Introduction to The Populist Delusion by Neema Parvini

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a book about the realities of power and how it functions, stripped of ideological baggage. It has at its core a thesis, which absolutely contradicts the democratic or populist delusion, that the people are or ever could be sovereign. An organized minority always rules over the majority. Perhaps as a testament to that fact, a recent empirical study showed that public opinion has a near zero impact on law-making in the USA across 1,779 policy issues. In fact,, my thesis goes further than that to suggest that all social change at all times and in all places has been top-down and driven by elites rather than ‘the people’. Those movements which have the appearance of being organic and bottom-up protests – for example, the 1960s Civil Rights movement in the USA or the Russian Revolution of 1917 – were, In fact, tightly organized and funded by elites. Those attempts to drive change from the ‘bottom-up, which is to say, in the absence of elite organization – we might think of the events of 6th January 2020 in Washington DC or the recent Yellow Vest movement in France – will amount  to little more than an inchoate rabble. This principle holds true regardless of the size of the political unit, be that a small company of twenty people, a large organization of thousands of people, a nation of millions, or even the entire world. It holds true not only in terms of hard power – the ability to capture and hold office – but also in two other crucial respects. First, there is the question of logistical power – simply the ability to execute orders- for it is possible to capture office without achieving the ability to execute, as Donald Trump showed. Second, there is the question of the ‘soft power’ of discourse, of information flow, and of opinion formation.

In addition to democratic delusions, there are also four liberal delusions that will be subject to significant attack by the thinkers who we will be considering. Let us call these the ‘Four Myths of Liberalism’:

 

1.      1.Myth of the stateless society: that state and society were or could ever be separate.

2.      2.Myth of the neutral state: that state and politics were or could ever  be separate.

    3. Myth of the free market: that state and economy were or could ever be separate.

    4. Myth of the separation of powers: that competing power centers can realistically      

        endure without converging

In the cold light of reality, these four myths turn out to be little more than wishful thinking.

Before continuing, it is worth emphasizing what ‘top-down’ or ‘elite driven’ change means. These phrases may suggest shadowy organizations that puppeteer unseen from the sidelines, but that is not the sense in which they should be understood. Rather, the defining feature of ‘top-down’, as opposed to bottom-up, change is the fact of tight minority organization as against the disorganized masses. ‘Elite’ in this sense could be the elites currently in power or a set of ‘counter-elites’ who seek to supplant them. I the former cases, we could cite examples such as the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, various LGBT movements, Black Lives Matter or Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion. In these cases, the current power structure uses its considerable influence and resources – whether through legal means using the formal structure of the state and its apparatuses (education, state-backed media, etc)  or through non-government organizations (NGOs) and corporate lobby groups – to manufacture consent and give the appearance of popular support for elite projects. In the later  case, however, the efforts of the counter-elites will only find success in a revolution. As outlined in Chapter 7, evolutions only occur when the current ruling class loses its ability and resolve to maintain power, which will produce widespread popular discontent, and when a counter-elite is ready to seize the initiative to fill the vacuum. ‘ Rebellions happen; revolutions are made.’ The superior and tight organization of the counter-elite group determines largely why it is that group as opposed to any other that will now take the reigns of power. Historical studies on revolutionary figures as diametrically opposed as Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler have noted tight organizational ability and iron discipline as the defining characteristics of their respective vanguards. Lenin has ‘a profound mistrust of the revolutionary potential of the masses, who he believed, without the leadership of an elite party vanguard, would inevitably become diverted by the bread-an-butter issues of Economism.’ Likewise, Arthur Bryant described  Hitler’s NSDAP as ‘a fighting movement of flawless discipline, and animated by the same unquestioning devotion to its faith and leaders as the old Prussian Guard.’ Bryant goes on, ‘It must place him among the great organizers of mankind that he was able to establish it so quickly.’

Aside from this iron discipline in organization, Lenin and Hitler also had in common an utter contempt for democracy, which was seen as a time-wasting impediment to effective decision-making, and a total disdain for the polite and respectable ‘bourgeois’ society of the status quo they each sought to supplant. The important point for this study, however, is that neither the rise of the Bolsheviks nor the rise of the Nazis was a popular uprising but rather the result of the determined organized efforts of counter-elites. Likewise, the movements of Civil Rights, LGBT rights, Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion were not popular uprisings either, but the result of determined organized efforts of the elites currently in power or, if you prefer, the ruling class.

This book will start by introducing the core tenets of the elite theorists, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels. These thinkers give us the indispensable tools and vocabulary with which to analyze politics and power. It will then add crucial insights from two other important political theorists, Carl Schmitt and Bertrand de Jouvenel, to think more about how power and law function  in practice and about how political change – ‘the circulation of elites’- can come about. Three chapters will follow on the ‘managerial class’- the vital second stratum of the elites or ruling class identified by the elite theories – and the special treatment given to this topic by James Burnham, Samuel T. Francis and Paul Gottfried. Chapter 10 forms a brief conclusion applying some of these lessons to the current political moment.

