Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas has made a name for herself over the years by expressing some very controversial views, like advocating arms sales to Hugo Chavez’s regime in Venezuela. For many, she has richly earned the right to be dismissed. But her widely reported speech last week, charging that the unwillingness of Congress to raise the debt limit stems from racism toward the President, should be taken seriously as the proverbial canary in the mineshaft. Mainstream liberal thought has been edging closer and closer to legitimating the idea that opposition to Barack Obama can be equated to racism.

Just a few days before Representative Lee was telling the House to “read between the lines…only this president–only this one–has received [these] kinds of attacks,” Harold Meyerson, one of liberalism’s most lucid commentators, was pressing a similar line of attack in the Washington Post. Fueled by “the politics of racial resentment,” conservatives loathe what their government is becoming–”multiracial, multicultural, cosmopolitan and now headed by a president who personifies those qualities.” Two years of relentless liberal assaults on the Tea Party helped to prepare this ground. The movement was said to be a front for racist policies, not the popular uprising against big government and uncontrolled spending that it claimed to be. Paul Krugman told his The New York Times readers that Tea Party activists might well imagine themselves starring in the “Birth of a Nation” (the classic 1915 racist film), while E. J. Dionne artfully made it clear that, “Opposition to the president is driven by many factors that have nothing to do with race. But race is definitely part of what’s going on.”

This continuing talk about racism, which is likely to be a liberal theme in next year’s presidential campaign, is sure to strike most Americans as not just disappointing, but unexpected. A great hope of the 2008 presidential election was that it would put to bed, not the existence of racism in society (the country is still a long way from that), but its role in presidential politics. Like the question of Catholicism, which evaporated almost overnight when JFK was elected in 1960, race would cease to matter. People could favor a president or oppose him without taking into account, or worrying that others might accuse them of taking into account, the president’s race.

For liberals who proclaim the continuing power of racism over our politics, the analogy of 2008 to 1960 does not hold. Although they cite few instances of overt racist comments by leading conservatives, this is only because–as they see it–conservatives managed to learn from bitter experience how to avoid cruder expressions and to speak in code. But the feelings are there at, or just beneath, the surface. (For the record, the only important figures to use race language directly against Obama have been Bill Clinton, who in the South Carolina primary in 2008 labeled him “the black candidate” and accused his campaign of “playing the race card on me,” and the Princeton philosopher Cornel West, who recently called Obama “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”)

But another possibility is that the analogy to 1960 does hold–or at least that it would, except for the efforts by liberals to inject the theme of racism for their psychological and political benefit. It is an instance of “playing the race card,” one that is all the more cynical for being deployed by those who celebrated Barack Obama’s “historic victory” as inaugurating a new day in American politics.

Why should liberals now risk throwing away a real benefit to the nation? One answer is that racism provides a convenient explanation for why liberalism has not had the success that was expected. For those like Paul Krugman, who declared that “the progressive philosophy won,” or like Harold Meyerson, who assured the faithful that the “future of American politics … belongs to Barack Obama’s Democrats,” it is consoling to think that temporary setbacks are not the result of any inadequacies of the progressive philosophy or its leader, but of dark and sinister forces plotting against the future. Just as likely, the card is being offered as a calculated gambit to keep the loyal in tow and, especially, to minimize potential defectors among decent people who despise racial injustice. They are the target group in this stratagem. Liberals have become high-stake gamblers willing to bet the house–and at any price.

I am reemerging from the depths and am posting a blog done last night for Commentary (with John York).

Blaming It All On the Tea Party
James W. Ceaser and John York
07.15.2011 – 5:30 PM

With the breakdown of negotiations on a so-called grand bargain on the debt limit demanded by President Obama, liberal commentators have sought a convenient scapegoat to account for the impasse. Not surprisingly, they have begun by rounding up the usual suspect: the Tea Party. Its intransigence, so the line goes, has sunk this great deal.

For two years now, “Blame the Tea Party First” has been the Democrats’ favorite mantra. “Firsters” invoke the Tea Party to make sense–for themselves–of the otherwise inexplicable fact of large-scale public opposition to President Obama, and they hold the Tea Party responsible for many of the nation’s deeper problems, from incivility in our discourse to an inability to set aside intransigent partisanship.

Generosity in describing one’s foes is a rarity, especially among conspiracy theorists. But Firsters have carried their animus against the Tea Party to unprecedented heights by failing to credit it with what is today right before everyone’s eyes. Without the Tea Party, there would be no debt limit negotiations going on, just as there would have been no budget reduction deal last December. Without the Tea Party, President Obama would not be posing as the judicious statesman, but would be pushing –as in truth he still is–for more stimulus and further investments in high-speed rail. Whatever pressure now exists to treat the debt problem derives directly or indirectly from the explosion of energy that has been generated by the Tea Party.

In lambasting the Tea Party movement for its stubborness, Firsters have silently acknowledged what for two years they had all but denied. Instead of being in fact a front for racism or opposition to abortion, the “baggers,” as they have been derisively called, are genuinely insistent on cutting spending and containing the growth of government. Everything is less complicated than it seems. Supporters of the Tea Party are who they said they were.

A stroll down memory lane provides a reminder of the Firsters’ shifting characterizations of the Tea Party. About the only constant in their analysis has been its political opportunism. The baggers have been charged with seven deadly sins.

1. They are uneducated poor racists. All honor for this accusation goes to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who referred to the grassroots movement as “astroturf,” comprised of swastika-carrying radicals. Since then others have joined in: Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson saw “no coincidence” in “the birth of a big, passionate national movement — overwhelmingly white and lavishly funded — that tries its best to delegitimize… the first African-American president.”

2. They are uneducated poor dupes. In this description, the racism is not denied, but it is almost beside the point; the real issue is that Big Money has been manipulating the ignorant and gullible masses. Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize- winning economist turned film-critic, offered this helpful advice to Tea Party activists in the New York Times,: “This is not the movie you think it is. You probably imagine you’re starring in ‘The Birth of a Nation’ but you’re actually just extras in a remake of ‘Citizen Kane’…[in which Kane] just puts politicians on his payroll.”

3. They are privileged whites who don’t want to pay their fair share. As poll evidence started to show, Tea Party supporters were not as poor or as dumb as was initially thought. On the contrary–for this CBS/NewYork Times Poll, at any rate– they were older, wealthier, and better educated than the general public. Never mind. Firsters just adjusted the image, having it that these people just wanted to protect their own, indulging, as Harold Meyersson would have it, in a “politics of racial resentment and the fury that the country is no longer only theirs.”

4. They are folks with understandable concerns, but they don’t comprehend what will solve our problems. This is probably the most sympathetic and patronizing treatment of the Tea Party, and it gained ground as the size of the Tea Party itself became apparent. It had to be treated now with some delicacy. Yes, Firsters acknowledged, these are mostly good and decent people–they may even care dearly about their children–but they need some guidance. In the time-honored tradition of legislators to revise and resubmit their remarks, Nancy Pelosi now began to find common turf with the Tea Party: “We share some of the views of the Tea Partiers.” The president let it be known “that there are strains in the Tea Party that are troubled by what they saw as a series of instances in which the middle-class and working-class people have been abused or hurt by special interests and Washington, but their anger is misdirected.”

5. They are just the old-conservatives rebranded. This is the Ecclesiastes argument, that there is nothing new under the sun. Although slightly angrier than other conservatives, and maybe just a little bit more libertarian, in fact they are pretty much “full spectrum” conservatives concerned not only with fiscal issues but social issues. They offer nothing different than the Republican Party of old. According to a New York Times sketch of the movement, “They do not want a third party and say they usually or almost always vote Republican.” Almost six in ten went so far as to hold a favorable opinion of former President Bush.

6. They are parts of a fragile and conflicting coalition. This charge, like the last one, brought some consolation, as it indicated that the movement was weaker than thought and would not be able to withstand the test of holding together in real votes. Scholars took the lead on this characterization, with a team led by Harvard Professor Theda Skocpol arguing that the “affection of grassroots Tea Partiers for major programs like Social Security is at odds with the policies pushed by many of the elite national organizations that fund their protests.”

