February 20, 2003
Usually accusations of hysteria come along, in a sort of mopping-up operation, a little after the accusations of paranoia, conspiracy theory, and intolerance. It isn’t supposed to bother us, for example, that neo-Confederates and Armageddon Christians play a big behind-the-scenes role in the Bush administration and are a major part of his core constituency. And when we are accused of treason, or when vague death threats are made against us (e.g., by Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, or Rush Limbaugh), we’re supposed to have a sense of humor about it. Urbane conservatives are always happy to explain to us that they personally pay no attention to these people, and that they don’t understand why we seem to care so much. And that we’re hysterical.[08:55 AM]This is all fine. But look what’s happening right now. First, President Bush has proposed an economic policy that makes no sense whatsoever and seems certain to lead to disaster. Second, we are beginning a war, supposedly against Iraq, which gives every evidence of being open-ended: we have no idea what the objectives are, who the enemies will end up being, or how long the war will last. And third, a multitude of administration proposals — bills passed by Congress, bills to be proposed to Congress, and executive orders — have vastly increased the police powers of the state and its powers of surveillance, while diminishing the rights of defendants and creating several classes of people with no rights at all: people who can be disappeared after a secret trial. […]
Already we liberals have had to get used to the accusations of treason. Once the war starts, these will get worse. The Bush administration has already made comparable accusations against unccoperative Congressmen. We can expect that to get worse too, and the Democrats seem incapable of resisting effectively. If the war goes badly, God forbid, things will get worse yet; and when the economy stalls on top of everything else, as it seems very likely that it will, we can expect a further escalation of unofficial and official attacks on us.
So yeah, I’m paranoid and hysterical. If you have a problem with that, bite me. In certain periods of history it’s been the paranoids who survived.
The old "joke" goes "It's not paranoia if they are really out to get you."
I scare-quote "joke", because it's no longer funny.
What periods of history has it been that the paranoids have survived in because of their paranoia? Just curious. The main examples I can think of, they've survived because they've killed or terrorized everyone else.
One point in time which comes to mind is the United States during the first world war: German-Americans who were sufficiently paranoid to go to extreme lengths to demonstrate patriotism, or who volunteered in the army, were far less likely than your average German-American to get lynched.
I was specifically thinking of Jews in Germany. In what little I've read of the pre-WWII period I remember that some Jews really couldn't believe that Hitler was serious or that people would support him in his plans.
This breaks Godwin's law, and Bush is not Hitler, but all the trial balloons about theocracy, a Republic founded by God, etc., have a sinister flavor to me. Seeing the Forest (http://seetheforest.blogspot.com)has a big thing up on Scalia's religious interpretation of the constituion, which differs widely from that of the founders.
I like to think of myself as fairly rational and unhysterical too, but this "writing on the wall" sort of fear of Bush is hard to turn your back on. I've left the US for the time being - for largely non-political reasons - and there is no chance that I will return until at least after the 2004 elections, but I can't help wondering if I'll be telling my grandchildren someday that it was the best decision I ever made, especially since I'm not a US citizen. I hope not. I hope it turns out that this is the turning point for America, where the old thinking just ceases to be viable and that we'll all have a better future because of it.
But in dark moments, yes, I have fears for the US that definitely break Godwin's law. I've probably called Reagan and the first Bush Nazis at some time in my distant and misspent youth, but if I did I certainly never meant it in any serious way. I don't say it about the current administration, but on more than a few occaisions I have thought it.
The New York Sun, apparently in all seriousness, suggested that NYC should gather evidence against peace protestors to try them for treason. The mind boggles.
http://www.newyorksun.com/sunarticle.asp?artID=529
I have already speculated publicly that the 2004 elections will be suspended because of some "emergency"--though on further reflection, it'd be easier to just rig the vote.
Sure it'd be easier to rig the vote. They did it last time. And with electronic voting it'll just get easier. (Someone has posted speculations on rigged senatorial elections in Nebraska and Georgia.)
On the Jews in Germany - they were right to be paranoid, but some weren't paranoid enough. Otto Frank, for instance. He had the sense to leave Germany as soon as Hitler came to power - which means he got out while the getting was good. (Later leavers often found there was nowhere to go.) Unfortunately, he went to Amsterdam. Whoops! Not far enough away.
Now it's happening in California. The rightists are floating a recall of Governor Davis, for what I assume is the crime of defeating Bill Simon in last year's elections.
There's a disturbing sense of aboslutism within the right. If their candidate does not win, then the other candidate is a criminal and must be recalled. If you disagree with them over the Iraq war, then you should be charged with treason. If you oppose their demolition of basic liberties, then you must be a terrorist.
And before the rightists chime in with their response "but, but, the left thinks people who disagree with them are bad" -- let me point out the difference. The right is determined to use threat and sanction to enforce their views.
Pissing off the 'secret feminist cabal' might cost you some karma, but it won't land you in a recall, court, or at the business end of an anti-tank rocket.
>this "writing on the wall" sort of fear of Bush is hard to turn your back on
The crux of the problem, it seems to me, is how yo dislodge George W. Bush and co. from the White House.
It seems to be up to the democratic party to accomplish this, and I see very little evidence that they are up to the task, or are even interested in the reasons it needs doing.
