that we are surprised by these things. I think that we are pretending to be surprised. I'm guessing that there are two (2) ways in which we pretend to be surprised, which coexist in varying degrees in any particular instance:

i. The first way in which we act surprised.
We want to be surprised by these things. Therefore, we either convince ourselves that we are surprised, or we act surprised in a semi-conscious attempt to simulate, for our own comfort, the feeling of being surprised. Or we act surprised out of sheer habit. In any of these cases—whatever our level of consciousness of our actions—we are motivated by a desire for comfort.

Why is the feeling of surprise comforting to us? Because surprise registers the phenomenon to which we are responding as something that is—as it were—beyond the pale. It's a psychological defense mechanism. We want so desperately to believe that everyone else values our Constitutional protections and civil liberties as much as we do. To us, this stuff is basic common sense, and it shatters our faith in humanity to recognize the truth: there are a substantial numbers of American citizens who would gladly give away their liberties in exchange for an illusory feeling of safety or security.

This brings us to:

ii. The second way in which we act surprised.
We hope that by expressing our outrage and shock in the face of the erosion of American civil liberties, we might be able to shock the aforementioned cadre of American citizens—a cadre that is in most other respects as heterogeneous as can be—out of its complacency and docility.

In other words, we like to believe that we are walking, talking George Orwells. That, if we talk frequently and loudly enough about how disgusted we are with our country's seemingly inexorable drift toward fear-mongering, surveillance state, that we will manage eventually to make them see the light!

The mistake we're making in this second instance is about as obvious as can be: do we really think that we can out-fear-monger the professional political-corporate-media fear-mongers?? I think this is a difficulty that faces those of us in the post-Baby Boom generations who believe that the only way in which our democracy can be repaired is through a reinvigorated civil discourse. At present, American political rhetoric is—like American political thought—beyond its moment of crisis. It is in a state of extreme fragmentation.

All I'm saying is, let's start admitting that we all know this. Let's stop acting surprised.

Harper's piece on "The Vanishing Liberal."

Frequent Harper's contributor Kevin Baker—who, according to his byline, is actually a novelist—has a couple of great things to say in an essay in the magazine's April issue (which non-subscribers like Your Humble Blogger will simply have to go out and buy in order to read). The essay's subtitle—"How the left learned to be helpless."—is somewhat misleading, or in any event insufficiently specific. Let's face it, the contention that the left is helpless can in and of itself be said to be controversial only in the sense that it assumes that the left exists. 

What's important about Baker's argument as regards this helplessness is the comparison he posits between today's thoroughgoingly lost and disillusioned left—a group among which I suppose most normal (or even semi-normal) people under the age of 40 must by definition count ourselves—and its intellectual and spiritual forbears in American history: the Populist and and the Progressive movements. Those movements, for all of their flaws, had gravitas. Vitality. Rocks. You get the picture.

It should not be surprising that contemporary left/liberalism/whatever pales in comparison to those often quite radical historical movements. But what's nice is that Baker's piece offers more than the usual woe-is-us routine.

(Not that it's bad to say "woe is us." It's actually necessary for us to say it. However, the usual plodding, overlong and doom-and-gloom-laden fare does tend to get annoying. For example, see the final rant that now-former Harper's Editor-in-Chief Roger Hodge contributed to the magazine before he was—shockingly, and in an ominous sign for the mag's future, as Hodge was an intelligent and ballsy editor—sacked.)

Instead of simply throwing up his hands in despair (although he does do that), Baker threads together a political-historical narrative that serves as a call for genuine grassroots action of an order that we've not seen in this country in generations. He sets the scene by lamenting the fact that President Barack Obama,

[o]ne of the most charismatic politicians of his time, a man who was able to raise the most money and draw the biggest crowds in American political history has apparently decided that his new job is to fluff up the generals and bankers and politicians who not very long ago were in panicked disarray. Armchair psychologists from the Maureen Dowd school of political commentary like to analyze this conversion in terms of the elusive personality of Obama himself. Others prefer to dwell on the surprising ineptitude of his administration. And some simply accept his about-face in terms of the political exigencies of an essentially conservative nation, concluding wistfully that Obama is confronted by so many barriers to change—Republican obstructionism, the treachery of this or that Democratic senator, the nature of the Constitution itself—that the country is now ungovernable.

All of which may be true. But it only skims the surface of a greater tidal shift, one that has little to do with Obama himself and in fact has inundated the whole of our democratic process. This shift, which is subtle and has been many years in the making, might best be understood by considering a design underlying many of the interrogation techniques we employ at the (still-unclosed) prison at Guantánamo or at the black sites we still maintain, wherever they are. That is, bringing about the state known as learned helplessness.

