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Monday, April 25, 2011

Pressuring the Emerging Conventional Distinction of a "Fact-Based" Left Versus a "Culture-Based" Right

New York Magazine did a sort of "human interest" profile of Paul Krugman this weekend, which as is usual in instances of the genre did not generally hold much interest for me. The thing that lodged in my attention, oddly enough, ended up being a rather incidental quote from Ezra Klein, who declared that “liberals understand politics as a policy argument… On the right, there’s something of a cultural underlay to the worldview: We are the real Americans, and they are not. Liberals want to say, We are correct on the evidence, and they are not.” One hears variations of this observation all the time, actually, and it amounts by now to a fairly familiar refrain. Part of what strikes me in the comment is that though Klein, who surely identifies with the liberal side of the divide he is sketching, attributes a "cultural underlay" to the Right, while his mapping is itself a cultural one: one arraying a liberal "fact-based culture" against a right-wing "culture-war culture."

Further, it seems to me that what is most glaring in this familiar framing of the terrain is the way it elides, of all things, certain indispensable facts. It seems to me that the modern conservative movement emerged in the opposition to the implementation of the New Deal. If that is right (however over-simplified), two things deserve careful attention here: First, that the American right-wing was founded out of the loss of the argument on the merits that Klein thinks Liberals are still having. And, second, that ever since they lost that argument the American right-wing has actually been winning quite a lot of the time.

In a nutshell, I would say that the American Right since the New Deal has been the project to preserve plutocracy in the face of the evident superiority of a democratically responsive social insurance state by deceiving majorities to vote against their own interests or not to vote at all through cynical and deceptive campaigns of disinformation, disenfranchisement, demoralization, and derangement (almost invariably mobilizing race-hatred, sex-panic, or war-fever). I would add that this effort has been, in the main, flabbergastingly successful.

To the extent that Klein is correctly describing what both sides of the American political landscape imagine themselves to be doing, I notice that there would seem to be something importantly delusive in play in each camp: Liberalism in treating politics as debates over policy pretends that the triumph of administration is settled when clearly it is not, when clearly the "losing" side of that question immediately turned (as of course anybody should have expected them to do) to politics by other means whereupon they promptly began winning political debates as often as not. The Right, in turn, in treating politics as the cynical deception and manipulation of majorities in the service of incumbent-elite minorities pretends it can fool all of the people all of the time, when clearly it cannot, hence the painfully slow and convulsive vicissitudes in the accumulation of reforms in the rough direction of the democratically responsive social insurance state after all.

And now allow, if you will, the theory-head in me to dig a little deeper for a moment. As it happens, questions of fact are always grasped as such through a prior settlement indispensably indebted to a contestation of norms and values that are themselves anything but settled facts themselves. That is to say, what we attend to as the relevant facts of the matter in any question are always determined as such in light of what we take to be possible and important given what we think we know with confidence and what we think we share in the way of concerns. Given the extent to which the academic humanitarian left is ridiculed and excoriated by reactionaries and ignoramuses precisely for taking such pragmatic and pluralistic premises on board, it has often perplexed me when mouthpieces for the liberal left in America then take up as theirs the moniker of the "fact-based community" in ways that suggest too facile an understanding of the formation and force of factual descriptions as such.

(It should go without saying, but I fear it does not, that one can easily and comfortably accept the inescapable contingency of well-warranted statements of fact and the embeddedness of factual and administrative discourses in ultimately unresolvable normative concerns, while still supporting for perfectly good empirical and logical and consensus-aspiring reasons the verdicts of climate science, evolutionary biology, Keynesian macroeconomics, multilateral diplomacy, harm-reduction models of healthcare policy, and so on.)

If "fact-based" liberalism takes on an appropriately pragmatic understanding of the factual, then I must say I cannot understand why it would ever occur to it to distinguish its own basis in fact from the Right's basis in "culture" in the first place, why it would have been the least bit surprised -- let alone bested in debate after debate, for generation after generation -- by opportunistic mobilizations of "culture" by its opponents, why it would fail to notice that the deceptions of the Right, to the extent that they are deceptions, actually would have to involve a discourse based in understandings of fact (to be manipulated, deflected, covered up) quite as much as Liberals do after all, and so on.

To the extent that the cynical plutocrats of the post-FDR American Right have always hitherto depended on racism to distract majorities from supporting policies from which they would benefit ultimately and to the benefit of incumbent elites, it matters that the demographics of an ever more multiracial multicultural America are rendering this strategy unworkable (just think how different the history of the twentieth century would have been had the New Deal not been derailed by the successful Right-wing deployment of racism from the implementation of universal healthcare even before World War II). To the extent that the "market spontaneists" of the post-FDR American Right have always hitherto benefited from the stealthed central economic planning and welfare for the already rich denominated "The Defense Budget" (the military-industrial complex providing yet another fork in the road originating historically and thematically in the turn of the New Deal to the administration of a World War), it matters that the imperial construal of American armed forces and bases has been exposed by serial failures as an essential imposture to which the multipolar powers of the planet are increasingly indifferent.