On 9/11, I wrote: "The right wing has their Reichstag fire now."
(And then I had to explain that I didn't think the Bushies arranged it.)
One thing I have found most discouraging is the inability of many political activists to recognize something very much like fascism, and their forgetfulness of the opportunities divisions in the opposition provided the fascists in the 1930s. It's not time for the opposition to be squabbling among itself, folks. As a caution, I feel compelled to add that it's also not time to fall in behind the authoritarians who happen to be out of power, or preach the virtues of independent action or anarchism. Effective political opposition to this monstrosity will necessarily be group action, in my view.
Unfortunately, the people who remember the lessons of fractured opposition to fascism in the 1930s usually seem to forget that it was the pathological inability of the far left to defend the admittedly flawed and compromised Weimar democracy against fascism that was so costly. They were so caught up in the need to go out and have a macho fistfight with a fascist in the streets and they ignored the more subtle battles inside the houses, the churches, the companies, the civil society as a whole. Because that might have taken compromise and persuasion, a willingness to listen sympathetically to someone besides the labor unions that were the core of the Weimar left's support.
History is a good teacher, but if you just go looking for the lessons you want, I promise you that you will always find them, and learn very little in the process.
I agree. The inability of the left to build a clear case for itself in public political discourage--to connect with, for the most part, anyone but like-minded individuals is an enormous failure in my view, and I do not believe it is to be ascribed only to media hostility, though that certainly exists--there is a failure both to construct coherent, humane, and democratic ideals and an equal failure to effectively communicate what ideals there are--some still of much value, in my view--to the broader public.
But I wasn't just thinking of the left, then or now. It is equally discouraging to me how many conservatives and libertarians--people who after all claim to be defenders of individuals against the state--are caught up in the thrill of what they perceive as victory, and do not seem to notice that what has won is a monster which has betrayed all their ideals. While European conservatives are much different from US conservatives, then and now, I do think the point also applies historically.
There seems to be a failure of imagination, of vision. And, oddly, in the White House as well. W. Bush, said often and by knowledgeable people (including Molly Ivins, who has known him since he was in high school) to be generally decent and pious, does not seem able to imagine how the policies his adminstration implement are harmful.
I don't know--I suppose vision is always pretty scarce. But it seems to me we have an exceptional shortage of hopeful visions seen by more than tiny groups. Now--and Patrick, you've taken me to task for saying this before--I believe we have hard times ahead of us. But it would be much easier to face them with hope and with some better world to believe in, than with the choking despair that seems to be the state of our philosophy at this time. Is it not despair, largely, that motivates the Islamic religious radicals? Would they be telling their own children to die for the cause if they believed there was something to live for? Would our leaders be planning an uncertain war if there were a wonderful peace to hope for?
Randolph, the reasons I've taken you to task predate this weblog and perhaps shouldn't be imported into this conversation. But since you ask: I think you have a lot of nerve complaining about anyone else's "failure of vision," given that you seem to have devoted your life (or at least your online life, on rec.arts.sf.fandom and here and perhaps other forums) to epitomizing the image of The American Liberal as a gloomy naysayer with a reproving finger and a frowny face. Where is your "vision"? Do you have anything to offer except disappointment, depression, and despair? I certainly can't find it.
You cannot guilt-trip the world into being what you want it to be. Doesn't work. Ain't gonna happen.
Basically, despite nominal agreement on many particulars, your politics and mine part company on a very basic level. You don't, it appears, by and large, like people. I do.
Despite Bill Humphries' amplification, I'd still say that when he says "There's a disturbing sense of aboslutism within the right," that he misspelled "within people."
I'm no "rightist." But I also daily read some leftist bloggers explaining that Bush & co. are treasonous, that certain right-wing politicans are criminals and should be recalled, and so on. Same words. Same absolutism. No difference in "sense" whatever.
And, naturally, we can point to the "leftist" regimes that, then and now, land people at the business end of a rocket launcher, or in a "psychiatric hospital" or in a gulag. Responding, say, that "those aren't real leftist regimes than any lefist I know would defend" is as useful, correct, and accurate as using the same words from rightist/libertarians about right/libertarian polices and regimes they dissent from.
This absolutism, regardless of local circumstances at any given time and place, is a human thing, not a "rightist" thing. It's something "people" are susceptible to, and it's important, I'd say, to watch all political movements, and rhetoric, for tendencies towards.
And what I see is that many people on both "sides" have precisely the same tendency to deny that "their side" can be as bad.
If I had a penny for every blogger, for instance, I've read who has explained how "there is a growing absolutism, and abusiveness, on [the other side]," I could personally elminate the deficit.
I was shocked by the Davis recall story till I read this:
Recall efforts have been begun against every California governor in the past 30 years, but none has collected the needed signatures.
Ah. Do other states do this too, or is it a California thing?
Avram, some states do, but I think most still don't. The West Coast states have particularly strong traditional referendum systems, but other states do too. Making states hold referenda was a particularly popular political issue in the '80's and early '90's.