7. Supporters are historical fetishists, concerned with quaint and outmoded things like the principles of the Revolution and the Constitution. E.J. Dionne, one of the first Firsters, has been long lecturing the Tea Party folks that they have been serving the wrong part of history, 1773, rather than the Constitution, which was a pro-government document. He recently lectured his “friends in the Tea Party” that they are “drawing all the wrong conclusions” which will lead to “some remarkably foolish choices.” Jill Lapore, professor of history at Harvard who has written a full length book on the movement, goes a step further than Dionne, condemning the movement for the folly of an “originalism” that would seek to apply directly the ideas of yesteryear, even if correctly understood, to today. She would evidently throw out of court, as would Dionne, the originalism of one Tea Party supporter who had the temerity to offer this application of the Founders’ political system: “I’m sick and tired of them wasting money and doing what our founders never intended to be done with the federal government.”

Despite the accident of its name, the Tea Party is not a political party, but a political movement, according to Peter Berkowitz, “one of the most spectacular grass roots political movements in American history.” A feature of such movements in American politics, whether on the Left or the Right, is that they are unformed and inchoate. Their boundaries–who is in and who is out–remain ill-defined, as there is no authoritative organizational structure that exercises control of the “members.” It’s therefore almost always possible for interested investigators to find, somewhere, what they are looking for. So the Tea Party movement has had its share of ideologues (Ron Paul) and flakes (Christine O’Donnell)–although the same might be said, respectively, of the Democratic Party’s Sheila Jackson Lee and Anthony Weiner.

Given the porousness of the movement, any serious analysis demands perspective and discipline, qualities that in political commentary today are in short supply. What Firsters have instead provided is a grab bag of charges from which they pick the one that best fits the need of the moment. On some days it may be that the Tea Partiers, as Michele Bachmann so colorfully expressed it, are a bunch of “toothless hillbillies coming down out of the hills,” on others that they are some country-club Republicans teeing up for a round of golf. One moment the movement is weak and fragile, another it has captured the Republican Party, which, according to David Brooks, “has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.” Where these characterizations do not undermine themselves by contradiction, they often amaze by their absurdity. In the most malicious and persistent charge–that of racism, which serves as a prophylactic to protect O’bama from any criticism–the evidence offered is a small number of African Americans in the movement. But how many African Americans, already the most liberal group in America, should one expect to join a movement opposing Barack Obama? And of course when one does, like Herman Cain, and upon a strong showing in a debate wins the respect of the hordes of racists, he immediately becomes subject to the most unseemly attacks by those free of any hint of racial prejudice.

In this week’s controversy, Firsters are promoting the narrative of Barack Obama as the great statesman of the hour, willing to go the extra mile for a great bargain. Somewhere and sometime, according to this fantastic account, Obama experienced an 11th-hour conversion to spending restraint. Only no one–no one–has seen or knows what he wants. It is the phantom of the budget, staged with wondrous smoke and mirrors and accompanied by the old refrain, now growing stale by repetition, of Obama worship. We are witnessing the sorry spectacle of high-minded commentators, who only recently were chanting in unison for greater transparency in our politics, and who now bite like a school of perch at the cheap plastic lures and leaks being tossed out by White House flaks. These are men and women without an ounce of pride in either themselves or their craft.

At the end of the day, the choice the nation faces is pretty clear–even if both sides will at one day face a point of reckoning. One side wishes a more constrained federal government and greater austerity in our welfare programs. It will hold or cut these programs to the point where it finds it cannot go much further, at which time other remedies may need to be considered. If one wants a model for this approach, it is necessary to look no further than the policies of some of the red-state governments (or Great Britain). The other side wishes a federal government at and beyond the level of 2008 and beyond the current level. If one wants a model for this approach, the blue-state of Illinois or California will do just fine. This side will continue to maintain and expand government, cutting national defense to the bone and adding more “revenues,” up to the point it becomes literally unsustainable. That point has not been reached yet.

This is the choice the nation faces. As of 2011, it has not been definitively made. Perhaps 2012 will be the year of the Tea Party.

James W. Ceaser is professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. John York is a graduate student in politics at the University of Virginia.

unlike peter, i never predict an election. but i do postdict. here is an account of the election that will shortly appear in the crb

Facts speak for themselves.

The Democratic Party under Barack Hussein Obama in 2010 suffered the greatest defeat for a newly elected president in a midterm since the Republican Party under Warren Gamaliel Harding in 1922. Democrats, at this writing, dropped 61 seats in the House of Representatives, where they will now be in the minority, and 6 seats in the Senate, where they will continue to hold a slight edge. The Democratic defeat was historic by other measures as well–in House seats lost in a congressional election (the most since 1948), and in House seats lost in any midterm (the most since 1938). But it is the performance of a president’s party following his first election that is the relevant point of comparison today.

The midterm election is one of the distinctive features of America’s constitutional system. By allowing for an expression of voter sentiment separate from the selection of the president, midterms help supply the concrete political support in Congress for checking presidential programmatic power. A check of this kind seems to be exactly what the public had in mind in 2010, ending liberal hopes that Obama’s presidency would inaugurate a “new” New Deal.

The comparison of Obama to FDR has been looming in the background for the past two years. Time magazine, in the cover of its post-election edition, superimposed Barack Obama’s head onto a memorable photo of FDR seated in his convertible following his 1932 landslide victory. The expectation was that Obama, like FDR, would lead Democrats to further gains in the ensuing midterm and then onwards and upwards to an era of Democratic dominance. Democratic totals in Congress in 2008 were taken to be a floor for the party’s support, not a ceiling. “The future in America’s politics,” wrote Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, “belongs to Barack Obama’s Democrats.” Happy days were here again.

If 2010 represents the future in American politics, it is not the one Progressives expected. This holds true not just for the Democrats’ standing today at the national level, but at the state level as well, where Republicans gained control of at least seven new governorships and fourteen state legislative chambers, giving them their highest total of state legislative chambers since the 1920s. More importantly, the renewed strength of Republicans in the states gives the GOP an important edge in the crucial process of the redistricting of legislative seats that begins next year. It was the perfect time for a surge.

President Obama and the Republicans did not agree on very much over the last two years, but on the question of what this election was all about there was not an inch of daylight between them–at least when the campaign began. The contest, as the President repeatedly proclaimed, was a judgment on “the change,” referring to his whole domestic package of stimulus policies, health care reform bill, and presumably his proposals for increased taxes on the wealthiest. Obama spoke of “guarding the change,” with Republicans responding by echoing the sentiment, if not always the exact words, of John Boehner, “Hell No.” Herein lies the main line of political conflict for the period ahead. With the advancement of the progressive Obama agenda by legislative (as distinct from administrative) means halted, Obama, now the “conservative,” will be using every ounce of his powers to sustain the parts of his program that have been enacted, while the Republicans, as proponents of change, will be seeking to reverse many of them.

The 2010 election was one of the most nationalized, some will say the most nationalized, midterm campaign in American history. Every Republican competing for national office, from Hawaii to New Hampshire, ran against the Obama agenda and made it the centerpiece of the campaign. The President, who was in full campaign mode for months, joined the fray, defending his agenda while excoriating its “enemies.” Only some Democrats, sensing the ship to be sinking, latched onto the stratagem of trying to “localize” their contests–not because the politics of 2010 really were local, but because they were not. This tactic worked in some of the Senate contests, like Delaware and Nevada, where the Republican candidates proved to have special vulnerabilities.

The 2010 campaign was also highly personalized, although not in the usual sense of focusing mainly on the President’s character attributes, as was the case in the Clinton “impeachment” mid-term election of 1998. “Personalized” in 2010 meant instead focusing on Obama’s policies and his continued boasts of having made “historic changes.” Even Republicans’ frequent invocation in their ads of the other Democratic leaders, the smiling Nancy Pelosi and the dour Harry Reid, became in the end a way of speaking about Obama’s change. All this fit with the President’s own evident comfort level in placing himself conspicuously front and center as the voice and mind of the administration. Although Obama made a point in his Denver convention acceptance speech in 2008 of telling Americans (and the world) that “it’s not about me,” a phrase he has repeated frequently since, there must be some reason why he has had to issue the disclaimer so often. It has not been entirely forgotten, either, that Obama reportedly reassured a few nervous congressional Democrats last January that any fears that 2010 might resemble 1994 were unfounded, because the “big difference” between 1994 and 2010 “is that you’ve got me.”

