The Legacy of "Conservatism"

An interesting question: what now amid the wreckage can be seen as the legacy of "conservative" governance over the past 38 years (from the time of Reagan's ascendance) - what did it accomplish? The answer that begs to be spoken: not much. Or maybe: too much (destruction).

By standard measures the record looks poor. While the stock market is higher than it was in the 1980s, a good deal of its rise was the result of the fiscally responsible Clinton 90's. The national mood is about where it was at the end of Carter's term. Military morale is likely higher than it was when Reagan took office, but it's not soaring, and military families are bearing the huge brunt of our "war" against terror. More or less unlimited abortion remains the law of the land - though the actual numbers of abortions dropped during the Clinton presidency. Meanwhile, our culture is coarser, more baldly pornographic and replete with sarcasm. Most young people get their news from "The Daily Show" or the "Colbert Report." Many of America's major industries - banking, airlines, automobiles, and most of its manufacturing base - is catatonic. Oil prices - while they have dropped in anticipation of our descent into a new Depression - remain historically high, and will rise again when economic activity reasserts itself, since the fundamental story remains supply constraint and the growth of China and India. We import a far greater percentage of oil for domestic consumption now than when the "conservative era" began: approximately 28% in 1981, compared to 67% now. Recall that one of Ronald Reagan's first official acts upon assuming the Presidency was to tear down the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had had installed. The size of government has everywhere increased; the national deficit is larger than ever; our indebtedness to foreign nations is massive; housing foreclosures are rampant, housing values are plummeting, and people are more insecure than I've seen in my lifetime. We are on the verge of witnessing the largest government bailout of "private" industry in the nation's history, an act being urged by a "conservative" President and the barons of Wall Street.

But still - we will be told that THE great legacy of conservative governance, and Ronald Reagan especially, was the defeat of the Soviet Union. Well, yes. But really - did we win? For twenty years we have crowed about the fall of the Soviet Union, and it was right to celebrate its demise. But did their defeat really constitute our "victory?" The story is that Reagan defeated the Soviets by massively increasing defense spending, resulting in their effort to keep up and subsequent financial strains that could not be sustained. To achieve this end, Reagan increased spending without cutting significantly elsewhere in the budget, committing us to years of deficits that were momentarily brought under control by Clinton. At the same time, he abandoned Carter's commitment to make us energy independent from "foreign oil" (read: oil), setting up our current military engagements in that area of "vital national interests" - the Middle East. That money pit is draining billions of dollars from our national pockets, a legacy of what was once quaintly called "the peace dividend."

However, this narrative may not even be quite true, as I've written about previously. A number of analysts (some with solid conservative credentials) have argued that what actually defeated the Soviets was America's ability to persuade the Saudi's to flood the markets with oil, thereby leading the Soviet's resource-based economy to collapse. If so, this was likely a Pyhrric victory, since current constraints in Saudi production (accelerated by the overproduction in the 1980s) are helping to make those same natural gas and oil reserves in Russia immensely valuable. Their increasing wealth - dominated by a small cadre of strong nationalists - is supporting a reassertion of national power and international ambitions (e.g., their recent "deal" with Venezuela). They have proven that we can't do anything about their sphere of influence (Georgia) but that they can play in our backyard.

One thing is certain: the American century is officially over. It may be the Chinese or the Russian century, or the beginning of the second Dark Age. But yesterday we saw clearly that we've all been fiddling while America drowned.

What must Vlad be thinking as he watches America's financial collapse and its own descent into socialism? Perhaps he is reflecting on the vaunted Russian sense of history, its understanding that nations rise and fall, and that Russia was never to be counted out. Perhaps he is paging through old clippings of American leaders declaring victory, crowing about a "uni-polar" world, the "indispensable" nation, the new Rome (perhaps he smiles, "how fitting"). Regardless, from his perspective - and ours - one rightly wonders about the legacy of the rise of a peculiar "conservatism" that was defined by a kind of Emersonian optimism, financial profligacy, disregard of conservation, neglect of culture in the name of "freedom" and individualism, the dismantling of jobs done by hand, and a disregard of history. It is breathtaking to consider.

Peak Education

A few - very few - in the world of the university are beginning to catch on. Sheltered as (we think) we are from the slings and arrows of worldly fortune, most of us blithely work under the assumption that what matters most is how many times our names appear in the index of obscure books published by obscure academics, and not some fundamental material conditions that have led to the rise of the contemporary university in its current form. As I've written here in a post over a year and a half ago, the end of the era of cheap energy (and therefore cheap money) means the end of higher education as we have known it. Then I wrote, "An issue close to home to readers of this essay, as it were, will be significant implications and challenges for higher education. Elite institutions have increasingly embraced a role as global or cosmopolitan institutions. As globalization itself declines, these institutions will necessarily return to a more local identification, including their student bodies and even faculty. Cosmopolitanism as a governing philosophy will again be the fancies of slightly kooky philosophers [e.g., Diogenes]. However, before this happens, the era of ever-growing endowments will end, and with it, the growth of the modern University. Those institutions that survive will nevertheless shrink, and the educational objective will return to providing an education for the benefit of localities and regions rather than for a globalized economy. The land-grant institutions, in particular, will return to their original mission and will bear a special responsibility in re-educating a populace in the arts of farming and cultivation."

Right on schedule, someone else has noticed the "Great Downsizing" is underway. An article in today's "Inside Higher Education" bears the tidings that "the party's over" (this happens to be the title of a book by Richard Heinberg on Peak Oil, as well). Its author notes that all of the sources of monetary expansion that have driven growth of the university system over the past fifty-plus years are about to decrease - the ability to raise tuition; endowment growth through fundraising; reliance on public funds. He also notes that the fantastic growth through market investments is also going to slow to a standstill and even reverse for the foreseeable future.

The author, Timothy Burke, also rightly notes that this decrease in higher education's monetary base will also have tremendous implications on the role and mission of the university, though he wryly notes that "I'm not hearing a lot of preparation for what higher education will look like if growth is over." It's not just a matter of belt-tightening - "There’s a different mindset involved." Among these changes in thinking that will be required are reconsiderations about the reality of "growth" of knowledge creation, mostly a phantasm by which growth of disciplines and faculty, as well as increasingly specialized journals publishing unread articles, is a stand-in for actual "knowledge creation." The most important challenge we face - not only in academia, but throughout the nation - is to face the reality that the era of easy and thoughtless growth is over. After all, when something biological grows forever, we call it cancer. Burke writes, "I think the most important but subtle thing that has to happen is just that every stakeholder in academia is going to have to develop new mental habits, to stop assuming or believing that growth is the default. At least at selective institutions, I find that in everyday conversation about curricular questions, administrative choices, and so on, the assumption of growth or plenitude is deeply ingrained."

While this essay is on the mark on many points, what is remarkable is how "deeply ingrained" reigning assumptions are even in the mind of this insightful author. He fails to mention, even in passing, that "the end of growth" will mean a fundamental re-thinking of the current mission of the university (notice how difficult it is for him to forswear the language of "progress"). He fails to connect the reality that this will impose on university budgets and research assumptions with how and what we will have to teach our students in the future. Most of us are incapable of entertaining the idea that growth will cease, and thus we're wholly unprepared to live in a world where that fact reigns. As Wendell Berry asked 2007's graduating class at Bellarmine College, oops, University (another grandiose term we'll have to downsize), "What more than you have so far learned will you need to know in order to live at home? (I don’t mean 'home' as a house for sale.) If you decide, or if you are required by circumstances, to live all your life in one place, what will you need to know about it and about yourself? At present our economy and society are founded on the assumption that energy will always be unlimited and cheap; but what will you have to learn to live in a world in which energy is limited and expensive? What will you have to know – and know how to do – when your community can no longer be supplied by cheap transportation? Will you be satisfied to live in a world owned or controlled by a few great corporations? If not, would you consider the alternative: self-employment in a small local enterprise owned by you, offering honest goods or services to your neighbors and responsible stewardship to your community?"

There is tremendous upside to this confrontation with limits, itself a salutary lesson that was once at the heart of a liberal arts education. How much healthier for us all if we released some of the pressure from the higher education balloon, returning it to its role and function as the place where civic elites and the intellectual classes received a decent training in the liberal arts, classic works of literature and art, and the arts of responsibility that are the hallmark of those privileged with the gift of higher education? How much better if admission to a few elite schools weren't interpreted to signify success or failure in the global sweepstakes to join the roving corporate class of itinerant vandals? How much better for our children (and ourselves) if they had a proper perspective on the benefits of a university education, viewing it rightly as the time and place for refinement and learning, not the capstone on a young lifetime of resume padding?

We, the adults, the grown ups, the teachers and leaders as a whole, are woefully ill-equipped to prepare our students for a world in which they will have less growth, less wealth, and less "upward mobility" than recent generations. We view such a prospect as a horrible civilizational failure, rather than as an opportunity to live with dignity closer to home, exploiting the world less and fostering communities and ways of life where memory and care begin to reassert themselves. We are unprepared to return to a curriculum that transmits a culture that has at its core the recognition of limits, care, and fidelity, rather than the wholly thoughtless rejection of culture in the name of "growth." Thus, because we refuse - are incapable - of recognizing the future we are entering, we are above all ill-prepared to equip our students for the great challenge and promise of this future, a future that most teachers will enter bitterly and grudgingly, viewing this time as one of failure and tragedy, a grand betrayal of everything they believed in. Essays such as this one may become more common in coming years, but until we face the real question of how we will begin to prepare our young to live in an age of growth's end, we will fail our students as surely as we have failed to educate ourselves.

Debating

I put words in McCain's and Obama's mouths over at the Culture 11 website. In it, implicitly I suggest that McCain should play to his strengths - using analogies of military self-sacrifice and his correctness about the "Surge" - to speak with authority about the economic crisis. Also - quite implausibly - I suggest that he should issue a national call for self-reflection about our own complicity in the crisis, and devote a McCain presidency to restoring virtues of frugality and self-governance. Unlikely, from a man who taunted Obama for suggesting that we could save gas by properly inflating our tires. Obama was right, and more generally, should have been praised for recommending ways that changes in our personal behavior can have significant public benefits.

By contrast, I suggest (again, implicitly) that Obama must overcome his greatest weakness - his inability to connect to "Red" America, or Reagan Democrats. I offer a bit of red meat populism, a call for an economy that rewards the lower and middle class, not the wealthiest, and an effort to paint these commitments as the most fundamental form of "traditional values." Obama began his campaign by an attempt to appeal to "values voters" and the Left swooned, but the fact is, he has never succeeded in attracting them (they seem to like the female candidates this year). He will likely win the election by default against a cratering economy and a clueless McCain, but his inability to draw these voters to his side intimates that he will be a one-term President unless he can build an electoral base that goes beyond easily-disillusioned and distracted college students.

Progressivism

The high priest of American progressivism was John Dewey. Dewey remains revered in education theory, as well as (increasingly) in Departments of Philosophy, Religion, and Political Science. He is admired for his rejection of doctrines or belief in unchanging Truths, of arguments based upon objective and unchangeable criteria. Rather, as a proponent of "pragmatism," Dewey sought to show that human interaction with the world and one another constantly altered each, leaving us constantly in the position of having to adjust our own approach to circumstances with the willingness of scientific experimentation.

Deep in the backdrop of his progressivism - necessarily - is a theory of progress. A theory of progress posits that some vanguard of civilization is necessarily more advanced than others - normally those who are open to the pragmatic approach and have overcome their antiquated adherence to a belief in unchanging truths. In this regard, Dewey shares fundamental progressive commitments and beliefs with the likes of Marx, Mill, and many contemporary liberal thinkers (e.g., Rawls). In its baldest moments, the basic presuppositions of this progressivism are revealed in all their boldness, and no amount of hedging and excuse-giving can circumvent this fact. In particular, such progressivism is based on two basic and abhorrent presuppositions: 1. the backwardness of "savages" (or, if you like, substitute "savage" with the term "people from small towns" or even "Wasilla" for a contemporary shorthand); and 2. a belief in the malleability (or, one of Dewey's favorite words, "plasticity") of the world, and hence justification of human mastery of nature and circumstance. To wit:

"Why does a savage group perpetuate savagery, and a civilized group civilization...? In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause, of their backward institutions. Their social activities are such as to restrict their objects of attention and interest, and hence to limit the stimuli to mental development. Even as regards the objects that come within the scope of attention and interest, and hence to limit the stimuli to mental development. Even as regards the objects that come within the scope of attention, primitive social customs tend to arrest observation and imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the mind. Lack of control of natural forces means that a scant number of natural objects enter into associated behavior. Only a small number of natural resources are utilized and they are not worked for what they are worth. The advance of civilization means that a larger number of natural forces and objects have been transformed into instrumentalities of action, into means for securing ends....

"A savage tribe manages to live on a desert plain. It adapts itself. But its adaptation involves a maximum of accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are [e.g., babies conceived with Down's syndrome?], a maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of active control, of subjection to use. A civilized people enters upon the scene. It adapts itself. It introduces irrigation; it searches the world for plants and animals that will flourish under such conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those which are growing there. As a consequence, th wilderness blossoms as a rose. The savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has habits which transform the environment."

These passages are drawn from Dewey's book Democracy and Education. They form, at heart, the basic presuppositions of much of modern education, especially modern higher education. For all the claims to embrace "environmentalism" that one hears today on college campuses, the basic presupposition is that we can exercise our technology to be green - that we can invent devices and methods that will allow us to be "green" on autopilot. Behind these fantasies is still the dream of control and mastery - the very opposite of an attitude of "accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are ... and a minimum of active control, of subjection to use."

And, one sees a continuity between Dewey's time and our own of the view of a world divided between the "civilized" and the "savage." Belief in this division underlies the visceral dismissiveness and condescension exhibited towards the likes of Sarah Palin. Nothing is more horrifying than the prospect of the backward and uneducated - the "savage" - disrupting the dreams of progress. If McCain is disliked, Palin is abhorred, for precisely this reason. We should see this hatred for what it is - not simply the prospects of electoral defeat, but a clash of worldviews that pits the self-styled agents of civilization against the recidivism of the savage.