The expression dates from a famous set of experiments by Martin Seligman some forty years ago, in which he found that dogs exposed to repeated and seemingly random electric shocks eventually stopped trying to escape those shocks, even when they could very easily do so. This insight gave rise to “no touch” torture, pioneered in large part by the CIA, whose efforts to “break” prisoners involved all manner of techniques, from the unsavory to the absurd, such as depriving prisoners of sleep for weeks on end, bombarding them with ear-splitting noises, exposing them to extreme heat and cold, shackling them in “stress positions,” tying bras to their heads, making them bark like dogs, and waterboarding them. There is no evidence that such practices enhance the odds that prisoners will provide more useful information to interrogators. It is well established, though, that they will make prisoners docile, and so the techniques remain popular.

For decades now, as our public discourse in general has become more scattered, random, and irrational, Republicans—funded by corporate and other elites in the private sector—have stunned Democrats with absurdist attacks that have proved to be effective at garnering votes and, more important in the long term, at hampering Democrats even when they hold the majority. Democrats have been reduced to a state of psychological helplessness, one in which any political obstacles—ranging from the prevarications of stalking horses like Senators Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, to the plaintive cries of the tea-baggers out in the streets, to the sterner demands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Big Pharma—are transformed into insurmountable organic obstacles.

We have learned to be helpless. And in this state of political depression, it no longer matters how many elections liberals win for the Democrats, or how badly Republican, right-wing policies fail or how much damage they do to the country or the world. There is simply no way to do anything differently.

Such hapless fatalism is, of course, in direct opposition to every tenet of American liberalism, which is rooted in the idea that human agency is still possible in the modern world—that democratic action can make a difference when ranged against vast, impersonal forces and supposedly immutable “laws” of human society. Liberalism’s antecedents lie in one nineteenth-century rebellion after another—against laissez-faire capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, Social Darwinism, and other efforts to transmute political dispositions into irrefutable “social science.” American voters of the time were regularly assured by authoritative voices that “hard money” was an indispensable economic principle; that women, people of color, and many varieties of European immigrant were inherently inferior; that any attempts to regulate the “natural” workings of the economy, even private charity, would thwart human progress because they interfered with the culling of those who, in Herbert Spencer’s description, were not “sufficiently complete to live.

[...]

And so we arrive at the present moment, in which the people are not asked to do anything. The fine words and able presentation of Obama, whether delivered at West Point or on Wall Street or in the well of the House of Representatives, obscure the fact that they are subtle parodies of a century of liberal argument. Whereas the Populists’ soapbox lecturers or the Progressives’ magazine exposés or FDR in his radio “fireside chats” explained the way of the world to the people and argued for why and how that way must change, Obama—like most Democratic leaders—concedes that the way of the world is wrong but tells us why it must stay that way because, some time in the past, powerful interests decreed it so.

[...]

Now, to be sure, there are problems with Baker's narrative—especially as regards sympathies within some manifestations of historical Progressivism itself toward Social Darwinism and other 'social scientistic' gobbledygook that he ignores completely—but no matter. It's worth a read. And one of its themes—the notion that human beings can and/or should always work to improve the world in which we live, to make it more fair and just, etc.—is a very interesting one about which I intend to say more in the near future. Specifically, I think there are some important details of this Enlightenment spirit that a rejuvenated left-populism needs to get right intellectually and rhetorically.

House 'Audit the Fed' bill persists, teeth intact.

From Politico:

The House Financial Services Committee has approved Rep. Ron Paul’s measure to drastically expand the government’s power to audit the Federal Reserve.

The measure, based on a Paul proposal that has attracted more than 300 co-sponsors, passed, 43-26, as an amendment to a financial reform bill. Florida Democrat and fellow Fed critic Alan Grayson co-sponsored the amendment with Paul and played a leading role drumming up support for it among committee members. The adoption of this amendment is an extraordinary victory for Paul, whose libertarian, anti-Fed leanings have often been dismissed by the political establishment.

[...]

The House Financial Services Committee will vote on approving the underlying bill after Thanksgiving recess.

This is precisely the kind of thing I'm talking about when I call for a tactical alliance of left and right in the interest of advancing populist measures.

True, I oppose the extreme laissez faire economic philosophy of Paul and the libertarian tendency. He favors a system with severe restrictions upon the regulation and oversight of markets. By contrast, I favor a social democratic model that protects ordinary people against the inescapable perils of market activity.

But so what? The fact is that left- and right-populism share the interest of instituting democratic checks against powerful, and currently insular and unaccountable, monetary policy-making agencies. As the poet said: in politics, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and it has always been this way. I don't have to want to play cribbage with someone in order to share some or many of his political interests.

The Populist Left / The Paranoid Right

In recent posts, I've discussed the idea of authoritarian populism, an idea popularized by the sociologist Stuart Hall to describe the rise of Margaret Thatcher in early 1980s England. I argued that the resentment-fueled rhetoric of the current Republican Party could be seen as an updated species of authoritarian populism.

But forget about all that.

I think that a recent op-ed by Thomas Frank nails it. What the GOP has been up to, he observes, is not really populism at all but paranoia. It's the John Birch Society gone mainstream....