This slight to Bill Clinton highlights one of the most fascinating rivalries of modern American politics. Going back to the start of the 2008 campaign, Obama knew that he could only defeat Hillary by, in effect, defeating Bill; the original meaning of “change” was change from the Clintons. Bill Clinton in turn chaffed at Obama’s oblique criticisms and was visibly dismayed at the prospect of being replaced as the brightest star in the Democratic Party’s firmament. Clinton’s reputation took a nosedive after he imploded during the South Carolina primary contest, accusing Obama of playing the race card. Not only did Bill Clinton, America’s first black president, have to bide his time and eventually cede the spotlight to Barack Obama, America’s second black president, but he was virtually forced after the election to hide from public view as a UN envoy. But the worm has turned this year, and as Obama’s approval ratings went down, Clinton’s popularity, especially with Democrats, went up, proving once again that William Jefferson Clinton, the self-described comeback kid, has had as many lives as Fredrick Charles Kruger. Clinton and Obama, being practical politicians, understood the advantage both to their principles and to themselves of working together. Clinton was almost as much in evidence during the 2010 campaign as Obama, going to places where Obama was not welcome. Now, in the wake of the 2010 election, which overshadows Clinton’s own historic mid-term drubbing in 1994, many are wondering whether Barack Obama will be studying Bill Clinton’s 1995 playbook in hopes of a political recovery over the next year.

Because midterm elections take place in distinct races, 472 of them this year, rendering a national verdict involves administering a very rough justice. The sins of the Progressive Democrats in the House were visited on Democrats of a more moderate disposition. Huge numbers of these Democratic “blue dogs” were defeated. There was something poignant, too, in watching these foot soldiers in the Obama-Pelosi army being mowed down in droves, in many cases having been denied funding from national party headquarters with which to make a fight. Meanwhile, most of the staunchest progressives, running often in Democratic redoubts, escaped to live another day, including Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank. A few of the old venerables, like committee chairs Ike Skelton (Armed Services) and John Spratt (Budget) were not so fortunate. Since there is little honor and less pleasure in serving in the minority in the House, it would not be surprising if a few progressives decided to avail themselves of Congress’s generous retirement provisions. About the only solace these House Democrats can take is that so many moderate colleagues were ousted that there is little chance for severe acts of recrimination.

A number of analysts, anticipating the need to soften the blow against the Democrats, began arguing in October that the 2010 election was about generalized anger directed at incumbents because of economic conditions. Some anger, no doubt, there was, which naturally fell on the party (the Democrats) that, given its extraordinary majority, had full responsibility for running the show in Washington. And in the Republican Party, too, there was more than the usual pressure exerted against incumbents early on, coming from a vast and energetic new movement, the Tea Party. (Two Republican Senate incumbents, Robert Bennett of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, lost primary contests, and–what is not the same thing–a number of establishment candidates running for GOP nominations, including Charlie Christ in Florida and Mike Castle in Delaware, was defeated.) But when it came to the final election, the story in the House was not one of incumbents losing, but of Democratic incumbents being ousted. All but two Republican incumbents were re-elected, while more than 50 Democratic incumbents met their political maker. In the Senate, every Republican incumbent who was nominated (and perhaps one other, Lisa Murkowski, who was not) was re-elected, while two of the Democrats’ finest, Russ Feingold and Blanche Lincoln, went down.

The results of the 2010 election changed the landscape of American politics. In viewing the national electoral map of House seats, it is as if someone came in overnight and redid the whole canvas, changing huge swaths of blue to red, especially in the vast area between the coasts and–adding to the impression of Republican dominance–in non-urban districts, which cover much larger geographic areas. Republicans have their largest majority in the House since 1948. And the political reality is even redder than it looks, since a number of the blue dogs who did survive, having observed the cruel fate suffered by their colleagues, will now be less likely to sit and stay at the President’s command. In the Senate, one new Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, was elected by firing a shot at President Obama’s cap and trade policy, and a large number of the 23 Democratic Senators up for re-election in 2012, especially those who come from redder states, have heard the footsteps. The Democrats in the House come January will be a more progressive lot, with a small but helpless contingent of surviving blue dogs, but the Senate is apt to be vey different. Some Democrats may look to do “business” with Republicans, although there would appear to be too few moderate Democrats to mount a sustained opposition against Obama from the center. If Obama is to face some pressure from within his party, it is more likely to come from progressive intellectuals and bloggers outside of Congress. Given where the center of American politics now is located, such posturing will be of no real significance.

To be sure, a “landscape”–a term that once carried the implication, if not of permanence, then at least of some duration–is not all that it used to be. Like the modern construction projects that turn a barren lot into a plush green field in a day, the contemporary political scene now lends itself to more rapid re-configurations. The nation over the past two decades has lived through a period of its greatest partisan fluctuation, with the presidential majority having changed party hands four times, the House three times, and the senate twice. Every midterm since 1994 has been highly nationalized by historic standards, a result not only of huge events–the first health care reform proposal (1994), the looming impeachment (1998), the 9-11 attack and the prospect of the Iraq War (2002), the Iraq War (2006), and now Obama’s “change” agenda (2010)–but also of sharpening party conflicts that draw clearer divisions on national issues. Congressional elections seem to have entered into new territory.

Of all the recent mid-term elections, 2010 is the closest the nation has ever come to a national referendum on overall policy direction or “ideology.” Obama, who ran in 2008 by subordinating ideology to his vague themes of hope and change, has governed as one of the most ideological and partisan of presidents. Some of his supporters like to argue in one breath that he is a pragmatist and centrist only to insist in the next that he has inaugurated the most historic transformation of American politics since the New Deal. The two claims are incompatible. Going back to the major political contests of 2009, beginning with the Governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey and to the Senate race in Massachusetts, the electorate has been asked the same question about Obama’s agenda and has given the same response. The election of 2010 is the third or fourth reiteration of this judgment, only this time delivered more decisively. There is one label and one label only that can describe the result: the Great Repudiation

What accounts for the Great Repudiation? It is not always easy to come by a genuine explanation from listening to political actors. While the social scientist aims to present the truth of the matter, politicians and spinners live by a different ethic. Their job is to offer explanations that serve their party’s (or their own) future political prospects. It is only by coincidence that their accounts resemble the truth.

The ballots were hardly counted in 2010 before the President and his allies were shifting the narrative, embracing a Beta version to serve as the post-election explanation. Instead of the election being a fair and clear judgment on “the change,” it was now said that the American people never understood the real issues. Part of the reason was a Republican campaign of misinformation, aided not just by the spending of huge sums of money, since Democrats overall spent as much as Republicans, but by the influx of “secret money,” which always buys more. Another reason has been a failure in communication. The President was working so hard to address the nation’s problems that he neglected to devote sufficient time and attention to explaining his policies to the public. The election outcome was all the result of a misunderstanding. If there was one substantive mistake to which the President admitted, it was that he had unwittingly fallen victim to a massive intelligence error. Contrary to the reports of our government’s agencies and to the assurances of his brain trust, Obama was shocked to discover in the end that there were no SRPs (Shovel Ready Projects).

The main Democratic explanation going forward, however, has taken a different tack, denying that the election ever had anything to do with “the change.” It was instead all about Americans’ reaction to economic conditions. In light of the administration’s original promises for the beneficial effects of its stimulus package, this explanation evidently has met resistance. But what the administration now thinks is that there was no fix for the economy, in the sense of being able to achieve a recovery at the rate that Americans came to expect. The blame rightly belongs to the previous administration, although President Obama now understands that pressing this argument, a year and half in office, looks petulant. The new line is therefore simply to blame “the economy,” as if it were an alien force dropped in from the outside, with no connection to the President’s policies. The economic crisis, previously viewed as an indispensable ally in helping the President enact the agenda, now appears as a malevolent agent, and a perversely ill-timed one at that, since, as Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker explained, “the longest and deepest mass suffering” of the Great Recession, in contrast to the Great Depression, “has occurred with Obama in the White House.” The notion that “the economy” is an actor in its own right, disembodied from “the change,” has led some analysts to float the strange argument that Republicans should have won more convincingly than they did.