Whack a Mole

The Fed and Treasury's massive and unprecedented bailout of the financial industry has given momentary respite to the American economic system, but the assumption of over a trillion dollars in new public debt has now raised the specter of national insolvency and runaway inflation. The economy is still in decline and the only way that the government will "pay" for these bad loans is by printing money. Accordingly, the price of gold has jumped in the past week from the mid-$700's per ounce to $910, including a $45 per ounce jump today alone. The dollar has fallen over 2% against the Euro, meaning that we are effectively poorer relative to the world economy. In the meantime, oil has returned to being an alternative to the U.S. dollar - combined with the belief that an economy that doesn't outright collapse will again return absorb all available oil production - resulting in a rise in the price of oil as high as $23 to $127 bbl. Having prevented one crisis, we are fueling (no pun intended) the next crisis, particularly a reinflation of commodity prices and a corresponding drop in the purchasing power of Americans. Pick your poison - insolvency through financial collapse or commodity inflation.

While the drop in oil prices was interpreted by many as a passing of the insanity and the harbinger of a return to modest gas prices of previous decades, the fact remains that the long-term trend in oil prices is up - and way up. An article on today's Fortune/CNN website discusses oil investor and 2001 Cheney Energy Commission member Matthew Simmons educated view on the matter, who foresees a not-too-distant price of $500 bbl. If we think the economy is in danger of imploding due to bad debt, we ain't seen nothing yet. And, unlike our current situation, where salvation can come from overworking of government printing presses, there's no government program imaginable that can come up with a way to replace rapidly decreasing quantities of oil. Our military can expect to be working overtime - more than ever - to secure what overseas oil reserves are still underground, while we lazily and heedlessly continue our happy motoring paradise blithely unaware of the coming day when we won't be able to afford to fill our tanks with worthless dollars. Neither of our Presidential candidates dare speak the truth about this issue to the American electorate, with the one candidate who claims "country first" telling us that our future energy policy will be "drill, baby, drill" and the other candidate delusively pandering to the eco-Left by promising that we can run our military-industrial civilization on diffused sunlight and french fry oil. Neither is willing to level with the public that we have to change our behavior, because each knows that such a suggestion is the sure path to electoral defeat. Simmons, on the other hand - having no public office in his future - tells it like it has to be:

Simmons believes that a radical change in the way we live is inevitable. "We should basically be going back to creating a village economy, so that we really reduce the energy intensity of how we live," he says. "We need bigtime conservation, not feel-good conservation. Make things where they're used. You'll end long-distance commuting, and we have the tools to do that now with webcams. Grow food locally. Grow food in your backyard. If they're not commuting, people will have time to do that.

A democracy that cannot govern itself is arguably not a democracy at all, which makes the craven appeals that mark each candidate in the upcoming election less a symbol and accomplishment of our self-sovereignty than an indication of our enslavement to appetites over which we have no control. This latter condition was defined by the ancients as a condition of servitude, not liberty. Our leaders fear to tell us the truth, but their fear of electoral defeat pales in comparison to our unwillingness to level with ourselves.

Stick a Fork in Him

In the wake of the economic news, polls have tightened, but the most telling indicator of the direction of the election is the decline of PDS, "Palin Derangement Syndrome." The media has lost interest in playing "gotcha" because they largely realize that not only does Sarah not know anything about the current economic situation, but neither do they. Economic events have sucked all the air out of the room, and while many will complain that Obama does not have a great handle on the economic situation, it's above all clear that McCain is completely lost. His game plan - to crow about Iraq and scare us a bit about Iran - is in the dumpster. He has already admitted he doesn't know anything about the economy, and it's clear that this admission was the straightest talk we've gotten from him in quite some time.

Sarah's brief spot in the bright white glare and the bump in the polls that she induced did show that the path to Republican victory largely remains where it has been since the days of Nixon (read Pearlstein's Nixonland for some insight here): stoking resentments of lower- and middle-class white voters in the heartland against the eggheads in the big cities. Frankly, the eggheads walked clumsily and willingly right into the trap that McCain had set for them by naming Palin, showing that the strategy had legs (no pun intended). Deriding small town losers who believe in God and shoot guns is not the best strategy when you're trying to win a few counties in western Pennsylvania and southern Ohio. However, it's clear that other than stoking resentment, the Republican well is empty and the Democratic well is at least half full. It will be enough to win the election, if barely. While the Democrats will celebrate a victory, smarter heads should worry why it was so close in the first place.

A question remains: can either party move beyond either its Politics of Resentment or its Politics of Condescension? One of "my students," Matthew Sitman, has written a very fine essay on the need for conservatives to move beyond the narrow and caustic prejudices that often motivate the Politics of Resentment. The Left needs its own Sitman to encourage its better angels to move beyond the Politics of Condescension (a new Christopher Lasch, frankly). I predict that whichever party is able to do this in a genuine way will put together a winning coalition that will have legs for a good while. Obama will win mainly because he's not a Republican. That will not be enough to give any staying power to the Democratic coalition. To do so, Obama will either need to resist all his basic instincts and impulses to talk down to bitter people who cling to guns and religion, or the Democrats will have to come up with a better gameplan and a different candidate (Jim Webb, anyone?). The Republicans - perhaps blessed with some years in the wilderness - may have the benefit of thinking their way forward without the burden of ruling during some very challenging times. They have good talent in the minor league system with Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, Yuval Levin, crunchies, and the likes of Matt Sitman, and some good potential younger candidates like Palin and Jindal. I don't see any corresponding strength in the Democratic minor league system - particulary in moving past the Politics of Condescension. Still, at the moment there is a populace without a Party. Game on.

It's All About YOU

Just in case there was any confusion, childbearing and childrearing is an act of personal expression. This is part of the inherent logic of extreme forms of liberal and libertarian autonomy, one which justifies marriage as a personal lifestyle choice (and thus fully disassociated from its communal and temporal dimensions, especially childbearing) and now tells us that childbearing itself is an expression of personal fashion. So writes Nicholas Provenzo on the website "Rule of Reason" where he asserts (condemning Sarah Palin for her choice to bear a child with Down's syndrome, a child she should have aborted):

that opportunity for challenge [of raising a child with Down's syndrome] is little more than a lifetime of endless burden. In this light, it is completely legitimate for a woman to look at the circumstances of her life and decide that having a child with Down syndrome (or any child for that matter) is not an obligation that she can accept. After all, the choice to have a child is a profoundly selfish choice; that is, a choice that is an expression of the parent's personal desire to create new life.

Viewing childbearing as "a profoundly selfish choice" tells us nearly everything we need to know about why birth rates in the "advanced" Western world has dropped below replacement rates. After all, how can anyone who simultaneously views children as a "burden" and a "selfish choice" really justify having children at all? That would be an illogical imposition on one's personal autonomy, after all - an unbearable burden.

Further - a point that comes out clearly in Provenzo's argument - the assumption that such a momentous obligation to the future and other human beings represents "a selfish choice" underlies the fundamental eugenicist assumptions at the root of this worldview. When we undertake any choice - including bearing children - for reasons of personal self-satisfaction, then like any consumer choice, we want the nicest fashion accessory possible. If choice dominates our calculus, then reasonably it should extend to exactly the kind of baby that I WANT. It's my selfish choice, after all. Thus, today according to Provenzo it's immoral and obscene to knowingly bear a child with Down's syndrome. Tomorrow it will be immoral and obscene to bear a child who will be short, who will have brown hair, who will not have the finest genetic package that money can buy. Gattaca meets Children of Men. Those with such "imperfections" will at times wish they had been aborted in a world in which they will be only good enough for a thrift store, a "seconds" sale, or the island of misfit toys. Anyone who doubts the return of a new eugenics needs only to read, and understand, the implications of arguments such as this.

Political Philosophy in the Details

With recent Fed and Treasury interventions to bail out the entire U.S. market, we can begin to see more clearly a fundamental truth about our economic and political system. It hides in plain view.

This crisis has revealed that our "free market" system is wholly skewed toward one object: growth and mastery. It is not a fundamentally free market, which presumably would be allowed to fall when conditions demanded. By absorbing the bad loans on the books of countless financial institutions, we have now officially revealed the basic philosophy of our economic system: privatized gain and socialized loss. By suspending short selling (betting AGAINST the market) it has been plainly revealed that the official stance toward our market system is to encouragement of increase. Neither the market nor the government are neutral about ends - as liberal theory purports to argue. Rather, THE fundamental end of human life under liberalism becomes economic growth, increase, and mastery of nature and circumstance.

A fundamental premise of liberalism itself stands revealed this week. Liberalism is a theory which holds that unleashed self-interest is a predictable driver of human behavior and can be harnessed to ensure stable political institutions and dynamic economic activity. Because it unleashes such dynamic activity, it allows for - indeed, encourages - massive differentiation of material conditions within society. Aristotle, for instance, and Aquinas following him, argued against such extremes of wealth and poverty in the name of commonweal. More fundamentally, Aristotle and Aquinas alike argued against unleashed self-interest inasmuch as its free rein led to the deformation of the human soul - a form of enslavement to the desires. Among its most pernicious effects was the incitement of envy and its cousin resentment (remember, the seven deadly sins? Dante wrote of envy that it was "love of one's own good perverted to a desire to deprive other men of theirs"). The founders of liberalism were sufficiently informed by the Christian tradition (in spite of their heterodoxy) to know that envy was a great challenge for a society defined by unleashed self-interest. Their answer was ingenious: envy could be minimized by the prospect of universal economic growth and increased overall gain. Locke sought to remind his readers that even a "day laborer" was immensely more wealthy than the richest Indian king in the Americas. A dynamic economic system reduced resentment by promising increase even to the poorest. A rising tide raises all boats, one might say, but more importantly, a rising tide renders resentments politically tractable.

Thus, liberalism prides itself on its neutrality to human ends and goods - purportedly. It claims that it cannot pronounce a preference for certain ends, and insists that it must remain neutral between competing claims about the good - whether religious, social, moral, etc. What this week's episode throws into relief, however, is that liberalism is NOT fundamentally neutral about ends, for what it seeks above all is the promotion of economic growth and material pursuit as the main activity of human activity. It can afford to be neutral about ends because by emphasizing that one end - growth and material gain - it effectively demotes all other ends. However, it tempts social and political turmoil by unleashing greed and envy, and controls them NOT by arguments for their temperance (as would the ancients and Christians), but by the structural promise of universal societal increase. Liberalism's raison d'etre is thus most fundamentally threatened when those conditions do not apply - when the pie shrinks and the society faces decrease. Liberal societies have almost always fallen apart under such conditions (witness Weimar, and the temptations to fascism and socialism during the Depression). Thus, in the midst of an election season when Pelosi and Reid and Paulson might not otherwise want to be seen together under any circumstance, the fact that they appear together reveals the deepest point of agreement in a society seemingly riven with political and philosophical differences. On this point - mastery, growth and increase - there can be no difference. Not merely a finger on the scales, but rather the heavy hand of government will weigh in as extensively as possible to forestall decrease. Correspondingly, no party of the government will call for virtue and restraint as a possible solution, since that would contradict the fundamental wellspring of human behavior necessary for increase and dominion (in a wholly ham-handed and inadequate way, Joe Biden came close, justifying a tax increase as a form of patriotism, but only one to be borne by the wealthy - thus implicitly suggesting that the poor and middle class were to be motivated by patriotism's opposite, self-seeking, since they are promised tax cuts). This week some of our most basic commitments have been revealed, though we are wont to miss them if we mistake them as mere "policy" and fail to see a more fundamental philosophy underlying public and private actions.

How to Set New Highs on the Dow

Here's a recipe for success:

Remove AIG from the Dow 30. Add Kraft Foods. Stir.

If the Dow were still composed of its original dozen companies, its average would be hovering around zero - since most of its original companies no longer exist, and those that do are moribund. The only company from the original index still doing any work in the index is General Electric. Ironically, though, the original Dow was composed mainly of companies that produced commodities. Once America stopped producing things, the Dow had to change - and thus the current thirty stocks of the index include roughly a third that are devoted to finance or information technology - industries that don't actually produce anything. The addition of Kraft Foods - and particularly as a replacement for a financial company - is striking as a revealing throwback to the days of yore. What it reveals is a prediction on the part of the Dow Jones company that stuff will matter again - above all, food. While Kraft Foods is a massive producer and packager of industrial foods (once part of Philip Morris), it's still a good bet that its addition will help the Dow index rise in the future - since food is not going out of style in the way that derivatives are, and is only likely to rise in price in the future as we will once again discover that our biggest problem is not the disappearance of money, but the disappearance of the money-creator, petroleum. Thinking about it, including Kraft Foods in the Dow 30 is really like adding another oil company, given the that its "food" is really oil. So, it's a good bet that the index will go up and up.

Abstraction

Nearly every explanation of our current financial crisis eventually settles on the claim that the problem is most fundamentally due to housing. Our housing sector was floated on cheap money and bad loans, and as defaults increased a financial house of cards began tumbling down.

While it's certainly true that the most visible cause of this unraveling is attributable to the collapse of housing prices and mortgage defaults, reflection suggests that the root cause is deeper still: it lies in a culture of abstraction. At nearly every level this financial collapse was precipitated by transforming reality into abstraction, unmooring grounded commitments and obligations and fostering new patterns of fantastical behavior throughout the populace.

It begins with an altered perception of one's abode. A rootless people - abstracted from particular places and settled patterns of life - perceive their abodes as investments, as notional assets that are packaged and bartered. In the 1980s and 90's - at the height of the American build-out into the exurban wasteland, the transformation of farmland into cul-de-sacs, six-lane feeder roads and blighted vistas of strip malls and box stores - a generation of people clung to the advice of Martha Stewart on how to create a country home with both peasant and aristocratic touches by means of purchasing bedding and paint colors at K-Mart. Houses in developments called "Hunter's Glen" and "Meadow Run" - built usually by destroying whatever the development was named after, as Kunstler wryly has pointed out - were built in a faux Victorian or classical style, using materials that wouldn't likely last 25 years without need for replacement. Designed for indoor living, with professional kitchens in which little cooking was done and separate living spaces for every member of the family, these cookie-cutter houses were paeans to a domestic idyll that was crushed under a reality of abstraction. Far-flung commutes, deadening institutionalized public school days bookended by chaotic bus rides, a younger generation that lacked meaningful interaction with adults who were not paid to be with them, lives that could not be lived without large streams of electronically supplied entertainment and "news" (increasingly indistinguishable), and frequent automobile drives to places that supplied essentials and detritus of life at the end of worldwide supply lines fueled by decreasing quantities of petroleum were the hallmarks of our disconnection with everyone and everything. This is what we called "home." The abstraction of this existence was further supported by words that had lost their meaning.

