[Mb-civic] Very Interesting Read - Michael

[Michael Butler]

Identity Cleft
For liberals, figuring out conservative America has never been harder.

 By  Jim Sleeper
 Web Exclusive: 11.04.04

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 Here I am, three days after this election, teaching a seminar on "New
Conceptions of American National Identity" at Yale, where George W. Bush,
John Kerry, and I overlapped as undergraduates in the late 1960s. Surely I
will have to tell my students how Bush has revived an old conception of our
national identity that depends heavily on notions about free markets and
spiritual salvation that are necessary but nowhere near sufficient to
sustaining republican freedom.

 Bush's voters believe that this year they've met the republican test set by
Alexander Hamilton, who wrote that history had destined Americans, "by their
conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of
men are really capable or not of establishing good government from
reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for
their political constitutions on accident and force."

 The Bush camp didn't resort to force or fraud in the voting process itself
to win ratification of its old vision of American character and destiny.
³Swift²-boat desperadoes and gay-marriage bans aside, the campaign was
relatively free of the conservative malevolence that drove the Whitewater
hearings, the Clinton impeachment gambit, and the untrustworthy 2000
election. This year's election seemed "clean" because the force and fraud
had come earlier. But force and fraud are coursing through the republic's
bloodstream and discourse more powerfully than at any time since the early
Cold War.

 What is being concealed or dodged here? The answer was anticipated in Death
of a Yale Man, Malcolm Ross' long-forgotten memoir of his early post-college
struggle to help poor miners and farmers in Kentucky in the 1930s govern
themselves through reflection and choice. He watched them swept up instead
in the raptures of tent revivals led by itinerant preachers such as Billie
Sunday. They backed "monkey trials" like the Scopes case against teaching
evolution in Tennessee. Driven mainly, if sometimes subtly, by force and
fraud, they followed demagogues to mystical certitudes or to war, and voted
for politicians who activated their fears, not their hopes.

 Hamilton's republican standard counts instead on expectations and
extensions of trust that are compelling enough to deepen trust itself. The
cultivation of trust has declined in favor of litigation, gladatorial
entertainments, hating the enemy, and free-floating rage. And now a majority
of American voters have come out for Authority, answering a call by a
commander in chief, his Congress, and, soon, his Supreme Court for a huge
national tent revival, there to cry up an old American spirit they think
more reliable than the overconfident Great Society liberalism of Lyndon
Johnson; the myopic, multiculturalist liberalism of George McGovern; the
rationalistic, "vital center," Cold War liberalism of Harry Truman; and even
the New Deal, Social Security liberalism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John
Dewey, and John Maynard Keynes. We are going all the way back to Bush
strategist Karl Rove's favorite president, William McKinley, champion of
robber barons and the Spanish-American War but also, in Bush's view, of
economic dynamism and Christian purity.

 What Bush wants was explained almost a quarter-century ago, after Ronald
Reagan's 1980 election, by James Lucier, an assistant to conservative
Republican Senator Jesse Helms. The liberal "leadership groups that run the
country -- not just the media but also the politicians, corporate executives
Š have been trained in an intellectual tradition that is Š highly
rationalistic," Lucier told the journalist Elizabeth Drew in a story that
appeared the July 21, 1981, issue of The New Yorker. That training -- the
"liberal education" that Bush, Kerry, and I encountered at Yale -- "excludes
most of the things that are important to the people who are selling cars and
digging ditches," Lucier claimed.

 "The principles that we're espousing,² he continued, "have been around for
thousands of years: The family Š faith that God is the creator of this world
Š and that there is a higher meaning than materialism. Property as a
fundamental human right Š and that a government should not be based on
deficit financing and economic redistribution Š . It's not the 'new right'
-- people are groping for a new term. It's pre-political."

 The contradictions here don't matter if the current deficit spending is
understood as an expedient to end Social Security as we know it -- and if
Social Security is understood as a "highly rationalistic" scheme to undo the
eternal laws of free enterprise.

 Lucier's candor recalls much in William F. Buckley Jr.'s God and Man at
Yale, which indicted both liberal education and liberal demands for the just
disposition of property and opportunity -- the liberalism that Malcolm Ross
had tried to advance in Death of Yale Man. That liberalism has been on the
defensive since Reagan, but now Bush and Co. are poised to extinguish it in
the whirlwind of self-reinforcing fears and escapes that Buckley, Barry
Goldwater, Reagan, Helms, and so many others worked so hard to sow.

 A silver lining in the thunderclouds gathering above their big revival tent
is that your race and religious denomination matter less now than in the
past to conservatives' protean, absorptive version of 1890s capitalism. If
you're willing to displace the frustrations of having to work harder for
lower wages and the ever-receding consolations of an alienating consumer
culture into compensatory obsessions about "guns, gays, and God" -- into the
war on terrorism, the Defense of Marriage Act, and the replacement of
government bureaucracies by ecclesiastical ones -- there's a seat for you at
the front of the bus, no matter your color. God can even hear the prayer of
a neoconservative Jew.

 In some ways, of course, liberalism asked for this. A "rights"-obsessed
liberalism that prattles on about respecting all "differences" and
suspending moral judgments ends up having to rely on virtues and beliefs
that liberalism itself cannot nourish, much less impose. Combine such
relativism with a misguided respect for the "rights" of intimately intrusive
corporate marketers and you have millions leading lives of quiet desperation
and degradation and looking for a Billie Sunday in a commander in chief.

 On Tuesday, they came out in droves, blaming social decay on liberals, not
the casino-corporate economy that innundates us with violence and sexual
degradation (and with the guns to "protect" ourselves from it). The
bread-and-circus currents that are invading and disrupting communities,
families, and personal moralities are swift and deep and driven by private
investors in free markets, not by big government liberals; Karl Marx wasn't
wrong to marvel that "all that is solid melts into air," even though his
prescriptions never equaled his diagnoses. Hence conservatives' desperate
search for order in salvific beliefs and the staged flight-deck landings of
a commander in chief. And hence the search for liberal scapegoats.

 The challenge for liberals is not to mock those who are being oriented like
magnet filings toward a darkening, doomed crusade but to acknowledge
American liberalism's own estrangement from a national character that is
often, heaven help us, a balancing act as weird as that of a Jack Nicholson
movie character, tottering along on a tightrope between rampant materialism
and rapturous faith.

 Many places besides Yale have been crucibles where people learn how to keep
that balance constructively enough, in themselves as well as in their public
posturings, to sustain a republic. But those crucibles are being drained
now, or cracked, or chilled, or heated into cauldrons of selfish ambition
masked by warlike rhetoric about saving "freedom" from its enemies. Freedom
may first have to be saved from Bush, who once said that he "never learned a
damned thing at Yale." He certainly didn't stay on the tightrope of a
liberal education any better than Dick Cheney, who dropped out after two
years.

 Both men displayed their contempt for the republic by becoming draft
dodgers, as defined clearly by conservatives at the time. But they soon
devised a new kind of balance, between God and war. As that rickety balance
of otherwordly yearning and this world crusading falls apart in the years
ahead, let's hope that liberalism will have recovered a balance of its own,
one reliable enough this time to help a wounded nation govern itself through
reflection and choice, not accident, force, fraud, and fear. That will
involve reopening questions about corporate capitalism that the left
mishandled, and it will mean giving up liberals' own loopy, compensatory
escapes from such hard questions, escapes into a self-indulgent politics of
racial and sexual "liberation" that has driven the unready and the fearful
into Bush's arms.

 Jim Sleeper is a political-science lecturer at Yale University.

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Sleeper,  "Identity Cleft",  The American Prospect Online, Nov 4, 2004.
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