SUBSCRIBER LOGIN






Search First Things

Advanced Search

RSS

Postmodern Conservative
Archive

Categories

Monthly


Masthead

Founding Editor
James Poulos

Contributing Blog Editors
James Ceaser
Ralph Hancock
Peter Lawler

Associate Bloggers
Samuel Goldman
Jonathan Jones
Jason Joseph
John Presnall
Carl Scott
Pete Spiliakos

Blogroll




A Note on Tone; or, the Perils of Aphorism
Sunday, June 21, 2009, 7:26 PM

Freddie responds to my tweet on Iran, solidarity, and fashion:

I could imagine that James’s refusal to show solidarity with the protesters (or at least his discomfort in the same) is the product of apathy or fear of the other. I think, applied generally and not specifically, that’s a plausible reason for anyone to not be proclaiming solidarity. With James, I just don’t think that it’s true. Just like I don’t think the fashionista impulse is overly important in widespread support for Iranian reformers.

It’s tricky business, but I find that to be a recurring (though tacit) thread in James’s work: plausible illegitimate motives imagined, so illegitimate motives proved.

Other commenters at the League agree that I must be snarking. Well, it’s a tricky business, but aphorism’s always in fashion. Freddie is right that something tacit is afoot, but it’s not strawmanning, it’s suspending ‘judgment’. I recognize that it might be easy to impute snark to the following –

Thought: above all, solidarity with the Iranian opposition has been *inspired* (not justified) by their *fashion*.

– but the point is that this thought could just as easily, and should, be taken at its word, no irony or sarcasm implied. I could have written lines like these:

Look at them! They wear what we wear. They dress like we dress. They can dance to music we can dance to. They wear their hair like we do; they wear makeup like we do; they like discos and read bestsellers and when we look at them, we look at us, only a little different, no more different, really, than we are already from one another. This isn’t mere cosmetics. It’s the foliage of freedom. When they shout, when they cheer, when they are shot, when they are killed, we see don’t see Them. We see Us.

A love letter to cosmopolitanism, that — and no more or less than a dramatization from the heart of a characterization from the head. Too long for a tweet, or an aphorism, and inappropriately ‘in character’ too. Inspired, not justified! I warned. But that’s what was read: here James is mocking people for standing in solidarity for no reason beyond taste. The accusation of illegitimacy, simply read in. Interpretive rule of thumb: criticize it, yes; but ask first how seriously it could be taken.


Booze: For, Against, and * Hiccup *
Sunday, June 21, 2009, 12:40 PM

Steve Sailer suggests that booze works wonders:

Perhaps alcohol enables one individual to display a wider range of personalities than can be achieved through solely genetic means, thus allowing personalities to evolve farther in directions suitable for making a living, while still allowing people to display different traits in the evening.

Nietzsche and Marx, by contrast, both despised Europe’s culture of alcohol as the ‘other opium of the masses’. To be sure, people who love drinking large amounts of booze all the time seem both physically and socially maladapted — even when their tolerance or nobility is robust enough to prevent them from public debasement of the teenage-Londoner variety. Internal and external to its experience, drunkenness is both happy and sad. Who wistfully remarked on the bougeois professional, who decently got drunk at home? Sometimes drinking in the privacy of one’s apartment is a release; sometimes it’s a prison; sometimes, you don’t know which until it’s too late. Sometimes of course it starts out as one only to become the other — and not because you popped open that second bottle. There’s no big reveal at the end of this post; I do remain skeptical that naturalistic approaches can get us one either. I will say booze at its best, in my experience, does the opposite of what Steve suggests — narrowing one’s range of sometimes fragmented ‘personalities’ or moods, and smoothing them into a coherent, comfortable whole. What do you think?

(Thru John Carney)


Hipology
Sunday, June 7, 2009, 9:51 AM

The results of two studies indicate that people who are high in openness to new experience and high in neuroticism are likely to be bloggers.

That from a study forwarded along to Richard Florida by Cambridge ‘personality psychologist’ Jason Rentfrow. Dig deeper, and the following variety of science is what you find:

Given that the characteristics of individuals high in openness include imagination, curiosity, artistic talent, intelligence, and diversity in interests (John & Srivastava, 1999; McCrae & Costa, 1986), it is not surprising that this is a characteristic of bloggers. Blogging is both a form of self-expression as well as a form of online behavior so it stands to reason that creative individuals who are willing to try new things are likely to blog. Indeed, it may be that individuals who are high in openness to new experience are likely to be the individuals who are the first to adopt new technology. Since blogging is a relatively new form of online self-expression, this relationship may change over time as more people start to keep a blog. Future research should examine whether there is any such relationship between technology adoption and openness to new experience and whether the relationship between blogging and openness persists as blogging becomes more widely adopted.

