We at Open Left are taking the New Year's weekend off. Golden Oldies will run in their place. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on January 4th--Chris Bowers
A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Sat Oct 06, 2007. Original HERE.
There's a rather far-flung concept in mathematics known as "duality." A few days ago it struck me how this concept can illuminate something very fundamental about the current state of American politics. It's a powerful, and far-reaching concept, but fortunately you don't have to grasp a great deal about it in order to get my point.
Generally speaking, dualities translate concepts, theorems or mathematical structures into other concepts, theorems or structures, in a one-to-one fashion. Duality is characteristically an involution operation: if the dual of A is B, then the dual of B is A. As involutions sometimes have fixed points, the dual of A is sometimes A itself.
Ohhhh-kay. Let's try bringing that down to Earth a little bit, shall we?
In mathematics, a dual graph of a given planar graph G has a vertex for each plane region of G, and an edge for each edge joining two neighboring regions. The term "dual" is used because this property is symmetric, meaning that if G is a dual of H, then H is a dual of G; in effect, these graphs come in pairs.
That may still sound like Greek to you, but it's a whole lot simpler when see it pictured like this:
See? Each blue vertex (dot) is alone within a plane region defined by red edges (lines), and visa versa. Each red line intersects one blue line, and visa versa.
In effect, the dual graph of G is sort of like turning G inside out.
So what's this got to do with politics? With Democrats and Republicans?
In my 2007 diary series, "The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem", I argued that Republicans were as sophisticated in the realm of political manuevering as Democrats were in reality-based policy analysis, and that Democrats were as clueless in in political manuevering as Republicans were in the reality-based policy world.
A couple of things have popped up recently to make me think this analysis is not only still valid, but that it reveals itself in a new wrinkle: while the Democrats are focusing on the need for massive efforts to clean up the countless messes that conservative governance has made, conservatives are zeroing in on prospects for screwing up stuff on the political process level, "big time," as America's #2 War Criminal would say. While the attempted scuttling of the auto industry bailout is an obvious example, a few more recent examples are what made me think of this, such as:
#1: At Calitics, Robert in Monterey focuses attention on a multi-pronged ploy surfacing in the WSJ, in "Prop 8 Supporters Launch Attack on Campaign Finance Disclosure Laws". Conservatives are always about blocking transparency, and Robert's got some sharp things to say about how this is being rolled out and where it could lead.
#2: Also at Calitics, dday's pre-Christmas Diary, "Budget Hell - Grassroots Reinforcements" has an update that mentions "three issues: 'rollback of environmental review for construction projects, greater use of private investment and contractors, and deeper spending cuts.'"
This diary combines two streams of thought. One comes from Chris's diary yesterday, "The Mutual Distrust Of Insider and Outside Rebellions", dealing with Obama's support among the foreign policy rank and file, the other comes from my ongoing series, "The Political Duality of Rep v. Dem" and its current sub-series "Questioning vs. Reinforcing Conventional Wisdom." I've already posted a diary ("The Elite/DFH Progressive Foreign Policy Split") more directly oriented to following up on Chris's discussion. This one seeks to draw on both streams.
I'm in basic agreement with Chris's view:
for the rank and file of professional, progressive foreign policy types who were opposed to the Iraq war from the start, the Obama campaign is the equivalent of the 2002 Nancy Pelosi leadership, 2003 Howard Dean presidential, and 2006 Ned Lamont Senate campaigns were for much of the activist rank and file. However, while this rebellion is analogous to those earlier rebellions of an anti-war rank and file against a pro-leadership, the cultural gap between wonks and hacks, between insiders and outsiders, and between professionals and the grassroots have prevented it from gaining the same traction as those earlier campaigns.
There is, however, something more that's missing. Quite simply, Obama is missing a counter-hegemonic position that challenges the "war on terror" narrative. He is not the leader here. Edwards was the leader in challenging the narrative frame, and Richardson was the leader in making a decisive commitment to withdraw from Iraq. This is not a minor matter. While the "war on terror" is a disastrous policy, one that does much more to help our enemies than ourselves, Democrats cannot run successfully against it without have an alternative vision-which they do not yet have. They have alternative strategies, but this is not the same thing.