Their houses were purchased with loans that were immediately shipped out of their "communities," appearing as electronic 1s and 0s on a 23-year old broker's screen who sliced and diced them until they were bundled into a variety of derivatives (the word itself suggests its greater abstraction) and sold to "investors" overseas who recombined and flipped them again.

Most of these "homeowners" worked in distant "office parks" (another combination of words abstracted from meaning) where their daily activity bore no relation to anything in their immediate surroundings. Local and regional differences had long ago ceased to have any bearing on their financial or economic fortunes - they were part of a globalized system that made them more interested in the closing price of the Nikkei than the local rainfall. They were more apt to have an interest in the atrocities in Darfur or the hurricanes forming off the coast of Africa than the impoverished areas of the city into which they commuted, and out of which they gladly left each night. Their children were up to date on the latest computer games and unlikely to know anything about the local history or traditions of their area, since that had been obscured or rendered irrelevant, and in all likelihood it was a place into which they had moved and from which they would depart when a new "opportunity" came along.

We inhabit a world which we have made obscure to ourselves. The height of our civilization has been to render the world unknown to us. The modern project seeking the conquest of nature has resulted in the imperative that we become ignorant. We know much, but little of substance or based in the reality of the existence we inhabit. We are distant from where, what, and who we are.

Homes were replaced with interchangeable houses. Neighborhoods were abandoned for exurbs. Actual work was outsourced and replaced by jobs in "information technology." Local banks were eaten by conglomerates and mortgages became hedge funds. Things ceased to bear any real relation in a proper order and proportion.

As the media (more abstraction) seeks to expose what caused the financial crisis, we are advised to consider the cause that will go unexplored: the abstraction of our lives in an abstracted world. A world of homes, paid for with work, passed on to generations, embedded in communities, sustained by practices and memory and by fidelity and trust, based in faith in and faithfulness to a created world that we did not create and a Creator who wishes for us to know this creation (and not to abstract ourselves from it), is a world where at least the failure of some investment banks far away in New York is not all that interesting. The rainfall, the harvest, whether the birds are beginning to fly south, the passing on of one's culture and history to one's children, and the recollection of those who have died - but still live in one's midst - is what matters, or ought to matter, far more.

Unraveling

The failure of Lehman Brothers today was the first instance that the public treasury was not used to "backstop" a large financial player since this crisis rose to public awareness in summer 2007. The market was allowed to do the work that its proponents demand most loudly when its trend is upward. Today the market plunged over 500 points out of fear that the entire financial system would unravel. The fear is not that several thousand people at Lehman will be out of work; rather, the fear is that numerous financial institutions that held Lehman-backed securities will in turn face the prospect of failure. While banks have been failing at increasing rates, it's possible we have only seen the beginning of a wave of failures. There is the prospect that numerous money market funds will begin to "break the buck." [Update - the first money market fund with Lehman connections fell below a dollar today, September 16. I don't think it will be the last]. With the financial system locked up, there will be little money for mortgages and a corresponding further drop in housing prices as desperate sellers compete for fewer eligible buyers. Cash is king - if cash is understood to be gold. Gold rose $25 an ounce today, among the only asset classes to rise amid the turmoil.

A complex set of phenomena led to today's rout - a rout that has been building for years, and which erupted today only because the market was finally forced to face a reality without taxpayer dollars to cushion the blow. An unsustainable accumulation of debt, overleverage by consumers and financiers, a bubble in housing and shoddy lending practices, stresses in the system that were exacerbated by high energy prices, rising inflation and rising unemployment. In a day, billions of dollars ceased to exist - 900 billion by one estimate on the front page of today's Washington Post. Those notional dollars are no longer. The nation is considerably poorer.

One can see a longer narrative that goes to the heart of our loss of self-governance as a democratic republic. Following the Civil War and truly taking flight in the 20th-century, the American industrial era produced vast amounts of wealth that would had been unimaginable to countless previous generations. Built to a great extent on plentiful natural resources - particularly American and then international oil - the rise of the Dow traces the growth of this American and increasingly international wealth to its peak in October, 2007.



The rise of American wealth was premised on the strength of its industrial production through the 1970s. Until that time, American workers participated in the growing wealth of the nation, giving rise to a comfortable and growing middle class. From that base of widespread wealth arose the belief - at least for a time - that poverty could be eliminated from the world. That moment in the nation's history witnessed the growing belief in actual human autonomy, exemplified in the 1960's aspiration to thoroughgoing liberation and in formalized in law in 1973. The period of the late 1960's until the 1970's was simultaneously the moment of the nation's greatest wealth and the end of an era. In 1971 the nation began producing less oil than in the previous year, a trend that was geological destiny. At the moment of America's most optimistic belief in its financial invincibility - even to the point of transforming the world and all human relationships within it - was the same moment when the nation began its long descent into moral and financial impoverishment.

With its growing reliance on "foreign oil" (a phrase that never fails to amuse me, since it smuggles in the implicit self-deception that denies what we really mean is just "oil"), the nation began a long and sustained overseas transfer of its century-old accumulated wealth. Rather than cutting back - as Jimmy Carter recommended in 1979, the one conservative speech that may have been given in the past 30 years, subsequently called the "malaise speech" - we were ready for a fairy tale. Rather than facing the limits of our domestic wealth and the corresponding need to exercise self-governance over our appetites, we readily grasped at the fairy tale that Ronald Reagan weaved, telling us that it was "morning in America" even as he plunged the nation into massive debt while setting a tone that sanctioned personal indebtedness and generational myopia at the same time. Everyone, regardless of political belief, called this "conservatism." Words had already lost their meaning.

Still, the nation was awash in dollars that needed employment. Without actually producing national wealth anymore, the post-70's era saw the rise of a series of bubble economies. From M&A and junk bond bubbles of the 1980s to the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, the nation's perception of wealth creation became unmoored from reality - perception and belief, not things of value, became the sources of investment wealth. Take, for instance, the "dot-com" bubble: its promise lay in a new form of advertising. In the end, enthusiasm ran high in the belief that consumers would be encouraged to consume more via a new electronic medium. The wealth that would allow this greater consumption? Winning from their sale of dot.com stock portfolios and the greater abuse of credit cards. It was an economy based on pure fantasy, and reality eventually intervened as the bubble popped.

The vulture began to feed on itself, and - in these years of worldwide peak oil - wealth began to be "created" by money itself. The logic of capitalism came full circle: money unleashed the power of money. A larger and larger portion of the American market were financial firms who conjured money out of money. The market made money from itself - meaning that its so-called wealth was increasingly a fiction.





Resembling a grandiose Ponzi scheme, a new last person had to be sought who would hold the bag of debt. The American "consumer" - already tapped out - was encouraged to take on further debt based on the prospect of ever-increasing housing values. A frenzy of borrowing and lending became the national pastime, to the point that one could not attend a barbeque or cocktail party without hearing about someone's daily increase in home equity. Anyone who could drag their debt-ridden overweight carcass across a lender's threshold was given a loan to buy a house in the belief that housing values could never fall. Bank and brokerage firms saw their stocks rise based on the amount of debt that they generated: absence was mistaken for substance, belief was confused with worth.

Tonight, as I scan channels and read explanations online, numberless narratives look for someone to blame. George W. Bush. Predatory lenders. A craven government that refused to regulate. Big corporations. Big government. Someone. Anyone.

We refuse to consider our own complicity. We started "paying" for things using credit cards. We demanded everyday low prices, and assented to the American military to secure a firesale on the goods of the earth. We began misusing language, like calling fantasy equity sources our "homes." Lemming-like we threw our children into the maw of a meritocratic meat-grinder, desperately seeking to ensure their successful corporate future by enrolling them in the best pre-schools - convinced that only an entry-level job at Lehman Brothers insured a successful life.

The symptoms were countless. The source was a loss of self-government, lodged most deeply in the fantasy that something could be gotten for nothing. If the fantasy continues to unravel - as every indication now suggests - we may re-enter a reality-based world. We will be poorer, but perhaps not in spirit. We may begin to value well and aright. While the world quakes tonight in the fear of plunging values, in that impending fall I see the inklings of a phoenix in the ashes that may arise and illuminate a fundamental truth: things of actual value - whether crafted by human hand or born of human relationships - are the products of work, memory, care, and fidelity. Dazzled by fantasy, we have been blinded to this truth, but a dimming of New York's neon glare may yet make this reality newly visible and even beautiful to behold.

My Googleganger

Yes, "googleganger" - yet another new contribution to the English language that this ubiquitous company has generated.

Given that Patrick Deneen is likely to be on the U.S. Olympic ski team, it's probably not too soon to point out that while I have been known to put on some skis, I'm not THIS good.

Though, perhaps any confusion of identity might be beneficial for my reputation. Probably not his, however.

I wish my googleganger well!


Patrick Deneen 08 Nor-Am and World Cup Competition Runs

Dissonance

Last night I happened to catch Sarah's arrival in Fairbanks, Alaska - covered with breathless expectation by CNN (has there ever been a VICE-Presidential candidate whose arrival by plane has been awaited with such expectation?). She gave what appeared to be an extemporaneous talk (maybe - there were teleprompters, of course) in which she gushed enthusiasm to be back in Alaska, spoke fervently about electing McCain, and used a few lines from "the Speech" now with less freshness. The one policy area she DID talk about was energy: namely, that a McCain administration would pursue nuclear (ah me, she actually said Nucylar, I think), renewable energy, and yes, would "drill, baby, drill." She did have the virtue of arguing that increasing domestic sources was a matter of national security, a point that should be stressed constantly in the shadow of several wars we have fought in recent years in the Middle East.

It was a brief appearance, but what struck me was here, on the eve of the attacks of 9/11, there was no actual mention of sacrifice that such a vital matter of national security might require from the American people. She - no more than McCain - has mentioned, much less stressed, the word sacrifice with any regularity. Coming out of a convention devoted to the theme "country first," what little policy tidbits we are now being fed by the Republicans is that we don't have to change our behavior one single bit. In spite of being in a war - a war that was started as a result of attacks on our mainland seven years ago today - not once has the current President, nor the current candidates, in any real way called on the American citizenry for sacrifice. We were told in the days after 9/11 that we should go shopping, and we are still effectively told the same thing today. Both candidates are running on an economic program that stresses tax cuts and magical energy solutions that will require no change in behavior on our parts. Neither can find the nerve to highlight the word "conservation." Both fear calling forth the better angels of the American electorate's nature, suspecting - perhaps correctly - that a generation of pandering Presidents (beginning with Ronald Reagan, I dare say, who taunted Jimmy Carter's call for conservation) has allowed to atrophy.

I have written of an encounter with Senator Obama in which he spoke with rhetorical brilliance about the need for sacrifice, but in fact called for none. I do not see any particular change in this basic fact in subsequent months. Senator McCain has run his campaign on the example of his own great sacrifice - no one can doubt he made extraordinary sacrifices for his nation, evident every time he raises his arms only to his shoulders - yet, an example he has not momentarily suggested that the American people might consider emulating, even if in the smallest way.

Democracy was classically understood to be a form of governance that called upon great reservoirs of self-governance. For this reason Montesquieu considered democracy to be the regime, above all, based upon virtue. Modern democracy, by contrast, is premised upon a philosophy that understands human motivations to be exclusively based on self-interest. Tocqueville observed in the 1830s that Americans speak constantly about self-interest, but that in fact they acted often out of altruism - thus, he wrote discerningly, they "do more honor to their philosophy than to themselves." The absence of any sustained or noteworthy call for sacrifice by either of our candidates suggests that we have tended, over time, to conform our actions to our words. Even a candidate whose life of sacrifice is exemplary and whose campaign motto is "Country First" can't bring himself to call for restraint and virtue from his countrymen. All the candidates rightly praise our military men and women, but in a society of severe subdivision of labor, we place upon them alone the burden of self-sacrifice while we change our behaviors not a jot. Members of our military protect our access to Middle East oil so that we can continue to shop. 9/11 was a terrible day, but perhaps what has been most terrible is the opportunity that was missed to call upon the willing reservoirs of sacrifice that was exhibited by the entire citizenry in the days that followed those attacks, and instead was allowed to fall back into the torpor induced by "Leaders" whose motto is more likely and honestly to be "drill, baby, drill" than "Country First."

Patriotic Vision

Shortly after the attacks on 9/11 seven years ago, I was invited along with a few others to offer reflections on patriotism which were intended for publication in the Intercollegiate Review. The essay that resulted was entitled "Patriotic Vision: At Home in a World Made Strange." The full essay is available via the link, but I provide some excerpts below (well, a LONG exerpt), in recollection of, and out of honor for, the events of this day.


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Patriotic Vision: At Home in a World Made Strange

Patrick J. Deneen



Love and Mistrust of One’s Own

Patriotism exhibits a form of unarticulated agreement with Aristotle’s great and challenging assertion, “all men are by nature political animals.” According to Aristotle, humanity in full flourishing requires the goods that a polity affords – those material goods of sustenance, shelter, protection provided by organized defense, and the less quantifiable goods of education, bonds of friendship, the opportunity for contemplation. Patriotism is a recognition of a debt that individual human flourishing rests upon a sufficiently good regime, that full-blown individuality exists not “by nature” but instead requires the antecedent institutions and practices of a city that lead to full individuation. Thus, Aristotle argues, “the city is by nature prior to the household and to each one of us taken singly.” To be fully human requires cultivation in political communities, cultivation that is unnecessary to “beasts or gods” since they are incapable or not in need of such sustenance, but necessary to humans ironically in order that they can become fully human. Patriotism, as an acknowledgment of the debts owed by humans to specific origins, and as a defense of those institutions and practices that constitute us, is a resonant echo of this Aristotleian understanding of the relation of wholes to parts.

Yet, if patriotism is regarded as a laudable expression of gratitude for the possibility, even a requirement, of human nobility, at the same time Aristotle also reminds us that a “good citizen” is only rarely “a good man.” It is a rare polity that does not call upon its citizens at times to act ignobly in ways at odds with Aristotle’s understanding of virtue. Thus, if the love of one’s own is a core political requirement, at the same time it remains one of the most persistent threats to political justice. Patriotism, as that form of loyalty that extends us beyond the familial and the amicable, presents one of the most potentially ennobling and degrading forms of love, at once directing our devotion to that which makes human flourishing possible – the polity – and yet ever portends the transformation of that devotion into blind obeisance, impassioned intolerance of a perceived enemy, and willing collaboration with that which is unjust and even evil.