Next month will mark the 45th anniversary of the publication by Harper's Magazine of Richard Hofstadter's famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a work that seems to grow more relevant by the day.

I was not always a fan. [...] I thought, who really cared about the strange notions that occurred to members of marginal groups like the John Birch Society? Joe McCarthy's day was long over, and even in the age of high Reaganism, I thought, the type of person Hofstadter described was merely handing out flyers on street corners.

As the historian himself admitted, "in America it has been the preferred style only of minority movements." Why bother with it, then?

How times have changed! Hofstadter's beloved liberal consensus has been in the grave for decades now. Today it would appear that his mistake was underestimating the seductive power of the paranoid style.

The essential element of this mindset, Hofstadter explained, was its predilection for conspiracy theory—for understanding history as a theater in which sinister figures control the flow of events from behind the scenes, nudging us constantly and secretly in the direction of communism.

Back in Hofstadter's day this sort of thinking at least had something supremely rational going for it: The existence of the Soviet Union and its desire to bring the West to its knees.

But take that away and the theories become something far more remarkable. Consider, by contrast, the widespread belief that President Barack Obama's birth certificate was forged. What could have been his parents' motives for committing such a bizarre deed, or his home state's motive for colluding in it, or the courts' motives for overlooking it?

Or consider the widespread conservative conviction that we are being marched secretly into communism or fascism. Why would someone bother? It seems equally likely, given today's circumstances, that conspirators would trick us into becoming a colony of Belgium or the imperial seat of the Bonaparte family.

The paranoid pattern persists regardless. It is impervious to world events; a blurting of the American subconscious that has not changed since Hofstadter analyzed it 45 years ago. Consider the recent wave of fear that the hypnotic Mr. Obama was planning to indoctrinate schoolchildren. In "The Paranoid Style," Hofstadter wrote, "Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; . . . he has a new secret for influencing the mind; . . . he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system."

Conspiracy-mindedness isn't just for fringe political groups anymore; it makes for riveting entertainment. And it is all around us today, a disorder with an entire industry to act as its enabler. [...]

Frank goes on to cite recent examples of this phenomenon, from Glenn Beck's fake news show to a truly bizarre essay penned by Michelle Malkin. These examples always include (1) alarmingly hysterical conspiracy theories and (2) a self-persecution complex, accompanied by massive amounts of self-pity.

What the hell's going on, anyway?

Although Frank's piece isn't about progressive political strategy, I believe that Frank's formulation (or, rather, his appropriation of Hofstadter) might provide a rhetorical framework with which to strengthen the project of Left-populism.

The conundrum that I had been perceiving in all of the Angry Right-Teabagger stuff had not been limited to the damage that violent, racist innuendo and intellectual dishonesty threatens to inflict upon civil discourse. What had been worrying me most of all had been the fact that it appeared that the Deranged Right was -- albeit disingenuously -- threatening to dominate populist-inflected discourse in this country.

But why cede that ground to a bunch of hacks, liars and -- as Frank notes -- producers of mass entertainment?

Glenn Beck doesn't represent a twisted, authoritarian version of populism: He represents many vile, stupid and wrongheaded things. Not one of them has anything to do with populism.

Crib From This Contra Glenn Beck

The diatribe that follows was prompted by having heard an excerpt of a certain very dumb man's radio program, which I encountered courtesy of PhuckPolitics.com:

Now, the fact is that this dude ain't worth it, because unlike, say, Rush Limbaugh -- who, despite having a lot of dumb people in his audience, cannot himself truthfully be said to be dumb, on the basis of his considerable moneymaking acumen alone (and who also isn't worth it) -- Glenn Beck's dumb as a rock. And that's an understatement. I mean, the guy is really, really dumb. Not George-W.-Bush/good-ol'-boy/lacking-intellectual-curiosity dumb. We're talking glaring/conspicuous-cognitive-deficiencies-having dumb. That's how dumb Glenn The Dumb Guy Beck is dumb.

And anyway, I tire of expressing pure outrage (because making normal, intelligent people angry is precisely what Glen Beck is designed to do…to what end is beyond the scope of my comprehension), but what the hell is this guy talking about?

All he does is tell bizarre lies and attack both individuals and large communities in a way that is at once deeply vicious and confoundingly non-specific.

The latter is especially troubling, because when he demonizes others by using insinuations and weird neo-McCarthyist rhetoric — be it cries of “communists” or “fascists” or whatever — he is himself by definition engaging in precisely the rhetorical strategies that are the hallmark of propaganda in radical totalitarian regimes. Surely, even someone as willfully ignorant as Beck realizes this, and that’s part of what makes it so outrageous and mendacious as a provocation.

But what offends me even more than his lies, his slander and even his vulgar and continual celebration of his own ignorance, is the fact that he clearly does not have anyone’s best interests at heart. There is no trace of passion for any human cause — however misguided or illusory — to be found in either his persona or rhetoric.