Ah — if it’s in John & Srivastava, it must be true! What’s surprising is how effortlessly the authors arrive at their presumptions. Imaginative, curious, artistic, talented, and intelligent polymaths could just as easily be cast as rigorously discriminatory folk who can’t excel voraciously across categories unless they ruthlessly filter out, disregard, or outright reject all manner of ‘new experiences’ — especially ones that pour out of the new-experience boxes of TV and the pop market. Similarly, blogging might just as well be characterized as the province of obsessives, not neurotics — people concerned over and over again with the same damn thing, whether it’s political philosophy, gardening, those crazy liberals/conservatives, one’s newborn child, the intersection of religion and public life…whatever. The authors themselves hint that tech-savvy first-adopters especially might be inclined to view blogging, like email, as yesterday’s news, really only more likely to have blogged.

The opportunity for science here is ruined by the most unscientific vision of ‘the creative personality’ that drives the whole study. The creative personality, above all, is ‘high in openness to new experience’. All we need to do now is define — meaning, of course, quantify — not only highness but openness, newness, and experienceness: as ridiculous a prospect as any that might be conceived. All to say that novelty-obsessed neurotics — who knows why they’re neurotic! — are ‘likely’ to blog. Rather than leading us to question whether our portrait of the creative genius reflects some kind of systematic wish bias, that portrait is used to scientifically legitimize a particular activity as the sort of thing a cool person is apt to do. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Hipology. Prepare youself, after that endowed chair in Trans Studies, for whole departments devoted to Cool Studies. Happiness Studies is already too confining, too dismissive of individualism; we are already a skip and a jump away from medically defining obsession and neurosis — that is, sickness — as symptoms or features of coolness — that is, health. And what does my devotion to — sorry, anxiety over — blogging about issues like that tell us?


Bean and Time
Friday, May 15, 2009, 3:54 PM

One line of commentary on my last post is deeply disconcerting. Three of our fellow bloggers on the postmodern conservative website have launched a scandalous attack on Maxwell House, mocking the American company which, until Folgers came on to the scene, was the number one producer of coffee in America. It pioneered the idea of providing a decent cup of coffee at an affordable price to every person in America, which is the democratic idea put into action. To belittle Maxwell House is to run down America.

Samuel Goldman, our nation’s most brilliant young Germanist, spoke in his reply of Heidegger and the experience of angst. He therefore knows full well of Heidegger’s attack on the great American principle of average quantity: “The primacy of sheer quantity is itself a quality, i.e., an essential characteristic, which is that of boundlessness. This is the principle we call Americanism.” It is precisely this great principle of mass distribution that pseudo-aristocrats deplore — this, along with the related economic principle of maximizing the use of resources. The latter is articulated in the great aphorism of “good to the last drop,” which stands in contrast to the pseudo-aristocratic practice of flaunting one’s concern for economic logic by leaving grounds in the cup, a notion otherwise known as Der Satz vom Grund.

Peter Lawler, the great American theorist, is no less guilty of snobbism than Goldman, only with less excuse. He has written eloquently on the limits of Darwinism and on the limits on the idea of progress, and yet here he happily joins hands with evolutionary Larry in casually dismissing Maxwell House on Darwinian grounds: “It goes without saying that the gradual disappearance of Maxwell House from our country is one undeniable sign of progress.” I do deny it, along with editor Poulos’s flippant rejoinder “Maxwell House — American to the Bitter Dregs.” The decline of Maxwell House (and the concomitant rise of Starbucks) is a clear sign of corruption. It is correlated with every matter of cultural decline, from the mounting threat of demographic extinction to the selection of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Maxwell House is an American icon, in the grand tradition of A&P and Chevrolet. Its motto good to the last drop was allegedly supplied by none other than that great American Theodore Roosevelt. Finally, to return to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, which launched the whole conversation, I now reveal a secret that accounts for the reference to coffee at the end of my post. It has rarely been remarked that Hopper’s painting revolves around the theme of coffee and coffee drinking: there are, count them, three mugs on the counter, and they all contain coffee — no one here is drinking rosehip-raspberry herbal tea. The sugar is pure granulated white, not raw brown. The coffee, trust me, is Maxwell House. No instance in recorded history exists of anyone drinking Maxwell House with brown sugar. That’s the necessary condition. The sufficient one is that there are two huge urns of coffee behind the counter, and no one, even today, uses anything but Maxwell House to prepare coffee in this way. Finally, the color of the coffee in the glass tubes of the two urns is green, a “detail” that plays with Hopper’s use of light and color. (This critical detail is not visible in any reproduction I have looked at, though it is not only noticeable, but conspicuous, in the original.) I know from an experiment that only Maxwell House is so thin as to allow itself to refract light in this way. Maxwell House is our House of bean.


