The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by David J. Greenbaum:

Mr. Arthurs;

My pseudonym is for my personal and professional protection. I have a valid email address attached to the posting, and I daresay that I can be identified ultimately with a little work. I have posted to Crooked Timber, to Brad DeLong's weblog, to Halfway Down the Danube, and to John Quiggin's weblog with the same pseudonym.

The people who might care who I am already know who I am. Those who may come to care who I am can certainly contact me should they come to desire that.

BTW, I have been a poster to Usenet for almost twelve years, and during that time, I never posted pseudonymously, nor did I ever engage in sockpuppetry. I always have posted under my full name, using my full - and unmunged - email address, and I have always been responsible for the content of my communications.

As I am now.

My beef with Phil Agre is that he finds "conservatism" to be a sentient, active, and unitary thing, and not as a label descriptor of a political movement of people who believe in "conservative" things for idiosyncratic, personal, and other reasons besides the philosophical, social, and economic.

It makes me a little angry that he does that because it is a little dehumanizing and when he goes off on conservative rhetors and conservatism it denies the fact that our modern collective conservative movement is an aggregate epiphenomenon of a bunch of groups composed of an elective membership of free people who believe in things for a reason, and not necessarily just because they heard it on Bob Grant or on Limbaugh in the morning.

Whatever, your comment about pseudonyms was a typically lazy, jokey, and fannish way of dismissing what I said.

My point is, I guess, if you want to win in a democracy, you make sure you are part of a majority group, and you make sure your group is the majority by working to bring everybody you can into your group, and then you do everything within your legal power to see your coalition to a majority or plurality count at the polls on election day.

Being true feels good. Saying the right thinks and elaborating the great rational project is uplifting. Running a collection of people bent toward the same goal, and achieving that goal with flair, finesse, competence, shrewdness, planning, and clear-eyed organization, seeing through to the goal over and over again - that's f_____g exhilarating.

I liked Phil Agre's essay very much.

But I have very large bones to pick with his reification of conservatism as the animating ideology of whatever "nascent aristocracy" exists in this country, because he does not say who the conservatives are.

He defines conservatism using a dictionary and grammar that I share. His language is clear there - we know what conservatism is and what its end goals are. We know that it seeks to destroy rationality and substitute for it the authority of engrained, customary hierarchy. We know they like to destroy language by using words to mean things in contradiction of consensus dictionary definitions. We know that they lie, they appeal to false images, they try to obscure and make irrelevant the consequences of ideologically pure brainwaves, because they are serving no greater truth than their own evanescent exaltation above us forelock-tuggers.

Sure.

But who are the conservatives? WHO ARE THEY, according to Phil Agre?

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.
...
Conservative rhetors, for example in the Wall Street Journal
...
rhetors such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter
...
Newt Gingrich's (then) organization GOPAC
...
The Wall Street Journal's opinion page
...
the Wall Street Journal's editors
...
[Wall Street Journal] late editor Robert Bartley
...
[Present Wall Street Journal editor]Daniel Henninger
...
conservative think tanks
...
conservative public relations
...
George Bush.

This is my problem. Figureheads. Symbols. Irrelevancies. Who are the nascent aristocrats? Are they members of an economic class? Are they members of a particular religious affiliation? Are they professionals? Are they the sad benighted Skinner-trained-to-pull-the-lever-for-a-Republican-peanut dupes?

Is it the class of people who believe in conservatism? Well, it might be nice to have some kind of systematic zoology by which one can identify the people who believe in conservatism? Is it their circles of professional or civic affiliation? Is it their geneaology? Is it their magazine subscription list or their home libraries or the fact that they can pay to send their kid to Andover?

That is a crucial and critical flaw in Phil Agre's essay, because while I receive very well his wonderfully cogent exegesis of conservatism and its threat to our culture; we end up struggling against an idea, and not struggling and confronting the people who hold that idea.

They have unifying characteristics beyond their desire to institute unthinking heirarchy? I'm sick and tired to shadowboxing the umbrous nascent aristocrats and their lackey toady conservative rhetors

Name them - do it - name them!

Say that people who believe in a militant evangelical faith that respects no bounds between public and private, between the parochial and the secular - that people who behave as though human law is subject to Divine Law are anti-democrat.

Felt good, right? Rationalist bonafides are secure!

Next!

Darn, well, since Phil said that the conservatives are the people who are trying to turn themselves into aristocrats, and they are also the people who are trying to extinguish rational thought, and they are also the people who achieve these things by lying about true things and making words mean the opposite of what they were originally supposed to mean... I guess every single group or class of people that engages in rhetorical dishonesty to advance its own condition, and every single group that unilaterally renegotiates the boundaries of "legitimate" debate to shape that debate toward selfish ends, well, darn it, they are all conservatives.

Oh, wait. There's that caveat about attempting to cement aristocracy - so clearly, the nascent aristocracy must have some congruence with the class of folks that have more (of something: wealth, influence, power, land, beneficiaries of non-reciprocated social obligations) than anybody else but are scared that they won't be able to hold onto the more without rigging the game.

Who are these people?

My point is This is hard. You can single out the conservative politicians, and you can put yellow hats on the loony conservative rhetors (pesky silly rhetors, kicks are for trids), and you can go target shooting in religious wackoland, and you are no closer to identifying the reasons why a particular individual might be attracted to the banner of a regressive and selfish cause. Iffn you is for democracy, you gots ta look to the individual who does pull the lever, and that person's pulling that lever up or down based on what that person believes.