It is worth mentioning here that this book is interested primarily in the fundamental concepts rooted in these works and not, for example, the lives and contexts of the authors or how their work has been received by scholars over the decades.  I will do my best to draw on the vast body of secondary literature, but purely for the purpose of better illustrating the core ideas rather than critiquing them except where necessary. There are two key reasons for this, one practical and the other pedagogical. The former is simply because of space, one could easily write a whole book on each of the chapter topics. The latte, however, is to avoid confusion.  Many of the thinkers we are discussing were severely critical of, or even outright hostile to, both socialism and liberal democracy, while many of the scholars who have worked on them have been either socialists or defenders of liberal democracy. Thus, their purposes for taking on these thinkers were usually in the service of defending their ideology, whether by re-interpreting or trying to co-opt the thinker for it or trying to find ways to disprove the thinker to ‘save’ it. This is not to say that any of the scholars in question were dishonest, or that their work was ‘bad’, or even that their arguments were incorrect, but rather to recognize that they were working under conditions in which they felt the need to pay lip service to the official doctrine the ‘political formulas’- of the status quo, I feel no such obligation.. Besides, as John Higley has pointed out, the march of history continues utterly in defiance of democrats and social radicals:

Many democrats and social radicals have rejected the early elite theorists ‘futility thesis’. They have sought to demonstrate that particular elites are not those with superior endowments or organizational capacities, but merely persons who are socially advantaged in power competitions. Adherents of this view have argued that the existence of elites can be terminated either by removing the social advantages that some people enjoy or by abolishing the power concentrations that spur competitions among them- remedies that often go hand-in-hand. There are no historical instances, however, where these remedies have been successfully applied in a large population for any significant length of time.

This book seeks to advance a value-free analysis which is not in tye service of any ideology. If power in human societies functions according to certain immutable laws, these laws are not suddenly suspended in the liberal, socialist, or fascist society. Granted, history never occurs in a vacuum: complexities and contingencies always play a part in its seismic events. But this does not mean we cannot discern identifiable patterns as to the nature of power and politics which cut across the specifics of time and place and of governmental system.

Nonetheless, we should mention at the outset the most generic complaint made by scholars who have sought to critique the thinkers I am covering in this book. James Burnham, who is one of them, dubbed these thinkers ‘the Machiavellians’. This does not mean they were all disciples of Niccolo Machiavelli, but rather that they conducted their work in this spirit: to see the world as it is and not how it ought to be. In other words, their watchword was realism. They each had a pretense to the neutral objectivity of science. Since it is virtually impossible when dealing with a topic such as politics to eliminate the biases and preferences of the author entirely, this has been fertile ground for their critics. If they could as James H.  Meisal put it ‘demonstrate the hidden moral bias’, these claims to objectivity vanish. For example, Gaetano Mosca was a kind of liberal, as was Bertrand de Jouvenel.  Vilfredo Pareto was read by and influenced Benito Mussolini and voiced some support for fascism before he died. Robert Michels joined the Italian fascist party after being a socialist and a syndicalist earlier in his life. Carl Schmitt joined the German National Socialist Party. James Burnham was a Trotskyist who later became a founder for the American conservative magazine, National Review, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, a Republican. Where the personal sympathies of the author leak into their otherwise ‘value-free’ work, it does admittedly become a potential issue. For example, C. A. Bond points out in his book Nemesis, some instances where de Jouvenel’s otherwise exemplary work lapses into the assumptions of liberal individualism. Ettore A. Albertioni shows where liberal ethical assumptions creep into the work of Mosca, especially when he posits  juridical defense* as a positive ethical category in an otherwise amoral analysis. Karl Mannheim criticized Vilfredo  Pareto for making a ‘myth’ out of the idea of the man of action and said his elevation of this idea was arbitrary. George Orwell complained that James Burnham too readily wrote off the prospect of making incremental and marginal increases in the standard of living for those worst off in society because of his personal antipathy to socialism. All these criticisms amount to is that our authors were only human: real men living in real conditions with all the raging political debates that go on in any era. None of these criticisms significantly attack the core of the central arguments made by these thinkers.

Thus,, I have presented what is most essential in the various theses of these authors while stripping out what I see as the most ephemeral elements. In other words, it does not matter that Mosca favored juridical defense or separation of powers while Pareto favored a strong ‘man of action’ or Machiavellian lion. It does not matter that Samuel T. Francis  called for a ‘revolution of the middle’ or that Karl Schmitt supported the Nazis. We must relegate all these stances to the category of personal policy preferences. We must separate those, which are merely contingencies owing to the circumstances and tastes of their authors, from the essential ideas concerning power and politics. What matters in each of their cases is whether the core principles of power and its functioning which they outlined are true. Does reality bear out in practice what they say in theory, now and always. This is the only test of a theory that aspires to realism.