Spirits of Rhetoric
Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 8:30 AM

The Immanent Frame, an academic blog launched on the release of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, is still going strong. They’ve started a new discussion series, replete with invited scholars, centered around Obama’s traditionalistic inaugural claim that the “values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism,” are things both “old” and “true.” Barack Obama, writes David Kyuman Kim,

has proven to be a master of public rhetoric — a form of engagement understood by the ancients as the art of persuasion. As with the classical art of rhetoric, Obama enacts the basic principle that one needs not only well-reasoned argument but also a sufficiently deep and engaged understanding of an audience’s values. Why? In order to effectively persuade them of something like a sense of shared and elective affinities or a mission of common purpose.  In this regard, Obama, as expert rhetorician, is also a master of the mythopoetic, an expert maker of myths: especially myths about the meaning of “America,” and of the values and institutions that constitute a common national tradition.

Just when you thought our practical phenomenology couldn’t get any more alienating, here we go, from having to experience a mere ‘sense of’ our affinities to having to experience ‘something like’ a sense of them. I try not to get pedantic about this ‘sense of’ business; but here’s an important point about rhetoric. Obama’s rhetoric, as Kim intimates, enchants more than it reveals. But in thinking of two different spirits of rhetoric, I don’t want to distinguish merely between vagueness and specificity. Presumably, by design, concrete, specific rhetoric can prompt vague or aimless action, while abstract or dissembling language can trigger quite particular acts. The distinction to make, I think, is between the use of enchanting rhetoric designed to elicit a response of mere enchantment and the use of revealing rhetoric designed to elicit a response of repentance. By repentance I do not mean the feeling of remorse. I mean the act of repudiation — the personal turning away from wrong conduct. In his inaugural address, Obama flirted with this mode or spirit of rhetoric, quoting pointedly from 1 Cor 13:11. But how do you call for a “young nation” to stop speaking, understanding, and thinking as a child? It seems the revealing, repentant spirit of rhetoric is inherently alien or inappropriate to American political rhetoric: but then there is Lincoln.

Yet, aside from politics, our hearts and minds, in their straining for infinite youth, have grown uncannily old in their wiliness. We celebrate the fleeting repose from repentance afforded by any of our rationalized ‘vagueries’. We are content to run, though we cannot hide, until we run out of gas. The interim is ‘ours’, but the ‘play’ is the thing. In such a schema repentence itself is implicated in and made subject to therapies of deferral, practiced by rhetors in denial — we Hamlets. Oakeshott warned that what is salutary for the individual may be fatal for the society, but there is a converse possibility: a flourishing society may teem with unhealthy, unhappy souls. In this case the rhetoric of revelation and repentance has little place in politics, though it may be essential outside it. Still, that rhetoric, calibrated to resonate individualistically, falls into tension with revelation and repentance as originally conceived: not simply must a person turn away from wrong conduct, in his or her capacity as a person, but a people as a people.


Bad News, Good News
Tuesday, May 12, 2009, 12:02 PM

Something to lift Rod out of his necrosexual funk: urban chickens have hit Drudge.


The Sunshine King
Monday, May 11, 2009, 12:52 PM

Richard Florida is blogging. Behold the intellectual firepower:

While I find such lists informative and fun, in my book Who’s Your City, I say that there is really no such thing as a single best city:  Invoking the old and somewhat cliched adage, “different strokes for different folks,” I argue the thing that really matters is to find location that best fits you.