He does not wish to change the minds of his ill-defined ‘political enemies’: He merely wants to silence them or to destroy them. His attitude toward his own audience (and even, at its core, toward himself) consists of nothing more than contempt.

According to the Weltanschauung he espouses (if I may call it that) the world is a dark, dark place where communication, understanding, consensus and even compromise among people is not only impossible but undesirable, whatever the specific circumstances, period.

In short, he's anti-democratic.

If Thomas Jefferson came back today and saw the things that Glenn Beck says in the name of ‘American patriotism’, he’d never stop throwing up.

Politics & ideas? Economic self-interest & authoritarian populism.

The relation of politics to ideas has always been complicated. But the conceit of this post will be that there's something to be learned by exploring it.

Politics and ideas: the Right
For example: Ideas are, in an important sense, anathema to the climate within which the current American conservatism prevails. Nevertheless, it's important to remember that during the decades prior to the election of Barack Obama, ideas had a twofold significance in em the Republicans to seize/maintain and use political power.

To be sure, at least half of this significance was ancillary to how, why and for whom the so-called 'conservative movement' of the 1980s, 90s and 00s was built. The GOP seized/maintained power through the application of brainpower to such tactical/operational processes as propaganda, demographic analysis and the procurement and allocation of material resources. Simultaneously, the ideas developed by various big brains/think tank types connected to the 'movement' as to how best to use this power were every bit as oriented toward strategic considerations -- how to maintain power -- as toward articulating philosophical/political 'principles'.

For the most part, this coterie of ideologically warped eggheads agreed that this political power could best be put to use by dismantling government itself (see: Messrs. Gingrich, Norquist, Rove, Ambramoff, et al.).

This GOP ambition to dismantle government did not extend, naturellement, to such elements of the public-sector as military and "intelligence" infrastructure. Although, of course, 'outsourcing' these functions -- to mercenaries to fight our wars and to 'specialists' to torture our 'enemy combatants' -- is by now established practice, thanks to Messrs. Rumsfeld & Cheney, et al.

Politics and ideas: the Left
By contrast, no left/progressive politics can exist or have any hope of success without ideas.

To be sure, ideas don't do the trick in and of themselves, and the Right knows this. That's why it has tried, and not without success, to milk every last drop of potential from the 'left-leaning, soulless egghead/expert' cliché. (Although, for some time now, its effectiveness is showing definite signs of strain.)

Allow me to illustrate. One of the biggest and looniest lies that extreme-neoconservative shills like the neo-McCarthyite former/longtime Communist and Black Panther David Horowitz have tried to propagate is that notion that the American professoriat -- as with, of course, 'the mainstream media, the arts, and the employees of public libraries(!) -- is overwhelmingly left-wing in its orientation and that its aim is to indoctrinate defenseless undergraduates, the progeny of unsuspecting, good, decent, law-abiding American families.

Would that that were the case!

For one thing, it's self-evident that this notion is a big, stinking lie (and a febrile one, at that), so ludicrous that it doesn't even merit refutation. However, setting aside the fact that it is categorically untrue -- self-evidently, and empirically -- I believe that there is a more important point to be made as regards the internal logic of what the lie intends to imply. Namely, we might ask: Could the professoriat -- irrespective of the direction in which its politics trend -- really wield the kind of seismic influence over the nation's populace that Horowitz wants to believe it does?

The answer: To the extent to which the academy (and the same applies to the arts, or the press, or what have you) has provided a safe refuge to progressive/left -- even 'liberal' -- ideas over the past decades, then surely this fact has diminished the capacity of these ideas to engage people rather than the other way around. Academia is not called 'the ivory tower' primary in order to evoke architecture. To the extent to which the Left has been hiding out there, it has hampered the flourishing of left-wing ideas. It has probably prevented many good ideas even from entering the public sphere, to say nothing of capturing the public's political imagination.

(Think of things that once existed in the public sphere that have by now retreated for safe harbor in the academic sphere: poetry, visual art, Lacrosse, etc. Do these things appear to be enjoying widespread influence? Can you name more living poets than you can count on one hand? Thus: Academia is the place where once-vital ideas, practices and traditions go to die long, painful deaths.)

Resentment is not an idea
Now, of course, the corollary I have just proposed doubles as a straightforward description of why right-wing political hacks like Horowitz bother proffering these self-evidently idiotic assertions in the first place. When it comes to the Horowitzes of the world: It's not what they're saying, it's what they're talking about.

In other words, since Horowitz and Company are not men of ideas, but rather, merely corporately-funded propagandists for far-Right interests (who previously had been well-funded propagandists for the most militant and radical causes of the far-Left), it is most appropriate to assess their utterances on the basis of how these utterances function and not on the basis of what or how these utterances might 'mean'. Their meaning is their function.

As Crib From This has noted on previous occasions, the vast majority of the intellectual energies among the hired brains of the Reagan Revolution, of the Gingrich Revolution, of the Bush/Cheney Reign Of Terror, of Sarah Palin's Wardrobe and beyond have been expended in pursuit of tactical positioning, not -- as had been at least partly the case in its early years -- in the service of real ideas.