The importance of taking this realist approach to power and politics is not only theoretical or academic, but also has practical implications. Those who wish to bring about political change  cannot hope to do so if they adopt populist methods o have faith that at some point a critical mass of the public will suddenly reach a ‘tipping point’ after which elites will be inevitably toppled. Change always takes concerted organization and cannot hope to be achieved simply by convincing the greatest number of people of your point of view. Power does not care, in the final analysis, how many likes you got on your Twitter account. In practice, the great bulk of people will adjust to new realities after the fact of change and reorient themselves to the new power structure one way or another. In any case, ‘manufacturing consent’  can only be carried out once a group is de facto in power. A group may achieve de jure power only to find that they cannot  execute or manufacture consent because they have not achieved de facto power  and, realistically, de facto power is the only power that counts.

* Mosca had in mind an independent ad fair judiciary backed by a strong rule of law which will, in turn, help to maintain a morally upstanding and law-abiding citizenry. If a ruling class keep political prisoners and act in an arbitrary manner, do not give the ruled the right to a fair trial, do not prosecute serious crimes and let criminals loose on the streets, and so on, then it it is evidence of a lack of juridical defense.

Edward Said's Marxism by Timothy Brennan

It is reasonable to agree with the Irish poet Seamus Deane that Said was not a Marxist, but only if we recognize the wildly different degrees to which one can be ‘not a Marxist.’ Like other opponents of U.S. foreign policy, Said was at times libeled as a sympathizer with ‘Soviet totalitarianism.’ The charge was absurd, yet it should not go unnoted that many of the intellectuals to whom he was drawn supported the Soviet Union for much of their lives. These included E. P. Thompson, Emile Habibi,  J. D. Bernal, Sadik Al-Azm, and, of course, Gramsci and Lukacs. Even more apt, given his professional interests, was the generation of third world authors who got their start as writing fellows in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and other parts of the Soviet bloc. These included his ally and correspondent Ranajit Guha, a historian of South Asia, the Kenyan author and critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the Palestinian poet laureate and close friend Mahmoud Darwish.

Said had always been clear about rejecting membership in communist organizations for both practical and political reasons. But Soviet realpolitik in the Middle East, although a mixed blessing, inspired communist groups within Arab nationalism generally. It was so interwoven with the politics of everyday life that from a Palestinian perspective it was simply part of the landscape and not at all an alien intrusion. At other times, he pretended incomprehension, implausibly turning down a request to be on the board of a left political organization with which she was affiliated on the grounds that ‘I am most unknowledgeable about Soviet history, and more particularly, the history of Marxism; I would therefore feel like a complete idiot.’

From as early as 1969, Said’s self-positioning vis-à-vis Marxism and his conditional praise for Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East was openly stated. He repeatedly questioned, though, whether a Marxism devised in the West could ever be relevant outside it: ‘I have yet to see –to my mind- a satisfactory translation of Marxism into Arab or Third World terms.’ For all of Arab nationalism’s heroism and rectitude, he once describe it as borrowed and inauthentic and for that reason too ‘inexpensive.’ Arriving already completed elsewhere, it could never feel the impress of a genuinely Arab stamp. So too communism. In the United States, the organizational Left was so bogged down in debates about whether racism or class struggle was more important that it had little to offer the Palestinian struggle, which is one of the chief reasons he never considered formally joining its ranks.

Apart from a brief visit to Poland on his Guggenheim Fellowship in Beirut, he never set foot in a Soviet bloc country, even at the height of his fame, although invitations were extended. On the other hand, he provoked Hitches in a revealing moment of anger: ‘Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publically criticized the Soviet Union  .  .  . The Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.’ For all the media outcry against ‘tenured radicals’ and Marxist indoctrination in the university, most of the academic Left distanced itself from Marxism or turned it into a docile lifestyle transgression.  Said was scrupulous about never doing either.

Marxism for Said, at any rate, was always something larger and older than its twentieth-century Soviet and Middle Eastern forms. At its most honorable, it was part of a tradition of the Left that reached back to a time before Marx. His investment in Vico, one could say, was precisely to resurrect an earlier counter-tradition based on giving dignity back to human labor, to the agency of ordinary people making history, to the class struggles that created the first republics, and to the spirit of humanist breadth rejecting narrow specialization and, like Marx, boldly weighing in on political theory and economics in a poetic spirit. In that light, he delightfully invoked the medieval reformer Cola di Rienzo as one of the founders of humanist thought. Rienzo, the son of a washerwoman and a tavern keeper, an avenger of the abuses of noblemen, and a denouncer of aristocrats, was a brilliant rabble-rouser, having steeped himself in the work of the Latin poets and orators in order to use their rhetorical techniques to unify Italy.

Said alluded to other moments of the historical left by way of Rabelais Abbaye Theleme, an anti-authoritarian idyll described in Gargantua and Pantagruel ( 1532), a place where one was able to achieve intellectual and physical fulfilment, free from drudgery and submission to authority. Apart from show the prehistory of Marx’s criticism from below, Said was looking to take humanism out of the hands of self-righteous cultural warriors. He had in mind, among others, Hilton Kramer’s neoconservative journal The New Criterion, for example, whose contributors were busy pontificating about these same classics of ‘Western Civilization” as he was, but for the very different purpose of calling those who exposed the crimes of imperial culture barbarians.