Thought and virtue demand a limit to our love. We should not love that which is unjust, or that which inclines us to act unjustly or accept injustice. We should not love that person or place that would make us worse by dint of our love. We should love no one, or nothing, without reservation. And yet loyalty, to be meaningful, requires that we love that which is imperfect, even morally frail. The core feature of loyalty would be lost if we abandoned those people or places we otherwise cherish at the first sign of moral imperfection. Indeed, such inclination to avoid all forms of immorality would preclude the possibility of our loving in the first instance. At critical moments it is precisely our loyalty that compels us to remain with that to which we have dedicated ourselves, even given these frailties. Indeed, perhaps because of those imperfections our loyalty demands that we re-double efforts to support, reprimand, and improve those people, things, or places we love.

Clearly there can be no formula for navigating the calm seas and the submerged shoals of patriotism: it is neither morally defensible to demand an unreflective patriotism from a citizenry nor humanly virtuous to call for its cessation. Yet the idea of “balancing” patriotism with the critical distance demanded of morality seems ultimately to defeat the necessary priority required by patriotism. How can this tension be maintained without betraying the demands of each? If “balance” eviscerates the core loyalties of patriotism, then must one simply decide between the love of one’s own and the love of one’s own virtue?

Vision and Politics

To love one’s own seems to be the “default” position of most humans – we begin our lives loving what is nearest to us, including our parents, our siblings, our childhood friends, as well as our hometown, our region, our homeland. We understand the essence of growing up and the central purpose of education to be the process of moving us away from such automatic loves. Without necessarily leaving behind our first loves, we learn that our parents are not omnipotent, that our hometowns are repositories of conventionality and parochialism, that our country is marred by episodes of injustice and cruelty. We move psychically and physically away from these people and places, choosing our own friends and lovers, creating our own families, exploring new towns and regions and nations, creating at all points ever greater critical distance between unchosen primary loves and conscious mature loyalties.

This movement away from unchosen commitments by means of a contemplation of and eventual dedication to a particular choice between alternative forms of life is mimicked by the enterprise of political theory as an academic study and political theorizing as a way of thinking. As an educator in political theory, it is part of my vocation to challenge all those loyalties with which students enter college. Political theory often does, and by some lights always should, teach us one thing above all: a rejection of patriotism. Patriotism is one of those most impassioned “loves of one’s own,” a sentiment of affection for the place of one’s birth and upbringing, and for the ways of life and traditions of people and a place. Political theory, on the other hand, teaches us at some level about the conventionality of these ways of life. The theoretical study of politics compels us to recognize the insufficiencies of all political forms, to appreciate the virtues of regimes and traditions that are not our own, and points ultimately to a question of the best regime, a regime of perfect justice which, while implausible if not impossible, nevertheless always stands at least in principle as a standing accusation against all existing regimes, even, and perhaps especially one’s own.

It is no mistake that political theory should call patriotism into question. The word “theory” comes from the ancient Greek word theorein, meaning “to see.” Over time, it came to describe a special and intensified form of “seeing,” namely the vision that was required of specially designated city officials – theoroi – who were charged with the task of visiting other cities, to “see” special events such as religious or theatrical or athletic festivals, and to return to their home city where they would then give an account of what they had seen. To “theorize” was to take part in a sacred journey, an encounter with the “other” in which the theorist would attempt to comprehend, assess, compare and then in idiom of his own city, explain what had been seen to fellow citizens. This encounter would inevitably raise questions about customs or practices of the theorist’s own city – why do we do things this way? Might there be a better way of organizing the regime? Might there be a best way of life?

This tension between the theorist’s role as critic and the city’s imperative to protect its way of life is deeply embedded in the history and the practice of political theory. The full dimension and implications of that tension was revealed when Socrates was accused of impiety toward the gods of the city and “corrupting the youth” and subsequently put to death after being found guilty at his trial. Throughout the Platonic corpus – one that idealizes, dramatizes and “theorizes” the life of Socrates – there is constant evidence of the abiding tension between the role of the theorist and the exigencies of the city. In his most famous dialogue, the Republic, we discover that Socrates has “descended” beyond the walls of the city of Athens, to the multicultural port city of Piraeus, where he has gone to “see” a festival celebrating a new foreign goddess that is being accepted into the Athenian religious world. While he expresses appreciation for the Athenian procession, he expresses even greater admiration for that of the “foreigners,” namely the Thracian worshipers. It is then “outside” the city, in the midst of a “theoretical” enterprise that Socrates undertakes his most radical political enterprise, the consideration and description of the perfectly just political regime – one fundamentally at odds with the Athenian, and all existing regimes. By this estimation, a theorist is in some respects defined by a kind of “outsideness,” an alienation originally induced by the experience of physically moving from one place to another in order to assess the virtues and vices of one’s own particular cultural practices. Although we have largely forgotten the original meaning of the word, we still consider “theory” to involve at least the internal ability to raise questions about accepted norms and customs and to provide a critical distance that in many instances expressly confronts and even offends a nation’s patriotic sensibilities.

It is not surprising that theorists of many stripes have been suspicious, if not downright hostile toward patriotism. This has been as true, if not even more common, for thinkers on the Left – such as Emma Goldman, who wrote an essay entitled “Patriotism, A Menace to Liberty” – as it has been of thinkers on the Right, such as Samuel Johnson who more famously declared that “Patriotism is the last resort of scoundrels.” There are good and principled reasons for thoughtful people to be suspicious of Patriotism. We do not admire the evident patriotism of the German people under the Nazi regime. A story like “The Lottery” reminds us that the unquestioned acceptance of custom can promote wholly malignant and evil practices that might continue in the name of patriotism or "the way we do things here." An ancient play like Sophocles’ Antigone suggests the limits of patriotism when fundamental obligations, such as religious ones, conflict with the demands of the State. People of varying ethical and religious backgrounds, from St. Augustine writing as a Christian, to Martha Nussbaum writing as a secular liberal ethicist, criticize the place of primacy that nations hold under a widespread patriotic sentiment. A thoughtful person should never willingly or knowingly sacrifice his or her “theoretical” perspective before the altar of patriotism.

Patriotic Vision

Does this mean that it is impossible for a thoughtful person to be patriotic? Does this require that “theorists” should by default view the actions and claims of the State with a skeptical eye? Are “theoretical vision” and patriotism mutually exclusive?

Returning to the original practice of “theory,” one sees that quite the opposite is the case. The “theorist” was a designated office of the city. To “theorize” was a requirement of particular regimes in antiquity. Part of the self-definition of ancient cities involved the practice of calling its own practices into question. The activity of “seeing” foreign customs and events comprised only half of the theorist’s official duty. The other half – just as essential – was the “giving of account” of what the theorist had seen. This could not be done employing concepts and language of the foreign city, a possibility that might make it easier for a theorist to explain what he had seen (how much easier it would be for me to explain to friends my own experiences living in Germany if only they could understand German!), but one that would make it nearly impossible for one’s fellow citizens to begin to form an understanding of exotic foreign practices.

Instead, the “theorist” delivered his report firmly in the idiom of his own city: the position required one deeply versed in one’s own language, one’s own practices and ways of being, indeed, one sympathetic to the patterns of thought and action that characterized one’s own native city. A “theorist” would betray his office if he were, so to speak, to “go native”: no Athenian “theorist” could conceivably observe a Spartan gymnastic festival and then simply return in a condemnatory stance toward his own city. Even if a “theorist” were persuaded that foreign practices were superior to those of his own city, the sympathetic primacy of the theorist toward his own city demanded the careful, thoughtful, and prudent explanation of those practices to his fellow citizens, presented in ways that sought to evoke similar admiration by means of native assumptions, opinions and shared understandings. Such gradualist explanations were not handed down from a position of superiority or greater knowingness by the theorist, but rather indelibly informed by a prior respect for the practices of his own city which, even if imperfect, nevertheless were the source of other civic virtues – the bases of which might be undermined if insufficiently appreciated – as well as the source of limits or even prejudice that, if directly confronted, would produce a hostile reaction to the theorist’s account and defeat indefinitely the prospect of amelioration.

The theorist was chosen then, not only for a recognized ability to “see” and apprehend with sensitivity the new and unusual, but equally for an abiding appreciation for the customs and practices of his own way of life. These are not mutually exclusive qualities, but intimately connected. A theorist was, by definition a patriot – one who treasured his cultural inheritance, traditions, intimately knew the stories and histories of a place and saw these as fundamentally constitutive of his identity. At the same time, it was by means of deep familiarity and love for that cultural inheritance that the theorist was able to move fellow citizens to a renewed devotion to those practices, in some instances, or subtle questioning of dubious customs in others.

One sees a form of “patriotic theory” particularly in the works of the ancient playwrights. The connection between “theory” and “theater” was more than linguistic, for the ancient playwrights were a kind of “theorist” – people of intense vision – who by means of their “accounts” made possible a form of “theorizing” for the city’s greater populace as well. By means of retelling old stories about the city, by expanding on well-known tales and legends like those of Oedipus and Theseus and Orestes, a theatrical theorist at once tapped into the same constitutive material that informed his own vision and perception of the foreign, while altering or changing an emphasis in those ancient tales in a way that could open new vistas and ways of thinking for his audience. The Oresteia or the Theban trilogy might begin in foreign cities – like the theoretical journey itself, take one outside the city gates, if only figuratively – but, significantly, each of those play cycles concludes in Athens. In each case the trilogy demonstrated to the Athenians their own best qualities – its system of self-governance, for instance, or its openness to foreigners (thus reaffirming the value of “theorizing” and theater) – by means of recalling and recasting ancient stories. An Athenian audience could at once celebrate the unique features that constituted the Athenian character, leaving the theater more consciously patriotic, and yet also newly aware of potential shortcomings embedded as warnings in the subtle but familiar retellings by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and kindred theorists.

The city, in effect, pre-committed itself to a course of potential change and improvement by means of selecting the appropriate theoroi: without knowing the kinds of accounts with which it would be confronted, the city relied upon and employed the theorist’s reservoir of patriotism to ensure that the city’s vital customs, practices, ways of life were, in the first instance valued and respected, and yet potentially subject to reconsideration. One might even say the prospects for patriotism were extended and broadened by this practice and by the city’s attentiveness to the selection of appropriate theoroi, precluding the possibility of encrusted forms of parochialism or unquestioned vile customs while also undermining the accusatory claims of ungrateful cosmopolitans, “citizens of nowhere” whose initial stance was always one of hostility and mistrust and ingratitude toward any existing city. “Theory” kept the city open to improvement without loosening the ancient loyalties. It helped to make the city a worthwhile object of devotion, in some respects anticipating Edmund Burke’s observation, “to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

Socratic Patriotism

The patriotic vision of the “theorist” eventually came to exist independently of the actual office sanctioned by the city, and in particular came to be closely associated with the form of inquiry of the ancient philosopher, most especially Socrates as portrayed by Plato. In a certain respect Socrates seems to represent the pure opposite of the activity of the “theorist” since Socrates famously did not travel outside the city of Athens except as a soldier during several battles in the Peloponnesian War. Yet the Platonic corpus featuring Socrates constantly alludes to and draws upon the ancient activity of the theorist, and demonstrates the manifold ways that Socrates “leaves” the city by means of contemplation, of imagination, through encounters with foreign guests (like Protagoras and Gorgias) and foreign teachers (like Diotima), through encounters with foreign teachings and deities (especially those of Sparta, Egypt and Persia), and through many small “journeys” within Athens that provide a setting for greater philosophic journeys (such as to Piraeus where the Republic unfolds, or to the banks of the Ilisus where Phaedrus transpires).

Generations of scholars have tried to explain the apparent contradiction that seems to exist at the core of Socrates’ relationship to Athens, exhibited on the one hand by his firm insistence that he will pursue his philosophic mission as he understands it even in spite of a prohibition from the city – as he announces in the Apology – and on the other hand, his deep commitment and gratitude to the city that “created” him, as expressed in the Crito. Most modern commentators, failing to see the “theoretical” character of the Socratic enterprise, often try to downplay or dismiss one or the other aspect of Socrates, ending with a portrait of Socrates as alienated critic or Socrates as devoted citizen. Yet these are not mutually exclusive, but indeed by ancient understandings are mutually reinforcing.

In the Apology – his defense speech before the Athenian jury, in which he defends himself against charges of corrupting the youth and introducing new gods into the city – Socrates reveals that he engages in his form of questioning at the behest of the gods who have declared him to be the wisest man and whom he seeks to disprove in his discussions with any purportedly wise person. His mission then seems to be potentially at odds with the interests and traditions of the city, and Socrates insists that he will not cease even if commanded by the city. Yet he goes on to explain to his fellow citizens that he will persist in this activity because of, not in spite of, his devotion to the city that, as the Laws say to him in the Crito, “begat, nourished, and educated you, and gave you and all the other citizens a share in all the noble things we could….” He insists in the Apology that he will continue to philosophize in order to rouse the “lazy thoroughbred” of Athens – a noble but insufficiently excellent regime – and that, while he will speak with anyone he happens to meet, “both foreigner and townsman,” he will dwell more with his fellow citizens “inasmuch as you are closer to me in kin.” His philosophic activity is undertaken on behalf of the city, born of the same gratitude and concern – if also futility – that prompted him to defend it bravely in the terrible Athenian defeats at Potidaea, Amphipolis and Delium. For Socrates, there is a unbreakable connection between this civic loyalty and his critical activity. We misunderstand ancient “theorizing” if we do not recognize the entwinement of patriotism and philosophy.

Theory without Vision: Against Patriotism

At some point, the practice of theory moved from this more integrated relationship between patriotic sympathy and critical distance born of the “sacred journey,” and became increasingly and almost exclusively a form of critique that started from an skeptical, untrusting, even accusatory perspective. While one can see such developments even in antiquity – Diogenes Laertius declared in the fourth-century B.C.E. that he was kosmou politēs, a “citizen of the cosmos” – the turning point that differentiated modern from ancient forms of theorizing, placing the theorist in an adversarial position with loyalty, can be arguably traced back to René Descartes.

Many people forget that much of the early section of Descartes’ seminal work on “theorizing,” Discourse on Method, begins with autobiographical details of Descartes’ many travels. His first engagement in the “thought experiment” by which he proceeds in a complete state of doubt about all inherited knowledge, all assumptions of what is true, all the most obvious facts of existence that arrive from the senses, notably occurs in a foreign country. During a winter spent in Germany, having “no cares or passions to trouble me, I remained the whole day shut up alone in a stove-heated room, where I had complete leisure to occupy myself with my own thoughts. One of the first of the considerations that occurred to me was that there is very often less perfection in works composed of several portions, and carried out by the hands of various masters, than in those on which one individual alone has worked.”

