In my previous post, "Glenn Greenwald's Ron Paul Problem--And Ours", I argued that Glenn-following some very important lines of critical inquiry over the past few years-was predisposed not to reocgnize the troubling aspects of Ron Paul's candidacy that Dave Neiwart and Sara Robinson of Orcinus were particularly attuned to and familiar with. Glenn is focused on the rhetorical directness and simplicity of Paul's anti-Iraq War and anti-Imperialist/Imperial Presidency self-presentation. Neiwart and Robinson are focused on Paul's whole package, and the role he plays in the larger world of rightwing extremist influence on American politics.
In 2003, Neiwart-a professional journalist prior to taking up blogging-wrote a Koufax-winning series, Rush, Newspeak and Fascism. Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An exegesis [PDF] [Illustrated HTML], which dealt at length with the role of Limbaugh as a righwing demogagic propagandist, and in particular with his role as a transmitter of extremist views into the conservative mainstream. It is Neiwart's familiarity with this entire world-which he had previously covered from the ground up-that informs his views of Ron Paul as well.
Neiwert notes that Limbaugh's closest parallel is probably Father Coughlin, a virulently anti-Semetic radio personality of the 1920s and 30s, however:
Limbaugh, in contrast, has always carefully eschewed conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism. Through most of the first decade of his radio career, his primary shtick has been to rail against the government and its supposed takeover of our daily lives. This anti-government propaganda has served one main purpose: To drive a wedge between middle- and lower-class workers and the one entity that has the capability to protect them from the ravages of wealthy class warriors and swarms of corporate wolves.
Although quite different in many ways, there is a clear parallel between Limbaugh and Paul-both serve to repackage and mainstream extremist views that are highly damaging to the fate of workers whom they appeal to on cultural grounds. If anything, Paul has more openly embraced classic conspiricism than Limbaugh has.
So far, none of this has impressed (or even visibly registered on) Glenn. My purpose here is not to dig deeper into the material Dave has already uncovered. Rather, it is to sketch out a framework for how we ought to understand Paul's politics, and why the issues Dave and Sara raise are not secondary concerns which can simply be ignored because of the primacy of the Iraq War and Bush Administration lawlessness. The framework for doing this was also introduced in the previous diay-it is Benjamin Barber's analysis of ethno-relgious tribalism and corporate globalization in his book, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World. Barber argues that both forces, although ostensibly oppossed to one another, actually work synergistically to undermine democratic republicanism, the only truly viable way for people to democratically and collectively control the larger outlines of our collective destiny. Barber's analysis helps clarify why Paul's opposition to Bushism is, in the long run, more injurious to the progressive cause than it is helpful. That is the argument developed on the flip.
The seeds of Barber's book-length argument in Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World were laid out several years earlier in an Atlantic Monthly article, which begins thus:
March 1992 Atlantic Monthly
The two axial principles of our age-tribalism and globalism-clash at every point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy
by Benjamin R. Barber Jihad vs. McWorld
Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures-both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe-a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food-with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.
These two tendencies are sometimes visible in the same countries at the same instant: thus Yugoslavia, clamoring just recently to join the New Europe, is exploding into fragments; India is trying to live up to its reputation as the world's largest integral democracy while powerful new fundamentalist parties like the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, along with nationalist assassins, are imperiling its hard-won unity. States are breaking up or joining up: the Soviet Union has disappeared almost overnight, its parts forming new unions with one another or with like-minded nationalities in neighboring states. The old interwar national state based on territory and political sovereignty looks to be a mere transitional development.
The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without. They have one thing in common: neither offers much hope to citizens looking for practical ways to govern themselves democratically. If the global future is to pit Jihad's centrifugal whirlwind against McWorld's centripetal black hole, the outcome is unlikely to be democratic-or so I will argue.
In the book, Barber developed another important aspect to his argument-he described how the two seemingly antoginistic forces actually work together in various ways to undermine democracy. One obvious way is the tribalist use of globalist infrastructure. 9/11, anyone? But a more profound point is that by fighting one another so intensely, they both serve to drain support from the middle ground of democratic mediation. And this is precisely what we see in the case of Ron Paul: however anti-democratic he may be (strip the federal government of virtually all powers it has taken on since the 1890s), some progressives are taken in by the intense vehemence of his anti-globalist rhetoric, even though the laws he would do away with include anti-trust and food-and-drug laws. This is a mirror image of how Bush uses the threat of al Qaeda to push the international theft of Iraq's oil wealth as part and parcel of "democratizing" Iraq. The more extreme positions become on either side of the Jihad/McWorld divide, the more they empower further extremism on the other side.