His appraisal of the Left was careful to avoid the balancing act of George Orwell and other self-styled ‘socialists’ whose art was  to elude middlebrow censure by denouncing leftist gods – a formula Said knew well from the late journalism of Hitchens and the writing of Leszek Kolakowski, Conor Cruise O’Brian, and others with whom  he fought bitterly over the years. In piece after piece, we see him running interference for the Left, humanizing communists and Marxist intellectuals by getting others to see them as full members of a collective intellectual  endeavor. Doling out strategic praise for authors he wanted others to read, he promoted a list of broadly social democratic exposes of U.S. foreign policy and the domestic surveillance state. He particularly loved on-the-ground studies of institutional complicity, citing on more than one occasion Frances Stoner Saunders on the cultural Cold War, Nadia Abu el-Haj on the fictions of Israeli archeology, or Carol Gruber’s Mars and Minerva, a study of the ways that universities turned themselves into instruments of the War Department during World War I.

“Traveling Theory,’ one of his most quoted essays, was all about the sapping of intellectual vigor as Marxist concepts like ‘totality’ and ‘reification’ moved away from revolutionary commitments in the actual struggle of parties and movements towards a decontextualized serenity. There are, of course, many instances when Said articulates explicitly liberal rather than Marxist political perspective, not only casting suspicion on abusive governments but finding in the very logic of institutions the threat of a new tyranny. The classically liberal model of the fragile individual pitted against organizations can be seen in “Secular Criticism’ when he singles out the unlikely trio of T. S. Eliot’s Anglican mandarinate, Lukac’s vanguard party, and Freud’s psychoanalytic community for sharing ‘vestiges of the kind of authority associated in the past with filiative order’- that is, for losing all reason and fairness when dealing with those outside its ideological ‘family.’ As in liberal thought generally, the private individual is portrayed as inevitably threatened by the hierarchy of groups, parties, and parliaments.

Hints of this same centrism can be found in his enthusiasm for Gramsci’s contemporary Piero Gobetti, who even inspires a slogan in Culture and Imperialism: ‘the Gobetti factor.’  As a passionate, young literary intellectual, Gobetti represented for Said a detached philosophical erudition placed in the service of mass mobilization. Gobetti, like Gramsci, was a student at the University of Turin whose outlook changed forever after he witnessed the young Gramsci’s skillful role in the Turin labor movement. More than anyone in his generation, Gobetti grasped Gramsci’s lesson that it was vital to connect the South, ‘whose poverty and vast labor pool,’ Said wrote, ‘are inertly vulnerable to northern economic policies and power, with the North that is dependent upon it.’ But, again like Said, he was less radical than Gramsci, in solidarity with the Italian Communist Party but never a member of it. During the fascist period Gobetti found that the only consistent and effective defenders of liberal ideals were the organized Left. In that regard, Said implied, aligning himself with the Left only reluctantly and pragmatically, he was the Gobetti of his time.

Yet this too appeared to be another Comradian mask, for there were many counterexamples. In a sardonic aside he once commented that ‘we liberals’ call a situation complex as ‘a rhetorical signal .  .  .before a lie is to be pronounced or when a grave and immoral complicity with injustice is about to be covered up.’ Although he conceded the influence of Will Rogers-like boldness and clarity of the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, for instance, he was not impressed by his ‘peremptory liberalism’ and hated his America-first politics. Because of his distaste for liberal hypocrisy, close colleagues judged Said ‘basically Marxist,’ although of course not a communist.

On the other hand, while acknowledging Said’s regard for twentieth-century Marxist philosophers, Al-Azm thought ‘the fundamental structures of his analysis .  .  .never Marxist,’ and his Marxism ‘cosmetic.’ Chomsky shared this assessment, challenging anyone to show him where, at any point in Said’s work, Marxism enters as a serious analytic principle. Deirdre Bergson, a close friend who earlier in life had been active in the Trotskyist movements in South Africa, delighted in Said’s confession in his Haverford College commencement speech that he should have studied economics more seriously, but she complained (very inaccurately, it turns out) that he never said a word in any of his works about class.

The attack on Marx in Orientalism seemed for many to settle the issue of Said’s real sympathies. There, in a move that scholars rightly censured, he corralled Marx into the camp of John Stewart Mill as a man convinced of the inferiority of Indians. And yet one had only to look at Said’s alert and prolonged close readings of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte  in ‘On Repetition’ to get the opposite impression. And in the very months that he was writing Orientalism, his support for the German communist was stalwart, and even a little defensive:

It’s been said about Marx that he saw this struggle as something exclusively economic; that’s a serious falsification .  .  . He was perfectly aware that the struggle was materially expressed and economically characterizable, but he was, I think, enormously sensitive to the shaping dialectic, to the intangible but very real figurations, to the internal unisons  and dissonances the struggle produced. That is the difference between him and Hobbes, who saw life as nasty, brutish, and short.

