It’s easy for me to choose my friends: My conversation style involves blurting out bizarre and enigmatic sentences, and anyone with the patience to put up with it is a friend of mine. (Call it "argument by spaghetti": throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.) Case in point, this scene from the Fuddruckers near the Chinatown metro in DC:
"The problem with the liberals is that they can’t do irony."
"The hell? They’re the ones who love it to death."
"It’s because they don’t understand loyalty."
Miraculously, my interlocutor knew me well enough to follow what I meant, but here’s a little elucidation. In the liberal understanding of loyalty, I am a Democrat (or whatever) exactly to the extent that I agree with their platform; if loyalty ever demanded that I do something contrary to my own opinion, that would be a violation of conscience. Consequently, I can never be ironic about a party, country, person, or institution I love: either I agree with them, in which case irony would be inappropriate, or I disagree, in which case I should voice my dissent in plain terms. Why put forward the pretense of allegiance when the best way to show my "loyalty" is straightforward criticism?
Irony exists in the space between what I believe and what I claim to believe, and liberalism destroys that space. If Obama has a sense of humor about his politics (not to mention his cult of personality), it goes to show that he wants to open that space back up and make the world safe once again for pragmatic idealists and idealistic pragmatists.
All of this is by way of saying that James said something interesting when he suggested that an ironic temperament "could be a twist on Rortyanism after all — with real humility forced into the private sphere and irony made its only permissible public surrogate ." James eyes this New Rortyianism with suspicion, but I’m pleased as Punch .
UPDATE: A relevant passage from Jim Scott in which he argues that poor people who’ve been brainwashed into really believing in their oppressors’ ideology are more likely to revolt than those who regard the enslaving ideology as manipulative bunk (i.e. false consciousness doesn’t prevent rebellion but, oddly enough, promotes it):
Contrary to the usual wisdom and to Gramsci’s analysis, radicalism may be less likely to arise among disadvantaged groups who fail to take the dominant ideology seriously than among those who, in Marxist terms, might be considered falsely conscious. In a perceptive study of working-class secondary school students in England, Paul Willis discovered a strong counterculture that produced a cynical distance from dominant platitudes but not radicalism. Paradoxically, it was the "conformists," who appeared, in form at least, to accept the values of the school (the hegemonic instrument par excellence in modern society), who posed the threat. Because they operated as if they accepted the implicity promise of the dominant ideology (If you work hard, obey authority, do well in school, and keep your nose clean you will advance by merit and have satisfying work) they made sacrifices of self-discipline and control and developed expectations that were usually betrayed. Employers preferred not to hire them because they were pushy and hard to deal with as compared with the more typical working-class youth, who were realistic, expected little, and put in a day of work without too much grumbling. The system may have most to fear from those subordiantes among whom the institutions of hegemony have been most successful.