On the flip, I go through a rapid-fire review of some examples in recent history of missed opportunities for challenging foreign policy hegemony at the level of vision, in order to give a better sense of what the missing elements might look like, and thus, what is needed.
In my last diary, I drew a distinction between "cultural hegemony" and "conventional wisdom", with reference to how they function in terms of Kegan's model of cognitive development:
Conventional wisdom can be thought of as the rationalization of specifc roles and relationsihps [things which define the Level 3 self], while hegemony is the rationalization of the entire level three subject of realm-the totality of all roles and relationships. The way that one moves from Level 3 to Level 4 is not by one big jump, but by gradually becoming aware of of specific roles and relationships-at first, only in specific situations, then gradually more generally, and finally as part of a larger structure that eventually encompasses all of Level 3-at which time you have evolved to full Level 4 consciousenss.
I'm now going to turn my attention to something that has a bit of the character of both--that is, the myth of the GOP as the "Daddy Party." I'm going to start with the more concrete, specific aspects of this, which are more in the way of conventional wisdom--that the GOP is the party of "real men," while the Democrats have nothing but "girly-men."
In one sense, this is a very broad notion, more on the order of hegemony. But when you see it specifically invoked, enacted or represented in various concrete instances, it is much more like conventional wisdom. Certainly, the idea that Bush--who ducked out on his National Guard service--was more of a man and more of a warrior than Kerry, who had gone to war and won a number of medals, was a very concrete piece of conventional wisdom.
Because the myth of the "Daddy Party" has this dual character, it is particularly useful to take on. What's more, it's very much in the news lately, with heightened attention to Hillary Clinton's gender, Obama's play to black homophobia, and increased attention to the military policy, Iraq and the "war on terror." I'm going to touch on some of these issues in future diaries, but in this diary, I want to focus specifically on the notion of "real men," and just how phony the Republicans are.
Last weekend, I did a couple of diaries about how Democrats could challenge the customary rules of the game without becoming "just like them." This was part of the longer series constrasting the policy ineptitude and political prowess of conservatives with the policy prowess and political ineptitude of liberals. I did this under the rubris of "'Breaking The Rules' To Fix The System." The first one used the example of Thoreau's civil disobedience (going to jail rather than helping to finance the Mexican-American War) as a touchstone, and considered how it might have been applied in response to the lawlessness of Bush v. Gore. The second one, looked at how impeachment could have been used to delegitimize Bush-and conservatism more generally-if removing Bush from office had been set aside from the beginning.
This weekend, I'm taking a doubly-related tack-talking about conventional wisdom. First, this is directly related to what I was suggesting should have been the primary purpose of impeachment proceeding, to delegitimate Bush and conservative rule. Second, I want to discuss how conventional wisdom functions as part of the Level 3 infrastructure that liberals and Democrats allow themselves to be trapped and defined by. The irony here is particularly deep, since the term "conventional wisdom" was originally coined by John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the great liberal public intellectuals of the last half of the 20th Century. He first recognized and articulated the concept, but over time it increasingly became a tool of conservative power. So we'll start with a brief look at some of Galbraith's ideas, and how they've been messed with, then we'll take a look at what it means today.
As part of my longer series, "Breaking the Rules" is intended to address the question of how liberals and Democrats can break the rules of "politics as usual" without beceoming "just like the Republicans."
Part 1 provided a first example: the model of a strike against the Supreme Court as a possible response to the Court's lawless ruling in Bush v. Gore. This was obviously a rather far-fetched example from a practical point of view, but it had the benefit of conceptual clarity, and close relationship with the classsic historical example of Thoreau's civil disobedience in going to jail, rather than paying taxes to support the Mexican-American War.
In this part I consider a much more realistic example: the use of impeachment proceedings to expose Bush Administration lawlessness and the moral bankruptcy of movement conservatism, but without the intention to remove him from office.
Using the impeachment process in this way is intended to accomplish a primary goal of impeachment--reigning in a lawless executive branch and re-establishing the system of checks and balances on which our democracy depends. It foregoes the means of removal for pragmatic reasons only: first, a Senate so politicized would never vote for impeachment, and second, the time needed for impeachment to run its course would leave the action largely moot.