The real purpose of this explanation, however, is to limit the reach of this election’s meaning in a way that leaves the President himself and “the change” untouched. The election was an anguished response of voters to the economy–nothing more. It was the Great Protest, not the Great Repudiation. This position, which the President embraced in his post-election news conference, allows him to join up with the spirit of the election and participate in its message. He will now concentrate on the economy like a … dare one say “laser beam”?

Republicans have agreed on the importance of the economy as part of the explanation for their victory. Yet in their account the anemic recovery is not unrelated to the core elements of Obama’s “change.” The problem in Obama’s approach has been his failure to appreciate what generates productive wealth, which comes not from bigger government and more spending but from the activity of private business and entrepreneurs. Economic “philosophy” in this large sense was in fact the main voting issue in this election. It was for this reason as well that Obama’s “populist” appeal against the big banks, Wall Street, the insurance companies, and the wealthy gained so little traction. While most Americans, including many on the right, were angered at “big business” and Wall Street, many also became convinced that Obama’s populism struck squarely at the sources that generate wealth. Even Obama’s plan to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, considered by White House advisor to be a sure-fire winner as an electoral issue, made little headway. The economic question in the campaign went back to the great colloquy in 2008 between Barack Obama and Joe the Plumber. This time, however, Joe seemed to have the upper hand.

For many Republicans, and especially for the allies in the Tea Party movement, the issues of economic policy were also linked to a deeper concern. The size of government and the extent of the federal debt represented not only a burden on future generation and a threat to American power, but also a violation of the spirit and letter of the Constitution. The Tea Party in particular, with its belief in Jeffersonian ideas, has been responsible for re-introducing the Constitution into the public debate, a place that it has not held in the same way for over a century. This theme is what connects the Tea Party to the American tradition and makes their concerns matters of fundamental patriotism. The stakes in the 2010 election for these voters went far beyond economic questions, and for Democratic leaders to reduce everything to frustrations about the “Economy, Stupid” represents a final act of disparagement and belittlement.

There was accordingly an additional factor that played in this election outcome that was hardly noted or tested in the polls. It was a cultural clash between an elite and much of the public, between liberal intellectuals and the Obama administration on the one hand and the mass of Tea party activists on the other. The one has shown disdain and the other has responded with resentment. It is impossible, then, not to say that the person of Barack Obama was a major factor in this election, for when he was not himself the leader he became the frequent enabler of this dismissal of middle America. That Obama would have to descend from the lofty heights that he inhabited during the campaign and after his election was something that no sane observer, and no doubt Obama himself, could fail to have foreseen. But this loss of bloated charisma has never been the real problem. It has instead been his demeanor as president. Obama modeled himself on Abraham Lincoln, and it is painful in retrospect to draw the contrast in how they have behaved. One showed humility, the other arrogance; one practiced sincerity, the other hypocrisy; one made efforts at cultivating unity, the other seemed to delight at encouraging division: and one succeeded in becoming more and more a man of the people, while the other, despite his harsh populist appeals, has grown more distant.

Elections in America serve two functions– a “formal” function of filling the personnel for the constitutional offices, which takes place in every election, and an “informal” function of signaling what the people want, which takes place in a meaningful way only in certain elections, where national public sentiment has congealed on a common message or theme. The situation in Washington now reflects a conflict stemming from the results of these two functions. On the formal side, the array of forces puts neither party in full control. Democrats hold the presidency, Republicans will now firmly control the House, and the senate appears likely to swing in ways no one can now foresee. The Democrats, who now derive their power from this formal situation and rely on officials chosen in elections conducted two and four years ago, will emphasize the constitutional authority of the offices. They represent for the moment the conservative position. On the informal side, Republicans claim not just their seats and numbers in Congress, but the weight and power of the majority as expressed in the clear and powerful message. delivered on election day. This claim cannot, of course, cancel the formal array of power–we are a nation governed by laws and institutions–but there is nothing amiss in reminding those in offices that they cannot stray too far for too long from the wishes of the majority without straining the fabric of authority in a democratic system. The informal function, while it should not be overvalued, should not be undervalued, either.

The Republicans’ case, resting on this informal claim that can always be disputed, is already under assault. Along with the Democrats’ open campaign to persuade the public that the election did not mean what Republicans thought, there is an allied effort underway, far more subtle, to undermine and weaken the Republican position. It comes from a group of self-proclaimed wise men who present themselves as being above the fray. These voices, acting from a putative concern for the nation and even for the Republican Party, urge Republicans to avoid the mistake of Obama and the Democrats after 2008 of displaying hubris and overinterpreting their mandate. With this criticism of the Democrats offered as a testimony of their even handedness and sincerity, they piously go on to tell Republicans that now is the time to engage in bipartisanship and follow a course of compromise. The problem with this sage advice is that it calls for Republicans to practice moderation and bipartisanship after the Democrats did not. It is therefore not a counsel of moderation, but a ploy designed to force Republicans to accept the overreach and the policies of the past year and half. It is another way to defend “the change.” If Republicans are to remain true to the verdict of 2010, they cannot accept that the message of this election was just containment; it must mean roll back.

There’s nothing more embarrassing than someone from an older generation commenting on the present one. Think of the aging hippie professor, clad in jeans and t-shirt, trying to prove his bona fides by showing he is hip to his students’ latest taste in music. It never fails but to provoke amused giggles from the back of the classroom, followed up by the inevitable tweet : “I mean this guy is so out of it; that’s stuff, like, from a month ago.”

Having repented of my foolishness a couple of weeks ago in bringing to our readers’ attention an article by Charlotte Allen on the current sexual mores of the young, I now repeat my folly by turning to the parallel issue of, precisely, the musical tastes of the young. I say parallel because the article I now commend suggests that the music of yesterday is the prolegomena to the sexual mores of today. Put more simply, who says rock says hook up. The author is the renown philosopher Roger Scruton, and the essay can be found at http://www.aei.org/article/101717 or, in the fuller version, at http://www.american.com/archive/2010/february/soul-music. And we will all await, as we did last time when the youth movement spoke up to set matters straight on the effective truth of the alpha male, for commentators still in touch with the current generation (is it X, Y, Z or AAprime?) to show us where, perhaps, Scruton may have gone astray.

Scruton is a wonderful writer and an expert on music (among a thousand or so other things that he has studied and mastered). The current essay, “Soul Music,” is highly reminiscent of the famous chapter on music that appears near the beginning of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Bloom’s chapter is also on the music of the youth. Interestingly, too, Bloom and Scruton both begin from Plato, referring to the Republic. The theme is that music shapes the soul, and thus shapes the way of life or the regime. (“The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city” Republic 424c). And sure enough, as our music has changed, so have our mores and laws, in the direction, as Cole Porter put it even before the revolution in rock, of “anything goes.” And consider for a moment not the music but the lyrics of that one:

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows,
Anything Goes.

Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes.

The world has gone mad today
And good’s bad today,

Stop. “Good is bad today.” Porter saw not only where mores were heading, but what was to be a precise linguistic transformation.  Kool! Of course, the dictum “anything goes” would be strictly libertarian, whereas the new ethic is in fact more restrictive: it permits only that which allows anything to go, while excluding anything that does not. This is what is known as political correctness or the dogmatism of relativism.

Returning to Bloom, he was known best for his attack on rock music. One line stands out: “life is made into a non-stop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy” (p.75). His chapter on music, incidentally, is commonly thought to have been the reason for which this work of theory was able to burst out from beyond the narrow circle of academic readership to find its way to the top of the New York Times best seller list, earning him the envy and enmity of the academic establishment. Not even John Rawls, in his wildest, er, philosophical fantasy could top that.