While I find self-promotion informative and fun, I say that it hardly makes up, in terms of content, for the confessedly shopworn homilies of the Nonjudgmental Age in which, as here, they might come wrapped. When you discover that your fish and chips is actually just a pile of fried batter crumbs at the bottom of the newspaper cone, you are not impelled to eat the newspaper. Unless you are starving. But in the riotous ecosystem of infotainment that is the blogosphere — or, for that matter, the Atlantic — starvation afflicts only the stupid, and uncreative reflections on the awesomeness of the creative class are hardly worth the paper they’re not printed on.


American Rapture
Monday, May 11, 2009, 1:43 AM

There are two models of rapture — one super-worldly, one this-worldly, one in which we are abducted, from here to eternity, and one in which we are inducted, to infinity and beyond. The first model is depressing if it’s the only opportunity we have to experience eternity. Even the devout — perhaps especially the devout — seek to experience the eternal, in some more or less durable way, amid the swirl of novelty amid the elementary, transactive particles of our microparceled, contingent world. And even the unbelieving — perhaps them especially — recognize that the novelties of the world seem to be approaching a singularity point, at which not even our experiences of eternity but our experiences of simple durability are under some sort of cognitive threat. At Slate, Laura Miller frets:

As long as we remain only dimly aware of the dueling attention systems within us, the reactive will continue to win out over the reflective. We’ll focus on discussion-board trolls, dancing refinancing ads, Hollywood gossip and tweets rather than on that enlightening but lengthy article about the economy or the novel or film that has the potential to ravish our souls. Tracking the shiny is so much easier than digging for gold! Over time, our brains will adapt themselves to these activities and find it more and more difficult to switch gears. Gallagher’s exhortations to scrutinize and redirect our attention could not be more timely, but actually accomplishing such a feat increasingly feels beyond our control.

Pragmatist philosophers of language and mind disparage Plato for teaching that Reason can make us remember the truth about our souls. Today we would seem to settle for remembering the truth about last Saturday night. (For a voyage of corruption down the drain pipe of digital memory in an out-of-control age, see the R-meaning-X-rated textsfromlastnight.com.) But our poor modern saps, stuck with living a real life that philosophers like Richard Rorty were infinitely more able than even Joe the Plumber to escape, maintain far deeper ambivalences about eternity than Rorty would hope. “I can’t speak personally,” Miller confesses, “to the effectiveness of meditation, Gallagher’s recommended remedy for chronic distraction, but the effectiveness of meditative practices (religious or secular) in reshaping the brain have also been abundantly demonstrated.” Among seemingly infinite pluralities of novelty, bowing to science, religion, and scientific religion alike seems most of all like prudence; even Rorty’s ‘romantic polytheism’, compatible as it is with Linker’s ‘moralistic therapeutic deism’, takes shape in our teeming vistas as the spiritualized restatement of Oakeshott’s conservative credo: bet the field. The popular case for paganism fits on the side of a bus, too: X-TREME ECUMENICISM — JUST IN CASE.

The garden of forking paths to eternal experience, however fleeting, traditionally leads us up and out; but the ultimate bet-hedging brings us to the same place as the ultimate non-compromise in religious experience — the convergence point of outwardness and inwardness. That looking deep enough within might open at last upon the eternal Without implies a rationalizing evasive maneuver from eternal authority that concedes such authority in order to drag out Augustine’s ‘not yet’ as long as the evader can manage. Jesus also prayed a ‘not yet.’ Between Augustine’s pride and Jesus’ fear we negotiate our positions under pressure of eternal authority. But those horizontal shufflings are kept honest only in the vertical of authority that divides the basis of Augustine’s “I want! I want!” from that of Jesus’ “Help! Help!” Burrowing with rationalizations to the very bottom of the soul may reveal, as Freud feared, the ‘unrepressed repressive’, the true guilt in eternal authority that our human longings shortcut us emotionally, not rationally, toward. But the bottom is very far down, and nobody is guaranteed to get there in time.

All the more reason that we seek comfort in the conflation of the eternal and the infinite in our inward attentions. Against our truancies of doing we prescribe a therapy of raptness:

Winifred Gallagher’s new book, “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life” argues that it’s high time we take more deliberate control of this stuff. “The skillful management of attention,” she writes, “is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from mood to productivity to relationships.” Because we can only attend to a tiny portion of the sensory cacophony around us, the elements we choose to focus on — the very stuff of our reality — is a creation, adeptly edited, providing us with a workable but highly selective version of the world and our own existence. Your very self, “stored in your memory,” is the product of what you pay attention to, since you can’t remember what you never noticed to begin with.