Arizona has extensive provisions for the recall of elected officials. Indeed, this was a sticking point; President Taft refused to allow Arizona to become a state until those provisions were removed from its constitution. The provisions were duly removed, Arizona was granted statehood (February 14, 1912), and the state fathers turned around and put the recall provisions right back in.
I worked as a volunteer for a 1973-74 campaign to recall Arizona governor Jack Williams, a former radio personality who liked to claim that Arizona's air pollution was primarily caused by backyard barbecues. More recently, of course, the late-1980s recall effort against Governor Evan Mecham was halted only by Mecham's impeachment and removal from office by the legislature.
And what I see is that many people on both "sides" have precisely the same tendency to deny that "their side" can be as bad.
If I had a penny for every blogger, for instance, I've read who has explained how "there is a growing absolutism, and abusiveness, on [the other side]," I could personally elminate the deficit.
The problem with this as a basis for analysis, of course, is that you might as well hang a sign around your neck saying GAME ME. Or, more specifically, GO AHEAD, MOVE THE GOALPOSTS, I DON'T MIND.
Human beings will always have biases, favorites, inclinations, partisan preferences, and blind spots. But being overly impressed with this fact seems to lead a lot of people to conclude that the truth lies at some point "between" the most forceful "extremes." Thus if one large political clump is demanding the total extermination of the Elbonians, and the other large political clump is calling for the destruction of only ten percent of the Elbonian population, the heuristics of "moderation" lead to the conclusion that rounding up and killing forty or fifty percent of the Elbonians is the reasonable approach. Those of you who might prefer killing no Elbonians at all--well, fringe views like yours are simply not serious. It's very important to be serious.
And you can bet the rent that in the midst of the controversy between the Party of Kill All The Elbonians and the Party of Kill Only 10%, there will be someone pointing out that people on "both sides" are making extreme claims and that there's "growing absolutism and abusiveness" all around. Whose interests are served by this? Not those of actual fairness or reason. But it's an endlessly effective performance piece, like a piece of stage magic that's impressive even when you know how it's done. The desire to be part of the pack is written deeply in our bones.
Also, I'm eager to hear from Gary which leftist government of the United States has thrown dissidents into "psychiatric hospitals" or established gulags. (And if one thinks that the Japanese internment camps are gulags, one has a debased understanding of the English language.)
When I criticize what the Cheney administration does, or what the Bush administration did, or what the Reagan or Nixon administrations did, I am frequently met by responses about what Stalin did, or Mao, or even Hitler, as demonstrations of what the left does. Why should I think this is fair argumentation?
Whose interests are served by this? Not those of actual fairness or reason. But it's an endlessly effective performance piece, like a piece of stage magic that's impressive even when you know how it's done. The desire to be part of the pack is written deeply in our bones.
The converse is also true. Advocating notions of truth and fairness that are completely at odds with public beliefs is a sure sign that you're dealing with a nutter. So, we can neither trust reason nor our principles to lead us to the truth, and we certainly can't gain certainty by taking a poll. Honestly, it's enough to drive someone postmodern.
Not to turn this into a philosphical discussion, but this is basically an epistemological argument. With the benefit of three millenia of arguing about the source of knowledge, the only conclusion I've managed to draw is that it helps to be both open-minded and biased, but not too open-minded or too biased, and it's good to be open-minded about admitting that you're biased, but it's also good to be biased in favour of being open-minded, although you sometimes need to be open-minded about your open-mindedness (when you're too open-minded), and you need to recognise that you may be biased about your biases, and not even know it no matter how open-minded you think you are (which is a good reason to stay open-minded about your open-mindedness, without getting biased about it.) There are exceptions, of course, like those times when it's best to be absolutist about truth and reason and those occaisions when everyone really is better off going with the flow.
Of course, as a crypto-socialist anti-nationalist social-constructivist computer programmer, I may fit my own symptomology for nutters by advoacting values well afield of the mainstream, so I should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
For what it's worth, the Internet has made it a lot easier for shrill voices to be heard on both sides, and worse, it has enabled people to make political arguments the centre of their lives to a degree not usually possible outside of a liberal arts college. This is a self-reinforcing tendency, where people have to take and hold firm rhetorical positions, even when those positions loose any relationship with reality. It's like arguing at the student union, only it goes on forever, 24 hours a day, and no one ever graduates and gets a job.
There is, of course, radical speech on both sides, but it is only on the Internet that one might perceive there to be a balance between the two. Everywhere else in America, it's shrill voices on the right that are gaining volume, not the left. I can't see how anyone could read American newspapers or watch American TV without coming to precisely that conclusion.
Gary Farber writes,
"But I also daily read some leftist bloggers explaining that Bush & co. are treasonous, that certain right-wing politicans are criminals and should be recalled, and so on. Same words. Same absolutism. No difference in "sense" whatever."
But, perhaps, a difference in truth. People like Ann Coulter call Al Gore a congenital liar. People like James Carville call George W. Bush a congenital liar. Perfect symmetry.
But that doesn't mean they're both wrong. Or both right. Maybe, just maybe, Bush really is a liar and Gore really isn't. When actual facts (instead of falsified ones) are presented, that is the conclusion that appears to follow.