There is more to the last point about selling books than meets the eye. I can testify to this first hand, for I knew Alan Bloom, as he once jokingly said to me, “before he was Alan Bloom,” meaning before he became a household celebrity. No one can say that Bloom knew he would become famous by writing Closing, as its success remains at the end of the day one of the more inexplicable events of modern culture. Still, I think its popularity was not a one-thousand percent accident. Bloom attacked rock music in large part to create a scandal. For a philosopher to jump into the mosh pit and talk about hip hop and MTV was to make him a shock jock avant la lettre. And the purpose was not so much to sell books–though the man could sure spend money!–as to try to reach and educate a portion of the youth generation. He attacked rock–he says as much at the beginning of his chapter–because he knew that modern youth would defend it. Indeed, he thought it was about the only thing they would defend as such, i.e., not on relativistic but absolute ground. And this was the kicker in his pedagogy: Defending something absolutely and with indignation is a precondition for philosophical inquiry. You have to love something first to be capable of beginning the ascent; you have to be in the thrall of a prejudice, to cling to something absolutely, before going through the wrenching experience of giving it up and opening up to the pursuit of truth.  A student open-minded to everything would remain that way forever. “If a student can … get a critical distance on what he clings to, come to doubt the ultimate value of what he loves, he has taken the first and most difficult step toward the philosophic conversion.” (p.71) Bloom no doubt meant most of what he said about Mick Jagger, but the analysis was secondary to his “rhetorical” purpose of engaging some of his students and helping them to get some satisfaction.

Roger Scruton’s article is much more about music per se than Bloom’s chapter, but the two together make for some good reading. Make sure you get the version of the Scruton essay that contains the musical clips, and have your headphones ready.

I was shocked and amazed to read Charlotte Allen’s long cover story for the February 15 edition of the Weekly Standard, entitled “The New Dating Game.” It is an exploration of the sexual mores of contemporary American society, either as they actually exist or as they are being imagined and described in a range of sex commentary blogs, which the author surveys with great interest and precision. Either way, Ms. Allen’s article is a fine piece of social science, and seldom is social science so arresting. At any rate, it sure beats Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf for late-night reading.

If Ms. Allen is anywhere near correct in her account, I gather that we are no longer living in Jane Austen’s world. True, beneath the surface, there are some alpha males lurking in Ms. Austen’s society, and one can detect in some of her females incipient cougar leanings. But all these things are partly channeled and  controlled by the weight of convention and by the consequences of sexuality in a different technological era.  Well we have broken through, for better or for worse. A pincer movement of advanced technology (birth control devices, new antibiotics) and a new morality of a male-style feminism have breached the walls of convention, which are tumbling rapidly, even since the recent and more halcyon days of the hook-up culture. Ms. Allen describes the return of a Paleolithic age that has none of the grace found in the Flintstones and none of the agonizing sensitivity of the cavemen of the Geico ads (these last, as Rousseau said of the men Hobbes described in his state of nature, only place modern man into a fictive primitive setting). It’s quite a world out there now, best accounted for in Allen’s speculation by Darwinian evolutionary models. George Gilder had seen this all before, a long time ago, even before he had all the biological studies that the modern analyst can cite.  And it seems to be ending just where he thought it would.

There is much room for commentary from our esteemed stable of writers, whom I invite to weigh in, along with the deeper thoughts still of Pomocon readers. Besides, it will boost our circulation hits beyond those of the Porch.

“Incline thy ear to me; answer me speedily in the day when I call!” Psalm 102

Forms—let’s call them for the moment manners, little rules of protocol, the observance of ceremonies—are the heart and soul of civilized life. And that is why the conservative, pre- or post-modern, is so solicitous of them, for he/she knows that civility is what keeps the wheels of social intercourse rolling. It is a fine thing, therefore, to have these little rules. I know, for example, that when I see a colleague, whatever I may think of him/her (or whatever she/he may think of me), I am supposed to offer a greeting.  It is a convention that often helps me get past the moment.

The opposite of forms is captured by the wonderful democratic phrase “let it all hang out,” which I think—meaning the internet told me—originated as a lyric with a rock group called the hombres. Letting it all hang out, excluding any of its more graphic connotations, means, according to various dictionaries, “saying or doing exactly what you want” (generally a poor idea), or “being yourself” (a worse idea still). I recall a wedding I attended many years ago, in which the ceremony, dictated by centuries of careful thought and adjustment—a “form”—was going very nicely; but then, alas, the presiding member of the clergy took it upon himself to step outside of the rules and add something of his own. Following a ten-minute soliloquy on why the congregation should support the president (it was Bill Clinton at the time) and urge our congresspersons to support his wife’s healthcare plan, we returned to the couple at hand, standing before their Maker, ready to pledge their vows till death do us part. Somehow the little ethical interlude did not quite measure up to the solemnity of the occasion.

But what happens when there are no forms to guide us, when some new situation or circumstance occurs that is unregulated by any previous rules? Technological innovation is often the source of such situations, which is reason enough for some staunch conservatives to be opposed in principle to technology itself. Take some of my friends sitting on their front porches in their little communities. There is a whole protocol of communication that is built up around this little idyllic setting. If you place yourself and your family on the front porch, unprotected by any kind of hedge, you announce that you are fair game. Someone strolls by on a hot summer evening—that is what people are supposed to be doing—and if they call to you, you are obliged to respond. You have signed away your privacy. And if they persist in chatting you up, all tiny signals of resistance notwithstanding, you have no alternative but to oblige. Form demands it.

Which brings me to the problem of email. Just what are the forms, especially—for my specific concerns—between teacher and student? I have no choice but to list my email address at my university, at pain of not knowing of upcoming lectures (thus sacrificing my intellectual well-being), or of department meetings (thus relinquishing my civic rights), or of social events (thus forgoing all social intercourse). But my address being “out there” in cyberspace, does it follow that I am supposed to respond to an inquiry from any student? Have I been placed, willy-nilly and without my consent, on the proverbial front porch, so that when the message arrives, invariably beginning “Hello Professor,” I will break conventions and commit an act of rudeness by a quick deletion? Certainly, this is how students see things, no doubt especially students at small liberal arts colleges. An email message is not like a telephone call without an answering machine. It has arrived and there is no denying it. It is like a letter, but how often would a student in the past have sent a letter, which imposed the costs of paper, thought, envelope, a stamp, and a trip to the mailbox? For the students today, the matter is all but settled: incline your ear and answer me speedily in the day that I write. I am still resisting, applying this principle only in regard to my occasional communications to them.

I agonized over this dilemma with a couple of post-doctoral fellows the other day. They listened bemusedly, as if the whole issue were passé. Their response? Just wait till you are on Facebook! To paraphrase a lyric of Metallica, May that day never come.

It has now been a full two days—by modern standards a generation—since Robert Cheeks released his review of The Book of Eli, which I suppose allows us to begin to engage in commentaries without ruining the film for others. Indeed, I almost never go to the movies, but on the strength of Cheeks’s review I did so, going even so far as to pass up the second half of the Jets-Chargers game, which was the only decent contest of the whole weekend. And lo and behold, the theater was nearly full, a result no doubt of the throngs who read (religiously) the Postmodern Conservative blog. Either it was that, or it was the disappointed overflow of those who could not get into the showing of the blockbuster Avatar, referenced (but not seen) in my own last posting on “America’s theological-political problem.”

Now given this interest in the theological-political problem, I was most taken with the character played by Gary Oldman, the petty tyrant. He wanted Scripture not for the sake of his own spiritual salvation, but as a textbook of political science. With Scripture in his hand, he tells others, he would have the tool to spread his hegemony from the one petty town he ruled to a much larger empire. He does not say whether he planned to do so by taking the literal Biblical teaching and using it to create a theological state, or by learning the techniques of rhetoric by which to move and manipulate mankind (in his case for evil ends). All of which reminds us, as Coleridge and others have pointed out, that the Book can serve many ends.
Which brings us to rhetoric. The Greek sophists and philosophers wrote many fine books on rhetoric, some going overboard in extolling its powers and possibilities. (Plato and Xenephon, while providing excellent examples of popular oratory in their writings, nevertheless taught their readers that the art of persuasion had its limits, and that one needed the force of law as well as speech to govern.) So be it. But it struck Machiavelli that the Greek thinkers never fully plumbed the power of speech. Their techniques, impressive as they were, were like child’s play next to the power of persuasion that was introduced into the world by the prophets and the Gospels. Biblical language set up tropes of persuasion of a force never hitherto seen. The use of these techniques for man’s salvation has been a boon, one might even say a godsend; for his political life sometimes a curse.