These are facts, sure enough, as are the facts that peer-to-peer formations and climate change have shifted the normative and institutional terrain of the political onto a planetary field in which the verdict of the contest between democratizing and anti-democratizing forces is far less settled than it had seemed for a generation to be in the national and international terrain. For it is also a fact that despite all the foregoing, the triumph of anti-democratic elite-incumbent corporate-militarist norms and institutions has never been so nearly total in America than it is now.

If that plutocratic triumph is shaken up by demographic and military-industrial and ecological and networked realities so as to renew for a time the chances for democratizing politics here and now, and if American liberals would contribute their proper measure to that struggle, they must grasp a thing or two that I fear is too readily obscured in Klein's commonplace about the politics of the moment: For one thing, that theirs is a movement grounded no less profoundly and indispensably in the fraught mobilization of contingent cultural concerns than is the plutocratic movement of their opponents, and never more so than in those very moments in which Liberals appeal to matters of fact -- And to grasp as well, for another thing, the essentially and necessarily deceptive character of plutocratic politics in a world universally but only notionally devoted to democratic institutions, and that deception relies no less than consensus policy discourse does on a public, if secretive, understanding of facts.

6 comments:

jimf said...

> The thing that lodged in my attention, oddly enough, ended
> up being a rather incidental quote from Ezra Klein, who declared
> that “liberals understand politics as a policy argument… On
> the right, there’s something of a cultural underlay to the
> worldview: We are the real Americans, and they are not. Liberals
> want to say, We are correct on the evidence, and they are not.”
> One hears variations of this observation all the time, actually,
> and it amounts by now to a fairly familiar refrain.

Yes, of course. George Lakoff, for one, has been at pains to make this distinction.

"Enlightenment Reasoning says thought is conscious -- that you know what you think,
that reason is dispassionate, unemotional, logical, and literally fits the world;
that it is universal, that we all reason the same way; that it is abstract, that
it is directed toward self interest. It's all false - every part. . .
Enlightenment Reason leads you to think that if you tell people the truth they will
come to the right conclusion. . . Democratic leadership learned
Enlightenment Reason. . . The Conservative communication machine
is an overwhelming message machine. . . Democrats go for 'truth' and policies,
while Republicans talk about values. . . Ronald Reagan ran his campaign
on the basis of values, authenticity, identity. . . Republicans know that
if you keep repeating the same message people will believe it."

Etc. (From a summary of the contents of Lakoff videos at
http://cultureofempathy.com/References/Experts/George-Lakoff.htm ).

> It seems to me that the modern conservative movement emerged in the
> opposition to the implementation of the New Deal. If that is right
> (however over-simplified), . . . [then] the American right-wing was
> founded out of the loss of the argument [on social welfare].
> In a nutshell, I would say that the American Right since the New Deal
> has been the project to preserve plutocracy in the face of the evident
> superiority of a democratically responsive social insurance state by
> deceiving majorities to vote against their own interests. . .

That's only part of the story, of course.

After the Depression and the New Deal, many ordinary blue-
collar working-class people in this country were "Roosevelt Democrats".
This loyalty has been eroding for decades.

First there was the anticommunism whooped up by Joe McCarthy and
J. Edgar Hoover and other conservatives during the 50s, together with
the public's constant fear of The Bomb.

Then, the civil rights protests of the 60's (and the riots),
the youth rebellion (the antiwar movement,
and the drug culture, and the rejection of the 50s "clean cut" ideal --
the jeans, tie-dyed clothes, and long hair), the "women's lib"
movement, and the sexual revolution: all these alienated a lot of
the Democratic Party's traditional supporters, in spite of its
ostensible alliance with their apparent economic interests. I suppose
Archie Bunker of _All in the Family_ is the icon of such blue-collar
Democratic apostates, but his TV antics, however entertaining,
were themselves a condescending and insulting product
of the "left-wing intellectual" TV writers who create such
sitcoms.

And then of course in the 80s the most rabid and dangerous fundamentalist
evangelical Christians formed an unholy alliance with the Republican
Party with the avowed intention of bringing about a de facto
theocracy in the U.S. That's now a huge -- maybe the dominant --
component of politics in this country (otherwise, why would gays and abortion
loom so large?). [See Mel White's _Religion Gone Bad_
http://www.religiongonebad.com/ ].

