In my previous diary, "Fool's gold", I wrote about Paul Krugman's blog post from last week, "The War on Demand". After quoting a bit from Krugman's set-up, (shortened version):
.... it's becoming clear that many people don't so much disagree with the idea that demand matters as find it abhorrent, incomprehensible, or both. I fairly often get comments to the effect that I can't possibly believe what I'm saying about monetary or fiscal policy, that no sensible person could believe that printing money or engaging in deficit spending will increase output and employment - never mind that all I'm saying is what Econ 101 textbooks have been saying for the last 62 years.
So what's going on here?
I summarized:
Krugman went on to suggest three things: First, there's a basic inability to see how shortfalls in demand are even possible. Although Krugman doesn't realize it, this derives in part from arrested cognitive development, explicable in terms of Kegan's typology. Put simply, Level 3 thinking, in which the individual is the product of their social surround, cannot stand outside of itself, and comprehend the social system as a system. And that is what you must be able to do in order to understand shortfalls in demand. Second, there's a fixation on Strict Father monetary morality--although, again, Krugman doesn't explicitly discuss the Strict Father angle as such. Third, there's a failure of traditional Friedmanite monetarists to realize that they are "part of the problem" in they eyes of the newly-emergent demand-deniers.
In that diary, I focused on the first item, tying it to a Kegan-style analysis of the role of cognitive complexity. I had already discussed the issue of moral economic visions before. But now I want to talk about the relationship between the two.
You see, the problem with folks like Obama is not that they want to try to mediate between liberals and conservatives. After all, the central liberal values of tolerance and respect for individual conscience are heavily slanted toward favoring such mediation. No, the problem is that Obama wants to mediate on the lowest possible level of cognitive complexity--and conservatives, of course, just keep dragging that level down, down, down the dark ladder, as Joanie Mitchell would say.
In Kegan's typology, Level 4 corresponds with modernism, self-authorship, and ideology. It is the level at which the individual steps back from society and makes their own decisions about what is right and just--and takes responsibility for doing so. Level 3 is the level of traditionalism, where one simply accepts the social world as one finds it. These two levels correspond quite well to traditional liberalism and conservatism. And while it's certainly true that traditional society has liberal as well as conservative content to it (just read the Gospels, if you have any doubt), once one fastens on to autonomy as a central liberal value, it should be quite obvious that one cannot fairly ask a liberal to "compromise" with conservatives using a Level 3 framework that not only denies the value of autonomy, but that cannot even really grasp it.
Of course one could make a similar argument about the unfairness of asking conservatives to compromise with liberals using a Level 4 framework. As I discussed in "Fools gold", anyone operating at a lower level will be unable to really grasp crucial concepts that are central to the next-highest level.
Which is why, really, one simply can't accept conservatives as equal bargainers, mo matter how much one might want to. This does not, however, mean that one must reject paying any attention to them. It's simply that one can't grant them the sort of dominating and defining role that they naturally seek and assume, based on their Level 3 logic of defining the self in terms of society, and assuming that this justifies their view and their view alone as "right" and "natural".
As an example of what I'm driving at, consider the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, which Gingrich abolished when he became Speaker in 1995. The OTA provided an objective screening process to create a common foundation for policy discussions. And Gingrich just hated that--as well he should, raging egomaniacal narcissist that he is. And here we have to distinguish between two distinct strands of conservatism: the moderate conservatism of Edmund Burke and the reactionary conservatism of Joseph de Maistre....
"At a time when so many families are tightening their belts, he's going to make sure that the government continues to tighten its own," Obama said. "
We'll never know how differently the politics would have played if Obama, instead of systematically echoing and giving credibility to all the arguments of the people who want to destroy him, had actually stood up for a different economic philosophy. But we do know how his actual strategy has worked, and it hasn't been a success.
Krugman boils it down to its simple essence. But in order to fight it, we need all the insight we can get, which can get rather messy. I'm not going to try and do it all here. I'm only going to highlight one aspect. But in doing so, I hope to illustrate the importance of brining as much insight to bear as possible. Yes, there's a lack of principle, courage and will, as well as plain old common sense. There's not even a sense of poltical self-preservation, as Krugman himself points out.