To be fair to those who want to recall Gov. Davis, the allegations behind the recall are that the state's current $35-billion-and-climbing budget deficit is the result of gross mismanagement and incompetence. It's a charge not entirely without resonance, especially when you consider that a bill that would raise $4 billion (by undoing a reduction in vehicle license fees passed with much fanfare several years ago) is going nowhere because of the governor's promise to veto it. On the other hand, many of the conservatives have decided to oppose any and all tax or fee increases, which makes the budget situation even worse (and justifies your charge of a disturbing sense of absolutism, Bill). But, while the California conservatives are hardly unimpeachable on this issue, the general case against Davis appears to be a solid one.
Timothy, I'm less worried about parallels to Germany than I am to parallels in our own history: during every major war in the twentieth century, there were significant restrictions on civil liberties that were either approved of, or at least tolerated, by the majority of citizens. This was even true during the early years of the cold war. In the case of the two world wars, the restrictions were eased over the course of time after the end of the war; in the case of the cold war, the restrictions were abandoned as the sense of fear eased and public opposition rose. In the case of this war, however, which is an entirely open-ended war in a way that the cold war (which had a defined, if unpredictable, end) wasn't, I don't see an end in sight; and so the changes being adopted now, it seems to me, have a significant likelihood of becoming permanent additions to US law. History, and a disrespect for the character of people who desire power, leads me to believe that repressive laws will eventually be abused --- and so, while I have little doubt about the integrity of this administration and its reasons for pursuing the policies it is pursuing, the policies still strike me as forming a permanent base upon which fascism, or its equivalent, can some day be constructed.
One of the things that is frustrating to me about how this debate is often framed is that I appear to have a choice between supporting the administration whole-heartedly, or believing the administration to be evil. Among activist circles, at least, the notion that the administration could simply be well-intentioned but wrong simply doesn't have any traction, and anyone holding that position must simultaneously debate both sides. (Similarly, people who believe that war with Iraq would be justified if the UN requested it, but who think that the way the US is trying to convince the UN to do so is heavy-handed and wrong, and who would be opposed to a war without UN sanction, have nowhere to go: the pro-war people, by and large, are pro-war regardless of international sentiment, and the anti-war people, by and large, are against war in any circumstances.) Yet I still think it is true: the Bush administration appears to have honorable intent which is severely misguided and may lead to a hideous corruption of our political system.
Patrick, Scott, Avram: California has a very robust system of mass democracy in which significant decisions are often made by ballot initiative and recall petitions are always circulating (one local example involved an attempt, dissuaded by the courts under the theory that the constitution doesn't allow it, to recall then-Congressman Tom Campbell for voting to impeach President Clinton). But statewide recalls rarely get enough support to qualify for the ballot; there hasn't been one in my lifetime (although, had then-Insurance Commissioner Charles Quackenbush not resigned under threat of impeachment after it was revealed that he had been taking kickbacks from insurance companies in return for friendly adjudication of charges that the companies hadn't properly handled claims stemming from the Northridge earthquake, there would have been). The Davis recall is unusual in that it actually stands a chance of qualifying.
The charge that "both sides" are exhibiting absolutism is not itself intrinsically a particularly useful or enlightening one, as Patrick notes. That's the kind of middle that people always whip out the Jim Hightower-armadillo quote about.
What I do think is a fair question in many cases is whether the absolutists take their own absolutism seriously. Is it based on any kind of consistent philosophical principle, observed consistently?
If I find myself rejecting existing "sides", as I do on the question of a unilateral attack on Iraq, it is not because I want to be perfectly positioned in between them. If I do that, I'm letting positions I reject dictate where I ought to be. I'm not in the middle: I'm doing my own thing with as much honesty and consistency as I can muster. I'm there because I'm following my own philosophical, intellectual and personal commitments, and that's where they leave me on this particular question.
I'm working up another bit on this whole question for my own blog, but I think that at this particular juncture, you can definitely charge the left with tremendous philosophical incoherence, with a completely contradictory mix of elitist and populist conceptions of what is to be done. (e.g., the people are right until they're wrong; the leaders are oligarchs who have seized power from the masses, but by the way, the masses are asses unless they're our Kind of Masses; we have to give power to the people unless they have the bad taste to want something the left doesn't want, in which case it's all Rush Limbaugh and Gary Savage's fault that the people have double unplusgood thoughts).
The left is stridently worried about the erosion of civil liberties in the US, but it was rarely willing to admit that civil liberties and democracy actually existed meaningfully before--we were always already supposedly in the grip of a globalizing capitalist oligarchic elitist dead-white-man's hegemony. If we never had liberal democracy, we can't lose it now. If we're on the verge of losing it, then we must have had it before. If we're suppose to rush to the barricades to defend our freedoms, then maybe liberal democracy in a capitalist society wasn't pure hellish oppression of subalterns and other living things all along.
The left believes in universal human rights unless the humans in question live in "another culture", at which point they can only be judged by the eternal, unchanging indigenous non-Western authentic standards of the "other culture" and it's none of our business, unless of course they have the bad taste to do something like clitorendectomy which offends against one of the left's programmatic commitments.