There is good reason to study the Bible for an understanding of rhetoric. As it turns out, the very day of Cheeks’s review was the one for the reading of “va-era” from the Book of Moses, which is one of the early teachings on rhetoric. The portion begins in Exodus 6. The Bible at this point is rather closer to the Greek teaching. Moses is told by God to speak, but he demurs, claiming (correctly) that he is not so gifted a speaker. Even with God as his speechwriter (something no Greek orator had at his disposal) Moses is convinced that he will fail. God allows Moses to enlist his smooth-talking brother, Aaron, for the cause (convincing Pharaoh), but even Aaron falls short. One must always accompany rhetoric with something more (in this case, the plagues).

But on the same day as the reading of va-era, the passage read from the later part of the Bible (Isaiah) modifies or amplifies the teaching. Now, with God still the speechwriter, we witness a rhetoric of a much greater force, one that speaks of “the new heavens and the new earth.” It no doubt in the end still needs force and law to be completed in the world in which we live. And that return us to the age-old problem of the dangers of rhetoric in the political world.

The Book of Eli ends on an optimistic note. Oldman, the tyrant, dies without learning the master science he seeks. Eli (Denzel Washington) dies having transmitted his message to posterity, with a (very hot and well-armed) disciple ready to carry it to the nations. I came home from the movies uplifted by the message, only to learn (alas) that the Chargers had gone down.

I published this one in the Weekly Standard under the title of “The Roots of Obama Worship: Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity finds a 21st- century savior”

Barack Obama has now been center stage for two years—one as a presidential candidate (and president elect) and one as president. Americans have begun to take their measure of the man, judging him to have been a remarkable success in his first role and struggling in his second. Obama recently awarded himself the grade of “a good, solid B plus” for his performance in office, but the public is not as lenient. The gap in the assessment between Obama the candidate and Obama the president is enormous. Having entered office with a public approval of 70 percent, he has fallen today below 50 percent, the steepest such decline at this point of any first-term president in the postwar period. Obama also has the lowest approval rating at the end of a president’s first year.

A drop in some degree in public approval is not unusual and might even be regarded as natural. Campaigns feed on dreams, governing confronts realities. But Obama’s decline appears to hold greater significance than for past presidents, as it reflects a qualitative change in perception of his image. This shift became clear during his acceptance last month of the Nobel Peace Prize, an award that was proposed just as he took office and that reflected the heady expectations of the campaign. In Oslo, Obama was a much-diminished figure, compelled by the public’s judgment of his record to concede that “my accomplishments are slight.” The actor Will Smith, invited to perform at a gala honoring the president, was one of many forced to respond to the awkward question of whether Obama merited his award. His answer, obviously in the affirmative, harked back to the spirit of the campaign: “Barack Obama as an idea marks an evolutionary flash point for humanity.”

Smith’s comment holds the key to explaining the gap between the two Obamas. The 2008 campaign was an event that unfolded on an entirely different plane from ordinary politics. It signaled the emergence on a worldwide scale of the “Religion of Humanity,” for which Obama became the symbol. What Americans have discovered is that being the representative of this transpolitical movement does not fit easily, if it fits at all, with serving as president of the United States.

There is, to be sure, a conventional explanation for the Obama gap that focuses entirely on American politics. The storyline is by now familiar. In an epic journey, Obama came from nowhere, and against all odds, to capture the presidency. His campaign, which was so brilliant in building enthusiasm and attracting support, did little to provide Americans with a clear idea of where he planned to take the country. The result has been a disconnect between Obama as candidate and as president.

This explanation clearly has merit. The Obama campaign was not programmatic—it had no slogan like Clinton’s “New Democrat” in 1992 or George W. Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism” in 2000—but thematic. Obama’s appeal was organized around two general notions: promoting “change” and fostering a new tone of politics (reform, transparency, and especially postpartisanship). “Change” accommodated many different expectations. For this reason, as late as the time that Obama took office, it was unclear whether it meant pragmatic and incremental adjustment or fundamental transformation. The promise of a new style of politics, a ploy that dates all the way back to the “outsider” campaigns of Ross Perot, was one that Obama quickly tossed aside. Indeed, on the core issue that once defined reform politics—campaign finance regulation—he did not even bother to wait for the election, but exempted himself before the final campaign began.

Yet even if all this is true, it cannot fully account for the decline in Obama’s approval ratings. For one thing, it has never been considered a requirement of American politics to wage programmatic campaigns. Candidates like Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 have not only run and won with thematic campaigns, but also gone on to succeed quite well as presidents. For another, when all is said and done Americans have shown that they can be surprisingly forgiving about “process” and “tonal” transgressions. The discovery that Barack Obama is a partisan who cuts deals behind the scenes with big interests may be dismaying, but it is no more shocking than learning that there was gambling going on in Rick’s Café Americain.

There is therefore a need for an explanation that goes beyond the conventional one. When the history of this period is written, the 2008 campaign will almost certainly be seen as a watershed event in cultural history, above and beyond any connection it had to American politics, when a worldwide movement congealed to display its enthusiasm for Barack Obama. This perspective will also require a reassessment of the place of Obama. To be sure, the campaign will continue in one respect to be regarded as being all about Obama. This has been Obama’s perception, and understandably so. Only the most rare of persons, after being the object for over a year of such unrelenting adulation, could have resisted the temptation to think that the world revolved around him. Barack Obama is clearly not that person. His speeches and remarks are filled with references to himself in a ratio that surpasses anything yet seen in the history of the American presidency. But in another respect, the 2008 campaign was about something much larger than Barack Obama. The character of the event will not be grasped until the focus begins to shift from Barack Obama to the yearning for Barack Obama. It is in the thoughts and actions of those who adored him that the most interesting and important dimension of the campaign took place.

The rise of the Religion of Humanity is what best describes this event. This strange term designates an actual sect, now defunct, that enjoyed a considerable following and prestige in intellectual circles in the 19th century. John Stuart Mill was a prominent convert, pronouncing the “culte de l’humanité [to be] capable of fully supplying the place for a religion, or rather (to say the truth) of being a religion.” In America, where the religion wore the respectable label of the “Church of Humanity,” the acolytes included the well-known journalist David Croly and his son Herbert, the founder and longtime editor of the New Republic. If it were not for the Religion of Humanity, Americans today might not have the pleasure of reading Jonathan Chait on “The Rise of Republican Nihilism” or E.J. Dionne “In Praise of Harry Reid.”

Mill and Croly were both intellectual disciples of the French social philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857). Though rarely studied in America today, Comte bequeathed an enormous legacy. He was the first to simplify and popularize the idea of a progressive movement of history, which he described as proceeding through three great epochs: the age of theological thinking, the age of metaphysical thinking, and the age of scientific or “Positivistic” thinking. (“Positivism,” referring to the scientific mindset and approach, was one of Comte’s many linguistic inventions.) The inevitable march of humanity (still with a small h) through these stages, albeit at different rates in different places, was the great story of history. Variations among nations and groups might continue, but they paled in significance next to the common destiny of humanity. Those who continued to view the world in terms of nations and their conflicts—Comte called them “retrogrades”—were caught in old thinking, unable to grasp the new global order being formed by the forces generated by Positivism.

Comte argued that it was time to expand man’s scientific knowledge of the physical world to the social realm. A new science of society, “sociology” (Comte’s term), was the latest and highest of all the sciences. Possession of knowledge of the laws of social movement was what ideally bestowed the title to rule. Comte and his circle were never much impressed by democracy and favored instead one system or another of governance by experts. (Saint-Simon, for whom Comte worked for many years, once proposed running society with “Councils of Newton.”)

But there was an important twist to Comte’s praise of science. In contrast to many who thought that the scientific method and scientific values were sufficient to bind society together, Comte insisted that people had to believe. As faith in the transcendent was no longer -possible in the Positivist age, he called for “replacing God with Humanity.” The aim of this religion without God was to build a global community that assured the betterment of man’s lot. Postulating this objective as an ideal is what Comte meant by Humanity (now with a capital H).