 

Here, at any rate, Said was clearly accusing bourgeois thought (in the person of Hobbes) of a crude materialism and saying that Marx himself was, among other things, a very early and invaluable cultural critic. What reservations he had seemed designed to encourage third-world intellectuals to free themselves from European icons, no matter how liberatory. And he was eager to show he wanted nothing to do with ‘solidarity before criticism,’ a phrase he often used to express how dangerous it was when allies keep silent about each other’s mistakes in the name of a common cause. Even Marx, he was implying, a giant of liberation and ethical integrity, could not entirely escape Eurocentrism.

His critique of Marxists, interestingly, was frequently from the left. He complained that professors had diminished the revolutionary force of Marxism by turning it into ‘principally a reading technique.’ He was also protective, even agitated, when the core of Marx’s writings were treated ineptly or gutted by the politically enfranchised. In a reader’s report on Geoffrey Hartman’s Criticism in the Wilderness in 1976, for example, he found it unforgivable that the author had ‘swept the whole matter of Marxism and its relationship to Hegelian philosophy out of the room.’ Samuel Huntington’s tribalist creed The Clash of Civilizations (1996) conducted its arguments without any attention to ‘the globalization of capital.’ He quoted Oscar Wilde’s Soul of Man Under Socialism – ‘no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering’ – adding that for that reason agitators are needed to bring it to consciousness.

Especially in Said’s writings on Palestine do the calculations of political economy and the dilemmas of class tensions associated with Marxism play a prominent role. In ‘The Future of Palestine: A Palestinian View,’ he laid out what he flatly called ‘the class role of the intellectual.” Again and again, he zeroes on the weakness of the ‘Arab bourgeoisie,’ which had been unable to create civil society, and so yielded to its intolerable alternative, the ‘national security state’ while assaulting the Arab free marketeers in his late writing for the Middle East newspapers.

It is reasonable to say, then, that Al-Azm and Chomsky were incorrect to think that the economic and sociological tenets of Marxism were never integral to Said’s  analysis. They are, on the contrary, particularly evident in his study on the ground of the Arab private sector in The End of the Peace Process, but not only there. Aghast at the low level of organization and theoretical awareness among the militants in Beirut in 1972, he gave a structural, rather than personal or partisan, explanation of the morass:

 

[We find] the mode of production and mode of distribution to be respectively, immediate consumption and dispersion. I mean something like this: since the society is essentially a surface, an exterior, it has no memory, no sense of dimension .  .  .This production, paradoxically, is consumption .  .  . You product an idea, a product, a movement, only to have it happen- it lasts only for the consumption .  .  . There is no history.

While engaging its modes of thought and conceptual apparatus, he did, it is true, resist Marxism a well,, but for one reason alone: its partisans had not creatively adapted it.

 

 

Notes on The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell

 

Speaking of the political consequences of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 Caldwell suggests that tempting though it might be to attack discrimination at its root, the cure could wind up worse than the disease, as Leo Strauss warned:

‘The prohibition against every ‘discrimination’ would mean the abolition of the private sphere, the denial of the difference between the state and society, the destruction of liberal society.’

When court cases do not arise ‘naturally’ out of a country’s ordinary social frictions but are confected by interested parties, doesn’t the entire tradition of  judicial review lose its legitimacy, Caldwell asked. Today, the ‘staging’ of court cases is such a standard strategy for activist litigators that even many lawyers are unaware that until the 1950s it was widely considered a straightforward species of judicial corruption, and not just in the South.

The Acts that had been intended to normalize  American culture and cure the gothic paranoia of the Southern racial imagination instead wound up nationalizing Southerners  obsession with race and violence, the author asserts.

The polarization that faces Americans in the second decade of the twenty-first century has many causes. Most were long developing economic and social shifts,. The Roe vs Wade decision was an exception. The decision was sloppily argued. It rested on a nonce right to ‘privacy’ established by Griswold vs Connecticut that was only ever invoked for the ulterior purpose of defending abortion.  In countless important privacy cases that have come before the court in the half century since, covering everything from internet surveillance of terrorists to GPS tracking of automobiles, the Griswold/Roe ‘privacy right’ never came up. Brown vs Board of Education may not have been a forensic masterpiece, either, and the line of civil rights cases from Katzenbach to Bakke didn’t exactly shine for its constitutional logic – but powerful political pressures were then bearing down on Americans regarding their historical responsibility for slavery, and these were enough to override majority misgivings. Roe was different. It pronounced on an issue in which Americans were divided, and frozen those divisions in place. It laid down a fundamental moral and even religious order on a fickle and frivolous basis. .  .  .