A lot of the prowar folks are showing the same schizophrenia: bring democracy to Iraq now! But rely on authoritarians elsewhere to suppress dissent and ignore popular opinion everywhere if it gets in the way of the sacred moral principle at stake here, which is "bring democracy to the world", except for all those cases where democratic majorities have the bad taste to disagree with us or misuse their civil liberties to think doubleunplus good traitorous thoughts.
In a case like this, I'm perfectly comfortable with rejecting absolutisms, not because they're absolutisms but because they're *failed* absolutisms that refuse to recognize themselves as incoherent and contradictory. They want the intellectual authority and political power that comes with being always and invariably correct, but not the philosophical responsibility of taking their own root precepts seriously enough to follow them wherever they may lead.
Of course, you can always find "philosophical incoherence" if you make your targets broad enough. Thus it's shooting fish in a barrel to find contradictions between different sections of the Right such as business conservatives, "national greatness" enthusiasts, neoconservative hawks, and minarchist libertarians, because, hey, guess what? They disagree with each other on lots of stuff! Likewise, it's easy for Timothy Burke to claim that:
The left is stridently worried about the erosion of civil liberties in the US, but it was rarely willing to admit that civil liberties and democracy actually existed meaningfully before--we were always already supposedly in the grip of a globalizing capitalist oligarchic elitist dead-white-man's hegemony.--but perhaps harder to actually pin this cartoon on individuals. For instance, I certainly think that "civil liberties and democracy actually existed meaningfully before." I think they exist meaningfully now, too. Nor do I find this particular view to be "rare". Indeed, I believe it has a name--it's called "liberalism."
I do agree that "the left" includes some people who would be yammering about the imminent fascist insect tyranny of The Man even if Barney Frank were President of the United States, but you know something, a lot of kooky "the income tax is illegal because Ohio never ratified it" types are part of the Right, too, but I don't really count that as part of my criticisms of mainstream right-wing opinion. "Right" and "Left" are inherently "philosophically incoherent" and always will be; they are large meta-clusters of sensibilities and viewpoints, not focussed arguments.
I dunno. At least in my neck of the professional woods, it's pretty easy to shoot some of these particular fish-in-the-barrels, which I think says less about my target skills and more about the number of piscean-loaded containers. There's a tremendous body of scholarly work devoted to more or less rejecting the proposition that liberal democracy meaningfully exists or has existed--Negri and Hardt's influential -Empire- is only the tip of the theoretical iceberg.
But it goes beyond academia. Take the metanarrative in Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States, a book that I think most liberals and progressives have had a life-changing encounter with at some point (it sure had a huge influence on me), and a book that I think could rightfully be said to be a fair representation of a large segment of activists on the US liberal-left. When I re-read it, I'm struck by the structured repetition that each chapter has: we open with oppression, hegemony, capitalism, racism; the marginal and oppressed struggle mightily against The System and briefly feel a sense of hope; then they are crushed by The Man. Wash, rinse, repeat. No real progress ever, just a struggle perpetually renewed.
True liberalism of the kind you're claiming for yourself is to my mind unfortunately rare, at least among those who cultivate an activist engagement with the public sphere. I think that a lot of the US left finds itself in the position of the boy who cried 'Fascist' or 'Racist'. Confronted with a truly threatening situation, the casual hyperbole of past rhetorical appeals now makes it hard to take seriously, and past hypocrisies of uneven standards on questions of global democracy and human rights makes it hard to sound like anything but the mirror image of securocrat hypocrites on the right. A promiscuous overuse of the "here we go, it's Weimar, 1933" trope for things like Ross Perot or Iran-Contra means that it's harder to use now.
But a lot of this does have to do with who you take as your benchmark or point-of-orientation. Maybe one of the reasons that neocons get hung up on the far left has to do with the fact that many of them were themselves there at some point. It's probably why I get hung up on the academic and intellectual left. If my benchmark was Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy, I'd probably be saying, "What the hell are you *talking* about?"
"But being overly impressed with this fact seems to lead a lot of people to conclude that the truth lies at some point "between" the most forceful 'extremes.'"
That's precisely true. And it's also both true that on occasion the truth is at one of the most forceful extremes, and that it is rarely so. The main error, as we know, Bob, is concluding, falsely, that the truth must lie at the median.
Kevin asks: "Also, I'm eager to hear from Gary which leftist government of the United States has thrown dissidents into "psychiatric hospitals" or established gulags."
The latter, none. The former, also pretty much none, though I'll remind Kevin of -- not quite the same thing -- such incidents as the CIA testing LSD on unsuspecting people, leading to, allegedly, at least one person throwing himself out the window.
Which is all besides the point, as I imagine it will come as as much news to at least some other readers as it does to me that we were under some mandate restricting discussion of politics and history to events in the USA.
"When I criticize what the Cheney administration does, or what the Bush administration did, or what the Reagan or Nixon administrations did, I am frequently met by responses about what Stalin did, or Mao, or even Hitler, as demonstrations of what the left does. Why should I think this is fair argumentation?"
I couldn't answer that without more specific knowledge of the specific conversation. As a generalization, it could be utterly unfair, or fair, of course. Though I would pretty much rule out using Hitler as an example of the "left" of any sort, despite the tendency of some rabid right-wingers to sidle up and point out that which we've never noticed: that "Nazi" stands for "National Socialism"! [sinister music cue: ba-ba-ba-DA!]