Given the suspicion that many today hold toward religion of any kind, Comte’s insistence on the need for a religion might seem to run counter to modern sensibilities. But set the word religion aside, and it is just on this point that Comte’s thought proves most prescient. The combination of confidence in science and a religious-like enthusiasm was the hallmark of the Obama campaign, just as it is the most salient characteristic of the contemporary progressive impulse. Confidence in experts and the pledge to “restore science to its rightful place” went hand in hand with chants of “Yes we can” and with celebrations of the gift of charismatic leadership.

What was more farfetched was Comte’s plan to establish an organized sect with churches, clergy, and calendar of Positivist saints. His movement in fact never reached much beyond the intellectual elites. But even here -Comte’s thought may be less naïve than it first appears, as he envisaged an initial period of syncretism in which existing Christian sects would adopt the fundamental premises of the new religion without officially becoming part of it. What better describes the theology of many contemporary liberal churches whose full energy in 2008 went into proselytizing for Obama?

There is one point, however, on which Comte’s idea of the Religion of Humanity, was inadequate. Social improvement, however admirable, was too elevated a goal to mobilize people and sustain their devotion. The contemporary movement has gone beyond the original to discover a new and firmer basis for promoting solidarity in the great cause of confronting climate change. Here is a project that can unite people in waging the moral equivalent of war against a common threat. The liturgy has been vastly strengthened by allowing the ecological soldiers to glimpse the moment of their glorious triumph, when, in candidate Obama’s words, “the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal.” This moment marked the dividing time between the pre- and post-Obama eras. The cause is also perfect in its “positivity,” since the threat can only be properly gauged by the disinterested research of the “best science,” the practitioners of which must be granted a central role in planning strategy. Although the recent Copenhagen conference on climate change ended in disappointment (even with Obama’s last minute intervention), the cause has lost none of its appeal. It is the subtext of James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar, which represents the next “flashpoint” in the evolutionary development of Humanity.

The confluence of the Religion of Humanity with the Obama campaign has every appearance of being a providential event. It was prepared by the advent in the 1990s of an ongoing world public opinion, something that had never previously existed. The focus was on views and attitudes about America, a symbol that was constructed under the guidance of the intellectual vanguard. This symbol, known as anti-Americanism, was given a human face in the first decade of this century when it was joined to the personage of George W. Bush. It was invested with every element deemed to be retrograde: the primacy of the nation, a claim of exceptionalism, and a set of principles—“nature and nature’s god”—grounded in theology and metaphysics. The world was depicted as comprising two fundamental “substances,” Bush and non-Bush, that were locked in a cosmic conflict.

Barack Obama’s coming served as the galvanizing force to carry the day for the cause of progress. Although Obama never conceived himself as playing a universal role when he launched his presidential bid, he awakened at some point in the campaign to the realization that he was no longer running merely for president of the United States. He was being selected for the much grander “office” of leader of a new world community. His credentials for this position were impeccable. Humanity as a concept formally includes everyone, but it is especially favorable to those who have previously been excluded from full recognition. (The old aristocrats, in Comte’s description, were hardly part of Humanity.)

Having decided as a young man to identify himself as African-American, Obama was in the category of the dispossessed, a member of a race against which some of the greatest crimes in history were perpetrated. This fact immediately commended him to Western intellectuals at the same time that it enabled him to be the plausible representative of the teeming masses of the Third World. No one from a privileged race could ever have fulfilled this role. Just as important was the fact that Obama is not purely African-American, but a product of amalgamation, what the French approvingly call métissage and Harry Reid describes less felicitously as being “light skinned.” Obama is postracial or, as he himself put it, a “mutt.” This look, favored among international fashion models, represents physically the common denominator of humanity. Religiously, too, Obama, though a Christian, has ties through his father to Islam, a fact he proclaims on some of his overseas trips. He was the embodiment of all men. Finally, while holding these biological qualities of both the dispossessed and of humanity, Obama is a member of the clerisy of the Religion of Humanity, having been credentialed at Columbia, Harvard, and Chicago and stamped as one holding progressive views.

In what measure has Barack Obama as president embraced this other role of leader of Humanity? Americans are now wondering. These concerns first came to light in unsympathetic reactions to Obama’s foreign policy speeches, especially those delivered on foreign soil, that made a point of apologizing for American missteps and wrongs. Realists and pragmatists dismissed these criticisms, arguing that the new approach served America’s interests by lowering the strident tone of the Bush years, thereby opening doors to engagement with other leaders and defusing anti-Americanism. In addition, it was said that Obama could leverage his position as a leader of humanity to help solve general problems like nuclear proliferation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obama’s two offices complemented one another, promoting the goals of Humanity while serving America’s interest. By standing above or outside America, he could best help America.

Whatever the plausibility of these arguments, their merit over the past year has been tested and found wanting. Obama’s authority as leader of Humanity has not borne the fruit that many had hoped for, and in any case—as his two trips to Copenhagen have made clear—his standing in the world is now in a free fall. Americans who thought that it is one thing to offer an initial hand to the likes of a Chávez or an Ahmadinejad think it something quite different to continue to offer it after the hand has been flagrantly rejected. To persist is to invite dishonor, both for the office of the president and for the nation. Realism dictates an adjustment. The fact that such a change has been so slow in coming suggests that it is not realism that is Obama’s guiding light, but a commitment to the dogmas of the Religion of Humanity.

Another instance of the conflict Americans now perceive between the two roles comes in the form of Obama’s repeated efforts to blame George W. Bush (or “the last eight years”) for every difficulty or problem that the nation confronts. On first encounter, there would seem to be nothing more in this tactic than an ordinary political calculation designed to win support and deflect criticism. But this technique, which is standard fare for a presidential campaign, at a certain point is bound to appear unpresidential, not only when indulged in before foreign audiences where it seeks to purchase a personal reputation for impartiality at the expense of national unity, but also in domestic affairs. It displays weakness by evidencing a desire to evade responsibility, especially for a president who based his Inaugural Address on calling for “a new era of responsibility.” Opinions may differ on whether the “blame Bush first” policy is obsessive or demagogic, but it is by now clear that it is counterproductive. Persistence bespeaks something more than political miscalculation. For the Religion of Humanity, the attack on Bush, both the man and the “substance,” is a matter of dogma. If Obama were to desist, he would relinquish his higher office.

The same pressure to hew to the dictates of the new religion is evident in the efforts of Obama’s intellectual supporters to save postpartisanship from the simple hoax that most now believe it to have been. Postpartisanship, we are told, never meant anything as mundane as dealing with the other party. It referred instead to working with those who embrace the consensus of the new era. It therefore explicitly excludes the bulk of the Republican party, which comprises those who cling stubbornly to their theology and metaphysics. Only those elements that have adapted or evolved qualify as potential postpartisan partners. The standard for inclusion is not an expression of popular will, but criteria supplied by the idea of progress. What has made many Americans increasingly suspicious of the office of leader of Humanity is their growing perception that it rests ultimately on contempt for the people.

The conflicting demands of the Religion of Humanity and the presidency of the United States have become most apparent in the administration’s approach to dealing with the threat of Islamic terrorism. The Religion of Humanity, by its own reckoning, admits to facing challenges from two quarters: from those who have not yet fully entered the age of Positivism, which includes the terrorists, and from those who are part of the advanced world but who refuse to embrace it, which includes the likes of George W. Bush. In the present situation, these two groups are understood to have a symbiotic relationship. The existence of the terrorists is regrettable, not only because of the physical threat that they pose, but also because, by doing so, they risk strengthening the hand of those in the West who reject the Religion of Humanity. Supporters of the Religion of Humanity therefore believe they have good reason to deny or minimize the danger of terrorism in order to save the world from the even greater danger of the triumph of the retrograde forces. This is the dogmatic basis of political correctness, and Obama and his team have gone to considerable lengths by their policies and by their use of language to hide reality. But reality has a way of asserting itself, and it is becoming clearer by the day that being the leader of Humanity is incompatible with being the president of the United States. No man can serve two masters.

There is a symposium this week in the National Review centering around the question: Is conservatism a branch of liberalism? I confess the way the question was phrased got my back up a bit. It made me think liberalism was akin to the company with whom I have an account (Wachovia), wheras the particular office I bank at (a “branch”) is conservatism. Much as I may normally prefer the particular to the general, I can’t but think in this instance that the notion of a “branch” is a bit degrading. (Plus, which is now a more plausible concern, my FDIC insurance is routed through the main company.) In any case, I am a participant in that symposium as are Robert George, Chalres Kesler, and Yuval Levin. Below is my article.