Thus, while it is maddening to see the Democrats wimp out again and again in opposing Bush's multifaceted attacks on our democracy, it is a mistake to assume that Paul is automatically far superior simply because he is unapologetically outspoken. One has to consider (a) the full range of things he stands for and (b) how his positions would effect the entire system of political positions.
Cognitive Development Levels
What I am arguing for is a minimum of a Kegan Level 4 approach to politics. As I've argued before, Kegan's Level 4 is roughly equivalent to Shawn Rosenberg's "Systematic Thinking" in the following schema, where particular attention should be focused on the "sense of causality":
Table K-1.1 Rosenberg's 3-Level Typology Fundamentals & Application to Politics
Derived from Reason, Ideology and Politics, and Thomas Jordan's "Structures of Geopolitical Reasoning: Outline of a Constructive-Developmental Approach"
I. Fundamentals of Reasoning
Nature of Reasoning
1-Tracks objects. Reasoning is bound to the world as it appears. 2-Analyzes sequences of activity. 3-Juxtaposes relationships among actions and beliefs.
Sense of Causality
1- Largely absent: Events transpire, without much interpretation of how they come about. 2- Unidirectional: One factor acts upon another. 3- Bidirectional: Many factors act reciprocally on each other.
Conceptual Objects
1-Objects which currently are, or have been observed. 2-Concrete, observable actions, with concrete objects as subunits. 3-Relationships between actions and beliefs.
Conceptual Relations
1-Sequential order of events or a match between similar ones. 2-Subjectively defined unidirectional relationships. 3-Abstract, bidirectional relationships interposed between units.
II. Politics
Nature of Politics
1- Focuses on particular actors and present or very recent events 2- Considers causal relations and organizational structure, in unidirectional fashion. 3- Sees politics as regulated by collective rules, norms and expectations..
View of Political System
1- Concrete interactions. No sense of durable relationships, or a general context in which concrete events are situated. 2- Hierarchical structures where control flows from the top downwards. 3- A complex web of mutual relationships.
Political Players
1-Observed, concrete objects, each with its particular appearance and place in a sequence of events. No sense of them as subjects. 2-Subjects-individuals and groups-with internal drives and motivations who are the causes of action, and those targets of action whose activities are other-determined. 3-Systems of action and belief.
Nature of Political Actions
1- Specific, concrete, actually-observed speech and action within relatively short sequences of events. 2- Observable, concrete acts-whether or not actually observed-that occur in an ordered world of cause and effect. 3a-Genreal organizing forces that regulate specific interactive relationships and define the rules governing interrelationships between ideas. 3b-Particular interactions and propositions defined with regard to specific acts and general rules involved.
Systemic reasoning involves multiple causes and effects, including the circular causation found in feedback loops and catalytic interactions. This is the level at which Barber's analysis makes perfect sense: tribalists and globalizers don't consciously seek to empower one another, but such is often the unintended consequence of their actions, and when this occurs, it is often at the expense of democratic civil society. This is particularly true when the actions of each side drives the actions of the other, in a spiral of circular causation which each side drives, but neither controls.
Barber's analysis in Jihad vs. McWorld is supported by his earlier work in his magnum opus Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age and his more accessible later book, A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong. The former focuses primarily on updating concepts from classical republican theory in contrast with the libertarian-styled drift of post-New Deal liberalism. The later presents a three-fold typology of civil society, one based on an atomized libertarian view of society (Kegan Level 2, says me), a second based on a socially conservative institutional view of society (Kegan Level 3, says me), and a third based on Barber's concept of strong democracy, in which people take an active participatory role in shaping civil society, up to and including the creation of new organizations and structures to meet social and political needs that are not met by the existing order (Kegan Level 4, says me). It's no big leap to see the first form of civil society reflected in McWorld, the second form reflected in Jihad, and third form reflected in the democratic republican tradition that Barber sees as vital to preserving and extending the moral, social and political achievements of our Western democratic tradition over the past several centuries.
Of course, this is complicated by the fact that while Jihad is fought in the name of Level 3 traditional values, it is actually a much impoverished imitation of that which it claims to champion-just as libertarians represent a much impoverished imitation of the liberal tradition they pretend to champion. Which brings us back to the subject of Ron Paul. Paul's form of "constitutionalism" is really nothing quite so much as it is a form of nativist mythology that makes his project an American parallel to bin Laden's Islamic jihadism. It is an attempt to "purify" a "decadent" culture and return it to it's mythical (and historically non-existent) roots--which, after all, is not all that different from what George Bush promised to do under the banner of "compassionate conservatism" back in 1999/2000. And that will be the subject of my next post.