Scott Martens, I've just blogged on me blog a paragraph of your entry. Scroll to "I'M OPEN-MINDED ABOUT THAT."
Timothy: I have read Zinn's book, but even at the relatively young age at which I read it (21, I think), I saw it as an interesting corrective to the "received history" of an earlier time, and I certainly recall noting the rather weary cycle-o'-struggle pattern you identify.
At any rate, I think the tolerant "true liberalism" you say I'm talking about is far from "unfortunately rare"; quite the contrary, I think that despite (or perhaps because of) its many unresolved issues and contradictions, it's one of the default strains of American sentiment, and that even college kids who flirt with Negri and Hardt and the like have a tendency to wind up with an outlook that's a lot more like liberalism than it is like that hothouse-flower Euro-pomo stuff, for the simple reason that has more connection to their lives and their culture. And if you want to talk about "those who cultivate an activist engagement with the public sphere," well, go talk with union organizers in Charlotte or migrant-worker advocates in Arizona or housing-project nuns in Brooklyn. I'm sure you can find individual exceptions, but overall I daresay you'll hear remarkably little blather about the hegemony of this or the historical contradictions of that. That deracinated language is disproportionately found in the academy and among parts of the chattering classes. The idea that 15 to 35 percent of Americans talk and think like that is simply absurd.
I am all for self-criticism on the Left, as I think a couple of years' worth of Electrolite posts demonstrate. But I have to wonder about the extent to which we do this because it would be great to figure out that we could solve everything just by changing ourselves.
Patrick, you are of course correct that many claims that the left and the right espouse philosophies which contain internal contradictions are, in fact, a result of an overbroad definition of the term and a conflation of the ideas of different groups who stand under the rhetorical umbrellas of 'left' and 'right'.
But I nevertheless think that you are perhaps too quick to reject the notion that these claims have merit. There is, for example, something massively contradictory about a philosophy which says that the best thing the United States can do is use its military to impose democracy upon people; I know of no branch of political theory which holds that a democracy which is imposed from without will function correctly. Similarly, on the left, there is a striking tension between the idea that people should be free to espouse the beliefs they want to espouse (eg., that nobody should force you to adhere to the party line) and the idea that it's not OK to force states to adhere to that principle (eg., to prevent states from forcing people to adhere to the party line).
The right has done a good job of skewering the latter contradiction; the left has done a less good job of criticizing the former one.
Avram said:
I was shocked by the Davis recall story till I read this:
"Recall efforts have been begun against every California governor in the past 30 years, but none has collected the needed signatures.
Ah. Do other states do this too, or is it a California thing?
That's news to me as well. But from on the ground here in California, this is the first time that a recall effort's starting to appear in the public media and discourse.
apharel:
But, while the California conservatives are hardly unimpeachable on this issue, the general case against Davis appears to be a solid one.
I'm unconvinced. And if the claim is that his crime is a deficit, then the righties can wait until the next election cycle. Now if Larry Ellison was dropping yacht-loads of bearer bonds into a Swiss number account for Davis, that'd be a different matter.
(For the non-Californians, the previous scandal was over a long term state contract to use Oracle. To which I reply, fine, do you really want to trust SQL Server? Or do you want to pay for getting solid transactions support into MySQL and Postgres?)
"[O]n the left, there is a striking tension between the idea that people should be free to espouse the beliefs they want to espouse (eg., that nobody should force you to adhere to the party line) and the idea that it's not OK to force states to adhere to that principle (eg., to prevent states from forcing people to adhere to the party line)."
I keep discovering all these things that people "on the left" are supposed to believe. Regarding "the idea that it's not OK to force states to adhere to that principle (e.g., to prevent states from forcing people to adhere to the party line)", I think you must have me confused with my libertarian isolationist friend Jim Henley.
I'm against this war, not out of Jim's admirably principled non-interventionism, but because this particularly piece of interventionism seems to me to show every sign of being a really bad idea, with all kinds of bad first-, second-, and third-order consequences. I do think we should think long and hard before imposing "regime change" on sovereign states, but I don't have any trouble imagining situations where it would be the best thing to do.
It would be convenient for enthusiasts of this war if everyone in disagreement with them would agree to be a pacifist, or an across-the-board anti-interventionist, or some other such easily-dispatched cartoon. Inconveniently, this isn't the case. As Teresa's sign at the DC demo said: Not This War.
Self-defined liberal here who found Howard Zinn's interpretation of history to be obnoxious and repulsive. If I thought Zinn were a liberal, and if I had the lack of reasoning skills of - say - David Horowitz, Zinn would be enough to drive me to arch-conservativism.
But that's not the case. I'm a liberal, not a paranoid socialist.
Patrick, I'm sorry that I spoke in such a fashion as to suggest I was putting words in your mouth; that was far from my intent. Just as the neo-Con interventionist stance that demands that we impose Democracy on the world is not accepted by everyone on the "right", neither does the simultaneous belief that it is wrong to force people to adhere to a particular set of beliefs and wrong to force people to adhere to this particular belief (eg., to stop forcing people to adhere to their beliefs) accepted by everyone on the "left". My earlier post was unclear on that.