But there's also an almost total lack of cognitive functioning. The content may be different, but as far as the formal processes are concerned, this is pure Tea Bag territory--reasoning by associative similiarity: You dress up like a Revolutionary soldier, and voila! the Founding Fathers are automatically your spokesmen! Obama's "reasoning" basically operates on the same level. This goes back to the appearance-based "sequential reasoning" that I first blogged about years ago in "Terri Schiavo: We're Too Smart!"
Sequential thinkers reason "by tracking the world," recognize regularities in sequences of events, but have no abstract understanding of cause and effect. The world they perceive is a world of appearances that has very little organization to it beyond the recurrence of sequences.
Linear thinkers understand cause and effect, limited to a one-direction, one-cause/one-effect model. The world they perceive has logical order and structure, but the structure is invariably hierarchical, causality flows top-down, and the world is divided neatly into cause and effect.
Systematic thinkers understand multi-faceted, multi-linear cause and effect, with mutual cause-and-effect relationships between different elements. The world they perceive is primarily a world of systems and relationships, rather than objects.
Equating the federal budget with family budgets is a classic example of sequential thinking. There is no logical reasoning involved here. There is simply an association between two things that superficially appear to be the same:
"The world they perceive is a world of appearances that has very little organization to it beyond the recurrence of sequences."
That perfectly describes the crazy world of John Boehner and the Tea Baggers last year. And the world of Barack Obama today.
Actually, Lind barely mentioned the particular historians, but he deftly summarized the thrust of their argument and its significance, and then for good measure placed it into the larger historical framework of how conservative intellectuals have repeatedly tried to deligitimize liberalism. I want to summarize briefly, and then argue that this understanding helps shed enormous light on how conservatives routinely operate, and how Obama's attempts to cope with them intellectual are both subservient, and doomed to failure.
I also want to underscore, from the beginning, that this provides a perfect example of how framing reflects a fundamental act of cognition, not just communication, and that for conservatives, far more often than not the cognitive act is intimately tied up in establishing dominance, a basic, primitive form of social mammalian behavior. See, for example, Meerkat Manor. The embededness of cognition in frameworks of purposive action is one of the deeper discoveries of cognitive linguistics (or, rather, re-discoveries, for those familiar with William James) that virtually never leaks through into political discussions of framing, but that has profound implications for big-picture understanding. For liberals, cognition tends to be embedded in a wider range of purposive activities, leading to a fundamentally more pluralistic diversity of intellectual enterprises.
First off, Lind lays out the basic framework behind Beck's pushing of the progressives-are-fascists meme--it comes from "dumbed-down versions of the history of the American center-left that originated with serious scholars on the American right.... including Harry Jaffa, Pestritto, Thomas G. West and Charles Kesler." They were all influenced by Leo Strauss, but Strauss is not the evil genius he's made out to be, or some such nonsense, according to Lind. (For once, I'll just let the little bit of crazy in almost every Lind column lie.) He explains:
In their version of Straussianism, the American Founders established universal human rights as the only legitimate foundation for government. The enemies of natural rights liberalism are historicists and relativists who argue that there are no absolute values and that good and evil vary in different times and places. In the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln defended the idea of universal values against historicist, relativist Southern slaveowners who dismissed the Declaration of Independence because it claimed "all men are created equal." In the 20th century, neoconservative hero Winston Churchill defended universal values against Nazi amoralism.
This is, of course, pure bunk. Universal human rights and slavery? Details, details....
Lind goes on to note that there's a germ of truth here:
In my earlier diary (parts 2 &3), I dealt with some specific examples in the news of how selectively conservatives employ and deploy notions of law and order. Here in part 3, I suggest a deeper explanation for why they so naturally embrace their chosen contradictions.
On Wednesday, In Tyranny for Dummies. digby wrote about the utter insanity of the current conservative superposition (it's a Schroedinger's Cat Thing, where the Constitution is both alive and dead at the same time!):
Next time someone in a tri-corner hat starts waving the constitution in your face, ask them about today's Senate Homeland Security hearings, where the conservatives had a complete fit at Mayor Michael Bloomberg's complaint that people on the terrorist watch list can buy any gun they like and there's nothing anyone can do about it --- while at the same time they all thoughtfully pondered whether or not we should strip them of their citizenship. I'm not kidding.