Authoritarian populism
This brings us to the issue that has prompted my little excursus: that of authoritarian populism.

A coinage -- I think -- of the sociologist and Marxist Stuart Hall, authoritarian populism refers to the now-familiar methods by which conservative political forces forge, nurture and/or manufacture political support -- and often sizable majorities -- by, in part, slyly embedding Rightist/ultra-capitalist/neoliberal ideology into the "common sense" of everyday life.

Hall's formulation draws from the thought of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who theorized that, in industrialized nations in the twentieth century, the dominant class established and maintained political control over the working class not only through the use and threatened use of conventional force, but through hegemony: the systems of socialization, the ingrained assumptions, the modes of valuation, etc. that imbue a society and serve to legitimate status quo power relations. Hegemony refers to the processes by which ideology does its real work.

Of particular relevance to Hall's thesis is that Gramsci's concept of hegemony might go part of the way toward explaining how exploited populations can be manipulated into voting against their own economic interests. (Follow this hyperlink for a decent primer on Gramsci and hegemony [with particular emphasis upon Gramsci's significance to educational theory].)

The age of Reagan and Thatcher
Hall's discussion of authoritarian populism emerged from a series of frenzied conversations conducted among leftists and liberals in the United Kingdom wherein Hall and his comrades watched in stunned horror as Margaret Thatcher's Tory Party rose to power in a seeming popular groundswell. To make matters worse, the Labour Party was starting to get routed and the once-steadfast support of the working class seemed to be slipping.

Soon afterward, Ronald Reagan ascended to the White House, with significant assistance from the Democratic Party's disillusioned, blue-collar base ("Reagan Democrats.")

Despite the parallel developments between the United Kingdom and her former upstart-colonies, it is important to remember that England's working class, in contrast to that of the United States, actually had a fairly strong tradition of a political consciousness. Whereas the relationship that had developed between the Democratic Party and American workers, beginning with FDR, had resembled a longstanding yet typical political transaction based upon mutual benefit, English workers were organized and had secured many welfare state protections through collective demand.

So: along came this woman Thatcher, who promised to undermine all of the reforms and protections that this class had fought so hard to obtain. And she swept into power in the midst of what was ostensibly a populist groundswell! How could this be?

Enter: authoritarian populism. Here's Hall's assessment of Thatcherism's populist flair, against which he juxtaposed the ineptitude of the Left's tactics, attitude and rhetoric. It's striking how similar his characterization is to those that emerged fairly recently within the American Left, particularly in the wake of the disastrous candidacy of John Kerry [boldface added by the present blogger]:

Horrendously, the Right has been far more successful in recent years than the Left in connecting with some of these popular movements and trends in civil society. Of course, they have connected with them in their own populist way. The intention of the radical Right, which has been most penetrative, has not been the conversion of masses to the religion of the market and unemployment. Rather, it has been the subtle capacity to identify the positive aspirations of people with the market and the restoration of the capitalist ethic, and to present this as a natural alliance. Thatcherism has been remarkably successful at moving the counters around so as to forge a connection between the popular aspiration for greater freedom from constraining powers and the market definition of freedom. It has created a chain of equivalences between the reaction against state bureaucracy, so deeply inscribed in the Fabian version of social democracy, and the quite different passion for self-sufficiency, self-help and rampant individualism. But, like all ideological and political interventions — which is what Thatcherism is — these connections are neither 'natural' nor necessary. They represent an attempt to inflect and expropriate and absorb what are often democratic currents into free market channels. We have suggested already how and why in the earlier period the market came to be a popular mass experience. The Right, after all, has no hang-ups about making money and stimulating the instinct for money making as the driving force of society. In simple terms, that is what the capitalist system is. So to address itself to isolating and developing the competitive side of that contradictory experience was an obvious and natural way for the radical Right to align itself with popular aspirations or, to put it another way, make itself populist. This is one feature of the wider phenomenon we have seen in this decade of the Right showing itself once again capable of recuperating itself, renewing itself, taking on the challenge of the social democratic consensus and eroding its basis, and learning once again to address the people in accents which seem to groove more naturally with life as they live and experience it. This is the naturalisation of the Right which has proven the real changed ground on which the Left in the 1980s has been forced to operate. It is part of the Right project to turn the tide on every front — in civil society and moral life as much as in economic habits and expectations. Its project, in short, is to become hegemonic, to address the common experience, to speak to and for 'the nation'.  [Stuart Hall, "The Culture Gap," originally published in Marxism Today, January 1984. Click here to access the entire article in .pdf format.]

Sound familiar?

Thomas Frank on American politics in the mid-00's
Although the parallel breaks down in some important respects, perhaps the most famous contemporary point of reference that comes to mind with respect to the relation between culture (and the "Culture Wars," a term that Hall at times used specifically in describing Thatcherism) and political "common sense" is Thomas Frank's influential What's the Matter with Kansas? (now also a film, directed by Laura Cohen and Joe Winston).