By abjuring the purely political goal of removing the President (and, of course, Vice-President) from power, impeachment on these terms could also restore the proper solemnity and purpose to the mechanism of impeachment, which the conservatives have so thoroughly debased with their power-mad attempt to drive Clinton from office.
Such a strategy would be an utterly exemplary act of level 4 thinking in action. It would address a total breakdown in how level 3 roles and relationships are supposed to work, restore the functionality and reaffirm the underlying purpose while establishing a guiding autonomous framework of principle apart from those roles and relationships, capable of critiquing and revising them when they go off track.
This ongoing series is about grappling with a conundrum: Democrats are as incompetent with political process as Republicans are with policy.
A significant key to why this is so (though certainly not the whole story) lies in the realm of cognitive development: On policy matters, Republicans (now dominated by movement conservatives) cling to "traditional values"--the set of expectations and understandings that are generated out of the pre-existing social system--what I have referred to (following Robert Kegan) as "level 3" consciousness. While these expectations and understandings work reasonably well in traditional societies, where the pace of social change is slow and the force of pressures driving them is relatively modest, they are utterly inadequate when the roles and relationships of society are no longer adequate to guide social behavior--a shift that first became quite noticeable in Europe during the Italian Renaissance, when the trade-oriented Italian city-states developed vibrant, innovative societies sharply at odds with the land-based, tradition-bound feudal systems that dominated the rest of Europe. Among other things, these city-states revived the older form of Republican government, establishing a participatory framework for civic self-government in which all sectors of society had a voice.
The core innovations of liberal political theory--freedom of religion, and thereafter freedom of conscience more generally, a broad framework of individual rights, government based on the bottom-up consent of the governed (as opposed to top-down theocracy), separation of powers, etc., are all responses to the dynamic waves of change that successively swept over Europe, from the Renaissance, through the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution (which, finally, through generations of class struggle, brought the industrial working class into the status of full citizenship). Conservatives have gradually adapted to these innovations, which, ironically, actually have a stabilizing, conservative effect on the social system as a whole, but not before bitterly opposing them first.
What makes the past, 30+ year period of rightwing ascendancy different is that during this period liberals have come to identify with and support the status quo to an historically unusual extent, and conservatives have opposed it so thoroughly that they have adopted the same sort of tradition-breaking attitude toward political struggle that liberals have typically had toward political policy.
The result is what I refer to as the "political duality" of Rep and Dem: Democrats are oriented toward shaping policies in response to changing realities, rather than being dictated to by existing forms as defining limits, while Republicans are oriented toward shaping the political process in response to changing realities, rather than being dictated to by existing forms as defining limits. Thus, the Republicans ran an off-the-books foreign policy under Reagan/Bush (Iran/Contra) in defiance of Congress's power of the purse, they tried to establish a de facto parliamentary system of government under Gingrich when they took back Congress in 1994, they tried to force Clinton from office for personal conduct having nothing to do with "high crimes and misdemeanors," they stood the 14th Amendment on its head to steal the 2000 election, and they tried to demote Congress to a merely advisory role in the aftermath of 9/11 (the exact opposite of what they tried after winning Congress in 1994.
Democrats have been inhibited by a number of factors in fighting back effectively, not the least of which is the fear of "becoming just like them." This begins a sub-series of diaries devoted specifically to overcoming that fear. Key to this is the recognition that there are principled ways to reshape custom, as well as unprincipled ones. Indeed, as Thoreau taught us long ago, there are even principled ways to break the law. Knowing this is the very essence of what it means to transcend level 3.
With the Democratic Senate seemingly hell-bent on granting retroactive immunity to telcos that helped Bushco spy on Americans without a warrant, Chris Dodd stepped up to try and bring a halt to the madness by announcing a hold on the bill after it passed a committee vote. Then, Thursday afternoon, at Firedoglake, Jane wrote:
Well this is quite shocking:
Tim Starks of Congressional Quarterly reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) plans to bring the Senate's surveillance bill up for floor debate in mid-November. That's despite the hold that Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) plans to place on the measure - something first reported by Election Central's Greg Sargent.