And yes, of course all this reptile-brain stuff is ripe for
exploitation by the plutocrats.

jimf said...

And how's this for "culture based"?


"Remember when, how things were then,
how plain and simple?
When girls were girls and boys were boys,
and life was simple. . .

But now the cop no longer whistles on his beat.
We hurry home for we're afraid to walk the street. . .

Recall the time when one thin dime was really money?
When funny papers made us laugh ‘cause they were funny.
When life was grand in this sweet land of milk and honey. . .

We're longing for a simpler time that never was."

"Longings for a Simpler Time"
Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller
Peggy Lee, _Mirrors_, 1975



Republicans know how to mobilize that powerful sentiment,
to seem to promise a return to the world of childhood
verities.

Democrats want to change, perhaps destroy, that remembered
world.

Dale Carrico said...

I wrote: "[T]he American Right since the New Deal has been the project to preserve plutocracy in the face of the evident superiority of a democratically responsive social insurance state by deceiving majorities to vote against their own interests or not to vote at all through cynical and deceptive campaigns of disinformation, disenfranchisement, demoralization, and derangement (almost invariably mobilizing race-hatred, sex-panic, or war-fever)."

You added:

That's only part of the story, of course. After the Depression and the New Deal, many ordinary blue-
collar working-class people in this country were "Roosevelt Democrats".
This loyalty has been eroding for decades.


The examples of Red-baiting, hippy-punching, and Christian-Talibanism you go on to narrate were all very much already on my mind in that initial formulation, so I think we are already telling the same story.

I think it is important to grasp that actual authoritarian religionists, like actual billionaires, are small minorities of the population (both of them profoundly feudal in spirit, though different facets of that feudalism) -- even when they peddle themselves as Silent Majorities, or Moral Majorities, or Values Voters, or Real Americans -- and the Right plutocratic politics of manipulating majorities to dis-serve their interests to serve the elite-incumbent interests of minorities are still playing out whether the elite-incumbents happen to be moneyed minorities or priestly ones.

I agree with you that George Lakoff is okay, certainly his heart's in the right place, and his actually pragmatic recommendations about how to frame progressive debates are right more often than they are wrong, seems to me -- though I personally think his reliance on a strict father nurturing parent distinction actually presumes a heteronormative frame that isn't general enough to do the work he wants it to do and leads him too often into over-simplifications, and I also happen to think he wastes a whole hell of a lot of his time supplementing his fairly sensible progressive arguments with all this going on and on and on about how original and super-scientific his methodology is, much of which strikes me as rather ridiculous and completely contrary to purpose (especially given how much of what he is doing is just re-inventing a wheel called rhetoric that as a legible intellectual discipline predates writing).

Dale Carrico said...

why do gays and abortion
loom so large?


The anti-gay thing is a dead duck and it remains to be seen if the Teatard Jobs mandate cashing out instead in the ongoing festival of woman-hating legislation will play out as lethal over-reach when all is said and done. That story hasn't been written yet, seems to me.

Dale Carrico said...

How can you destroy what didn't factually exist? Also, isn't it factually true that plenty of Democrats have their own nostalgias (for one example, for an FDR Democratic Party that didn't actually play out in real time as it does in retrospect either, for another example, for a Summer of Love that had more than its share of white-racist patriarchal consumer capitalist narcissistic bullshit about it)? I am far from denying the reality of the Right's Culture-Wars, I am just pressuring any distinction of a fact-based Left and a Culture-War Right, in no small part out of my sense of the role of the cultural in the constitution of the factual, if we are to grasp aright what it is that yields the intuitive sense in such commonplace distinctions.

jimf said...

> How can you destroy what didn't factually exist?

Well, you can't, of course.

I was just paraphrasing the right-wing narrative, which
harnesses people's insecurity by portraying the left wing
as world wreckers. Goes back a long way, of course. ;->

"Mr. Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by
what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate
**bred** in a handbag, whether it had handles or not,
seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary
decencies of family life that remind one of the worst
excesses of the French Revolution. And I assume you know
what **that** unfortunate movement led to!"

And of course, if you believe in a foundational theory
of morality, and particularly if you believe that foundation
is God, then godless left-wingers cannot be trusted
not to destroy the foundations of human existence (as
the Devil no doubt intends ;-> ).

And speaking of God, you know that many Christian
theologians to **not** recognize the primacy of human
reason -- they think it's corrupt (like the rest of
the human condition) and a snare. Only revealed
truth, ungraspable in its totality by the merely
human mind, can be trusted.

That's all windfall stuff for Republican campaign
planners.