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A couple of weeks ago, Michael Lind wrote very important column at Salon, "Glenn Beck's partisan historians: The academics behind the progressivism-as-fascism meme"
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:
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In the early 1900s, Woodrow Wilson and many members of the progressive movement, influenced by the German scholarship of the time, dismissed Enlightenment notions of natural rights, arguing that government was the product of historical evolution, not Lockean social contracts. Many progressives also disliked the checks and balances of America's 18th century Constitution and argued that a benign, technocratic administrative elite should be empowered to carry out economic planning and social engineering, including eugenics (a horrible fad that attracted many Fabian socialists, communists, feminists and conventional conservatives as well as fascists, before Nazi Germany discredited the idea).
A couple of things are worth noting here. First off, Lock's social contract theory was first and foremost a theory of moral legitimacy--a political mythos in contrast to the divine right of kings, not necessarily an historically grounded logos along the lines of what would later become the social sciences, particularly anthropology. Regardless of whatever social sciences may teach us, they all operate implicitly within a framework that is at least broadly Lockian--that social systems reflect consensual structuring by participants, however constrained they may be, rather than the pre-ordained nature of things as defined by an other-worldly God. To believe that social science can undermine Locke's central thrust is to fundamentally misunderstand the kind of core argument he was making. Of course, Locke himself was not always clear about this. But it's vitally important to realize that there are different sorts of intellectual enterprise which cannot simply be reduced to a single intellectual framework. This point was already made today in my diary "Framing is thinking, not just communicating: Oil spill/global warming edition".
Second, what Lind doesn't say--but that is a very important point to keep in mind--is that progressives gained power after the very differently-oriented Populists lost out in the election of 1896, and that "progressive" was itself a highly contested term even at the time, even claimed by the big-business backers of William McKinnley in that same fateful election--backers who despised the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, whom they tried to bury four years later in the backwater post of Vice President.
The Diversity of the Center-Left
This links very significantly with the very next point that Lind does make, quite forcefully: that although early 20th century progressivism feed into 20th century left politics in America, it was only one influence among many:
The Straussian conservatives are correct when they point out that many progressive intellectuals like Wilson rejected the 18th century ideas of natural rights and checks and balances as outmoded. The problem arises when these scholars, and their popularizers like Beck and Goldberg, treat all American liberalism and leftism from World War I until the 21st century as the continuation of early 20th century progressivism, the better to denounce today's liberalism as "historicist" and "relativist" and lump it with the Confederate and Nazi ideology. This ignores the profound differences between the Progressive movement and subsequent movements on the American center-left.
New Deal liberalism broke with progressivism in many if not most respects. Progressives wanted technocratic economic planning. By the 1940s, New Dealers dropped planning for Keynesianism. Most progressives were nativists who supported immigration restriction on ethnic or cultural grounds. New Deal liberals celebrated the melting pot and liberalized American immigration laws in the 1960s.
Wilson resegegrated Washington. Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security and Johnson created Medicare. Wilson opposed national health insurance....
What Lind says here (and afterward) is absolutely correct. But on a more fine-grained level, all these different strains tended to interact with one another in policy deliberations at different levels. There were plenty of Wilsonian planners left over in the New Deal, and although they never dominated, and eventually lost out to a more Keynsian approach, they did have influences that remained. In fact, programs such as agricultural price supports are clear remnants of the progressive planning tradition that have persisted under every administration in living memory-liberal, moderate or conservative. American liberalism has always been ideologically heterodox, driven a pragmatist logic that not only says "whatever works", but also that "alloys are generally stronger and more versatile" than pure metals are. This was also clearly reflected in the Warren Court, which had a clear liberal majority, but often had vigorous dissents by different sorts of liberals, as well as its more moderate or conservative members.
Although he doesn't use the word "projection", Lind goes on to point out how outmoded the Wilson-era characterization of liberalism is, and how much better it fits the right than the left:
The claim that modern American liberalism rejects the founding tradition of universal natural rights is particularly preposterous. What, if not the idea of universal, inalienable human rights, has been the basis of center-left campaigns for feminism, gay rights, reproductive choice, civil liberties and international human rights?