However, your political position (and mine) aside, I don't think it can be argued that this set of beliefs is non-existent among the activist or academic left, or even that it is rare. In my neck of the woods, at least, it's the accepted popular wisdom.
aphrael notes: "I know of no branch of political theory which holds that a democracy which is imposed from without will function correctly."
Setting aside theory for the moment, and setting aside and granting absolutely a huge range of utter differences in circumstances, I'm curious what aphreal does think of the German government of today, and the West German Federal Republic as constitued in 1949, as well as of the Frankfurt Documents and the Six Power Conference of 1948?
It's kind of like an Abbott and Costello routine. Which Left? That Left! He Left? Who Left? Me Left?
I think there's a populist, everyday liberalism that fits Patrick's characterization, that is largely pragmatic, principled, reasonably consistent, and deeply grounded. It's demographically a large percentage of the people who vote for the Democrats and support liberal organizations.
I think the left I can get a bee in my bonnet about rises much more to the fore among intellectuals, academics and the chattering classes in general. It's the Left that speaks in magazines and in Blogistan, in academic journals and in conferences, at rallies and consensus-process meetings to organize protests. It's the Left of some of my students and some of my colleagues. It was my Left before I left (kind of).
Is that the important Left? Naw, not really. It's not the one that makes a difference in the voting booth, at any rate. But we all have our pet concerns, and I guess one of mine is why some people whose minds and personality I like and admire nevertheless attach themselves with such fixity to immovable and inconsistent ways of thinking. And in some respects the problems of the "speaking Left" do matter. It has a lot to do with why liberal talk-show hosts are such a rare species, for example, and it also provides a rich source of fodder for people eager to dismiss all liberal politics.
(This is drifting pretty far from Zizka's original comments, for which I apologize...)
Look, I'm probably about as far to the left of centre as things get in America, even though I support terribly few of the leftist causes that get the most publicity in the US, or at least rarely support them in the form that gets the most attention. But there is one thing that I try to remember that has gotten lost over the last 20 years or so: people like me need the vast moderate to conservative centrist majority in order to be of any value at all.
It is important that there be people advocating radical ideas and challenging societies most basic values. These people are as necessary to the proper functioning of the world as policemen, firemen and bureaucrats. It is exactly such fringe movements that make change happen. Women's right, civil rights, gay rights, even as far back as the anti-slavery movement - these were all radical fringe movements who spoke out loudly, frequently and sometimes in the shrillest of voices.
But, they had a large, basically conservative, slow changing public to work with. Radical ideas need to be greeted with some skepticism, because stuff just doesn't always work out the way we intend it to. A genuine mass conservativism - people who simply resist changes that they don't see as necessary and seek to preserve existing institutions that seem to serve them adequately - is every bit as essential as a body of radicals to the proper functioning of society. That kind of conservativism isn't evil and it isn't wrong and it does not deserve to be treated derisively.
What has happened in America that is, IMO, so terribly destructive is that this simple working conservativism has been liquidated, or at least been removed from any meaningful role in political life. Most of the people who still advocate that sort of thing are now branded as leftists at best. I am quite happy to be a radical and to know that most people disagree quite sharply with me - after all, there is always a good chance that I'm just plain wrong - but it does no good at all to be a radical in a society so polarised that the only choices available are radical ones.
I suspect that the earlier generation of leftists bears some of the blame for undermining this kind of conservativism, but my memory doesn't go back that far. By the time I got to the US, the sort of conservativism I have in mind was already in deep decline.
If I had to pick a battle that most needs to be fought in America, it is not for some kind of unlimited victory of the left or for the causes we most frequently stand for but for the restoration of a proper conservativism, one dominated not by radical plans for reform but by a mandate for stablity and sanity. I'm perfectly willing to work from there for what I believe in.
"If I had to pick a battle that most needs to be fought in America, it is not for some kind of unlimited victory of the left or for the causes we most frequently stand for but for the restoration of a proper conservativism, one dominated not by radical plans for reform but by a mandate for stablity and sanity."
I think you may be on to something. Certainly very little of what we nowadays call "conservatism" is particularly conservative in any real sense; it's a radical, crusading philosophy of forced social change.
I...half agree. "A mandate for stability and sanity" is attractive to me. But it seems to me that radical change is coming, will-we, nill-we, and no mandate will stop it. I think maybe a big part of the reason the USA is going off the deep end, planning war overseas and practicing repression at home, is that many of us are terrified of change and our leaders, especially, are terrified and they are trying, desperately, to defeat time.
Perhaps "conservatism" has become a word for policies which derive from the fear of change.
I would, I think, rather see a mandate for grace and balance in response to change. Perhaps there is something, here, to be gained from the study of other cultures--I am thinking right now of some admirable Japanese cultural responses to change.
I don't know. But I am certain that we will not achieve stability in the first half of this century, no matter how much we wish for it.
Gary, framing the question in such a way as to exclude both political theory and the differences between the German experience and other experiences makes it extremely difficult to answer. :) I have a high opinion of the German government on most fronts, although I think they have a tendency to over-react to certain forms of speech that would be legal in other countries. I wouldn't hold them up as the epitomy of the perfect representative democracy, but they come reasonably close, and would serve as a good model for several of the less savory Eastern European states to follow.