Phil Agre's prescription list: pssh....

Rebut conservative arguments
Benchmark the Wall Street Journal
Build a better pundit
Say something new
Teach logic
Conservatism is the problem
Critically analyze leftover conservative theories
Ditch Marx
Talk American
Stop surrendering powerful words
Tipper Gore is right
Assess the sixties
Teach nonviolence
Tell the taxpayers what they are getting for their money
Make government work better for small business
Clone George Soros
Build the Democratic Party

Dear god almighty! Let's divide these prescriptions into categories:

1) Rhetorical toolkit general improvements:

Rebut conservative arguments
Build a better pundit
Talk American
Tipper Gore is right
Stop surrendering powerful words
Benchmark the Wall Street Journal
Tell the taxpayers what they are getting for their money

Basically, fight back by engaging enemy statements in detail while being more persuasive, fluent, unassumingly confident, concisively firm and combative, and not using rhetoric that implicitly or explicitly accepts the legitimacy of particular taboo subjects -- ie avoid things that are obscene or can be construed to be obscene by grandma-hard-of-hearing. So, basically, learn how to present your case better while simultaneously negotiating the irrational minefield of the shifting consensus view of obscenity?

2) Be better thinkers. Spread better thinking.

Assess the sixties
Ditch Marx
Say something new
Teach logic
Critically analyze leftover conservative theories
Conservatism is the problem

Oh, golly gee, think about what you believe, and think about it in a way so you believe it more and persuade more people to the truth in the way that democracy asserts can be the only way things are virtuous and true. Warms the cockles of me heart.

OF COURSE WE SHOULD HAVE A COHERENT SYSTEM OF BELIEF RESPONSIVE TO EXTERNAL CHALLENGE AND SUSCEPTIBLE TO SKEPTICAL IMPROVEMENT BY PEOPLE OF GOODWILL.
Like, duh. Sign me up to the lecturn! I'm gonna do the thinking, and then I'm gonna speechify!

3) Learn how to win in ways that don't include being persuasive, but do include being more competent:

Make government work better for small business

Clone George Soros

Build the Democratic Party

Teach nonviolence

Getting resources to improve doing things that help us win elections. Sounds good. Strengthening institutions that help us to organize to do things like get better press and win elections. Sounds good.

What about things forgotten like running for office and convincing friends and organizing parties and driving people to the polls and collecting donations, and voting yourself, and doing more than bellyache and complain about the water filter? What about knowing the law and organizing human effort and association on many levels, so that the individual efforts of mirror-opposite conservative organization can be nullified, or even co-opted? What about developing a political culture that desires and understands winning, because of the stakes of losing, and fixing that awareness in our organization building?

What frustrates me about these things is that in the end, not enough people are going to go door to door in East Flatbush registering voters and running vans. Not enough people approach the political project as a permanent part of their lives, so that they might look to the personal, the professional, the private, the religious, and the political with equal weight, because, frankly, we're not scared enough to get off our fat, lazy, consensus-accepting asses. When in a single week, I am contacted by more panhandlers, conartists, and grifters in the public space seeking my personal engagement in social matters than I have ever had try to engage me in political association building *in* *my* *entire* *life* (note, present NYC resident professional, there is lots of solicitation in my public space now, former reporter, formerly a student of a liberal Ivy), well, damn, we just don't care enough to take the war out of the parlors, the journals, and the coffee shops.

Hooray! Power came back up at 9 am here in Queens, connectivity at 9:30 am.

I walked home up Queens Boulevard from Long Island City - traffic jams like nobodies business. I remembered fondly those days when there were traffic lights on Queens Boulevard, on an ordinary day a mere Boulevard of Death - I was stuck on the northern side of the Boulevard, and had to walk practically back to Woodhaven to cross south.

Did my frantic phone calling, found everybody who needed to be found (cell phones were completely dysfunctional) and shmoozed up the Bukharian greengrocer while the night fell.

Then, moonlight on the rowhouse rooftops, and WCBS on the portaradio, powered off the UPS.

Well, Slate did change the text, as of 2:10pm. The thing is, I read that quote - "Dennis Kucinich, Jew" - and I hear "Dennis Kucinich, Ju"d".
Bugs me. But they did change it.







BTW.Making Light is Lynx unfriendly in a way that Electrolite isn't, regarding dynamically generated and linked comments pages. To wit, I can read and post to yours because you have permanent hyperlinks, while Theresa's javascript makes my lynx browser barf.)

I'm breathless.

Torture is not a liberal thing.

It is nothing more than the fixing of vengeance in living flesh.

Pardon me, please, while I retch. If I could vomit on Oliver's shoes, I would.

Need to clarify the particular translation (Engels' is a little funky) - this one:
Arise, you prisoners of starvation!

Arise, you wretched of the earth!

For justice thunders condemnation.

A better world's in birth.

No more tradition's chains shall bind us.

Arise, you slaves, no more in thrall!

The earth shall rise on new foundations.

We have been naught, we shall be all.

'Tis the final conflict;

Let each stand in his place.

The international working class

Shall be the human race.

And the American-English translation of the Internationale can be sung to the tune of George M. Cohan's "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy."

And the German Internationale scans very well to "Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles."

The Italian? "O sole mio."

http://home.planet.nl/~elder180/internationale/

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