Descartes describes the perfect antithesis of the approach of the ancient theorist: rather than proceeding from a sympathetic stance toward the inheritance of his own legacy, Descartes begins with radical suspicion toward all that has preceded him in act or thought, and especially as an outcome of common endeavors like that of a community or a people. The fact that he is in Germany as he launches these considerations only highlights the variance of his own investigations from those of the ancient theorist. He purposefully eschews the insights and experiences offered to him by an alien culture, and instead shuts himself literally within a room and figuratively within his own mind.

Descartes’ presence in a foreign land is almost irrelevant as part of his approach, a conclusion he has reached as a result his previous travels that all human arrangements are wholly conventional, mere accrued custom and accretions of generations, and not a result of considered and purposive thought. Travel has taught him that there is nothing more to be learned from travel: he is now a cosmopolitan, a thinker without origin or destination, an occupant of earth who can contemplate equally well anywhere he should find himself. He is the precursor of and the model for the modern philosopher, a citizen of no-place but the realm of abstract thought, one who can presumably arrive at the same patterns of thought regardless of what nation he might find himself – all locations are accidental and tenuous. A thinker like Descartes would appear to be content to think anywhere on earth.
At the same time, Descartes reveals that this apparent lack of preference will result in certain preferences all the same – Descartes admits that ideally, such a philosopher is a kind of “free rider” on the wealth, security, generosity, and anonymity provided by modern nations and especially cosmopolitan cities, ones in particular that are sufficiently liberal as not to demand any loyalty in return. As Descartes relates, since his first investigations in Germany, “it is just eight years ago that this desire to remove myself from all places where any acquaintances were possible, and to retire to a country such as this [i.e., Holland], where the long-continued war has caused such order to be established that the armies which are maintained seem only to be of use in allowing the inhabitants to enjoy the fruits of peace with so much the more security; and where, in the crowded throng of a great and very active nation, which is more concerned with its own affairs than curious about those of others, without missing any of the conveniences of the most populous towns, I can live as solitary and retired as in deserts the most remote.”

Descartes inaugurates modern philosophy’s estrangement from the places where philosophy begins – among and with one’s fellow citizens – and ultimately from the world. G. K. Chesterton once suggested that the “main problem for philosophers” was to solve the problem of how to “contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it” (he proposed a novel in which an Englishman sails the South Seas in search of new islands. He lands in England without realizing it, and all that was once familiar is now new. Chesterton describes an accidental theoretical journey, in effect). Descartes seemed not to have even acknowledged either “wonder” or “belonging” as of ultimate value, for by making oneself a stranger from one’s fellows and the world, one made it thereby impossible to be astonished by it.

Deepak to Kansas: Drop Dead

Michael Kinsley challenges Sarah's defenders to "show me the snobs."

How much time does he have, I wonder?

There are a few good examples posted over at "No Left Turns." But the one piece of evidence I'd like to offer has to take the cake: a posting by Deepak Chopra on HuffPost. It's a prime piece of evidence of exactly the disdain that the "enlightened" have toward the very people from whom they are seeking votes. Can the Democrats really be so obtuse to wonder why they keep losing elections during the course of which they insult the segment of electorate they are seeking to attract?

To wit, here's Deepak. Or maybe it's Rush Limbaugh pretending to be Deepak. No, he doesn't need to take time out of the day for that kind of imposture. Deepak does it all on his own.

Obama and The Palin Effect
From: Deepak Chopra
Posted: Friday, September 5th, 2008

Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin's pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of 'the other.' For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don't want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.)

I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin’s message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision.

Look at what she stands for:
--Small town values
-- a denial of America's global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.
--Ignorance of world affairs
-- a repudiation of the need to repair America's image abroad.
--Family values
-- a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don't need to be heeded.
--Rigid stands on guns and abortion
-- a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.
--Patriotism
-- the usual fallback in a failed war.
--'Reform' -- an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn't fit your ideology.

Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from 'us' pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of 'I'm all right, Jack,' and 'Why change? Everything's OK as it is.' The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.

Obama's call for higher ideals in politics can't be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow -- we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.

What's the matter with Kansas? They don't like the so-called enlightened classes looking down on them. And I don't blame them.

From a Gentle Reader

A friend, and serious Catholic writes to me thusly:

I just skimmed Dreher and a post or two of yours and get the sense that you like Palin but are concerned about her predictable Republican rhetoric, presumably indicative of a "same-old, same-old" approach to the issues of concern to traditional/crunchy/Kirkian conservatives.

My 2 cents: you should be shouting to the rooftops about this woman. She is the real deal: a person for whom the local has always been paramount; who comes from a large, tight-knit family; who has not risen through and is not beholden to the East coast policy establishment. Watch her debates from past elections -- she's smart and articulate. She cares about environmental issues not because of abstract scientific evidence but because she's someone who hunts and fishes and lives within and is responsible for some of the most beautiful wilderness area in the country. She'll be receptive to arguments that economic policies should put families and localities first because of her lived experience (not just her professional experience, although that will contribute too). Maybe she's wrong in supporting McCain on Iraq -- but isn't it something that one voice at the table will be the mother of a deployed soldier? And, most importantly, she's pro-life -- and not, mind you, in an ideological way, but again because of her lived experience, because of how she was raised, because of her faith.

Less than 2 weeks ago she was vaulted unexpectedly onto the national stage; it's unsurprising that she'd take direction from the campaign on what to say and how best to get the McCain-Palin ticket elected. But think what happens if she gets good people around her; if Matt Scully (who wrote her acceptance speech, and also wrote Dominion, which you should read if you haven't) writes her speeches. Think about 2012. Did it ever seem likely that someone with her lived experience -- someone even slightly inclined to a traditional small-government conservatism -- would be that close to the Presidency? Unless the sky really is falling tomorrow and we'll all be decamping to our monastic hold-outs anyway, that will count for something. While she'll never be a Front Porch Anarchist, she could be a Front Porch Republican.

Many good points here. Awaiting further word from Sarah, like everyone in America...

The Future of Conservatism?

My web presence expands: my review of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party, in the latest issue of Intercollegiate Review, also appears today on I.S.I.'s website First Principles.

My conclusion:

Douthat and Salam’s legitimate concern—how to preserve the shaky institutions of family and community—will need to be further considered in light of unprecedented pressures on the suburban and mobile way of life that arose in the mid-twentieth century and may be passing away a mere half-century later. A return to more local economies and communities will happily mean less government intrusion in the daily affairs of the citizenry; however, the transition from our energy-intensive and wasteful society of sprawl and exurbia will also certainly require ingenuity and responsiveness on the part of government—just not in the form of continued investment in a way of life that has no future. The sooner that Douthat and Salam themselves come to this realization, the sooner they may be able to offer creative new solutions based not on a misplaced sense of optimism, but on a real sense of hope for the health of local communities, vibrant and living traditions, and networks of families.

Perfectibility

Michael Gerson has written a masterful short essay on the contradiction at the heart of the Left, namely, a stated compassion for the weak combined with a ardent support of a progressive ideology that has resulted in practical eugenics. While it is not apparent to many, this contradiction lies at the heart of responses to the nomination of Sarah Palin for the Vice Presidency: the condescending dismissal of her backwardness thinly veils the Progressive assumptions about what constitutes a properly enlightened person. While seeking to woo the "middle class" voters of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other blue-collar states, leading voices of the Party attack Palin for holding values identical with many of those very voters they seek to attract. In dismissing the provincialism of Palin, they reveal their true views about the ordinary people for whom they claim to speak on behalf of.

The deeper contradiction at hand - solicitous disdain, the lifeblood of a therapeutic mindset - is made most manifest in one paragraph of Gerson's piece in which he writes about the concerted effort to test, and abort in utero, children diagnosed with Down's Syndrome:

This is properly called eugenic abortion -- the ending of "imperfect" lives to remove the social, economic and emotional costs of their existence. And this practice cannot be separated from the broader social treatment of people who have disabilities. By eliminating less perfect humans, deformity and disability become more pronounced and less acceptable. Those who escape the net of screening are often viewed as mistakes or burdens. A tragic choice becomes a presumption -- "Didn't you get an amnio?" -- and then a prejudice. And this feeds a social Darwinism in which the stronger are regarded as better, the dependent are viewed as less valuable, and the weak must occasionally be culled.

Gerson notes the contradiction that results from this form of almost obligatory eugenics:

Yet the pro-choice radicalism held by [most Democrats] -- the absolute elevation of individual autonomy over the rights of the weak -- has enabled the new eugenics. It has also created a moral conflict at the heart of the Democratic Party. If traditional Democratic ideology means anything, it is the assertion that America is a single moral community that includes everyone. How can this vision possibly be reconciled with the elimination of children with Down syndrome from American society? Are pro-choice Democrats really comfortable with this choice?

One must spend some time studying the great progressive philosophers of the 19th-century especially to discern the deepest assumptions of the current leadership of the Democratic party. The aspirations for achievement of a "single moral community" was deeply premised on the elimination of all particular communities. John Stuart Mill, for instance, constantly attacked "custom" and "tradition" in an effort to liberate individuals and their capacities as "progressive beings"; similarly, while he praised a diversity of "experiments in living," he had no tolerance for the particular experiment called "Calvinism" (or, more broadly, Augustinianism), which, by definition, asserted that humans were fallen, imperfect, and imperfectible by their own devices. Traditional societies and religions needed elimination (thus, Mill justified multiple votes for educated individuals and enslavement of "backward" populations until they could be brought up to speed). At the same time, he promised that the elimination of various forms of particularism, as well as religions that called to mind human imperfection, would set humanity on a progressive path to a worldwide human community. The elimination of particular religions would usher in "the religion of humanity" - that "single moral community" of which Gerson speaks. In the name of the progressive apotheosis of humankind, the aggressive elimination of "backwardness" was to be justified. In its name the eugenics policies of the 19th-century were inaugurated - policies now associated in the popular imagination with Adolph Hitler, but in their time propounded universally by the most advanced and "progressive" thinkers, such as H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw. Credit should go to such traditionalist thinkers such as G.K. Chesterton - in whose honor this "blawg" is named - who in the 19th-century stood against the progressive program of enforced eugenics, as his intellectual heirs stand against it now.

We tend to associate the name Machiavelli with the philosophy of "realpolitik" - those leaders for whom the end justifies all means. We should realize, however, that the most ardent Machiavellians of our age are our Progressives, whose philosophy of an improved humanity is the backdrop in which we now have a 90% death rate for imperfect humans like Trig Palin, and less obviously but no less connected, underlies the deep hostility to "traditionalists" who stand in the way of progress toward the universal and homogeneous State.

Change

The heat from all the discussion of the Presidential race is becoming white hot. With less than 60 days until the election, the sniping between the candidates only increases ("lipstick on a pig" being the latest contribution to our national political debate) and in bars and airports, over kitchen tables and in the pews, the discussion over which candidate will be better for the future of America rages.

At the moment both candidates are attempting to position themselves as agents of CHANGE. If during his long campaign the number of times that Obama has used the word "change" were to be counted, we'd likely discover that he'd used it more times than most people use words in a year. Meanwhile - to Obama's deep frustration - with the pick of Sarah Palin, John McCain has reclaimed his "maverick" title and now is running even, if not slightly ahead of Obama, in many national and state polls.

For a time some Republican candidates attempted to raise questions over the kind of change that we can expect from Obama, rightly questioning whether he will indeed bring "change we can believe in." Lacking any strong legislative record or significant political accomplishments or stands, Obama has spoken extensively of change while minimizing emphasis on concrete instances of what change he would like to enact. Lately, in arguing that electing McCain would simply be putting more of the same in office, his argument for change simply seems to boil down to the choice of putting a different party in the White House. His choice of Joe Biden as a running mate seemed to confirm that what we could expect was more of the same from the party that has held the Presidency for roughly half of the 20th century. In the midst of widespread raptures induced by the touching belief that Obama will be a messianic figure of "change," we should recall that during our modern Presidential era - let's say from 1945 to 2008 (thus not including FDR's long Presidency), Republicans occupied the White House for 34 years and Democrats for 29. Change indeed.

In policy terms, what does "change we can believe in" - either from an Obama or McCain presidency - likely entail? From Obama we have been offered a long litany of domestic programs that promise to sink the nation further into massive debt. His claim that all his promised programs can be paid for relies - as usual in these cases - on the most optimistic forecasts for revenue (i.e., tax receipts). At the same time he proposes a massive increase in federal spending, he is also promising tax cuts for the middle class. Most recently he is talking about instituting another "stimulus" package, meaning a further dip into funds borrowed from the Chinese. Given a backdrop in which the U.S. Government has nationalized the national mortgage system and in which the economy is dropping faster than attendance at a Nicholas Cage movie, it's implausible that such an expansion can take place in a fiscally responsible way. The larger point is: even were the economy robust enough to allow for a tax cut AND sufficient tax receipts, in what way does an expansion of domestic programs under a Democratic presidency represent "change we can believe in"?

Meanwhile McCain proposes further tax cuts modeled on George Bush's first term tax cuts - ones that, along with a weakened economy, have massively increased the deficit and thus borrowing from foreign powers - while proposing an energy "policy" whose primary plank is to "drill, baby, drill." He may be able to impose slightly more fiscal responsibility on what will assuredly be an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, but one can almost predict that the fiscal policy of a McCain-Democratic Congress will consist of compromises in which the American citizenry receives tax cuts AND new spending programs. In an Obama presidency with a Democratic Congress, we can expect broad tax cuts for the middle class and even more new domestic spending.

In short, we have two candidates who are effectively promising more of the same. Both would likely preside over an enlargement of the federal government. Both are engaged in a war of making promises to an anxious and comparatively pampered American citizenry. Both promise to be conscientious caretakers of our far-flung empire.

In this, we actually see no change at all. Both will continue the consolidation of national power to the center and identically embody the modern fetish of "bigness." They both contend to occupy an office that they insist should exercise massive power. What should strike observers is that both candidates offer themselves as a savior of our times, investing hopes in the office of the Presidency far beyond what it can actually achieve, even while deepening the American love affair with their ever-more centralized Executive office. As stated wonderfully here,

The chief executive of the United States is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws. He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise. He—or she—is the one who answers the phone at 3 a.m. to keep our children safe from harm. The modern president is America’s shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He’s also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth.

Our current national obsession with the Presidential race is, at one level, understandable, since so much of the national policy will take on the cast of the worldview of the man elected to office. But how much better if we were far LESS concerned with the current race for the Presidency. How much better if the President were not invested with so much power to run so massive a military-industrial apparatus. How much better if we didn't operate under the belief that the fate of the world potentially lie in the hands of this one man. How much better if we viewed the election to the Presidency with the same level of interest we view the election of our State governors - and, correspondingly, if we had far greater interest in the election of our State governor and even more in our mayors and aldermen. How much better if the activities of our Federal government in expanding commerce to encompass the trade and exploitation of the globe, on the one hand, and the military power of an empire in comparison to which Rome paled, on the other, had remained a theoretical fear of the first critics of the Federal constitution.

(Thus warned the Anti-federalist Cato of New York: "Compare your past opinions and sentiments with the present proposed establishment, and you will find, that if you adopt it, that it will lead into a system which you heretofore regarded as odious.... Wherein does this president, invested with his powers and prerogatives, essentially differ from the king of Great Britain....? [Do not] be convinced that this government is no more like a true picture of your own [State government], than an Angel of darkness resembles and Angel of light" [Letter V]. Elsewhere he wrote, "The strongest principle of union resides within our domestic walls. The ties of the parent exceed that of any other; as we depart home, the next general principle of union is amongst citizens of the same state, where acquaintance, habits, and fortunes, nourish affection, and attachment; enlarge the circle still further, and, as citizens of different states, though we acknowledge the same national denomination, we lose the ties of acquaintance, habits, and fortunes, and thus by degrees, we lessen in our attachments, till, at length, we no more than acknowledge a sameness of species" [Letter IV].)

Neither candidate will seek to restore "attachments" to our localities; each promises to continue our centuries-long movement toward ever-greater "consolidation." A real change would be on the day when we spend far less time obsessing about the Presidential race because the activities of the executive will matter far less to the lives we lead in our communities. Now that's change I can believe in.

Kooky Cookie

Rod Dreher has been saying it thoughtfully and better than I can - while he still cannot bring himself to support mccain/PALIN, he knows for certain that he is disturbed mightily by her unkind reception by the mainstream media and many of Obama's surrogates in the "blogosphere."

I'm pretty much in the same boat - I don't think I can pull the lever for someone who seems too eager sometimes to start another war, but I absolutely despise the condescension of the coverage of Sarah. I am certain I am not alone, and it will be the height of irony if the Democrats lose an election that they should run away with if they STILL can't overcome their kneejerk elitism and not-so-subtle derision of the ordinary Americans they claim to want to help.

To wit: I was just watching CNN, which ran a piece on Palin's religion, showing a clip of her prayer in which she hopes that our leaders are doing God's will in prosecuting the war in Iraq.



Notice that she does not exclaim, "Let us defeat the infidel in accord with God's Will!!!" Rather, she humbly prays in the hopes that our leaders are correctly discerning the will of God in sending our young men and women in harm's way.

The reporter concluded the report NOT by pointing out this fact, but by making sure we know that "many people are concerned that a Vice-President Palin will bring religion into her political decisionmaking."

I wonder what reporters in 1862 made of this crazy statement:

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party -- and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true -- that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

Yea, that was one kook, that Abraham Lincoln. Trying to discern God's will, and humbly acknowledging his uncertainty. Just like that wacko Sarah Palin, praying that our leaders have striven to understand the will of God. Better that we simply assert human will as we wish...

Small Towns

Daily Kos gleefully posted this Daily Show video denigrating the praises that have been heaped on small towns during the Republican convention. Stewart's "reporters" - a.k.a. "gotcha men" - reveal that the delegates weren't able to give a very good answer to the question of why small towns are worthy of praise (you can be sure that footage of anyone who was able to respond well is lying on the cutting room floor).

Perhaps Stewart's "reporters" should have read the New York Times - at least if the name of the town in question is not Wasilla, Alaska. Today's front page features an article on the demise of Iowa's barns, and the way of life that is passing away.

The article draws its information from a Depression-era Federal Writers Project, a history of Iowa during the early twentieth-century. Written by outsiders, it tells a story of small town life different than what has been intimated in recent condescending attacks on Sarah Palin's background.

According to the article:

After the writers moved on, machines, more and more, took the place of handwork and workhorses, and these farm implements grew ever bigger, more powerful, more expensive. Farms, in turn, ballooned in acreage. They shrank drastically in number. So farmhouses, schools, farming towns, even Mr. Scott’s beloved barns emptied, making way in some cases for the long, low, plain buildings used in modern large-scale livestock operations.

That period, as described in the guide, was steeped in a sense of community, an innocent warmth: county fair days, band concert nights, when farm families rushed through chores to gather for music, and threshing runs, when neighbor farmers helped one another with the harvest (before combines made that simpler, solitary work) and their wives gathered to prepare mountainous feasts of meat, potatoes, pie.

“We just don’t neighbor like we used to,” said Donald Wedeking, 81, of Nemaha (A “Mighty Small Town,” as its sign somewhat ambiguously promises), who grows 830 acres of corn and soybeans with his son, far more than his family once did.

He was one of many near and along U.S. 20 through western Iowa, where the guide’s writers wandered, who seemed to long for elements of the past.

“Now it’s kind of dog eat dog,” said LaDon Grotjohn, 63, a farmer in Schaller.

“It was a good way,” said Wendell Body, 76, of Sac City, the county seat for Sac County, an agricultural community where more than 17,600 people lived in the 1930s, but where fewer than 11,000 people live now.

Perhaps Stewart should dispatch some of his reporters there. But, unlike the WPA writers during the Depression, they would doubtless report on these farmers' weird religion (prayer), oppressive beliefs (morality), and strange appearance (overalls). How distant a time, but more, how distant a world, when outsiders - often from cities - could come to small towns and find something there of value. Now they are likely to find only smallness - the thing to be feared and rejected.

The Daily Show is watched - well, daily - by innumerable college students especially. It is representative of a broader culture of derision, sarcasm, and constant irony. This sarcastic detachment forms the true education of the youth of today's wealthy, powerful, free societies. It is very difficult to imagine that a nation whose youth is formed in such pervasive irony can have much of a future. Ironically, it was folkways learned in small towns especially that provided an alternative - earnest, decent, common. If Daily Show viewers can't comprehend why Sarah Palin appeals to broad swaths of their countrymen, they might spend some time reading about a more serious time when your life depended on your neighbors, such as in 1930s Iowa.

(This one's for you, John.)

Utilitarian Logic

Peter Singer didn't write this book, but the logic of Singer's utilitarianism leads where David Benatar takes it. If our response to existence is reducible to pleasure and pain, and existence inevitably involves pain, then one must entertain the possibility that it is better never to have lived at all. While putting oneself out of existence might be painful, however - if not the deed itself, the thought of one's own death once one is alive - one ought to avoid bringing other people into existence, thus preventing them from the inevitable pain they will experience. Hence, we are morally justified - indeed, required - to abort any pregnancies we might be involved in having engendered. The author of the book - Better Never to Have Been - urges us to adopt a pro-death view.

Exerpt:

"Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad-and considerably worse than most people recognise it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people. Creating new people is thus morally problematic."

Modern philosophy's trajectory is that of human extinction. Europe is simply following the logic of that philosophy to its logical conclusion. Lest we think "the culture wars" are a silly distraction of the electoral season, we should take note that the fate of humanity literally hangs in the balance.

Rainy Day Fun

To all you elitists on the East Coast currently being washed out by Hanna (especially college students with impending English lit. essay deadlines), I invite you to spend some time generating gibberish, oops, I mean producing profound and insightful essays, here. The more enterprising among you might even try to submit your randomly generated essays to Social Text. They seem to have fairly liberal editorial policies. You might even be hailed as the next Zizek.

Guest Authors

Gentlemen named Eric and John have left comments on my post expressing skepticism about Palin's real contribution to preserving small town life. They are so good they deserve marquee billing:

Eric wrote:

It is for the reasons offered here that I cannot in good faith understand the glowing reaction to Palin's speech. As a lifelong South Carolinian, gun owner, hunter, fisher, evangelical Christian, small town married guy with kids, I am an admirer of all the things that Palin is claimed to represent. But, other than identifying herself as such, what did Palin say that would help preserve this way of life? What Republican policy would further it?

The specific policies mentioned here (restrictive zoning, gas taxes, public transportation) are all Democratic territory, are they not? I work for local government and, at least at that level, they are. When we try to restrict land use to encourage infill development and prevent suburban sprawl, it's the republican land rights absolutists that are against us. When we try to move the county farmers' market to local, sustainable produce, our supporters are democrats. When we try to force the local Wal-Mart to stay in its existing building, rather than move two miles further out and leave another deserted strip mall behind, the local Chamber of Commerce republicans wear us out. When we complete a public transportation center to get people to work, the disgruntled residents are republican tax hawks. And so on, on things from afterschool mentoring to sidewalks to green space in low-income neighborhoods. The point is that whenever we take action to create a uniquely local, self-sustaining, pedestrian accessible community, it's Palin's party that obstructs us. And I didn't hear anything in her speech to make me think she is different.

All of which is why, in the end, I remain puzzled. I can see two things that today's republicans, even with Palin, offer to traditionalists like me. First, I am pro-life, and this may well be determinative. If that decides the entire issue, fine, but we need not cede every other issue in the immensely complex welter of political discourse to this republican party. Second, and I sadly think that for many people this carries the day, they offer an aesthetic affirmation of a cultural identity. This is where Palin excelled, of course, in presenting an authentic and most likely sincere testament to the virtue of such a culture. But I worry that this testament is being deployed in service of the party that has impaired that culture. It is for this reason that I find myself liking Palin, but still unpersuaded to vote for her ticket.

And John wrote:

I can echo Eric's post.

As someone who lives in an infill house in a historic, but neglected, urban neighborhood in Macon, GA, I have a little experience with some of the issues he raised..

The city I live in is controlled by Democrats who have done an admirable job trying to bring new business and housing to the downtown area. The city government has partnered with private corporations, foundations, and my employer to provide subsidies for people to build infill housing or restore older homes. So far the results have been mostly positive--crime rates are down, derelict housing is disappearing, homeownership is on the rise, and the neighborhood is pleasant and walkable. Yet, the local Democratic party is rife with corruption and fiscally irresponsible, thus undercutting much of the good they have done.

On the other hand, the Republicans who control the county surrounding our city have no interest in the city's revitalization. They give property tax breaks to any developer that wants to build a big box mall next to an interstate exit. Each one of these malls siphons away business from the city and encourages exurbs to follow in their wake.

The result--I live in a great neighborhood where I walk my kids to school and myself to work, but I have to drive to buy food, clothing, or gasoline. Church is 20 minutes away. When I tell people from the suburbs where I live, I am greeted with shock and misplaced pity.

I bring all this up to say that the Republican party, for whom I have voted most of the time, is the chief culprit in supporting an economic system that is the enemy of real places that are inhabited by people with roots in that place.

The dilemma for me is that the other side is not much better. If Republicans are guilty of bleeding traditional culture to death through their mindless support for the "global economy", more oil drilling and the exurbs, Democrats seem to be militantly in favor of destroying that same culture albeit for different reasons.

I have real problems with some of the reasons that McCain nominated Palin (her inexperience, the loose ends that she has in Alaska, her lifelong membership in the NRA), but when those who identified themselves as liberal commentators mocked her family size, her pro-life stance, her faith, and her small-town origins, it touched a nerve. So much so that I will probably be voting for John McCain in the fall, despite the fact that I share most of Patrick's concerns about the McCain/Palin ticket.

I am beginning to think that those of us who value places and connection and an unhurried family life are pretty rare or too silent. We have no natural political allies and we are unlikely to get any soon.

So the best we can do is join the PTA, neighborhood watch, community garden, etc., and keep faith with our families, friends, and neighbors. I know that is not much but it might be enough, for now.
____________________________

Thanks, both, for these thoughtful and category-breaking comments.


I wonder how many there are like this? Maybe more than we think...

How About that Free Market?

The Treasury "seizes" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Or, should we call it "nationalization"?

All along, our suburban build-out has been subsidized by the taxpayer or its costs have been socialized - through transportation bills that favored automobiles, through farm policies that made it impossible for family farmers to hold out when developers come knocking, through policies that made it possible to throw up plywood and alumnium shell housing without developers having to worry about inevitable public costs, in tax and zoning policies that favor big companies whose headquarters are distant over local businesses - and so on.

Tonight we can see more transparently than ever that the public trough was always available to expand "home ownership" - a.k.a. development spread like a blight on the land. We will be told piously that these corporations were established to make the dream of home ownership available to as many Americans as possible. That would ring a little truer if the tax policies of the U.S.A. didn't permit mortgage interest deduction on two houses - for starters. How about supporting first-time home ownership by closing up that particular give away? How about capping mortgage interest deductions up to a certain amount (if it was home ownership that mattered, and not unlimited square footage)? In reality, the public backed up the writers of sub-prime mortgages, the real estate speculators, the myriad ancillary workers in real estate, all the Big Box companies that filled up our big, ill-constructed houses... Will all the people who made considerable profits in these businesses over the last few decades offer to pony up to avoid an expansion of government? Will we hear denunciations about creeping socialism and welfare kings? Don't bet on it - not when it's socialism for the rich.

It's unclear how much the U.S. taxpayer will be asked to cough up for this bailout. The two "private" corporations hold 5 TRILLION dollars in mortgages. Still looking forward to "tax cuts" after the election?

The next time Wall Street starts denouncing the dangers of statism, RUN in the other direction....

Peter Lawler's America, Rightly Understood

The most recent issue of "Perspectives on Political Science" arrived today, featuring a terrific symposium on Peter Lawler's most recent book (at least last time I blinked), Homeless and at Home in America. The symposium was organized and edited by up-and-coming RIT political scientist Ivan ("the K") Kenneally. Contributors to the symposium on Lawler's wonderful book are Kenneally, Ave Maria's Marc Guerra, EPPC's Yuval Levin, and - yours truly. I recommend picking up a copy pronto (and better yet, Peter's book, which features, as well, a superb set of blurbers), but in the interest of whetting your appetites (or maybe overfilling your plates), here's some of what I wrote:


___________________________________________________

A House Divided:
Peter Lawler’s America, Rightly Understood

Patrick J. Deneen
Georgetown University



Peter Lawler is the founding Dean of a small but steadily growing school of thought that has been jocularly but accurately called “Building Better Than They Knew Studies.” The designation refers to a phrase in John Courtney Murray’s book We Hold These Truths in which Murray argues that the American Founders “built better than they knew.” Murray – echoing an earlier American Catholic, Orestes Brownson – claimed that the Founders’ official and self-understood grounds on which they built the American Republic were not the actual reasons for why the American constitutional order was well-constructed. The American Republic, it is implied, is admirable and deserving of loyalty in spite of the explicit intentions of the Founders, not because of them.
....

Throughout his writings – but particularly in his 1999 book Postmodernism Rightly Understood – Lawler has argued that the modern project has played itself out. The logical progression from Locke (autonomous liberalism) to Rousseau/Marx (progressivist collectivism) to Nietzsche (fascistic nihilism) has led to a palpable crisis of modernity that makes it possible – perhaps now even in hindsight – to see its failure. Our capacity for hindsight in viewing the catastrophe of modernity is enabled by our transition into a postmodern era – an era that moves beyond and away from the various modernisms that were inaugurated by Locke and the Enlightenment. Lawler argues that we now have in view an actual postmodernism – a postmodernism rightly understood – which, on the one hand, rejects the entire philosophical edifice of the modern project (including our faddish academic “postmodernism” which Lawler rightly diagnoses as a form of “hyper-modernism,” or “modernism on steroids”), but, importantly, also rejects the temptation (even conservative temptation) for a return to pre-modernity. In this he parts with his teacher at one remove, Leo Strauss, who called for a recovery of ancient philosophy, just as he rejects the nostalgia of “paleo-“ or “crunchy”-conservatives (such as that of Rod Dreher) who, he contends, reject the true benefits of our modern inheritance. Post-modernity rightly understood seeks to live in the light of our growing awareness of the truth that modernity rejected while acknowledging the goods (many of them technological) that modernity nevertheless makes available. Lawler tells us, in effect, that it may just be possible that we can have it all.

Lawler has arrived at an original and plausible understanding of America that rests deeply upon the basic insights of a submerged American Christian and even Catholic tradition – a tradition perceived and articulated philosophically by Brownson and Murray and literarily by Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. Only if America was built better than its founders knew could it be fundamentally deserving of our allegiance or loyalty, in Lawler’s view: a nation founded upon an explicitly Lockean basis would be ultimately false and self-destructive – arguably as false and self-destructive as Marxism, even. If America were actually a Lockean nation, it would have to be opposed as fervently as communism on the basis of its ideologically false view of the human person. Fortunately, Lawler argues, the likes of Brownson and Murray (and, elsewhere – if more artistically – Percy and O’Connor) have shown us that the basis of the American republic is not fundamentally Lockean. Rather, its basis is more deeply in the natural law tradition that has its origins preeminently in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

The particular aspect of the Founding that reveals the deep and fundamental adherence to Catholic natural law teaching is to be found especially in the relationship between Church and State – and more broadly, religion and politics – articulated in the First Amendment especially. Resisting the temptation of radical figures in the Enlightenment, particularly the theorists of the French Revolution (and their intellectual heirs, the Fascists and Communists), the acknowledged division between Church and State reflected an acknowledgment of the limits of the human will to remake all human relationships. Leaving untouched by the State the religious belief and practice of its citizens, the American constitutional order recognizes (in the words of Murray) “the existence of a whole wide area of human concerns which were remote from the competence of government” (99). By contrast, “the Jacobin thesis” – which seeks to place government imprimatur upon all aspects of human life, including the formation of a strictly civil religion – seeks to make a claim over “all of reality and so a claim over the whole human being” (99). The existence of the First Amendment – marking out a space over which politics cannot dictate and law must be silent, and finally over which the temptation of the human will to remake the world must acknowledge limits – reveals the deep sources within the Natural Law tradition from which the Founders unwittingly drew.

Thus, according to Lawler’s reading of Brownson and Murray, there exists a “providential” Constitution that draws from deeper and truer sources than the explicit Lockeanism of our Founders. This constitution exists “prior to and more fundamental than our written one,” and draws most deeply upon the pre-modern Christian tradition that made it possible to render “republicanism compatible with rights” and especially “the right of the creature by nature open to the truth about his Creator” (101) John Courtney Murray is more explicit still about those deeper (if unconscious) sources to the secret vitality of the Constitution, pointing in particular to the Catholic natural law tradition that was still vital at the time of nation’s founding. Our founding, as Lawler tells it, “was a somewhat traditional rather than Lockean understanding of those truths that guided the construction of our political institutions. Our framers built better than they knew, ironically, because they thought they knew less than they really did” (98). Because they did so – almost wholly unaware – Lawler concludes along with Brownson that “what they [the Founders] did actually deserves our loyalty” (97).

* * * * * * * * * *
I think there is good reason to suspect that Lawler would like to believe the thesis that the Founders built better than they knew, but can’t quite bring himself completely to accept its validity.... More than once in other sections of Homeless and At Home in America, Lawler himself acknowledges the basic liberal and Lockean presuppositions at the heart of the American constitutional order. For instance, in his chapter exploring judicial interpretation, “Toward a Consistent Ethic of Judicial Restraint,” he writes critically of the fundamental trajectory of “our individualistic Constitution” (118). Far from suggesting that the individualistic jurisprudence of the modern Court represents a departure from the “unwritten” or “providential” natural law Constitution, he writes that there is an inner logic to the Constitution that has become more evident over time: “we can predict that the progressively more imprudent application of our individualistic principles over time…” (118). If the unwritten and Providential constitution were wholly and truly our actual Constitution, acknowledgment of such “individualistic principles” would be nonsensical. In acknowledging “our individualistic Constitution” to be the source of those “individualistic principles,” Lawler recognizes that the Founders’ stated Lockeanism was far from nugatory and irrelevant.

There is perhaps more than a little wishful thinking on Lawler’s part in seeking to advance a view of the Constitution as one based in Thomistic natural law theory and in his claims that the Founders built better than they knew. For this to be true, in the first instance there would need to be a fuller explanation of the sources of the pervasive individualism that Lawler acknowledges to exist in contemporary America. If the Constitution were truly a reflection of deeper and unconscious Thomistic natural law principles, then there would need to be an explanation for how the corrosive individualism that Lawler elsewhere acknowledges to exist comes not only to infiltrate the widespread and popular understanding of the Founding documents, but American society more broadly. Is our national proclivity to Lockean individualism a foreign import, a contagion that infiltrated our society in spite of our Thomistic Founding? Did it bear no relationship to the self-proclaimed Lockeanism of our Founding? Given Lawler’s own acknowledgement of an “individualistic Constitution,” there is can be little doubt that the explicit Lockeanism of the Founders did in fact manifest itself politically and that its logic has continued to unfold, culminating in a form of “creeping and creepy libertarianism.”

A more plausible understanding – one shared by his teacher at one remove, Leo Strauss – is to acknowledge that the Founding was mixed, comprised of an explicit and even dominant Lockean strain and a submerged and less dominant pre-modern tradition, particularly Christianity.... [Understood thusly,] the ancient tradition (of which Natural Law was one inheritance) existed contemporaneously with the rise of Lockean political philosophy, and persisted for a long time as a countervailing if ultimately supportive inheritance. Lockeanism assumes, but cannot explain, the existence of families and the necessary self-sacrifice that accompanies the role as parents. He implies that part of the legal order will be to enforce the duty of parenting, meaning that the natural instinct to reproduce will be the main spur to ultimate formation of families. If nature impels us to reproduce, the State forces us to assume the responsibility of acting as parents (especially a necessity in the case of fathers). However, in a society in which the priority of autonomy comes to dominate, individuals will find ways around the State imposition to form families, either devising ways to avoid issue from sexual relations (part of the dominion of nature means our ability to exert control over our own reproductive capacities), as well as altering laws in ways that permit family dissolution well before the age of “nonage.” The traditional role of families in forming decent and trustworthy children – the kinds of children who will grow up and honor the terms of contracts, for example – is assumed, but not explained or even justified, in Locke’s philosophy. The assumption of families is possible because of the persistence of an older tradition in which it is not assumed that all human relations are fundamentally chosen or alterable according to human will and choice. Family life is understood to be a duty and an obligation, but also a source of deep and profound fulfillment for what constitutes a good human life. It is because of the persistence of this older, pre-modern tradition even deeply into a Lockean age that Lockeanism is even tenable as a political philosophy. Nevertheless, the Lockean logic of autonomy is ultimately destructive of that older tradition, relying upon it while undermining and depleting it.

To recognize the mixed nature of the American founding – one that Lawler himself appears to acknowledge, at once seeking to advance a theory of an unwritten and providentially Thomist constitution while pointing to an explicit “individualistic Constitution” – is to raise some troubling questions that curiously do not appear to much trouble Lawler. In particular, the relationship of these “mixed” and contradictory elements of the Founding makes the Constitutional loyalty or allegiance of a non- or anti-Lockean – such as a Christian – problematic. If, as Lawler suggests, there is a logic to the Constitution that leads to his prediction of an “imprudent application of our individualistic principles over time,” this is to suggest that over time the explicit Lockeanism of the Founders will overwhelm and rout the implicit Thomism that antedated the authors of the Constitution. To have allegiance even to this mixed Constitutional founding is to ultimately declare allegiance to the trajectory of radical autonomy and individualism. At best an opponent of such an outcome might seek to fight a holding pattern – recognizing the likelihood of defeat – but such opposition is far from a form of unalloyed allegiance and loyalty. It is at best a provisional and prudential willingness to declare provisional allegiance to the unwritten Constitution while fully acknowledging that its explicit Lockeanism works at cross purposes and ultimately will likely prove corrosive to its pre-Lockean inheritance. It will mean acknowledging, but not necessarily celebrating, this mixed Founding, combating its official philosophy through the effort to shore up its unofficial pre-modern legacy.

Yet, Lawler claims to be largely untroubled by our Lockean propensity, at once because he believes in (if perhaps by overstating) the persistence of the Thomism of (or during) our Founding while also noting the manifold ways in which, while our official philosophy is Lockean, our actual actions show us to be at times closer to the social animals depicted by Darwin (or, less deterministically, Aristotle). In spite of widespread evidence of American “homelessness” – that form of “restlessness” that Tocqueville diagnosed as a centrally American and democratic quality – Lawler admirably sees ample evidence of non-Lockean behavior – our capacity to be “at home” – including the American willingness to form families and raise children (this, in contrast to the demographic catastrophe of Europe). He notes that it is our most “homeless” places – the exurbs, that paean to our Lockean assertion of rights to build anywhere and live however we please – that we find birthrates that even within America are staving off national self-extinction (14, 16). He has long admired the sanguinity of David Brooks toward our most materialist and officially individualistic Americans – our Bobos and Exurbans – who act differently than they speak, at once proclaiming their individual rights while parenting enough children to ensure replacement of the species within America.

However, Lawler is conscious that the current contradiction between what we say and what we do is a tenuous and worrisome source of that sanguinity. Tocqueville long ago noted this phenomenon: Americans claim that their actions are based on their official Lockeanism but in fact they frequently act in ways that are altruistic and self-sacrificing: Americans, Tocqueville wrote, “do more honor to their philosophy than to themselves.” Lawler notes that to do as we say would be the ultimate form of human misery: “We would be freely pursuing happiness, but never actually either attaining happiness or experiencing joy. It makes sense to say that naturally political, familial, and religious animals never would nor could do with much consistency what American moral theory – now called autonomy – says” (73).

In his chapter exploring the thought of the political theorist Wilson Carey McWilliams, Lawler acknowledges that this divide between what we say and how we act may ultimately be untenable: speech ultimately has a way of directing our actions and conforming them to our speech. “What we say, McWilliams perceptively observed, turns out to have a long-term effect on what we do. The mistaken psychology of our constitutional theory erodes the decencies that support our moral practice. Our legal liberalism gradually transforms our private relationships, turning us into rootless emotional transients. The result, as Tocqueville predicted, is creeping individualism – a kind of apathetic indifference based on the mistaken judgment that love is more trouble than it is worth and an unnecessary limit on our freedom” (73). In this passage – which Lawler acknowledges to be a perceptive Tocquevillian and McWilliamsian observation – Lawler undermines the grounds of his own sanguinity in the persistence of our exurban virtues. He notes the “mistaken psychology of our constitutional theory” – that is, its deeply Lockean basis, pace his efforts elsewhere to read those out of the document as less relevant than our Thomistic inheritance – and its tendency, over time, to corrode the older and pre-modern virtues that corrected our official belief in the priority of autonomy. Writ large, he recognizes that the official Lockeanism of our Founding will, over time, tend to crowd out our pre-Lockean inheritance. It suggests that Lawler knows that he is whistling in the dark, making the best of the pre-modern reservoirs that persist – even overstating their centrality to the American founding – even as he acknowledges that the logic of the Constitutional order is toward their ultimate depletion....

Still, one must admire the tactical and rhetorical approach of Lawler, recognizing that Lockeans do not like a scold or a killjoy. Lawler’s visceral dislike of Rod Dreher and “paleo-cons” appears to derive less from a fundamental philosophical disagreement with their pessimistic diagnosis of modern America (though, no doubt, there is a significant personality difference to be accounted for), than from the fact that they are too willing to chide their fellow Americans for their Lockean excesses. Adopting the guise of quiescence, Lawler seeks to defuse the temptation toward off-putting and ineffectual Jeremiad amid the ruins. Rather, Lawler has adopted the tone of a comforting friend and compatriot, finding in his countrymen decencies and virtues that persist even amid the exurbs - love in the ruins, one might say. In so doing, he hopes to compliment and flatter his homeless and homebound fellow Americans in an effort to encourage the persistence of pre-modern virtues, even as he acknowledges that it’s possible and even likely that America may not be permanently stuck with virtue after all.

After the Glow

In response to The Speech:

Daniel Larison calls down an anathema on all their houses, demanding political purity. Rod Dreher offers a more nuanced reflection, mainly centered around the question of whether putting Sarah into national ascendance would justify lending assent to the last eight years of bellicose, incompetent Republican rule. While a close call, he's leaning mccain/PALIN.