Feminism was potentially a rich intellectual current. It is close to that part of Western philosophy that, since Rousseau, has speculated on what is ‘natural’ to humans and what has been conferred (or imposes) on them by civilization. The first-wave feminism of the nineteenth century was built on the Bible and the Fourteenth Amendment. Second-wave feminism was a moral work in progress. Happily it had no respect for superstition. Less happily, it cast as superstition any tradition that could not justify itself in one sentence. Very little that passed for sexual common sense in the middle of twentieth century would be standing by the end of it . . .

There is a limit to how hard one can strain against a mythology. Sexuality,  the font of human life, is fickle, mysterious, contingent. It is not always subject to will, to put it mildly, and sometimes seems to blow in like the weather. A mythology that moralizes sex may do something to shelter a delicate flame. It is hard to say exactly what, but there must be a reason that flourishing fertile, creative societies tend to be conservative about sex.

The modern impulse to rationalize human relations undermined conservatism, and threatened to take the ground rules of sexual relations down with it. As early as the 1920s, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell had warned that the establishment of welfare states risked turning not just the economy but everything upside-down, because the state would replace the father as protector and provider. Breaking the traditional family structure might look rational, modern and sensible. Nonetheless, Russel wrote:

‘if this should occur, we must expect a complete breakdown of traditional morality, since there will no longer be any reason why a mother should wish the paternity of her child be indubitable .  . Whether the effect on men would be good or bad, I do not venture to say. It would eliminate from their lives the only emotion equal in importance to sex love. It would make sex love itself more trivial. It would make it far more difficult to take an interest in anything after one’s death. It would make men less active and probably cause them to retire earlier from work. It would diminish their interest in history and their sense of the continuity of historical tradition.’

Here Russell, enthusiast for sexual freedom as he was, was willing to go out on a limb. Citing the ebb of paternal feeling in the Roman empire and among the upper classes in his own time, he warned that an un-superstitious attitude towards family formation would ultimately threaten Western countries with de-sexualization:

‘My belief is, though I put it forward with some hesitation, that the elimination of paternity as a recognized social relation would trend to make men’s emotional life trivial and thin, causing in the end a slowly growing boredom and despair, in which procreation would gradually die out, leaving the human race to be replenished by stocks that had preserved the older convention.’

 .  .  .  . Hyper-sexualization might be a mask worn by de-sexualization. What is thrilling, fulfilling, and functional about sexuality might be wrapped up in the very ‘complexes’ about sexuality that crusaders for sexual freedom and other reformers insist on getting rid of.


For a while, starting in 1963, when Timothy Leary was ejected from Harvard for his ‘demonstrations’ of LSD, drugs were the spiritual solution with which that generation’s protestors were most closely identified. ‘To arrive at the unknown by disordering all the senses,’ as the French poet Arthur Rimbaud put it, was a cause on a par with making love, not war. People used drugs with particular ardor for only  about two decades until, around 1985, the government cracked down on them and young people decided they were not a liberty wort defending. In the years after that, the ‘head’, the ‘stoner’, faded out of the story of the 1960s, like some reprobate who enlivens the early pages of a gothic novel but whom the author loses track of as the action picks up.

Maybe the problem with drugs was that they were an affront to one vital component of countercultural thinking, religious or not: tye idea of purity. Somewhere out there was the ‘real’ America, unspoiled, unexposed to the influence of television and shopping, un-manipulated by politicians. Americans of the sixties and seventies sought out places where the twentieth century had not done its awful work on the national character.

 

 [ Caldwell uses the example of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974); another good example might be Gary Snyder’s Smokey Bear Sutra (1969), https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2012/01/smokey-bear-sutra-by-gary-snyder.html ]

A certain cultural environmentalism was a natural accompaniment of this rural hankering. It was not the mix of science, ethics and politics that we call environmentalism today and which, back then, was only just emerging under the name of ecology.’ It was more a Romantic way of life, in the sense that William Wordsworth (‘Nature never did betray the heart that loved her’) was Romantic. Drawing from Western culture’s deep well of ideas about simplicity and authenticity, it was, while it lasted, something you could partake of even in a truck or on a mortorcycle. It meant natural ingredients, home cooking, family values as defined in some past era, folk and country music, all kinds of crafts, the grumpy novels of Edward Abbey, backpacking, and the Whole Earth Catalogue.

[ see https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2019/09/innocence-lost-by-michael-arntfield.html ].

The expression ‘American Dream’ is not an ancient one and has had its ups and downs. It was invented only in 1931 by the historian James Truslow Adams and caught on a bit in that decade, only to fall out of fashion in the 1940s. It owes its near-omnipresence in today’s political discourse to two periods when it was very much in fashion, In the seven years between 1963 ( the year King gave his ‘I have a dream’ speech and the first Baby Boomers left high school) and the end of the decade, its usage more than doubled. In the seven years between 1986  ( the year the last Baby Boomers left college) and 1993 (the year Bill Clinton, the first Baby Boomer president, took office after twelve years of Reaganism, its usage went up by nearly 50 percent.