That said, I am not certain that it is fair to characterize what happened in Germany after the end of WWII as the 'imposition of democracy'. Like every major western European power except Spain, Prussia had made movements in a democratic direction throughout the late nineteenth century, establishing a (weak) parliament with some ability to influence policy. After the collapse of the Empire, representative democracy had appeared to those left in power to be the only legitimate choice for the re-founding of the state; to the extent that fascism constituted a rejection of representative democracy as a form of government, the failure of the fascist state strengthened the case for democracy. (To my mind, this operated in a manner very similar to the manner in which the collapse of state socialism in the early 1990s caused many moderates and moderate-conservatives in the United States to conclude that any alternative to modern capitalism must be doomed). What the United States did in the late 1940s was less an imposition of democracy than it was an assistance of democracy; in essence, we lended our aid and support to one side in an ongoing internal debate within German society, and that assistance helped the proponents of democracy win that debate.
My original point in bringing up the subject was to point out that there is a brand of internventionist neo-conservatism which, if one judges by their rhetoric, appears to believe that the United States can go into any country it chooses and 'establish democracy', without paying any attention to the political debate within that society. More generally, it was to complain about a model of democracy which fails to include the possibility that the people might legitimately choose some other form of government, which I think has always been an inherent internal contradiction of the Wilsonian and post-Wilsonian programs.
I'm sorry - I've been away for the weekend so I haven't been able to make a timely response while this was near the top of the blog.
Yes, the world is changing and I don't imagine stability is really an option. I would agree with calling it "grace and balance in response to change." I want to see conservatives saying things like "but maybe we can fix it with only some small changes" when confroted with genuine institutional failure.
I don't want this because I think that every situation should be met with the minimum respose. Deeply entrenched problems may well require radical solutions. But, I want to know that a voice for the smallest change and the greatest constancy is out there and being taken seriously.
"...framing the question in such a way as to exclude [...] makes it extremely difficult to answer."
You did a pretty good job. I just wanted to avoid getting diverted very far into theory or the understandable urge to point out the vast differences in circumstances.
I'd not disagree with your answer; it's not far from what I would have said. I could write a long paper attempting to make the counter-case as to how weak the foundations of democracy in Germany were, in any era prior to Bonn. Weimar is the strongest prior democracy, and many theses have filled shelves pointing out its structural flaws and historical general lack of success, particularly in the Stressman period. But why bother?
It does seem to me that saying "After the collapse of the Empire, representative democracy had appeared to those left in power to be the only legitimate choice for the re-founding of the state" is pretty quibble-worthy. It was more a project of the Social Democrats than not, wasn't it, and they weren't highly representative of those "left in power." What support the conservatives and industrials gave was pretty much only out of fear of success of further Bolshevik revolution, in my understanding. Then after the Kapp Putsch of 1920, there was nothing but minority coalition, increased extremism on both sides, and then Stresemann. (And the conservative /monarchical desire for an authoritarian government doesn't seem necessarily to have implied Hitlerism; after not very long, he wasn't a great hero to many of the non-Nazi conservatives who had merely hoped to use him and had underestimated him.)
But this is a quibble. Overall, I'd say that, yes, surely the US/UK built on what democratic strands survived, particularly Christian Democratic strands, and, of course, there's the lackluster nature of "de-nazification" I'll avoid going into here. But there was quite a bit of "imposition" in the formation of Bonn, nonetheless. And, after all, for a different form of imposition and results, we have the GDR as a control experiment!
For all the differences between Iraq and Germany/1946, it seems to me there's quite a lot to be built on in Iraq, as well. It is, after all, one of the most industrialized, urbanized, Arab countries, with a far deeper tradition of politics than any of the desert or Gulf Arab countries.
For that matter, people compare it to Yugoslavia, with the Lesson Learned that Iraq would "inevitably fly apart" from the "centripetal forces" of divisiveness between Shia and Sunni and Kurd and so forth, and while that's not to be sneezed at, neither, it seems to me, was the flying apart of Yugoslavia inevitable. There were considerable forces holding that creation together, as well, and many citizens who regarded themselves as "Yugoslavs," just as many Iraqis today regard themselves as "Iraqis," not members of a tribe or village alone. I'm not convinced that Yugoslavia could not have done better nor that Iraq couldn't sustain a vibrant democracy within a decade (inevitable point to the, admittedly less heterogeneous, Kurdish free area here). (Nor am I convinced that an Iraqi project would be any sort of sure success!)
Anyway, thanks muchly for an excellent and thoughtful response. You do know, by the way, that the URL you give for your "website" is not reachable due to 403 error?
Oh, and Wilsonianism has always been rife with contradictions, as I was hyperventilating upon just yesterday in comments on another blog (Yglesias, probably; in this case on the lack of defined granularity of "self-determination"). I've been known to put people to sleep on the topic.
As for the idea that "the United States can go into any country it chooses and 'establish democracy', without paying any attention to the political debate within that society," well, I would hope no sane person would believe that. Not in any timeframe of under 50 years, anyway, and the second clause is particularly a killer.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
Comments on Zizka: