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A New Political Theory Research Program For Today
Sunday, February 14, 2010, 11:32 AM

I want to sidestep the brief, silly article running in Esquire about the increasing number of “kaleidoscopically shifting arrangements” we honor with the name family, but I also want to use it to frame what I think ought to emerge as a new vein to be mined in the sometimes barren-feeling realm of political theory. As predictable and pat as the Esquire piece may be, there’s little doubt that the new consensus on family — “straight people blew up marriage a long time ago” — has powerful adherents quite a bit further up in the clouds than the average Esquire reader, or writer.

Political theory today is a friendly and welcoming place for scholars interested in blowing up — er, deconstructing — not only marriage but the authority of the family itself. Certain conservatives, meanwhile, have recently become able to carve out a space for the defense of the authority of the family on traditionalistic grounds, especially by way of natural law.

As instructive as it is to trace the logic of Sade, Emerson, Freud, and others into the post-Foucauldian territory we frequent today, and as worthy a task as it is to reemphasize the natural character of the traditional family, both these sides of the family debate seem to me to miss something essential: a special aspect or character of the family that is non-natural. Typically, those who defend the family on natural-law grounds are happy to further demonstrate the compatibility of the nature-based approach with a supernatural one, wherein the authority of the traditional family results from the imposition of sacred order upon the natural substrate or raw material of biological necessity on the one hand and possibility on the other. But the question of whether that imposition is soft or hard is an important one; at least some commentators, particularly on the left, will not tire of pointing out the potentialities, in Christianity, particularly, for a sacred order that imposes commanding truths against certain aspects of the traditional family. The pagan, republican, quintessentially Roman family — as Tocqueville took a moment to hint — runs fundamentally contrary to the typical sort of family lived and theorized by natural-law Christians.

There are a variety of ways in which this is so, but, at the same time, it’s clear that certain aspects of pagan familial virtue are not exactly incompatible with the Biblical sacred order that can check or overcome their excesses and pathologies — just as the Biblical order imposes powerful interdicts, not to be confused with taboos, against the kind of violent desires that, to the morbid fascination of the ancient Greeks, deconstructed and destroyed the identities of family-bound individuals. Above all, for individuals in families Biblical order interdicts two kinds of pride, which combine and culminate in aristocratic nobility: pride in the unity of bloodline and virtu. Nonetheless, Biblical order has been unable to destroy both pagan familial order and the residual pride in family identity and family accomplishment that persist, especially among ‘real Americans’, to this day. It is not too much to suggest that Biblical order, in practice, has been unwilling to destroy these things.

What is true in this respect about religion is, perhaps paradoxically, largely untrue about philosophy. Philosophers, as Nietzsche made powerfully clear, are some of the most anti-family people around. The practice of philosophy itself, Nietzsche posited, is virtually inimical to the practices required of family life, to say nothing of family creation or leadership. But it is strange and striking how little else Nietzsche has to say out loud about family, because the classical or pagan pursuit of what it means for a family to be great is perhaps the most significant and enduring example of noble values that a philosopher of noble values could hope to find. If Christianity is skittish at best about familial nobility and not just dignity, as a pridefully creative project of life-defining meaning, is it not remarkable that the most venomous and blatant of the anti-Christian philosophers is so circumspect and muted on the matter? Is there not an uncanny alliance between reason and revelation against familial nobility (and what nobility is not familial)? Is it not the case that religion and philosophy both urge individuals in families to fundamentally orient their souls away from their family as a foundational source of meaning?

Add to this the rise of psychotherapy, charismatic transgressivism, and the romantic notion that the experience of full individuality, not the knowledge of individual being, is the source of selfhood, and it’s no surprise that the authority of the family as a noble institution has been, if not ‘blown up’, significantly undermined. Yet, puzzlingly, the authority of the noble family stubbornly persists, in a way that cannot, I think, be chalked up to mere biology. More than a natural degree of loyalty, discipline, sacrifice, tenacity, and vision, I think, is required of anyone seeking to cultivate an authoritative family that presumes to offer its members a nobility beyond the simple dignity of a sentient animal, even a human animal. This ‘aristocratic’ ideal would seem to have been compromised or made ‘imperfect’ as it has been democratized. But perhaps its democratization, in conjunction with the persistence of Biblical faith among many of those who retain the ideal, actually points the way toward its further ennoblement. The lingering question is how this intriguing state of affairs should provoke us to view anew the past, present, and future of political thought. Assuming we are indeed stuck with virtue in a certain way, so too may we well also be stuck with a certain type of ‘noble values’…


Perspectives On Political Science
Monday, January 25, 2010, 2:31 PM

Some good ones are to be found in the latest issue of Perspectives on Political Science.


Tea & Tom
Sunday, January 24, 2010, 10:17 AM

The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. [...] Obama should bring together the country’s leading innovators and ask them: “What legislation, what tax incentives, do we need right now to replicate you all a million times over” — and make that his No. 1 priority. Inspiring, reviving and empowering Start-up America is his moon shot. [...] You want more good jobs, spawn more Steve Jobs. — Tom Friedman

It’s become increasingly hard to take Tom Friedman seriously, but his latest op-ed is so odd and confused, in such an important way, that one has to say something. Though the tea partiers have given our left-leaning commentariat plenty of reason for caricature, what’s lost in the easy jokes and dismissive pigeonholing is a serious understanding of the animating force of the tea partiers’ movement. I’ve tried to say a few things about it here and here, without the benefit of Friedman’s foil. Here now are a few more observations:

* Who more than the tea partiers favors small businesses? The idea that the tea partiers long only to ‘stop things’ is so juvenile and crude that it hardly merits comment. But Friedman uses that idea to contrast a vision of real productive growth driven by individuals taking charge of their own destinies, which — last time I checked — is precisely the positive agenda that all tea partiers, regardless of sect or faction, tend to promote. Only a pundit like Friedman, however, could blind himself to this actuality, intent as he is on realizing in American practice what his beloved Chinese government has made possible only in theory: the marriage of ancient Egyptian despotism with the modern dynamism of Hong Kong. Only the government, you see, has the extraordinary, unilateral power necessary to breed and launch a million innovators! Only the government, Friedman exhorts, can save us from slipping into dissolute quietude. Tocqueville on acid, Hobbes on crack: what could possibly unite the average libertarian, the conservative of any stripe, me, and a tea partier selected at random, if not Friedman’s belief that the self-realized innovators of tomorrow are the listless, powerless lumpenbourgeois of today? Ask yourself, Mr. Friedman, if you see such creatures loafing around America today: how did they get that way?

* The answer would be the same despotism he champions. I suppose Friedman imagines that any government so devoted to the cause of innovation can hardly be despotic. But this is to confuse means and ends. The sort of freedom governments manufacture and instrumentalize in a policy-driven pursuit of national prosperity cannot be mistaken for liberty. Politically speaking, liberty is not a means to anything but an end itself. Ironically, Friedman’s Tocquevillian fear that our springs of action have been sadly weakened is belied daily by real America, red blue and purple. It turns out that we did not transform en masse into lumpenbourgeois under the tutelary rule of federal-national government. We may have 99 problems, but a shortage of the energy required for innovation is not one. We are, alas, surfeited with micromanagerial government, government interested in the petty details of our lives and animated by some compulsion to intervene in them. Often, “leave us alone” conservatives worry that meddling of this kind is pursued for its own sake, or out of the tyrant’s love for simply beholding the exercise of his own power. More often than not, though, the compulsion to manage and nudge and sculpt and manipulate behavior may be driven by a fear like Friedman’s: that without some vigilantly tuned and retuned matrix of government incentives and disincentives, we rubes of suburbia will squander our productive potential, falling prey to the expertly-managed systems of ’80s Japan, ’90s Taiwan, ’00s China, or whatever economic menace will cast its shadow over the ’10s.

* The folly of Friedmanesque thinking is in its privileging of economics over politics. It cannot conceive of liberty politically, as an end. It can only contemplate liberty economically, as a means. I know there are at least a few libertarians who will stand up and shout at this formulation, on the theory that it’s possible to think of liberty economically as an end. We can take up that question later if anyone would like. At any rate, it’s an economic view of liberty as a means that brings with it a political commitment to an activist, interventionist tax policy of incentives and disincentives. And it’s an economic view of liberty that leads us to believe that, because economic policy can manufacture productivity better than political liberty can facilitate it, we should pour our energies into shaping and implementing economic policies. The key to national greatness, on this view, is policy greatness. But the key to this view is that national greatness, of the sort you can obtain with the greatest policies, is more important than political liberty. I almost said “is of more value,” because, indeed, on this view, importance is determined by value, and value is determined economically.

* I recognize that my call for more political liberty is fairly weak relative to, say, a call for a return to true civic republicanism. Hobbesian defenders of Friedman might ask why I should bother when I concede that the basic character of the American regime is properly as Hobbesian as it already is. They might accuse me of making a rhetorical mountain out of a practical molehill. I’d answer by pointing to Andrew Sullivan, who, like me, is somewhat torn between the Oakeshottian-Hobbesian view of the state and a view more like that of Ron Paul by way of Locke. Andrew’s recent choice has been to defend the President much more robustly out of a judgment that the Oakeshottian-Hobbesian view needs to prevail at the present moment. My choice is to lean in the other direction. This is not a theoretical clash of the titans, although the theoretical stakes are clear enough; this is practical politics, and it is how America works.

* One final note. The tea partiers are consistently ridiculed as washed-up old white people, as the defunct humans of the lingering, but not much longer lingering, past. The tea partiers are taken as the latest conclusive evidence that the party of conservatism is simply the party of those who already have whatever human beings want to have — cosmic opponents of the party of those who do not yet have those things. It’s the Party of the Old vs. the Party of the Young. This is straight out of Emerson, whose ‘eternal politics’ of old versus young was itself an economics of nature. Relative to others on the right, I rarely invoke Aristotle to prove anything, but Aristotle here is the antidote to the facile transcendentalist critique of the tea partiers. For Aristotle, the presence of a middle class was essential to political liberty. The typical explanation of why focuses on the way that Aristotle’s middle class combined a bourgeois interest in stability with a rather upper-class property interest. Unfortunately, the typical explanation stops here; few bother to ask why middle-class people have these interests as a rule. What is the specific characteristic middle-class interest in stability and property, and what is driving it? I think the plain answer is that the middle class is defined by middle age — by those who are no longer young but not yet old, and therefore completely break the frame of Emersonian generation-gap analysis. It’s silly, given how similar Emerson and Nietzsche are on nature as a condition in which nothing really is but everything is becoming, that the heirs to Emerson in this regard refuse to recognize the middle aged as existing in a state of becoming that makes young-versus-old analysis ridiculous. In desperation, they exhume, ’60s generation-gap analysis, which held that anyone over 30 is in the Party of Old. In its new zombie formulation, however, the idea would be that anyone who acts old in their personal life is Old for political purposes — which leads us back to the need for follow-through in our thinking on the Aristotelian middle class. I can’t conceive of a middle class defined by middle age whose particular interests in stability and property aren’t defined by the creation and/or continuance of family. The middle class, conceptually and in practice predominantly, is the class of people who are starting to have kids and raise them. The tea partiers are spearheading what is and must be a middle-class movement — a movement not of the old but the middle-aged, not of those who are conservative because they have nothing left to create but who are conservative because they have just begun creating in earnest. America’s most influential old person, lest we forget, is Steve Jobs.


Open Question About Scott Brown
Wednesday, January 20, 2010, 9:32 AM

Quick and easy political symbolism is as American as election season itself, so obviously the aspect of Scott Brown’s massively significant win in Massachusetts most in need of dissecting analysis is his truck. The reflex appears to be one of mocking wealthy Republicans for continuing (remember Fred Thompson?) to fake working-class economic values and down-home cultural ones by repeated recourse to the pickup truck. But I wonder if the truck actually trades in another sort of symbolic: manliness. I could launch into a bit concerning the relation between self-reliance and manliness, and another bit about the sort of conservative democratic individualism that’s paradoxically low on the ‘individuality’ you get out of liberal democratic individualism (I’d work in a meditation on the word ‘generic’)…but I’d rather hear your ideas.


Fatal Distraction
Friday, January 15, 2010, 4:06 PM

My take on race, Reid, and the politics of meaning is up now at the Guardian. Snip:

In a panic over the chance to unseat Senator Reid, the GOP is in danger of making permanent our misbegotten descent into the crackpot belief that racial symbolism is more real than our actual race relations. Inherited from deconstructionist academics whose postmodern school of thought had already become fatuous in the 1990s, the idea that inequalities of power institutionalised into our language were the key to social change has metastasized into our whole society. It is a sad, but not surprising, turn: when real change seems to become impossible, we strain to lose ourselves in the therapeutic shadowplay of change theatre. Our obsession with “changing the tone” belies our lost hopes of ever changing the substance, either of Washington politics or of race relations.


Postscript
Saturday, January 9, 2010, 1:55 PM

My final thoughts on Avatar are over here.


On Bankruptcy
Sunday, December 20, 2009, 10:29 AM

I think America’s system of easy bankruptcy is one of the jewels of our economic and political institutions, because it allows people who genuinely cannot repay their bills to get a fresh start as quickly as possible. I think non-recourse mortgages are an excellent idea, which I would like to expand, not destroy. I think that America’s incredibly deep credit markets indisputably do a lot of harm to the minority of people who simply cannot control their spending as long as they have access to credit, or who ignorantly rely on high-cost credit to smooth their cash flows—but they are also the reason for our mobile labor markets and the dynamism of our entrepreneurial system, and on balance do much more good than harm.” — Megan McArdle

There is a reason for the altogether singular indulgence shown in the United States toward a trader who goes bankrupt. An accident like that leaves no stain on his honor. In this respect the Americans are different not only from the nations of Europe, but from all trading nations of our day; their position and needs are also unlike those of all the others. — Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol II, Ch. 18 (Concerning Honor in the United States and Democratic Societies, 622 Mayer ed.)


On Corruption
Sunday, December 20, 2009, 10:20 AM

I don’t usually say this — in fact, I’ve never said it — but go read Frank Rich: specifically, his long column on the Decade of Bamboozlement. Beneath the flash of the cons that characterized the past ten years, however, is a quieter and truer truth: corruption. It is, as even Machiavelli would admit, exceedingly difficult to avoid corruption in the course of a life devoted to seeming and not being. (Someone still needs to connect the dots between mass faux friendship and “actor’s faith” among democratic individuals.) Over the course of this decade, we have seen big cons revealed time and again to be the opposite of what they seemed. But the key to understanding how and why we are living in the age of the con is to rediscover the meaning of corruption.

When people speak of corruption they refer to corruption of the spirit and corruption of the flesh. Correspondingly, reactions against corruption have taken political and anti-political form. One of the primary tensions on the right nowadays being between those who want to fight corruption by rallying around classical republicanism and those who put more faith in the repudiation of political struggle itself, we might infer that enemies of corruption are destined to be divided. But this would be wrong. Though the anti-corruption coalition as a whole might never be more united than the average Venn diagram, the diagram’s middle portion contains some individuals convinced of the necessity of both a political and a non-political response to corruption — and able to organize the entire coalition, or a decisive chunk of it, accordingly. When this class of leaders appears, this particular age of the con will at last near an end.

But not, I think, without a fight. We have compiled a long list of excuses for corruption, and we may surprise ourselves in our hesitance to forget them.


On Lifestyle Choices
Saturday, December 19, 2009, 3:40 PM

Reihan says something that gets the wheels turning:

At the moment, my side, the partisans of going after downscale voters first, is losing the argument to those who recommend going after the voters Michael Petrilli has described as “Whole Foods Republicans.”

What makes these voters potential Republicans is that, lifestyle choices aside, they view big government with great suspicion. There’s no law that someone who enjoys organic food, rides his bike to work, or wants a diverse school for his kids must also believe that the federal government should take over the health-care system or waste money on thousands of social programs with no evidence of effectiveness.

These voters, interestingly, are almost the opposite of Rod Dreher’s “Crunchy Cons,” the Birkenstocked Burkeans who are more aptly described as evangelical hippies than as affluent cosmopolitans with a libertarian streak a la the voters Petrilli has in mind.

I’m unsure that we can assume with quite as much confidence as we could in, say, 2003 that bike-riding localists who “want diversity” are likely to be upwardly mobile. In fact, I suspect that ‘cosmopolitan’ attitudes about the way humans should relate to nature are quickly coming decoupled from economic class in America. The relationship between class and putatively ‘cosmopolitan’ attitudes about acceptable human-to-human relations is another matte — one that’s harder to think through clearly in some important ways. But ‘crunchy’ lifestyle choices really aren’t luxuries in the fashion of other material goods commonly sought after by the upwardly mobile. Organic food is not that much more expensive, seeming, at least to my unempirical eye, to be getting a bit cheaper all the time. And certainly forsaking that $1799 flatscreen this year, or every 2 years, would allow many otherwise budget-conscious Americans of modest means to get choosier about the quality of their everyday food. Surely a bike is cheaper than a car; surely a diverse public school is cheaper than a private school curated according to specific tastes, interests, and affinities of any sort. And so on.

All of which suggests that shifts in the culture are cutting against the polarity sketched out by Reihan and Petrilli. Specifically, Reihan seems correct to observe that the typical crunchy con isn’t likely to be a small-government yuppie, but wrong to follow Petrilli in assuming that all ‘cosmopolitan’ lifestyle choices line up in the same way with certain economic indicators. The social mores of upwardly-mobile cosmopolitans, in short, have cultural valences with heavy political implications that their environmental mores simply don’t. There’s nothing about a commitment to individual-scale, family-scale, and even community-scale crunchiness, remember, that dooms a person to supporting cap and trade. Although technically there’s no reason a person living out liberal lifestyle choices of, say, a sexual variety has to translate their behavior into a political agenda, many such individuals do. This a trend I expect to continue.

The close link between ‘personal preference’ and politics is what’s loosening when it comes to crunchy or green ‘lifestyle choices’. Bundling socio-sexual and cruncho-environmental behavior under the same category of ‘lifestyle choices’ is increasingly misleading — suggesting that ‘lifestyle choice’ itself is increasingly an underspecified and euphemistic term that impedes, rather than facilitates, our ability to understand who we are today.


On Avatar
Saturday, December 19, 2009, 11:12 AM

Peter’s review of Avatar is a must-read:

Avatar isn’t much a movie: Instead, Cameron’s cooked up a derivative, overlong pastiche of anti-corporate clichés and quasi-mystical eco-nonsense. It’s not that the film’s politics make it bad, it’s that even if you agree, the nearly three-hour onslaught of simplistic moralizing leaves no room for interesting twists or ambiguity in the story or characters: corporations are bad, scientists are good, natives are pure, harmony with nature is the ultimate ideal — the only suspense comes from wondering what movie Cameron will rip off next.

Last week, Jeffrey Wells called Avatar “the most flamboyant, costliest, grandest left-liberal super-movie anyone’s ever seen,” and that’s true as far as it goes — but he forgot a word. It’s also one of the stupidest major movies in recently memory, blithely peddling a message that its entire production process actually undermines. That Avatar‘s melodramatic attacks on corporate interests and its defense of simple, natural living come packaged as one of the most expensive, and probably the most technically advanced, corporate films in history would seem to indicate that only quality bigger than the movie’s stupidity is its head-in-the-clouds hypocrisy.

Yet the tension here is only to be expected, once you stipulate the philosophical premises. Though liberals criticize and mock conservatives for their unwillingness to embrace scientism and emotivism both, they act as if giving in to that embrace is without deep and abiding problems. Ironically, the characteristic liberal view of marriage between spouses is a fairly disenchanted one; but when it comes to the marriage of big brains and big hearts, liberals, like Cameron, succumb to the sappiest romanticism. It’s a romanticism in which even incommensurable differences, fundamental incompatibilities, and thoroughgoing contradictions are transcended — if not conquered — in a flourish of bad poetry.