Last year in The New Atlantis I considered The Technology of Memory:

[...] lodged in a present that no longer belongs to us, we find ourselves like Jorge Luis Borges’s character Funes, who fell off a horse to discover he could remember perfectly everything he experienced thereafter. Rieff noted that Funes is supremely memorious but holds no remembrance of things truly past—he remembers only what he has learned since becoming able to remember everything. Thus, in Borges’s tale, he develops a dark and haunted taste for learning ancient languages in ten minutes’ time and filling the interminable hours reciting tomes he had only glanced at. Funes is all knowledge and no wisdom, all events and no narrative. He knows more about an eyelash than he does about himself, for now, properly speaking, he has no self.

The technology of memory can tell us everything—or the most refined selection of things—but it cannot tell us how to refine or choose. There is nothing in accordance with which to choose. The task of supplying a rationale will be left to those who manage our memories for us. “To be memorious and yet not a remembrancer,” Rieff suggests, “heralds a technological super-successor” to the human intellect: “Imagine an idiot savant as forerunner of the computer data bank.” He refers us to the vaudevillian Mr. Memory in Alfred Hitchcock’s 39 Steps, a freak capable of total recall, unable to judge what not to remember or even say. Like Rieff, Davidson recognized the question that follows the surrender of our memory to systematization—Why not? Mistaken as a powerful expression of confident openness, Why not? perhaps better captures the final passivity of he who cannot remember what, or how, to remember.

Raptness therapy, like Augustine’s ‘not yet’, dangerously offers to make us adepts at our mortifications of memory, not better remembrancers: “while it’s one thing to accommodate more information,” writes Miller, “it’s another to engage with it fundamentally, in a way that allows us to perceive underlying patterns and to take concepts apart so that we can put them back together in new and constructive ways.” For every thirty-five units of mental dissolution take one thirty-five minute raptness break. Our breaks, from an otherwise uninterrupted life of billions upon billions of breaks, are intended to improve but not heal. Miller notes that Rapt, aping Malcolm Gladwell, “aims to walk the line between social science and self-help.” Alas,

disappointingly little of “Rapt” is concerned with the state Gallagher describes as “completely absorbed, engrossed, fascinated, perhaps even ‘carried away,’” that is, precisely the experience Carr thinks is becoming ever more inaccessible. Ironically, for a book about focusing, “Rapt” can be frustratingly scattered, self-contradicting and platitudinous; do we really need more hand-wringing about families who don’t have dinner together or reheated summaries of scientific studies demonstrating the power of positive thinking?

Given our insistence on not having dinner together, among other dissolutions mental and physical, yes; the alternative to these shiny booklike objects is something further from both social science and personal therapy than Economic Man or Psychological Man can reach. God is not gold, nor gold God, no matter how snappy Miller’s depth metaphors. Gold is shiny, with twice-reflected light. All that glitters is gold. Ours is, as Miller acknowledges, “a culture composed of millions of small, spinning, sparkly bits” — what I have referred to at this blog for years now as Smithereens. Attention alone can clear the way to a reckoning with eternity; the delight of contemplation can arouse in us a curiosity about what we should contemplate; but the experience of attention itself is not the experience of eternity.

MORE…see Peter Suderman on memorizing books, outsourcing brains, and how the Web teaches us to think like it does.


Togetherness Today
Wednesday, May 6, 2009, 12:22 PM

Here’s a nice contrast. First, Rod:

As Wendell Berry explains, especially in “Sex, the Economy, Freedom & Community,” you cannot have community without order, and you cannot have a workable order as long as both economic and sexual decisions are wholly privatized — that is, as long as they are considered only a matter of consequence between the parties making those decisions. Because in reality, they aren’t: the entire community, one way or another, has to bear the burden of those decisions.

Then, Matt Frost:

you go to war with the army you have, and if Americans are going to pull through a tough recession and discover the virtues of mutual support and community engagement, it will probably not be through a wholesale reorganization of our priorities — it will happen in a way that flatters and accommodates our peculiar (and peculiarly American) flaws and fantasies. Rather than deep moral and spiritual renewal leading to civic health, what if it’s our national solipsism and susceptibility to suggestion that pull us together, and pull us through? What if, rather than being stuck with virtue, we discover that, after a few initially painful changes in lifestyle, we can buy spray-on virtue in a can? If enough Americans decide that the TV show of their lives should feature them acting like engaged, conscientious citizens, might that not be just as good as a more “authentic” conversion?