I'm a bit confused here. This just doesn't happen. So I chatted with someone I know with extensive Hill experience, who said:
"I can't think of one time when Harry Reid went around his own. It's just not normal for a leader to do that to his own side. Sometimes you'll go around Republicans, sometimes they'll use holds to be "spoilers," but that happens to the other guy. You just don't do it to one of your own."
Consider what happened when Chris Dodd introduced the Emmet Till cold case bill, which called for more money for unsolved civil rights crimes. Tom Coburn put a hold on the bill - and Reid just let it go. The bill died.
Strange set of priorities you've got there, Senator Reid.
I hope Dodd fights this one like hell.
Outrageous as this is, it's a perfect illustration of a point I didn't quite make as emphatically as I had hoped to with a diary series [links below] I did two weekends ago: that Democrats are as bad on political process as Republicans are on policy in cognitively similar ways. And so I return to that task on the flip.
In this diary, I want to begin the the analysis of why and how liberals are constrained in their political actions in a manner directly parallel to how conservatives are constrained in their policy analysis.
I'm going to do so by taking yet another pass at a historical review of how we got here. What can I say? I'm a historical junkie. It's my mission to help counteract cultural and historical amnesia, America's national disease.
First I'll present a materialist run-though of the major forces involved and that will set up the point of entry for talking about how big lie fantasy conservatism made the scene, and how difficult it has been for liberals and democrats to adjust to it.
In my Part Two of this series, Why Conservatives Can't Govern, I argued that (a) the world is simply too complex for the Level 3 conservative mind [in Kegan's typology] to handle and (b) movement conservative political discourse often doesn't even rise to Level 2. This raises the obvious question: if they're so stupid, and we're so smart, then how come they're running everything?
The simple answer is: wealth and power. But a secondary answer is that they're not all stupid (besides which, cognitive complexity and intelligence are two different things).. In this diary, I'm going to lay some groundwork, and then begin discussing how the lens of cognitive complexity can illuminate why conservatives have been so much better at politicking, when they suck soooo bad at governing.
In The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem, I made the claim that Republicans and Democrats are inverted mirror reflections of one another:
(A) Democrats are reality-based when it comes to policies, and totally out to lunch when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.
(B) But Republicans are totally out to lunch when it comes to policies, and as reality-based as it gets when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.
And I argued that there is a deeper, more specific explanation for why this is so. To lay the groundwork for that argument, I spent most of the diary laying out two related schemas for understanding human cognition in a stage-like developmental framework, and I presented an initial argument that liberalism represented a generally more advanced way of thinking about the world. In this diary, I want to take one main example-the defining example of the "war on terror"-to flesh out that argument some more by showing how the "war on terror" is heavily dependent on a low level of cognitive development. I will add some comments at the end about several other issues as well, to give the flavor of how such an analyisis can be generalzied into other areas as well. Then, in the next diary, I will look at how liberals and Democrats tend to be as clueless about politics as conservatives are about governance.
There's a rather far-flung concept in mathematics known as "duality." A few days ago it struck me how this concept can illuminate something very fundamental about the current state of American politics. It's a powerful, and far-reaching concept, but fortunately you don't have to grasp a great deal about it in order to get my point.
Generally speaking, dualities translate concepts, theorems or mathematical structures into other concepts, theorems or structures, in a one-to-one fashion. Duality is characteristically an involution operation: if the dual of A is B, then the dual of B is A. As involutions sometimes have fixed points, the dual of A is sometimes A itself.
Ohhhh-kay. Let's try bringing that down to Earth a little bit, shall we?
In mathematics, a dual graph of a given planar graph G has a vertex for each plane region of G, and an edge for each edge joining two neighboring regions. The term "dual" is used because this property is symmetric, meaning that if G is a dual of H, then H is a dual of G; in effect, these graphs come in pairs.
That may still sound like Greek to you, but it's a whole lot simpler when see it pictured like this:
See? Each blue vertex (dot) is alone within a plane region defined by red edges (lines), and visa versa. Each red line intersects one blue line, and visa versa.
In effect, the dual graph of G is sort of like turning G inside out.
So what's this got to do with politics? With Democrats and Republicans?
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