( - promoted by Chris Bowers)
On Novermber 6, Glenn Greenwald wrote a diary, "The Ron Paul phenomenon", occassioned by Paul's feat of raising 4.2 million in 24 hours online.
In his second paragraph, Glenn wrote:
Regardless of how much attention the media pays, the explosion of support for the Paul campaign yesterday is much more than a one-time event. The Paul campaign is now a bona fide phenomenon of real significance, and it is difficult to see this as anything other than a very positive development.
It is, in fact, quite easy to see the Paul campaign as quite negative in several respects. For example: (1) It promotes rightwing conspiracy theories. (2) It provides organizing opportunities for racist and nativist hate groups. (3) It promotes emotionally satisfying, but simplistic political analyses that short-circuit development of more mature critical analyses. (4) It's a form of tribalism that, per Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World, works synergistically with the globalization it ostensibly opposses to undermine democratic republicanism, which is the one thing that can actually save us. Taking just those four aspects into account, the end result is that Paul's candidacy must be judged a mixed bag, at best. So far, however, Glenn has dug in his heels, refusing to address more than the surface of the objections raised about Paul. Although mistaken, in my view, Glenn's approach to Paul deserves serious reflection. It has a consistency with his overall work, which is grounded in his earlier career as a constitutional lawyer. He is thinking in terms of procedural fairness, and the attacks on Paul seem both unjust and fallacious-primarily in the way of guilt-by association. This individidualist/case-oriented approach differs significantly from the group/social historical approach that informs David Neiwart and Sara Robinson's work at Orcinus, which I referenced.
Thus, when I commented:
:
Not only is Ron Paul a rightwing nut, as others have noted (the most conservative member of the House, by the DW-Nominate scale, compared to Tancredo who fell short by 7, 13 and 16 slots in the 108th, 109th and 110th Congresses, respectively), he's a longtime magnet for the white supremacist fringe, and the rest of the hard right.
Glenn responded:
Paul Rosenberg:
I'm really uncomfortable with judging someone by the support they attract. When The NY Sun wanted to discredit Walt/Measheimer, they did it by asking David Duke if he agreed with their book, and when he said that he did, they published a big article about it, implying that Duke's agreement must mean the argument is racist.
And, of course, a lot of the money that has been donated to Clinton and Obama -- A LOT -- is from the largest corporations that many of their supporters blame for most of the nation's ills. Should Clinton or Obama be responsible for the actions of their corporate donors?
Paul is out there arguing against worldwide organizations as well as clearly oppposing our unbending support for Israel. That is going to attract some anti-semites and other assorted crazies and haters, but that is most assuredly not the same as saying that Paul himself is anti-semitic or hateful.
Connecting a candidate to the views of some of his supporters without more smacks a little of guilt by association (not say you're doing that), and I doubt any candidate is really immune to that sort of thing.
The only problem is that I wrote a good deal more than that single paragraph. I referenced some of the long-running commentary on Paul at Orcinus, among other things, and although Glenn has responded ("Ron Paul distortions and smears") to a more recent post by David at Orrinus ("Ron Paul's record in Congress"), he did so in an uncharacteristically superficial way, while ignoring another post altogether ("Ron Paul and his followers"), which went much more directly into the material that Greenwald was not examining, which details Paul's history of intentionally courting "anti-semites and other assorted crazies and haters."
There are, as I see it, at least two major factors at work here. One is a difference in fundamental operating orientation, the other is political orientation. On the flip, I begin the process of critiquing Glenn's analysis of Paujl, and what it leaves out, by explaining what I mean about these two factors.
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| Operating Orientation and Political Orientation
In this section, I aim to elucidate what I see as significant aspects of Glenn's approach that contribute to him under-appreciating severely negative aspects of Ron Paul's candidacy. The objections he raises are, I believe, misplaced, but they come from an orientation, and represent a set of concerns that are a valuable part of the critical intellectual mix on the internet. There are, however, shortcomings to Glenn's approach-as there always are to any approach-which are also strengths in other ways, but not in this particular instance.
Glenn is primarily a highly knowledgeable play-by-play commentator coming out of his background as a constitutional lawyer, and a relatively apolitical centrism prior to the Bush Administration's systematic attacks on the Constitution following 9/11 (as recounted in his book, How Would a Patriot Act.) From his perspective-expressed in that book.