Dreams were where Americans lived. An unwillingness to recognize the limits of reality and common sense in any walk of life became the signature of their political rhetoric, of their corporate marketing, and even of their national culture . . .The problem came from how these dreams were to be managed. In social life, questioning limits means not bowing down to anything. In economics, questioning limits means not paying for anything. At first, American Baby Boomers appeared to be doing with little effort what other generations had only managed to do by the sweat of their brows. But that was an illusion. What they were doing was using their generation’s voting power to arrogate future generation’s labor, and trading it to other nations and peoples for labor now. Reaganism meant  Reaganomics. Reaganomics meant debt.

Keynesian economists had believed that higher taxes could make the economy not only fairer but more efficient. Rich people tended to sock their money away as savings. A progressive government could dislodge it via taxes and invest it in big projects, pumping up demand as it did. But this argument became harder to defend after FDR’s infrastructure state gave way to LBJ’s welfare state. ‘Supply-side’ economists now argue, with considerable cogency, that when government collected too much from ‘the rich’, potentially productive concentrations of investment capital were eroded, and spooned back into society in bites of welfare too small to be used for anything but immediate consumption. Tax cuts became the order of the day but spending was not diminished.

Consider affirmative action – unconstitutional under the traditional order, compulsory under the new.- which exacted a steep price from white incumbents in the jobs they held, in the  prospects of career advancement for their children, in their status as citizens. Such a program could be made palatable to white voters only if they could be offered compensating advantages. A government that was going to make an overwhelming majority of voters pay the cost of affirmative action had to keep unemployment low, home values rising, and living standards high. Reaganomics was just a name for governing under a merciless contradiction that no one could admit was there: Civil rights was important enough that people could not be asked to wait for it, but unpopular enough that people could not be asked to pay for it.

Ronald Reagan saved the Great Society in the same way that Franklin Roosevelt is credited by his admirers with having ‘saved capitalism.’ That is, he tamed some of its worst excesses and found the resources to protect his own angry voters from consequences they would otherwise have found intolerable. That is what the tax cuts were for. Each of the two sides that emerged from the battles of the 1960s could comport itself as if it had won. There was no need to raise the taxes of a suburban entrepreneur in order to hire more civil rights enforcement officers at the Department of Education. There was no need to lease out oil-drilling rights in a national park in order to pay for an aircraft carrier. Failing to win a consensus for the revolutions of the 1960s, Washington instead bought off through tax cuts those who stood to lose from them. Americans would delude themselves for decades that there was something natural about this arrangement. It was an age of entitlement.

Using resources taken from future generations, the Baby Boom generation was briefly able to offer a vision of an easy and indulgent lifestyle, convincing enough to draw vast numbers of people to construct it, like the pyramids or the medieval cathedrals or the railroads.

The big problem with the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was that it bred inequality. Its role in doing so was as significant as that of other factors more commonly blamed: information technology, world trade, tax cuts. In 1995, the economist George Borjas, writing in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, modeled the actual effects of immigration on Americans. He found that while immigration might have caused an increase in economic activity of $2.1 trillion, virtually all those gains – 98 percent- went to the immigrants themselves. When economists talk about ‘gains’ from immigration to the receiving country, they are talking about the remaining 2 percent – about $50 billion. This 450 billion ‘’surplus’ disguises an extraordinary transfer of income and wealth. Native capitalists gain $566 billion,. Native workers lose $516 billion.

One way of describing mass immigration is as a verdict on the pay structure that had arisen in the West by the 1970s: on trade unions, prevailing-wage laws, defined-benefit pension plans, long vacations, and the power workers had accumulated against their bosses more generally. These had long been, in most people’s minds, excellent things. But Republicans argued that private business, alas, could not afford them, and by the 1980s  they had won the argument. Immigration like outsourcing and tighter regulation of unions, allowed employer to pay less for many kinds of labor. But immigrants came with other huge costs: new schools, new roads, translation (formal and informal), and healthcare for those who could not afford it . Those externalities were absorbed by the public, not the businessmen who benefited from immigration.

Outsourcing was a similar windfall. Sending manufacturing jobs abroad offers consumers all the advantages of heavy industry and none of the pollution.  .  . pollution continued at the same rate, of course; It just involved deforesting Brazil instead of pouring bilge into Lake Erie. And it would be years before people began paying attention to the cost of permanent underemployment outside the country’s globalized cities.. .

If we were judging open immigration and outsourcing not as economic policies but as U.S. aide program’s for the world’s poor, we might consider them successes. But we are not. The cultural change, the race-based constitutional demotions of natives relative to newcomers, the weakening democratic grip of the public on its government as power disappeared into back rooms and courtroom, the staggeringly large distributions of wealth – all these things ensured that immigration would poison American politics right down until the presidential election of 2016. .  .  .