It might be exasperating to live among neighbors who are acting out a self-conscious “sense of” community, but that may be the precise way our better natures come to light these days. And the available alternatives could be a hell of a lot worse.

I think Matt’s point is the more powerfully evocative one. Being stuck with virtue in theory does wind up being different from being stuck with virtue in practice, or now. The superficiality of the moral life, despite everything psychotherapy has done to undermine and get beneath it, remains more a feature than a bug; in a democratic age dominated by social acting, striking rewarding poses loses its opprobrium to the extent that everything is superficial. All things being superficial, why not charitable giving by the porn industry? Virtue superficiality maintains an important hope: that no matter who we are on the inside or what we do on the outside, all of us can meet the minimum standard of ‘social awareness’ — something measured not in personal awareness but in public performances. And Matt is right to imply that outsourcing virtue, as important a component of performing social awareness as it is, has shown itself to be weak less in its superficiality than in its distance from home.

There is another spin on this. It might be that the moral life has become so superficial that the only place to begin in real-izing it is a superficial one. Although we might postpone a return to Real Virtue indefinitely, we also might proceed, through a sort of ‘soul therapy’, from a more superficial to a more actual moral life, in relatively short order. We should not mistake the moral habits and hangups of the boomers for those of America ever after. We might yet have more self-aware virtue perfomances and less superficiality. Things like breast cancer walks have already taken on the depth quality of ritual. And as any good critic of Rousseau knows, if we are stuck with virtue we are also stuck with an inevitable degree of superficiality. At our most bizarre, we maintain the most superficial virtue performances precisely because we guiltily seek a sense of real authenticity. Paradoxically, perhaps moral performance will begin to lose its superficial edge the less we seek to willfully orchestrate and manufacture ‘experiences of the authentic.’


Prospects for Neo-Neoconservatism
Tuesday, May 5, 2009, 2:58 PM

Ross’s latest NYT column makes a point I think I alluded to earlier: just because losing Arlen Specter is bad doesn’t mean having him to begin with was good. And this is not just a charge you can level due to Specter’s stance on policy (on ‘strictly political’ issues or cultural ones). It’s one that really hits home — on Ross’s account, at least — courtesy of Specter’s defective intellectualism. The defects under consideration go beyond the recent jibe — I forgot who said it — that Specter is an attorney and his only client is himself. The enlistment of the intellect in the business of personal aggrandizement is lamentable enough, I suppose, but it’s hard to imagine when high-octane careerism will finally be purged out of congressional politics. A while ago elsewhere I think I made the argument that the Senate has rather pathetically taken shape as a would-be farm league for Presidents — something historically it is horrible at being. The Hillary Clintons of the world reinforce a destructive assumption that the only real reason to become a Senator is to grab a suitable platform for mounting a national campaign. But the Arlen Specters of the world remind us that even today rank careerism sometimes tops out at the ‘most exclusive club in America.’

And why not? For this, as I noted, is incidental to Ross’s attack:

The Republican Party will miss the Pennsylvania senator’s vote, but it’s hard to imagine anyone taking inspiration from such a consummately unprincipled figure. The larger species to which he belonged — Republicanus Rockefellus, the endangered Northeastern moderate — likewise has little to offer a party in distress. Indeed, if you listen carefully to high-profile Yankee moderates like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Lincoln Chafee, who fanned out across op-ed pages and TV shows last week to bemoan their marginalization, it seems as though they don’t even understand their own political situation, let alone the Republican Party’s.

And, right — the role of Ombudsman to Big Government has a certain Weberian dignity to it, but it can hardly carry a party; and besides, all the action today pertains to the kind of moral life we’re living in America. If the Pat Toomeys of the world are about as relevant to abating the economic crisis, practically speaking, as Ron Paul, then Rockefeller Republicanism, as a standpoint on political economy, is similarly moot when it comes to the main controversy in Republican circles today — namely, how much or how little to be culturally libertarian. Unsurprisingly, the RockReps’ claim to relevance today is their ‘big tent’ stance on ‘social issues.’ Yet Ross seems to want to circle the conversation back to political economy (to avoid a doomstruck Second Ypres of culture war attrition?):

What’s required instead is a better sort of centrist. The Reagan-era wave of Republican policy innovation — embodied, among others, by the late Jack Kemp — has calcified in much the same way that liberalism calcified a generation ago. And so in place of hacks and deal-makers, the Republican Party needs its own version of the neoliberals and New Democrats — reform-minded politicians like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton, who helped the Democratic Party recover from the Reagan era, instead of just surviving it.