Here's an excerpt of Frank's book -- published in 2004 -- that recalls aspects of Hall's 1986 assessment of UK politics, but which then takes the conversation into new territory, elements of which I have rendered in boldface.

That our politics have been shifting rightward for more than thirty years is a generally acknowledged fact of American life. That this rightward movement has largely been accomplished by working-class voters whose lives have been materially worsened by the conservative policies they have supported is a less comfortable fact, one we have trouble talking about in a straightforward manner.

And yet the backlash is there, whenever we care to look, from the "hardhats" of the 1960s to the "Reagan Democrats" of the 1980s to today's mad-as-hell "red states." You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America – "going out of business" signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush.

I chose to observe the phenomenon by going back to my home state of Kansas, a place that has been particularly ill-served by the conservative policies of privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization, and that has reacted to its worsening situation by becoming more conservative still. Indeed, Kansas is today the site of a ferocious struggle within the Republican Party, a fight pitting affluent moderate Republicans against conservatives from the working-class districts and the downmarket churches. And it's hard not to feel some affection for the conservative faction, even as you deplore their political views. After all, these are the people that liberalism is supposed to speak to: the hard-luck farmers, the bitter factory workers, the outsiders, the disenfranchised, the disreputable.

Who is to blame for this landscape of distortion, of paranoia, and of good people led astray? Though Kansas voters have chosen self-destructive policies, it is just as clear to me that liberalism deserves a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon. Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Wichita and Shawnee, Kansas with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.

This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and – more important – the money of these coveted constituencies, "New Democrats" think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where's the soft money in that?

This is, in drastic miniature, the criminally stupid strategy that has dominated Democratic thinking off and on ever since the "New Politics" days of the early seventies. Over the years it has enjoyed a few successes, but, as political writer E. J. Dionne has pointed out, the larger result was that both parties have become "vehicles for upper-middle-class interests" and the old class-based language of the left quickly disappeared from the universe of the respectable. The Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters – their traditional base – the big brush-off, ousting their representatives from positions within the party and consigning their issues, with a laugh and a sneer, to the dustbin of history. A more ruinous strategy for Democrats would be difficult to invent. And the ruination just keeps on coming. However desperately they triangulate and accommodate, the losses keep mounting.

Curiously enough, though, Democrats of the DLC variety aren't worried. They seem to look forward to a day when their party really is what David Brooks and Ann Coulter claim it to be now: a coming-together of the rich and the self-righteous. While Republicans trick out their poisonous stereotype of the liberal elite, Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.

Now, here's the part with respect to which, in my opinion, Frank's prescience is being revealed before our eyes in the political events and Democratic electoral/political gains of Obama's 2009:

Such Democrats [Bill Clinton, the DLC, et al.] look at a situation like present-day Kansas where social conservatives war ferociously on moderate Republicans and they rub their hands with anticipation: Just look at how Ronald Reagan's "social issues" have come back to bite his party in the ass! If only the crazy Cons push a little bit more, these Democrats think, the Republican Party will alienate the wealthy suburban Mods for good, and we will be able to step in and carry places like super-affluent Mission Hills, Kansas, along with all the juicy boodle that its inhabitants are capable of throwing our way.

Has this very demographic shift not been cited as one of the chief components of Obama's victory? The Loony Right has stepped beyond the point of no return for many middle- to upper-middle-class suburbanites in the Northwest, the Midwest, the West and even in key portions of the South. So what's the problem, we might ask? Frank decries the long term prospects of and, to be sure, the very point of a Democratic Party that severs its ties with economic populism:

While I enjoy watching Republicans fight one another as much as the next guy, I don't think the Kansas story really gives true liberals any cause to cheer. Maybe someday the DLC dream will come to pass, with the Democrats having moved so far to the right that they are no different than old-fashioned moderate Republicans, and maybe then the affluent will finally come over to their side en masse. But along the way the things that liberalism once stood for – equality and economic security – will have been abandoned completely. Abandoned, let us remember, at the historical moment when we need them most.

Truer words have never been -- etc., etc. I mean, I'm with Frank on this: The lack of responsiveness on the part of either party to the needs of poor people -- from the victims of Katrina to the countless victims of predatory lending who are now being evicted from their homes -- is morally repellent. There is absolutely no doubt about the fact that Republican Party is chiefly to blame for this state of affairs. It is furthermore true that Obama has at least been addressing and acting to solve some of these problems -- far more so than it's possible to picture any Republican president doing.

Unfortunately, it's also true, as Frank has pointed out, that a sizable share of the blame for the dismantling of the few remaining traces of the welfare state, consumer protections, corporate/financial regulation in the wake of Reagan and Bush Sr. sits squarely on the shoulders of our former President William Jefferson Clinton.