None of these movements has appealed to historical traditions or moral or cultural relativism. The historicists and relativists are to be found on the right, where, for example, same-sex marriage is denounced because it goes against "six thousand years" of tradition (historicism) or because it represents the imposition of the values of a liberal subculture on conservative subcultures with different values (cultural relativism).
Indeed, in 1999, I reviewed a book by conservative intellectual darling Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, which was entirely devoted to the idea that the left's devotion to universal justice was the root of almost all current political evil. This wasn't supposed to be an attack on the "universal rights" of the founders, but rather a contrasting of procedural justice vs. something else that Sowell never got around to defining. And yet, in practice, it turned out that he definitely was attacking universal rights, even when they were clearly procedural in nature (i.e. Miranda rights against self-incrimination). Here's the beginning of my review for Publishers Weekly:
One of the country's most respected conservative intellectuals, Sowell (Race and Culture, etc.) proclaims a need to clarify the notion of justice. He then hurriedly decrees an absolute dichotomy between "traditional justice"--purely procedural equal treatment--and "cosmic justice." Unfortunately, Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, never satisfactorily defines what he means by cosmic justice, using it as an elastic term. Sowell easily tears apart handpicked examples of ill-conceived cosmic justice while steering clear of serious engagement with opposing positions. Thus he attacks Supreme Court rulings such as Miranda as "attempts to seek cosmic justice in the courtroom," but it requires a much better argument than Sowell provides to see how Miranda is anything but procedural. He equates redistributive state policies with "Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot," as if Western European welfare states simply didn't exist.
As any student of Altemeyer's work on rightwing authoritarians will know, Sowell's hostility to universal rights for folks he doesn't like is entirely typical of authoritarians, who are disproportionately conservative--and all the moreso, the more engaged in politics they become. In short, the entire thesis is absurd.
Repetition Repetition
But the pattern of historical argumentation is surprisingly resiliant, as Lind goes on to note:
The Straussian-inspired denunciation of progressives as amoral historicists and relativists who have more in common with Jefferson Davis and Adolf Hitler than with Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill is simply the latest in a series of smear campaigns against the center-left launched by American conservatives with the help of the highbrow right. From generation to generation, the details of American conservative historical mythmaking change, but the underlying pattern remains the same.
Once upon a time, we are supposed to believe, there was a golden age in which everyone shared orthodox conservative beliefs. Then a wicked intellectual introduced heretical ideas, and the world went to hell in a handbasket.
For the conservative thinker Richard Weaver in "Ideas Have Consequences" (1948), the decline of Western civilization began with the triumph of William of Occam and the nominalist school of Catholic theology in the 14th century. For Irving Babbitt, who influenced T.S. Eliot and Russell Kirk, world history's greatest villain was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who spawned romanticism, which is responsible for all of the ills of the modern world.
Today's Straussian conservatives attribute the Fall to the influence of German Hegelianism on early 20th century American progressive intellectuals. The narrative of the expulsion from Eden is always the same, no matter when it is supposed to have occurred or what thinker is assigned the role of the snake.
All of these conservative interpretations of history share one thing in common: They ignore any material factors -- industrial revolutions, population growth, urbanization, geopolitics -- and treat American and world history as a Manichaean struggle of abstract philosophies.
In short, the real problem for conservatives is that the world changes. And as the world changes, the conservative elites of one era have to scramble like mad to stay on top in the next era. And if there's anything a conservative hates it's seeing their privileged position challenged in any way. Hence the vitriolic attacks framed in terms of existential battles of good vs. evil, even though the overall thrust of liberal ideas across the centuries has been more to mitigate and buffer the harshest consequences of often traumatic historical changes than to make them more difficult.
The problem for conservative ideologues is two-fold. First, such efforts do more to address the purported concern of conservatives--preserving cultural continuity and reducing social conflict--than anything on offer from conservative ideologues themselves. Second, such efforts tend to more or less ignore the narrow self-interest of conservative elites, which is the actual core purpose of conservative ideology.
No wonder they get so angry: liberalism's success means the jig is up.
Lessons Learned
Okay, so now what? What bigger lessons we don't already know can be gleaned from all the above? Some of what follows may not be new, but whether or not we've learned the lessons I'm about to discuss in theory, we certainly have not learned them in practice. And in politics, practice is pretty much all that matters. So here goes:
(1) Narratives matter. The conservative narratives are pure hokum. But people are wired to understand the world in terms of stories. And they aren't nearly so well wired to understand stories in terms of logical consistencies or contradictions. So "pure hokum" beats "no narrative" every time.
(2) Narratives naturally tend to revolve around individuals, hence stressing matters of individual character, personal good and evil, etc. They involve larger groups (up to and including the whole of society) only by extension and accretion. Hence conspiracy is the most natural way for them to deal with complex social phenomena that is actually too complex to understand in individual terms--just as the temperature of a substance is too complex to understand just in terms of the movement of individual molecules.
(3) Thus, narratives can take the place of classical ideology, understood as a coherent theory of the whole. Classical ideologies in this sense are level four phenomena in Kegan's typology of levels of cognitive development. They represent systematic abstract thought applied to the political sphere. Their most natural form--in light of Kegan's self/object structure at level four--is the historical core of liberalism: the autonomous individual consensually engaged in reshaping social practice through secular law, for secular ends. Narratives, in contrast, first arise at level two, but only as a series of occurrences (ask a child of certain age what a movie was about, and you'll hear what I mean). At level three, narratives acquire meaning and purpose, as well as the capacity to define reality (as in creation myths and the like).
(4) Conservatives use such narratives-in-the-place-of-classic-ideology strategically in hegemonic struggle to paper over their own internal contradictions, and to represent liberals as a monolithic other. They play a crucial role in Supreme Court nomination struggles, as we are now witnessing, and as I shall discuss in another diary later on today.
(5) The idea of a perfect past world lost is easier to grasp than the idea of a future perfect (or rather more perfect) world. The idea of how the perfect past was created can simply be ignored, or rendered in unrealistic cartoon form. But the task of creating a more perfect future requires realistic considerations: engagement and technical competence, rather than fantasy and escape.
(6) The idea of a perfect past world is made even easier to embrace with invocation of an all-knowing, all-powerful leadership. The perfect past and authoritarian leadership make up a natural pairing. In turn, the embrace of an all-knowing, all-powerful authoritarian leadership serves to help expunge all worrying doubts about things that just don't fit. This is further buttressed by own individual pasts: The imaginary perfect past is our own personal childhood writ large.
(7) The repeated and unchallenged invocation of the conservative narrative creates a purportedly "neutral" framework--such as "strict constructionism", defining any hint of "liberalism" as a dangerous deviation. The only safe way that liberalism can be invoked is by pretended adherence to the "neutral" framework, which is, of course, anything but nuetral.
(8) The purportedly "neutral" framework allegedly ensures fidelity to the founding purposes of the political and/or religious order, as defined by conservative narratives/myths.
In a followup diary, I will incorporate some of the above into my critique of the current Supreme Court nomination debate (or lack thereof). But it has a much broader applicability. In particular, it sheds light on how Glenn Beck and the tea-baggers can "organize" an incoherent and self-contradictory mass of often juvenile (if not infantile) complaints into something at least superficially resembling an ideological opposition proclaiming its pure-hearted patriotism in the same breath that it threatens sedition. And it also explains how Obama's centrist, pseudo-pragmatic rejection of "ideology" "on both sides" leaves him at the mercy of competing narratives, in which conservatives have an enormous home-field advantage.
If Obama himself actually were a progressive, firmly rooted in a level four understanding and dedicated to critical analysis of the problems confronting him and the nation, then he would be pursuing a far different set of strategies than he has chosen, based on a clear understanding of the objective perils we face as a nation. Instead, however, whatever his actual cognitive capacities, he operates at the level of competing level three narratives, a level that inherently disadvantages the natural strengths of level four critical thinking and classical ideological coherence, as well as the further level five strengths of post-modern meta-critical analysis. He has, in effect, surrendered the hegemonic high ground to the right, by choosing to exclude the engagement of critical thinking in the public sphere, except for the occasional set-piece demonstration, where he shows us all how smart he really is. |