MSNBC covered the story this way, starting with the man who has been saying that we are terribly unsafe if Guantanamo prisoners are tried in America and that we need to have a many tiered system of justice in terrorism cases. Just don't let anyone see if terrorist suspects might be buying their weapons in America, because that would be unconstitutional:
Lindsay Graham: [speaking of restricting people on the terrorist watch list from buying automatic weapons] this is not going in the right direction because we're dealing with a constitutional right. And I am very concerned about the gaps in our defenses. But maybe I'm not making a good argument to you but it makes perfect sense to me that losing the ability to own a gun which is a constitutional right using this list the way it's constructed is unnerving at best.
Total intellectual incoherence is what's unnerving.
Andrea Mitchell and Kelly O'Donnell took it from there:
....
....O'Donnell:....These are really tough issue[s] because they go right to the heart of the constitution and right to current day events that have everyone on edge.
Yeah, they're tough alright because they don't make any fucking sense. You can't take away someone's right to own a gun if they are on the watch list, but you can take away their citizenship? Being accused of treason could lead you to lose your citizenship? What are these people smoking?
While Schroedinger's Cat is one way to look at this, there's another way I find just as appealing, if not moreso. This involves a blend of two different perspectives I've often used to understand differences between liberals and conservatives. One is the egalitarian/inegalitarian perspective, and the other is the cognitive developmetn perspective. Both these perspectives have a number of different variations to them, but I'll try to keep those variations in the background. What's important is that both these perspectives can tell us something important about liberalism and conservativism. In the first place, liberals tend to see people as basically equal.
This doesn't mean that eveyone is the same. But it does mean that how we are the same is more important than how we differ.
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?
The role of ideology keeps coming up again and again, often with people only barely recognizing it. And this seemed to be a moment crying out for some clarification. I'd like to start with a comment I wrote in response to comment by metamars. I wrote:
I Agree With Everything You Say Here
except for your bizarre insistence that "this has nothing to do with ideology":
I personally am not very ideological, so I don't look at this so much as "pushing Obama to the left". Rather, I look at this as saving the country from financial armegeddon, which will directly relate to the ability of the United States to lead the world to a greener, planet-saving future.
We can't afford to waste yet another 8 years, which could be well spent moving the planet to a sustainable future. To me, this has nothing to do with ideology. If the sea level is rising, water resources are getting stressed, arable farm land is being lost, and we are still hooked on burning hydrocarbons, 8 years from now, your ideology isn't going to make a fig of difference when it inevitably becomes your turn to suffer drought, lung cancer, hunger, and poverty.
The essence of ideology is how one parses the world--not just the physical world, but the moral and conceptual world as well. So the connections you make in this passage are your ideology made manifest.
This is a crucial point, deeply obscured by our history, and repeated mischaracterizations of ideology (typified by the trope, "I have ideas, you have an ideology!").
It's not just that they failed catastrophically the last two times they were tried in the last 100 years. There are fundamental reasons why conservative ideas CANNOT work. This diary briefly explains why.
Put simply, the GOP has basically had TWO ideas since 1932: (1) Kill the New Deal and anything related to it. (2) Promote Republicans as heroic saviors and attack Democrats as depraved traitors who hate America and are trying to destroy it.... All the other ideas Republicans have had since then have simply been tactical or strategic weaponry to advance those two basic ideas, split the Democratic base, shift blame, or otherwise gain political advantage, regardless of any real-world policy consequences. In short, Republican ideas revolve around the long-term struggle for political power, based on controlling political and quasi-political institutions, and thus controlling the political discourse.
I now want to go deeper into why conservative ideas cannot work. Without claiming to be exhaustive, I advance four main arguments:
(1) Conservative ideas cannot work, because they are faith-based, rather than reason and evidence/experience-based.
(2) Conservative ideas cannot work, because they are accepted-and liberal/progressive ideas are rejected-based on authoritarian obedience.
(3) Conservative ideas cannot work, because they are based on an objectively false model of the world, reflected in a false moral model for human action.