American conservatism is devoted to conserving the American republic. Since the American republic is commonly classified as a “liberal” regime, the question of this symposium almost seems to answer itself: Conservatism today serves liberalism. (“Liberalism” in this context refers to its original 18th-century variety, meaning a limited government whose chief aim is to secure individual rights, rather than the modern variety, meaning a positive state that seeks to establish “social justice.”)

Yet it is mistaken to think of conservatism as merely a branch or subsidiary of liberalism. Conservatism may serve liberalism, but it often does so in ways that original liberalism hardly conceived of and that modern liberalism usually rejects. And this it does for liberalism’s good. Liberal theory never developed the tools to sustain itself; it has always required something beyond itself to survive. Conservatism, while endorsing so much of liberalism, recognizes and satisfies this need. Without conservatism, liberalism would begin to wither away. In fact it has already begun to do so.

Conservatism conserves the American republic by supporting its theoretical foundation of natural rights. This “abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times” (Lincoln) is something conservatives are not embarrassed to proclaim, even before the United Nations General Assembly. On this point, they are in full accord with the original liberals. Modern liberals, by contrast, are suspicious of metaphysical truths, advertising themselves as pragmatists while hiding their values behind the process of change.

Conservatism conserves the American republic by supporting the idea of the nation. The nation is necessary for security, for the activities of the common political life, and even for the welfare of humanity in general. What entity other than the nation-state, after all, defends us, enacts our laws, and provides for the well-being of many beyond its authority?
Conservatism not only recognizes the rational case for the nation but leaves space for justifiable feelings of attachment to it, acknowledging that the heart has its reasons that reason cannot comprehend.

Original liberalism was also a friend of the nation and developed such ideas as sovereignty. But it had difficulty from the first in articulating what the nation-state was beyond a contract, and it could never make full sense of feelings of attachment to it, allowing them therefore to develop unregulated. Modern liberalism, by contrast, has grown increasingly uneasy about the nation. It considers patriotism an anachronism and promotes global citizenship and global studies as replacements for American citizenship and education in our own political tradition.

Conservatism conserves the American republic by supporting the biblical religions, which have been the major source of our ethical system, one of self-restraint and belief in something beyond material existence. Conservatives subscribe to the liberal principles of freedom of religion, nonestablishment, and religious tolerance. But they see no contradiction (why should they?) between holding these principles and promoting reasonable measures—whether these concern immigration, fiscal policy, or education—that seek to preserve the central place of the biblical religions in our culture. Original liberal theory was sometimes cool to religion, failing to acknowledge how much liberal society was borrowing from the storehouse of religious capital. As for modern liberalism (setting aside the important faction that is hostile to biblical religions), it has taken the legal norm of religious freedom and twisted it into a new ideal of neutrality among faiths—an ideal reflected in President Obama’s proclamation that America is not “a Christian nation.”

Conservatism conserves the American republic by promoting “the tradition,” which refers, beyond religion and the Enlightenment, to the classical Greek and Roman ideals of virtue and excellence. Conservatives subscribe to the liberal principle of equality of rights, but they do so in no small part in order to allow for the emergence of inequalities and excellences. The tradition also provides a theoretical basis for a hierarchy of standards, which gives conservatives the confidence to criticize the vulgarity that pollutes any society and runs rampant in ours. Original liberalism often had the same inclinations—Jefferson spoke of a “natural aristocracy”—but it engaged too easily in attacks on the classics and, in its rationalist exuberance, went too far in elevating utility at the expense of nobility. Modern liberalism, in its focus on compassion, has had difficulty openly supporting and rewarding excellences. It has also allied itself culturally with relativism, which is the application of the idea of equality to all thought. Relativism makes it harder to support standards except those that touch on equality or diversity. Above all, in our universities, modern liberalism has pushed aside the “old books” in order to make room for diversity and identity politics.

Conservatism is the home today for the few remaining full proponents of original liberalism. It is also the home for those friends of liberalism who believe that liberalism’s defense requires something more than itself. The combination of these different strands of thought within the same movement produces tensions, but it is also a source of the movement’s great creativity. That creativity is best expressed in the view that the public good is not to be found in adherence to the clearest and simplest principles, but rather in the blending of different and partly conflicting ideas. It is above all by acknowledging this fact that today’s conservatism is no mere branch of liberalism.

I have been gone for a long time; i wrote this last night and posted it also on the weekly standard wesbite this morning. it’s a case of double entry blogkeeping, but i can’t resist.

How low can you go? This is the question confronting the nation in the aftermath of President Obama’s deep bow to the Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko last Saturday.

In contrast to the greeting the President accorded to the King of Saudi Arabia in April, where spooked White House officials dismissed what looked like a full gesture of obeisance as a mere exercise in height adjustment, this time there was no ambiguity. The President executed a clear, full-scale, and unmistakable bow. It was the most transparent act of his presidency—ample, sweeping, and bounteous. Yet contrary to what some malicious bloggers alleged, it was not, by Japanese standards, excessive. For a Japanese person visiting the Emperor, who is the symbol of the state and the highest authority of the Shinto religion, President Obama’s dip, for a man his height, was appropriate according to local custom. His only flaw, commented on by Japanese observers, was to have extended simultaneously his hand. The norm is that one must choose: there is no shaking and bowing at the same time, however athletic such a maneuver might appear.

Though largely correct in form, the President’s act poses some thorny problems for the future. Just how does one decide when and to whom a President should bow? If the President follows local custom in some cases but not others, will not some feel that they have been gratuitously insulted? What must King Abdullah be thinking this week of the (half) bow (half) disavowed that he received, compared to the full monty extended to emperor? Is the House of Saud inferior to the Japanese imperial family, or Islam less honorable than Shinto? And then there is the queen of England, no insignificant figure, who is not only head of state (and of the Commonwealth), but also a spiritual figure in her own right, as leader of the Church of England. Yet Her Majesty did not merit so much as a presidential curtsy, while Michelle touched her on the back. Does a President in this day and age bow to non-Westerners, but not to a white Christian women? Whatever the Queen’s humiliation may have been, one can rest assured she will bear it, in good British fashion, with a stiff upper lip. Besides, she has her presidential ipod, filled with Broadway show tunes, to console her.

It has been widely claimed, although with no confirmation yet by students of the presidency, that Barack Obama is the first American President to have thus lowered himself to a foreign leader. The idea has at least the ring of plausibility. Bowing to a monarch would seem to violate the spirit of the Revolution, which wasn’t wildly favorable to displays of rank, as well as to run counter to our proclaimed self-evident truth of all persons being created equality. But then again, this may be just one of our local customs. President Obama has nuanced our notions of universal truths as instances of America’s assertions of exceptionalism, when, as he reminds us, “Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” When truth is made relative all that remains is the authority of custom.

Another possibility, less theoretical, is that the President has taken to bowing, because he is still a novice in foreign affairs. Either he does not travel with a protocol officer—the State Department does not seem to count for much in this Administration—or, what is more worrisome, he is too confident in his own intelligence to be instructed. His first instinct when dealing with those whom intellectuals deem the “other” has been repeatedly to go the extra mile to display his signs of respect. But what is appropriate for the son of an anthropologist might be wanting for the dignity of “America’s first Pacific President.”

Of course, change can only go so far. President Obama, like other presidents before him, has already had to take into account certain practical considerations. Before beginning his trip to Asia, the President very unceremoniously refused a meeting with the Dali Lama, bowing preemptively to the tender feelings of the Chinese. The meeting will be rescheduled. Of necessity, the current Dalai Lama, who has been dispossessed of his country and lives in exile, has had to relax traditional expectations. In good democratic fashion, he is regularly seen shaking hands with foreign dignitaries or, as he seems to prefer, simply folding hands in a prayer-type greeting. Yet by local custom, the Dalai Lama is typically greeted by Tibetans with a deep bow, or, in a more formal setting, such as at his residence in Dharamsala or in the context of a public ritual, with three or more full prostrations to him. For our young prince, another self-inflicted dilemma may soon be in the offing: To bow or not to bow, that is the question.