The true lesson for liberals in the Kansas story is the utter and final repudiation of their historical decision to remake themselves as the other pro-business party. By all rights the people of Wichita and Shawnee should today be flocking to the party of Roosevelt, not deserting it. Culturally speaking, however, that option is simply not available to them anymore. Democrats no longer speak to the people on the losing end of a free-market system that is becoming more brutal and more arrogant by the day.

The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or anti-school-prayer; it's that by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the sneers of Hollywood whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns. We are in an environment where Republicans talk constantly about class – in a coded way, to be sure – but where Democrats are afraid to bring it up.

What Frank might have mentioned here -- and which he'd be sure to mention somehow were he revisiting these thoughts given the ratcheting-up of this species of GOP rhetoric in the hands such Fr. Coughlin-epigones as Glenn Beck -- is race, which can never be far removed from any serious discussion of socioeconomic class in America. From Nixon's "silent majority," to propagandists from Lee Atwater, to Karl Rove, the GOP has relied upon unspoken -- and, indeed, often subconscious -- racial animus in the cobbling together of its majorities, particularly with respect to its 'South Strategy'.

Of course, in a way, what Frank found so alarming about the radicalization of the Republican Party in Kansas was precisely that its activism began increasingly to resemble that of the fanatics of the Deep South. (Frank discusses this fascinating observation, with particular reference to the politics of abortion, in the film version of What's the Matter with Kansas?). Paradoxically, at precisely the moment at which the Southern Strategy stopped working -- i.e.: at the moment of Obama's resounding victory -- the Republicans are no longer even bothering to couch their race-baiting rhetoric in "coded" terminology. I wonder what Frank makes of that?

In the meantime, let's rejoin Frank for the conclusion of his lecture, in which he almost seems to have anticipated Obama, specifically with respect to his belief in the necessity of a political movement.  Of course, the only kind of movement politics that he argues will work effectively in the long run is one that is focused upon economic populism:

Democratic political strategy simply assumes that people know where their economic interest lies and that they will act on it by instinct. There is no need for any business-bumming class-war rhetoric on the part of candidates or party spokesmen, and there is certainly no need for a liberal to actually get his hands dirty fraternizing with the disgruntled. Let them look at the record and see for themselves: Democrats are slightly more generous with Social Security benefits, slightly stricter on environmental regulations, and do less union-busting than Republicans.

The gigantic error in all this is that people don't spontaneously understand their situation in the great sweep of things. Liberalism isn't a force of karmic nature that pushes back when the corporate world goes too far; it is a man-made contrivance as subject to setbacks and defeats as any other. Consider our social welfare apparatus, the system of taxes, regulations, and social insurance that is under sustained attack these days. Social Security, the FDA, and all the rest of it didn't just spring out of the ground fully formed in response to the obvious excesses of a laissez-faire system; they were the result of decades of movement-building, of bloody fights between strikers and state militias, of agitating, educating, and thankless organizing. More than forty years passed between the first glimmerings of a left-wing reform movement in the 1890s and the actual enactment of its reforms in the 1930s. In the meantime scores of the most rapacious species of robber baron went to their reward untaxed, unregulated, and unquestioned.

An even more telling demonstration of the importance of movements in framing people's perspectives can be found in the voting practices of union members. Take your average white male voter: in the 2000 election they chose George W. Bush by a considerable margin. Find white males who were union members, however, and they voted for Al Gore by a similar margin. The same difference is repeated whatever the demographic category: women, gun owners, retirees, and so on – when they are union members, their politics shift to the left. This is true even when the union members in question had little contact with union leaders. Just being in a union evidently changes the way a person looks at politics, inoculates them against the derangement of the backlash. Here, values matter almost least of all, while the economy, health care, and education are of paramount concern. Union voters are, in other words, the reverse image of the Brown-back conservative who cares nothing for economics but torments himself night and day with vague fears about "cultural decline."

Labor unions are on the wane today, as everyone knows, down to 9% of the private-sector workforce from a high-water mark of 38% in the 1950s. Their decline goes largely unchecked by a Democratic Party anxious to demonstrate its fealty to corporate America, and unmourned by a therapeutic left that never liked those Archie Bunker types in the first place. Among the broader population, accustomed to thinking of organizations as though they were consumer products, it is simply assumed that unions are declining because nobody wants to join them anymore, the same way the public has lost its taste for the music of the Bay City Rollers. And in the offices of the union-busting specialists and the Wall Street brokers and the retail executives, the news is understood the same way aristocrats across Europe greeted the defeat of Napoleon in 1815: as a monumental victory in a war to the death.