(4) Conservative ideas cannot work, because they are based on a limited level of causal connectedness, which is functionally inadequate to understand the world.
I will spell these out at somewhat greater length on the flip.
I've written repeatedly about Robert Kegan's developmental model of cognitive complexity, based on the earlier work of Piaget and Kohlberg. Among other things, it can provide a useful perspective on an aspect of debates about ideology. Kegan uses the term "ideology" in a very particular sense, which isn't necessarily the same thing we mean in talking about political ideologies, but it's a useful sense, nonetheless, and provides an angle of attack that illuminates some issues better than anything else I'm aware of.
Kegan's model seeks to explain common aspects of cognition across the entire range of areas studied--including reasoning about physical sciences (Piaget's forte), moral reasoning (Kohlberg), psychotherapy (Kegan's own area of expertise), and personality development (Erick Erickson), among others. It's essence is a common structural relationship connecting each successive developmental stage to the stage before: What is the background, subject or context of consciousness in one stage becomes the foreground, object or content of consciousness in the next.
Stage 3, which Kegan identifies with adulthood in a relatively static traditional society, has the social roles and relationships of that society as its background, subject or context. Other things identified as subject at this level include abstractions, inner states, subjectivity, and self-consciousness. At Stage 4, all of these become object-capable of being reflected upon and manipulated. Critically reflecting on abstractions as content requires a context of abstract systems, while reflecting on social roles and relationships as objects requires a context of self-authorship. Combined, these two produce an ideology (an abstract system of ideas) supporting personal autonomy (self-authorship)-otherwise known as liberalism. Only this last step is my own. All the rest is directly from Kegan.
When I was in college, I was obsessed with the first third of the twentieth century. It wasn't because I thought things were better back then-far from it. However, they did at least seem exciting and full of possibility: monarchists, communists, fascists, imperialists, anti-colonialist nationalism, and civil rights movements operated simultaneously in what was certainly the most diverse ideological mix the world has ever seen (the literature and art wasn't bad, either). Compared to the incredibly boring and corporate loving 1990's, it certainly was alluring.
Suddenly, he goes on, there are signs that we may be in for a bit of an ideological shakeup. Which raises the questions: what is ideological struggle, anyways? A minimalist answer, I think is fairly simple: it's a struggle over what sort of model to use in organizing society. Of course, in practice it gets rather messy, since each different model comes with its own set of assumptions that make side-by-side comparisons difficult, if not impossible. In his classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn advanced an historical argument that even in the refined rationalist realm of science, fundamental shifts from one model to another were in some sense trans-rational--competing models were incommensurable with one another, since they entailed different definitional frameworks that precluded straight-forward comparisons. Loosely speaking, we could think of them comprising different quotient spaces, dividing the world up in fundamentally different ways, as I discussed in my earlier diary, "Quotient Spaces In Politics".
Beyond the scientific realm, it gets much worse. For a true believer in the early-modern ideology of the divine right of kings, for example, anyone questioning the ideology was cast as an agent of Satan. That certainly puts a crimp in your attempts at comparative ideology. And, really, that's the way that most ideological struggle is carried out: true believers in one ideology cast all others as agents of evil, end of story. It's not about an intellectual exercise in model-building and testing, it's about quasi-religious belief. In a way, though, it's both. One key to understanding the past 40 years of American politics is that conservatives understand this in their bones, while liberals understand it not at all.
(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.
The series grew rather long, so I want to concentrate on its basic premise, why it is so, and why it matters to us right now. The bottom line of all this simple: there is no silver bullet. No matter how brilliant you think your idea is, even if you're absolutely right, it won't be enough to win the election. It's not silver bulletts, but systemic approaches that win elections, and beyond, build political power over time.
It's important to them [the American people] to know if Palin can handle herself in an environment that isn't controlled and sanitized by campaign image makers and message mavens. Maybe she can, maybe she can't. As far as Wallace is concerned, it's none of their -- or your -- business.
Remember back in the Dark Ages of mid-August when being able to give a good speech was grounds for being dismissed as unqualified?
Looks like McCain was right: we do have to catch up with history!
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.
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