As I wrote in my review of his book at My Left Wing:
As a Bush critic, the knee-jerk brigade has labeled Greenwald "a liberal"-a label he rejects. In his preface, he explains:I never voted for George W. Bush-or for any of his political opponents. I believed that voting was not particularly important. Our country, it
seemed to me, was essentially on the right track. Whether Democrats or Republicans held the White House or the majorities in Congress made only the most marginal difference. I held views on some matters that could be defined as conservative, views on others that seemed liberal. But I firmly believed that our democratic system of government was sufficiently insulated from any real abuse, by our Constitution and by the checks and balances afforded by having three separate but equal branches of government.
My primary political belief was that both parties were plagued by extremists who were equally dangerous and destructive, but that as long as neither extreme acquired real political power, our system would function smoothly and more or less tolerably. For that reason, although I always paid attention to political debates, I was never sufficiently moved to become engaged in the electoral process. In short, if Greenwald comes across as unyeilding in his criticism of Bush, it's not because he's a liberal-he's not. It's because-despite his legal sophistication, he was politically naive, an innocent. And his innocence has been lost.
In the book, Glenn devotes a great deal of attention to conservative crititicisms of the Bush Administration, particularly Antonin Scalia's dissent in Hamdi. This is central to his argument that the Bush Administration represents a radical departure from the historical mainstram of the American political tradition. In my review, I quoted the following passage from Glenn's book:
Justice Antonin Scalia, who usually sides with the Bush administration and is a longtime advocate of broad presidential powers, objected that the court's decision did not go far enough in finding the president's conduct towards Hamdi unconstitutional. Justice Scalia wrote a long and impassioned opinion making clear that the United States was founded upon a rebellion against exactly the powers asserted by President Bush-the power to imprison citizens with no charges based solely on the decree of the ruler-and that there is no more basic American value than the prohibition on citizens being imprisoned by their government based on a secret, monarchlike decree.
Scalia explained that other than in times of national emergency, when the U.S. Constitution allows Congress to suspend the right to challenge one's imprisonment (something that has not occurred since the Nineteenth Century), no elected official has the right to unilaterally and secretly order the imprisonment of American citizens without charging them with a crime. Scalia added that no U.S. citizen can ever be held as an "enemy combatant," because a citizen who is truly fighting a war against America can be charged with treason and given all due process to defend himself. As Scalia put it: "The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive."
However, in my review, I also note what I regard as an element of naivite in Glenn's centrism:
His preface sketches out his evolution from patriotic presidential supporter immediately after 9/11 to the uncompromising critic he has become. The doubts did not begin until May of 2002, when Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was arrested on American soil and publicly labeled "the dirty bomber," as the Bush Adminsitration government claimed the right to hold him indefinitely without charge and without access to a lawyer. I never imagined that such a thing could happen in modern America-that a president would claim the right to order American citizens imprisoned with no charges and without the right to a trial. In China, the former Soviet Union, Iran, and countless other countries, the government can literally abduct its citizens and imprison them without a trial. But that cannot happen in the United States-at least it never could before.... I developed an intense interest in the Padilla case. It represented a direct challenge to my foundational political views-that we can tolerate all sorts of political disputes on a range of issues, but we cannot tolerate attacks by the government on our constitutional framework and guaranteed liberties.
The sharp bifrucation between "all sorts of political disputes on a range of issues" and "attacks by the government on our constitutional framework and guaranteed liberties" is typical of a sort of naive centrism such as Greenwald professes. Many on the left would say that the struggle for constitutional guarantees is central to "all sorts of political disputes on a range of issues." The fact that Greenwald accepts this sharp division so matter-of-factly reflects the sort of complacency, one might even say, that typifies political centrism in America. That complacency is also evident in how long it took him to shift from being troubled, but still loyal, to being fully opposed.
The Search For "True Conservatives"
In February m 2006, Glenn asked, "Do Bush followers have a political ideology?", and went on to argue that Bush supporters are cultists who do not possess a political ideology, but instead use the terms "conservative" and "liberal" to identify members of the cult and those outside the cult, respectively;
It used to be the case that in order to be considered a "liberal" or someone "of the Left," one had to actually ascribe to liberal views on the important policy issues of the day - social spending, abortion, the death penalty, affirmative action, immigration, "judicial activism," hate speech laws, gay rights, utopian foreign policies, etc. etc. These days, to be a "liberal," such views are no longer necessary.
Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required - a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a "liberal," regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more "liberal" one is. Whether one is a "liberal" -- or, for that matter, a "conservative" -- is now no longer a function of one's actual political views, but is a function purely of one's personal loyalty to George Bush.
To sharpen his point, he went on to quote Andrew Sullivan:
OFF THE RESERVATION": Brent Bozell says I'm no "conservative." Label debates are silly. But I should say, for the record, that I favor the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been horrified by the incompetence of the occupation, but have been trying to make constructive arguments for how to win for quite a while now. Yes, I oppose the torture and abuse of military detainees. I'm a little stunned that this is now something that now requires one to be seen as a "liberal."
I support almost all of Bush's tax cuts (I support the estate tax) but also believe in balanced budgets and spending restraint (heretic!); I oppose affirmative action; I oppose hate crime laws; I respect John Kerry's military service; I believe all abortion is morally wrong and that Roe vs Wade was dreadful constitutional law (but I do favor legal first trimester abortions); I support states' rights, especially in social policy, such as marriage; I oppose the expansion of the welfare state, as in the Medicare prescription drug plan; I supported John Roberts' nomination and Sam Alito's; I believe in a firm separation of religion and politics, but I certainly take faith seriously and wrestle with my own. As regular readers know, I'm no fan of the far left. At some point, I have endorsed every single Republican president in my adult life.
All of that makes me a "liberal." Imagine what it now takes to be a "conservative" in Brent Bozell's eyes.
In response I wrote ("It's The Ideology, Smarty!"):
Glenn Greenwald wrote a dynamite post yesterday, "Do Bush followers have a political ideology?" His conclusion: No. They are cultists, nothing more.
I applaud everything about the post except for its conclusion. You see, cultism is their ideology. It's not an ideology as we commonly use or understand the term, but if we recall such doctrines as the Divine Right of Kings, or the Führerprinzip, we can see that it's not without historical parallels--frightening ones.
What's more, I went on to expand on that analysis and place it in a larger context in a series of posts, beginning with "Conservatism as identity politics-Some Introductory Remarks" in which I explained:
Thesis
Here's my thesis: Conservatism is a form (indeed the original form) of identity politics. It is expressed through multiple forms of political ideology based on justifying elite rule and the division of the human race into dualized classes (ideal and counter-ideal) in terms of some "natural" moral order.
Conservatism appears in various forms as the rationalizations and dualized classes shift over time, and in three distinct states of realization, reflecting different levels of development of the self. The overt rationalizations commonly mistaken for conservative ideology are, in fact, derivative phenomena-tertiary at best. The primary phenomena is the creation of a conservative identity, the subject of conservative political narratives. The secondary phenomena is the supporting ideology of superior and inferior groups, casting conservative identity as something to be preserved, promoted, and defended against the forces of evil, embodied in its demonized others. The primary and secondary phenomena are relatively constant over time, while the tertiary phenomena vary considerably.
NOTE: It's particularly important for this discussion to note that I am not questioning the sincerity of individual conservatives who may cling to the tertiary ideology of the day, month, year or decade. I am merely arguing that such ideologies are tertiary from a social science/historical perspective, and that we should not be surprised when evidence turns up that makes little or no sense if we were to take the tertiary ideology as primary. In fact, I have argued elsewhere on a number of occassions that there is a profound disonnect between what the majority of rank-and-file conservatives believe, and what movement conservatism stands for (destroying the welfare state, for example.) </NOTE>
In (apparently now lost) comments I made at this time at Glenn's blog, I referenced Phil Agre's essay (much-discussed at MyDD after the 2004 election), "What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?", which begins:
Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:
Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States...
At the time, Glenn dismissed Agre as a partisan hack. But within a year he had pretty much come around to my (if not explicitly Agre's) point of view. At least two things that Glenn himself commented on seemed to have isgnificant in his change of view over this sime: First, when conservatives finally did start abandoning Bush, due to his tanking polls, they suddenly discovered that Bush was not really a conservative-and never had been. Second, Glenn was quite impressed with John Dean's book, Conservatives Without Conscience, which he reviewed here.
Ron Paul's Place In All This
Seen against this background, the Ron Paul candidacy represents a resurgence in the idea that Bushism is an aberration in American conservatism, and that there is a broad spectrum political tradition opposing him, including "true conservatives." The problem with this position is not simply that "true conservatism" does not exist. The problem is also that Ron Paul is nothing new, and simply represents a recurrent phenomena by which conservatism in crisis renews itself by drawing on its fringe and appropriating patriotic language. In Ron Paul's case, it is his claim to be a "constitutionalist," a favored defense used by his supporters to ward off any and all criticisms. And, indeed, this is part of what Glenn finds so appealing about him:
Paul, of course, is not only in favor of immediate withdrawal from Iraq, but also emphatically opposes the crux of America's bipartisan foreign policy consensus. He reserves his greatest scorn for America's hegemonic rule of the world through superior military force, i.e., its acting as an empire in order to prop up its entangling alliances and enduring conflicts -- what George Washington lamented as "permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others."
And Paul is as vigilant a defender of America's constitutional freedoms -- and as faithful an observer of the constitutional limitations on government power designed to preserve those freedoms -- as any national political figure in some time. In one interview, Paul put it this way: As a matter of fact, if you look at every single problem we're facing today, it's because of the lack of respect for the rule of law and the Constitution.
What Glenn fails to appreciate is that Paul is simply articulating the standard conservative ideology of 1937/38. Like them, he is an isolationist-so rabidly so that he would denounce FDR as a war-mongering tyrant for wanting to stop Hitler. Also like them, he is utterly opposed to the welfare state, and idealizes 19th Century capitalism, staunchly refusing to acknowledge the reality of the Great Depression and its direct connection to his ideal. He decries as teasonous, socialistic and unconstitutional FDRs Hurculean efforts to save both capitalism (a threat exemplified on the world stage by the Soviet Union) and democracy (a threat exemplified by Nazi Germany).
Paul is not a conservative in one of the most plausible senses of the word-supporting the organic nature of existing society against radical restructuring. In this sense, Paul-every bit as much as Bush-is a stark raving anti-conservative. He wants to go back to a pure conservative past that never was, and he calls this "constitutionalism." But Paul's vision is no more "constitutionalism" than televangelists' mamon-worship is "Christianity." Like any textual fundamentalist, he simply reads his own beliefs into his sacred text, and then reads them back out again, denouncing as a heretic anyone who disagrees with him. A dead give-away in this regard is his claim, cited above that "if you look at every single problem we're facing today, it's because of the lack of respect for the rule of law and the Constitution." This is the exact same attitude that Christian fundamentalists take toward the Bible-a single solution for all the problems we face.
Perhaps the most fruitful way to situate Paul is within Benjamin Barber's framework in Jihad vs. McWorld. In that book, Barber argues that the mutually antagonistic forces of "free market" globalization and ethno-religious tribalism are actually mutually reinforcing, and that both together are deeply corrosive of what he calls "strong democracy"-also historically known as democratic republicanism (for example, the Democratic Party was originally known as the Democratic-Republican Party). Barber's perspective is so important for understanding the Ron Paul phenomena that it requires a separate post-which will be my next installment.
Conclusion
For now, however, I want to conclude by clearly underscoring the point of this diary. I believe that Glenn's perspective is an important one, although I believe it is mistaken. One cannot take any politician at face value-irrespective of quetions of sincerity. One must consider their statements in the larger context of their actions, and one must consider those actions in the larger historical context in which they were taken. While Glenn is correct to warn against invalid forms of reflexively rejecting what any politician has to say-including Ron Paul-he has failed to recognize the difference between an invalid guilt-by-association argument and a valid identification of a decades-long pattern of deliberately courting extremist supporters. Glenn is not a sloppy thinker, so the most logical explanation for why he has ignored this difference is that he has long been pre-occupied with dissecting patterns of political behavior that run at right angles to it, so to speak. His work in doing so has been extreme valuable, but in this instance it needs to be supplmented with a broader cultural/historical analysis, which David and Sara from Orcinus provide a good deal of. And that is what I have tried to begin elucidating in this post. My next post, utilizing Barber's analysis, will continue this process. |
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