Liberals like Amartya Sen have long been on record asserting bravely that multiple identities, however radically different, are noncontradictory. (In a world in which we believe we are all composed of a smithereens of protean, Pelagian subselves, this had better be true — at least if you like your noncontradiction served nonviolently.) The triumph of left postmodernity — its identity, if you will — was to render unanswerable the question of what our identities are. Natural? Nurtural? Supernatural? There is only interpretation; and the politics of interpretation, the only kind of politics available in bad postmodernity, are the politics of destroying liberalism’s venerable public/private distinction in favor of a new one between official and unofficial interpretations. So no one can say for sure whether anyone else’s plural identities are given by themselves or by other or things. In the place of certainty — of a truth about the matter — there can only be official interpretations of what various identities are.

Where official interpretation does not hold sway, unofficial interpretation takes on the character of poetry. But whatever resources poetic interpreters discover and use take on the character of nature. The natural is simply whatever is on the receiving end of interpretation — this is bad postmodernity’s ‘effective truth’. If interpretation that’s unofficial is poetry, interpretation that’s official is — ah, but here’s where it gets interesting.

There are two competing kinds of official interpretation: political and scientific, or will-based and knowledge-based. Right now we can see the struggle for interpretive officialdom playing out in Copenhagen. Is the environment a question of knowledge, which allows us to act decisively and uncritically in whatever manner the scientists tell us is appropriate? Or is the environment actually a symptom of a deeper question of will, which requires us to recognize climate change as a consequence of deep-seated, systemic, and exploitative imbalances of power? (Another way of putting this is that the environment is not a question of science but of justice; Marx, the obvious touchstone here, is very conflicted about where justice ends and where power begins, because he lacks an adequate theory of authority.)

Liberals hate the idea that science is destined to be nothing more than a slave to the will. And lest we think that poetic interpretation is an exercise of the will, we should be clear that in liberal theory such creativity — no matter how unique, personal, or ‘individualistic’ — only makes sense as an exercise of whim. The distinction between will and whim, fine-grained though it may be under certain circumstances (think liberalism’s great nightmare, ‘oriental despotism’), is essential to the liberal embrace of artistic democracy. In Avatar, the official political interpretation of the Edenic moon Pandora is unobtainium repository, unobtanium being “a great whatsit” of a natural resource “that is an emblem of humanity’s greed and folly.” But Pandora itself, in its flourishing ecological balance, does not come with natural meaning built in. Paradoxically — and if Cameron is a Lockean, he is a most paradoxical Lockean — Pandora, which is to say nature, has no inherent meaning. It is simply a resource; the valuation which is to be mixed into it through the labor of interpretation must come from outside it.

Science is caught, then, between the possibility of slavery to will (in the person of stereotypically gruff kill-it-or-pillage-it space Marines types) and the hope of serving some other prime mover in its own mastery of nature. For make no mistake: nature is there to be interpreted. The great liberal hope, dramatized potently by Cameron, is that science will freely enslave itself to whim without will, which is love. Love — transcendent love, species-hopping love, galaxy-crossing love, love between beings who fully inhabit their own bodies and beings who pilot their semi-inhabited avatars from a ship somewhere not very nearby in orbit. Love is the magic word, the only key that can rescue science from will and so achieve the inescapable, otherwise impossible task of interpreting the inescapable, otherwise meaningless natural world. No hypocrisy needed.

But oh what a strain on the credulity of the audience. And, if the producer of such poetry himself is knowledgeable enough — as was Rousseau — oh what a strain on him. Of course, adding an adequate theory of authority into the mix — that is, a theology — audiences and authors alike wind up in a rather different situation. But that is a story for another day, and you will have to go see Avatar yourself in order to fully contemplate what kind of God lurks at the Rousseauvian heart of the inventor of the Terminator.

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