Hart, Clinton and their peers were critical of their own side’s orthodoxies, but you couldn’t imagine them jumping ship to join the Republicans. They were deeply rooted in liberal politics, but they had definite ideas for how the Democratic Party could learn from its mistakes, and from its opponents, in order to further liberalism’s deeper goals.

No equivalent faction — rooted in conservatism, but eager for innovation — exists in the Republican Party today. Maybe something like it can grow out of the listening tour that various Republican power players are embarking on this month. Maybe it can bubble up outside the Beltway — from swing-state governors like Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty, or reformists in deep-red states, like the much-touted Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Utah’s Jon Huntsman. But to succeed, such a faction will have to represent something legitimately new in right-of-center politics. It can’t sound like Rush Limbaugh — but it can’t sound like Arlen Specter either.

I welcome such an efflorescence of policy innovation among practicing politicians — much as I have welcomed it from practicing commentators like Ross and Reihan themselves. But I am pessimistic about the ability of Bold New Innovators to skirt a reckoning within the Republican party about how officially to manage the shifting intersection of public policy and sexual ethics. (For, as I have said elsewhere, the ‘culture war’ is almost exclusively a fight over sex as an ideal.) And one reason I am so pessimistic is that I am unsure how such Bold New Innovators are going to emerge organically from a party distracted by the real question about its identity.

But now let me reverse this pessimism by keying it to pessimism somewhere else. The Jack Kemps of the world did not rise up in the GOP because of an existential crisis brought on by Rockefeller Republicanism — though to be sure, a real struggle for primacy transpired on the right between the RRs and the supply-siders. The Kemps arose because the Democratic approach to political economy was a big loser. Some of this can be pinned on the RockRep stylings of Nixon and Ford, but the catharsis was Carter; and Carter meant a Republican landslide, not on account of the decisive defeat of Freak Power by Orthogonians Everywhere but because the political economy was crumbling and crumbling on a Dem’s Beltway-centric watch. Reagan did not win on a Law and Order platform. He won on the Anti-Declinist ticket, and Anti-Declinist in 1980 meant Anti-Government.

I say all this to suggest that the rise and success of the sort of innovationists Ross describes is almost entirely contingent (in my early view) on the failure of the ‘innovations’ currently underway at Obama HQ — carried out under our 21st-century version of a buck-stops-here motto, The Government: Too Big to Fail.

Remember, we’ve seen this movie before: the much-needed Republican version of neoliberalism was called, uh, neoconservatism, an uber-intellectual movement that started out hoping to cure the culture though the sheer power of smart innovation and wound up freaking out over just how willing people were to let a sea change in sex mores radically revise the basic premises of society, culture, politics, and economics alike. Neoliberalism, in fact, was largely an attempt by the sea-changers to get serious about technocracy: yes, here are some fatally narcissistic adulterers, but they’re wonky! They know stuff! About hard-to-pronounce foreign places and potentates, a-and health care! Neoliberalism — at least on the backs of the Harts and Clintons of the world — promised the old guard, first-wave neocons and all, a momentous, high-stakes bargain: cultural libertarians could do good government.

At its most pathological, this grand hope cashed out in the repellent proposition that being President is so hard, and a good President is therefore so hard to find, that trysts with the help are virtual perquisites, to be tacitly bestowed by a grateful nation. But at its most powerful, neoliberalism showed just how competent, efficient, and innovative a country of people with messed up personal lives can be — an important data point for anyone championing a condominium of wonkocracy and loose mores. Ultimately, the kind of mass fail the GOP needs to retain its most fundamental brand as the Party of Normal People involves a societal collapse of the neoliberal or liberaltarian project. But something rotten happened between the Clintonian ‘passing of the torch’ and the swearing-in of model family man Barack Obama: the Bush GOP revealed that apparently the forces of cultural libertarianism could only be held at bay in an avalanche of bad government.

This, of course, is a parody and profanation of first-wave neoconservatism in the worst way, but it is where we are today; and it is the toxic waste out of which any Neo-neoconservative innovator of the moderate, intellectual right will have to crawl.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Links

Blogs

Find Us

Contact