While leftists sit around congratulating themselves on their personal virtue, the right understands the central significance of movement-building, and they have taken to the task with admirable diligence. Cast your eyes over the vast and complex structure of conservative "movement culture," a phenomenon that has little left-wing counterpart anymore. There are foundations like the one operated by the Kochs in Wichita, channeling their millions into the political battle at the highest levels, subsidizing free-market economics departments and magazines and thinkers. Then there are the think tanks, the Institutes Hoover and American Enterprise, that send the money sluicing on into the pockets of the right-wing pundit corps, Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, and the rest, furnishing them with what they need to keep their books coming and their minds in fighting trim between media bouts. A brigade of lobbyists. A flock of magazines and newspapers. A publishing house or two. And, at the bottom, the committed grassroots organizers going door-to-door, organizing their neighbors, mortgaging their houses even, to push the gospel of the backlash.

And this movement speaks to those at society's bottom, addresses them on a daily basis. From the left they hear nothing, but from the Cons they get an explanation for it all. Even better, they get a plan for action, a scheme for world conquest with a wedge issue. And why shouldn't they get to dream their lurid dreams of politics-as-manipulation? They've had it done to them enough in reality.

Like Hall, the indexes by which Frank traces the Republican Party's wholesale capture of the populist mantle are cultural and rhetorical. But, unlike Hall, Frank is not a Marxist. Not even a socialist. He dreams of a return to the left-populism that was -- throughout the vast majority of US history -- the norm for prairie states, Great Plains states and Midwestern states. It's true that even over the past thirty years, the Midwest never really became a GOP stronghold, and furthermore, it wasn't all that long ago that Kansas had a reasonably strong Democratic Party (it can still be strong, on the local level).

So...
I suppose my point is that I think that Frank -- and to some extent Hall -- are correct about the folly of any so-called Left that disregards economic populism and that disregards the economic needs of ordinary people, even (or perhaps especially) the ones who have been brainwashed by the Right through any of its innumerable channels of influence.

We have to (1) find a way to establish a greater, more cohesive and more sincere Left/populist presence that can put pressure on leaders in the Democratic Party or support Left third party candidates, and (2) stop letting cultural differences and even large differences of opinion on some cultural issues get in the way of establishing meaningful political solidarity. You don't have to be someone's bestest buddy in order to vote alongside him if and to the extent to which your and his economic interests coincide.

Ron Paul in conversation with Jon Stewart... ...prompts the question: Why can't progressives & libertarians forge a tactical alliance?

Why do I seem to be getting a boner over Ron Paul?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Ron Paul
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

It's not just, I don't think, that he seems intellectually honest. Nor is it only because his response to Stewart's question about the authoritarian-populist teabaggers is hilarious. It's mainly an idea that I've had swishing around in my head for the last couple of years....

I'm not a libertarian (in the American sense...across the pond, it doesn't mean the same thing), not by any stretch of the imagination. In other words, I disagree vehemently with the central tenet of libertarian ideology: the notion that "big government" or "more government" is always bad.

Sure, I am skeptical and even fundamentally antagonistic toward the growth of certain sectors of government, and I am absolutely opposed to the frightening steps that our nation seems to be taking toward establishing a surveillance/police state. I think the military is way too big, and I think the people in government cooking up wars for us to get into are mostly cynical assholes who don't have the best interests of the American citizenry at heart.

But, in comparison to governmental power, I am worried more about the concentration of power and influence in the hands of business and financial interests. I can explain why I oppose unchecked business and financial power more than government power with one very simple statement:

The legitimate exercise of governmental and political power -- formally if seldom substantively (particularly lately) -- is conditioned upon the consent of the governed. By contrast, the legitimate exercise of power by business and financial interests is conditioned upon the dominance of those who exercise it over those who do not.

But, when speaking of reigning hegemonic structures with the greatest capacity and incentive to curtail individual liberty, it seems that the most pernicious of all is the unchecked, oligarchic interrelation of governmental and business power.

Since the latter, to lesser or greater degrees in given cases, is clearly what we have in the United States today (and -- to be sure -- have often had throughout history).

So here's the question to which I have been drawn lately: Why can't progressives & libertarians forge a tactical alliance?

For now, let's leave it as a rhetorical question. It's a discourse that I shall undertake to explore in subsequent posts. As a food for thought, I might hypothesize that it's a problem of discourses, cultural politics and short-mindedness. But, honestly, despite my deep-seated opposition to Ron Paul's core libertarian ideology, I confess that I like a lot about the way he's thinking.

Progressives and libertarians both want a country that protects and promotes the free-exchange of ideas, the ability of individuals to live their lives as they please, to not be spied on, to eschew supporting an endless succession of neoconservative military adventures...

As is illustrated in this exchange between Ron Paul and Jon Stewart, the differences between each side have to do with conceptions of (or dedication to) social justice. I won't pretend that that isn't a lot. But the differences between the two tendencies on an array of issues pertaining to respect for the Constitution and individual liberty are fewer and smaller than we sometimes like to pretend.

Do we have to want to have a beer with someone or share her sense of fashion in order to share common political cause?

Is it a pipe dream to think that progressives and libertarians could place aside their many differences in the interest of political expediency, to forge a tactical/temporary political alliance against our common enemy: the forces of authoritarianism?