 

The Reagan administration’s model of deficit financing  was like the business deals that were going on at the same time. Leveraged buy-outs, which spread across the business world in the 1980s, involved borrowing against the assets of a company you didn’t own in order to buy it – at which point the borrowed money could be paid back by a combination of superior efficiencies (which often didn’t materialize) and pitiless sell-offs (which always did).This meant that financiers had to become more like politicians ( or enlist politicians to do their dirty work). They had to tell a story to convince the public they were advancing progress, not stripping assets. The economist and businessman Louis Kelso, who, like Lewis B. Cullman and many others, claimed to be the inventor of leveraged buy-outs, always described his financial innovation as a kind of shareholder democracy. Boardrooms were now the place for ‘activists’ – fighters and crusaders who wanted to earn billons, fix world hunger, or preferably both at the same time.

Up-and-coming businessmen like these were seldom Reaganites. They didn’t appear even to like Reagan. Why should they? Those profiting most in the 1980s were not, as Reagan’s oratory implied, government-hating small-town loners  dreaming big. Nor were they cigar-chomping robber barons, as his detractors would have it. Increasingly, they were highly credentialed people profiting off of financial deregulation and various computer systems that had been developed by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the NASA space program. They were not throwbacks to William McKinley’s America but harbingers of Barack Obama’s. They were the sort of people you met at faculty clubs and editorial board meetings. Their idea of what constituted a shining city on a hill was different from the one held by the president who enriched them.

Political engagement and economic stratification came together in an almost official attitude known as snark, a sort of snobbery about other opinions that dismissed them as low-class without going to the trouble of refuting them. Why offer an argument when an eye roll would do? The targets of elite condescension  could be roughly identified as those Americans who made up the Reagan electorate, minus the richest people in it. A new social class was coming into being that had at its disposal both capitalism’s means and progressivism’s sense of righteousness. It would breathe life back into the 1960s projects around race, sex, and global order that had been interrupted by the conservative uprisings of the 1970s.  .  .

‘Political correctness’ became the name for the cultural effect of the basic enforcement powers of civil rights law. Those powers were surprisingly extensive, unexpectedly versatile, able to get beneath the integument of institutions  [through fear of litigation] that conservatives felt they had to defer to. Reagan had won conservatives over to the idea that ‘business’ was the innocent opposite of over-weaning ‘government.’ So what were conservatives supposed to do now that businesses were the hammer of civil rights enforcement, in the forefront of advancing affirmative action and political correctness ?

Corporate leaders, advertisers, and the great majority of the press came to a pragmatic accommodation with what the law required, how it worked, and the euphemisms with which it must be honored. All major corporations, all universities, all major government agencies had departments of personnel or ‘human resources’ – a phrase five times a prevalent in the 1980s as it had been in the 1960s. ‘Chief diversity officers’ and ‘diversity compliance officers,’ working inside companies, carried out functions that resembled those of the Soviet commissars. They would be consulted about whether a board meeting or a company picnic was sufficiently diverse.

The Rainbow curriculum that Joseph Fernandez was advancing in the early 1990s in Queens, for instance, had been laid out by his predecessor, Richard Green, in 1989 as a full-spectrum overthrow of everything in the New York school system, including its personnel. In Green’s words: ‘The commitment to multicultural education will permeate every aspect of educational policy, including counseling programs, assessment and testing, curriculum and instruction, representative staffing at all levels, and teaching materials.’ At a time when political conservatism was alleged to be triumphant, politics came under the dominance of progressive movements that had been marginal the day before yesterday: question in the Western literary canon, arguing that gays ought to be able to marry and adopt, suggesting that people could be citizens of more than one country and so on.. These disparate preoccupations did not spring up simultaneously by coincidence. They were old minoritarian impulses that could now, through the authority of civil rights law, override every barrier that democracy might see to erect against them.

Republicans and others who may have been uneasy that the constitutional baby had been thrown out with the segregationist bathwater consoled themselves with a myth: The ‘good’ civil rights movement that the martyred Martin Luther King Jr. had pursued in the 1960s had, they said, been ‘hijacked’ in the 1970s by a ‘radical’ one of affirmative action, with its quotas and diktats. Once the country came to its senses and rejected this optional, radical regime, it could have its good civil rights regime back. None of that was true.

Affirmative action and political correctness were the twin pillars of the second constitution. The were what civil rights was. They were not temporary. Affirmative action was deduced judicially from the curtailments on freedom of association tat the Civil Rights Act itself had put in place. Political correctness rested on a right to collective dignity extended by sympathetic judges who saw that, without such a right, forcing the races together would more likely occasion humiliation than emancipation. As long as Americans were  frightened of speaking against  civil rights legislation or, later, o being assailed as racists, sexists, homophobes, or xenophobes, their political representatives could resist nothing that presented itself in the name of ‘civil rights’. This meant that conflict, when it eventually came, would be constitutional conflict, with all the gravity that the adjective ‘constitutional’ implies.

[The rest of the book is an account of the winners and losers that resulted from the transformation of the demand for civil rights into the demand for human rights but with out much consideration for the role this has played in the justification for the U.S.’s  hegemonic foreign policies; see

 https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2015/05/formal-and-substantive-human-and-civil.html ]