Both seem to assume that Sarah represents all that is good for the future of conservatism in spite of all that's bad about Republicanism. Having praised her speech - and criticized the sources of the vicious hostility of a number of her overheated critics - I actually remain dubious that Sarah is the savior of conservatism any more than Obama is the actual savior.

My main objections - it will surprise none - revolve around her (doubtless Alaskan, if not Repubican) impulse to "drill, baby, drill" (is that chant any less creepy than when it was "burn, baby, burn"?). I think her position is reflective of a broader set of commitments that ultimately raise questions of how she can reconcile her laudable small town conservatism to her adherence to economic profligacy that contributes above all to homelessness and placelessness. I'm not against drilling per se - and it really wouldn't matter if I were, since it will be pursued by a thirsty public and a craven Congress, as surely as an addict will search the dregs of an ashtray for an unsmoked cigarette butt - but what I AM against is the prospect that we will tap whatever domestic reserves we still have in an effort to bring down prices enough to continue our happy and wasteful motoring suburban lifestyle. If the best and largest oil reserves we have remaining are offshore and under ANWR, shouldn't we put what remains to good use - like preparing for a post-oil world? Shouldn't we create incentives and zoning regulations to increase settlement density and make a world of decreased cheap energy a decent place for our children? If McCain/Palin (or Obama/Biden) are serious about treating domestic and sustainable production as a national security issue - which surely it is, about the best and most effective front we can fight in the "war on terror" - then isn't it about time to ask the citizenry for the kinds of sacrifice that warfare demands? The Republicans have spoken quite a lot about John McCain's noble sacrifice for his nation and have gaudily displayed their motto "Country First," but not once have I heard a single one of them call for even a comparatively tiny amount of sacrifice from the citizenry. We don't have to expect that we're going to live in the Hanoi Hilton, but surely it's not so awful if we begin living in smaller houses spaced closer together if it means we don't have to send another generation of soldiers to protect our "Vital National Interests" in the Middle East? Instead, we hear the tired mantra of tax cuts (who's demanding them? Oh, yea, those folks with large inheritances) and free enterprise (you know the kind - subsidized by the Fed).

How about a deal - we "drill, baby, drill," and in turn put a floor on the price of oil. How about not letting it drop below $4 a gallon, for instance (or, pick your favorite amount, and adjust it for inflation, etc.)? The tax revenue could be used to sponsor research in alternative energies, for starters. It could be used to subsidize public transportation (don't gasp - we already use tax revenues to subsidize private transportation, including things like the "bridge to nowhere"), and investments in infrastructure that will be actually useful in a decade (rather than expanding existing highways). What about creating mandates that encourage States and localities to approve mixed use zoning - rather than the current set of incentives that foster vast distances between where we live, shop, learn, work.... How about changing a whole set of tax incentives that currently favor BIGNESS instead to favor small businesses and local farmers? I'm not a policy guy, so talk among yourselves. But we need something else than tax cuts and "free" markets.

Such a set of policies, or something like them, would ACTUALLY do something to support the kinds of home towns that Sarah Palin came from and whose values she extols. Ironically, it's the policies of her party (no less than those of Bill Clinton, to be honest) which did a whole lot to kill off my home town and many just like it. How about a call for some policies that support real small town values, rather than a really great speech about them? I loved the speech - I really did - but, as you keep saying about Obama, in the end, is it "mere rhetoric"? Personal example is a good thing, but societal structure shapes us. Show me the money - and that it's not all going to go the oil companies, the "developers," the big box stores, and the SUV manufacturers. Show me the money, Sarah. I'm ready to believe, but admit to a whole lot of skepticism.

Dissed

Yes, it hurts. Based on my CV, I'm one of those snobby elitists too. I get it. I even saw it coming.

I come from a small town in central Connecticut - one of those classic New England towns - but am now a transplant in the new Rome. I've long felt a bit homeless in the heart of the cosmopolis, and more than a bit put off by those who consider themselves escapees from parochial backwaters and disdain the poor masses that didn't make it out. It's from that perspective of being "in exile" that I often write critically of my fellow East Coasters - more a worldview than a geographical inevitability. Let's face it: most Americans come from somewhere and end up somewhere else. That's a truth of our culture and our economy. The difference lies in whether you think we should seek to preserve and defend those somewheres or join the progressive tide of history in seeking their demise (i.e., through human strip mining operations that liberate us from parochiality and policies that support destruction of local economic entities. Meritocracy meets Wal Mart). It's a progressive project that's advanced simultaneously by the economic "Right" and the "cultural" Left. I've written about the conundrum and even potential hypocrisy of criticizing the cosmopolitan project while ensconced at an elite institution. Sadly, it's possible that the respectability of such a critique is likely to have more credence from within those very institutions. Maybe Wendell Berry can do it all on his own from the farm - but it can't hurt to assign his books in university classes and raise a very different set of questions for tomorrow's leaders. For all the perils, it's worth the risk...

One Other Thing

A lot of people on the Right have been accusing the MSM of picking up their "talking points" from the extreme Left of the blogosphere. Like Yuval, I'm prone to distrust the range of wild accusations about a media that may be populated by liberal reporters but is structurally governed by corporate imperatives, but I was struck by the number of times a variety of MSM commentators seemed to dismiss Sarah's speech as simply a matter of reading off a teleprompter. I was struck because I first encountered this dismissive attack earlier tonight (before the speech) on a posting at "Daily Kos": "She's going to read a good speech, written by professionals, off of a teleprompter, and she'll do so with a smile." This dismissive observation was made again and again by "objective reporters" on the several channels I was flipping between.

The subtext is, "she's just a pretty woman in a skirt who can read. Let's not jump to any conclusions, however, that she can think." Perhaps we are supposed to be reminded that she was once a sportscaster with a 1980s hairdo. I don't recall this particular dismissive observation having been leveled at all, much less repeatedly, against Obama, who indeed used a teleprompter during his celebrated acceptance speech - a speech that was also written beforehand. The one-sided insinuation game here really reeks. And, frankly, it has every impression of being a smear job based on cultural assumptions about dumb, pretty girls.



UPDATE: It turns out that the Sarah's teleprompter may have been malfunctioning - and she was unfazed. Go figure!! Now she'll be attacked for being too smooth, I'm sure - like all those pretty girls who seem too polished...

Small Town Barracuda

Sarah was ... well, amazing. It was the manliest speech of the evening.

But, it was Palinly obvious that she would kill. The Left's effort to destroy her before she could speak a word, using every weapon available - including impugning her ability to be a working woman while raising five children, or most recently Harry Reid calling her speech "shrill" - was a glaring "tell" that they knew she was a HUGE threat (see Yuval's righteous anger). She embodies a threat not only to Obama's coronation, but - more profoundly - a threat to the basic worldview of the bi-coastal Left.

She is a woman who has achieved power and success but hasn't signed on to the feminist agenda, being pro-life, pro-family, pro-traditional marriage. She COULD have escaped from small-town life, joining the strip-mining operation by which promising human raw materials are inserted into the upwardly-mobile stream that conscripts footsoldiers in the international army of cosmopolites - and refused to do so, even when achieving state-wide and even national success while refusing to repudiate the small-town values that formed and inform her. She seems like the modern incarnation of the old Anjoli commercial - making the bacon and cooking it in a pan - whether in pumps and a skirt or a hunting or fishing suit, or simply sitting on a big motorcycle - while delivering a hammer of a speech while her youngest daughter smooths the hair of a special needs child that most Americans would have aborted. Wow!



Above all, she was able to make the genuine case against Obama's effete elitism. Hearing Mitt Romney attack the "East Coast elites" almost made me blow chow. Rudy G. posing as a populist small-town mayor was laughable. But Sarah - when she noted Obama's habit of speaking one way to people in Scranton and another way to people in San Francisco - well, that was something she KNOWS something about. She's had to live it in all its ferocity from his surrogates for the past week, if not from the broader society her whole life. During this past week the bi-coastal Left has revealed all too clearly what it thinks of small town folks in its treatment of Sarah and her family (and it still goes on, incredibly enough). They can overlook the inexperience of a cosmopolitan, but not a small town gal. Especially a small town gal who, by all rights, should be liberated. How dare she not be!! It's time to put on the back burner the question of experience (it turns out Governors and Senators of small states can be effective Presidents), and to raise the question of what is being valued, and what is being repudiated, in the worldviews of the candidates (and it now seems to be an Obama v. Palin race, amazingly enough...). On that score, Sarah will be spending a LOT of time in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And the crowds will be Obama-like in their immensity, albeit without bitterness toward God, guns, or Sarah.

New Categories

Joe Bageant's "anonymous political consultant" is subsequently and insightfully cited in a more recent post, and again points out how the "elite consensus" is forged by vilifying and excluding the "backward" elements of society - those who are not (yet) economically or socially liberated enough. In a great rip-roaring piece of analysis, he notes the deafening absence of objections by the proponents of "personal responsibility" when it comes to the public covering of losses incurred by the power elites of our economic system, and of the inviolability of the practice of externalizing "socializing costs" in the worldview of this class:

The elite consensus on these issues is solidly to the right of public opinion. This is especially the case on the issues of trade and globalization. Support for supposed free markets, free trade and globalization are almost universal and unquestioned within elite circles.

This is the establishment issue, all else can be argued and debated but to question the system of privatized profit and socialized cost is the fastest road to political oblivion for any candidate for national office.

Within the confines of elite consensus no cost is ever too exorbitant in "reassuring" Wall Street and "calming the financial markets". No better example of this than the prompt and generous response of the Federal Reserve and the Congress to the recent financial crisis in the housing markets. With hardly any opposition the United States Government nationalized the losses which resulted from the bursting of the housing bubble. There where no calls of prosecution, lectures on personal responsibility, fears of creeping socialism or demands for conditional structural adjustments from bankers and investment houses. The scandal in fact is not the crime in this case, which is to be expected, but in the silence of the public and the political class to this public thievery.

My one objection to this analysis is the claim that we can classify such economic mandarins as members of "the Right" (I don't think it was the capitalists who were sitting on the right side of the French Parlement when discussions preceding the French Revolution were taking place. Recall that Turgot was wildly admired by the philosophes, and was one of the great 18th-century proponents of progress, economic growth - and centralization. He understood well that economic growth necessitated the existence of a strong and centralized State to flatten and consolidate those lumpy parts of society - the original "corporations" - that might stand in the way of public and private power. For more on this general point, read Grant McConnell's classic book Private Power and American Democracy. Better still, try to digest Bertrand de Jouvenel's classic On Power, which refutes the idea that the revolutionaries were seeking to displace a centralized regime. Theirs was a project of State centralization.). What Bageant's consultant considers to be to the Right, however, is what is called "liberalism" in Europe. It is only a fluke of history - the common opposition of a coalition of disparate worldviews to the communism - that gave rise to the widespread trope that economic liberals should be considered as constituents of "the Right." The consultant's earlier commentary, linking these economic liberals to the cultural Left is apropos: the liberation of self from all restraints of tradition and custom required, and is based upon, the initial artillery attack of an internationalizing commercial system. This coalition of the willing, seemingly separated into opposing parties but joined by a worldview, is masterfully obscured by our broken political categories.

Bill Kauffman gets to the heart of the barrenness of these categories in his rousing speech before the Ron Paul Un-convention. I hold no particular flame for Paul, and I think Bill (like Ron Paul) is too willing to critique the Empire (rightfully) without noting the depredations that our private, corporate Empires exert on the small towns and local customs that he extols. But there's much here to admire - beginning with a quote from one Wendell Berry (who is better on the recognizing the role of an expansionist economy in destroying cultures), which appropriately receives a shout-out from the Kentucky delegation. I couldn't agree more with his call to re-think our basic political categories, and am cheered that a growing chorus of voices are calling for just this.

Part One:



And Part Two:



Hat tip, Rod Dreher - nice tag teaming...

Divided and Conquered

Speaking of encouraging the libertarians to form their own (wealthy) Party, I recommend this great post by one of America's most insightful writers, Joe Bageant. (Obama should read Bageant's book Deer Hunting with Jesus, and pronto!).

In this post, entitled "Life in the Post Political Age," Bageant quotes a political consultant (not sure if this is a real person, or just Bageant - whichever, s/he's brilliant) to explain the rise of Obama and why this signals the culmination of trends leading to a post-political, consumerist, individualist society in which both organized Labor (on the Left) and evangelical Christianity (on the Right) have been the losers, in spite of suspicions from opponents that they are the heart and soul of their respective parties. Separated by false perceptions of each other and tied to their respective party elites who pursue agendas at odds with these supporters who are on the wrong side of History, they have been divided and conquered:

The underlying social change that led to the Obama victory is the unprecedented extent to which the narrative of popular consumer culture, and the media that drives it, has become the dominant influence on how Americans think, formulate their ideas and understand the world around them.

The most important result of this process has been the steady and consistent depoliticization of American society, to an extent that we can make the case that we are living at the dawn of the post political age.

The two primary features of the post political age are a politics completely drained of all its contents and ability or willingness to be used as an agent of change in social or economic policy, and its full integrations into the world of American popular, consumer and entertainment culture. To such an extent that there exists today a seamless web between our political, economic, media and consumer cultures wherein the modes and values of one are completely integrated and compatible with the others.

It should not come as a surprise that the dominant ideas and mores of popular culture have become the dominant ideas of our society. Popular culture is the breaker of customs, prejudice, tradition and relevant historical knowledge.

It is a result of this dynamic that the two consistent winners in American politics over the last 30 years have been the cultural left and the economic right. Despite the massive organizing drive of the religious right over the past three decades, they are further away from reversing the cultural liberalization of American society than when they started. On others side of the ledger, organized labor outside of a few urban pockets and industries is no longer a relevant force in American life. The ever greater electoral activism of both of these groups is generally misunderstood as a show of strength; in fact, it is the exact opposite. It is the desperate fight of the losing side of the American economic, cultural and political scene.

In essence the same forces that make it possible for the rapid acceptance of ideas such as gay marriage are the same force which can create a society that will accept massive social inequalities.

In the post political world the candidates who can best thrive in it have tremendous appeal to the economic elites; these candidates thrive in a system that does not dwell on issues and will never ask the question, "who has power and why", but simultaneously creates a social and media environment of stupefying distractions while destroying traditional social mores (under-credited as a source of much social solidarity). This can only benefit their continued rule of that society.

In such a setting our political choices like our consumer choices, regardless of the product, are primarily about what makes us more fulfilled and feel better about ourselves.

Senator Obama's campaign understood much better the impact of these changes on our electoral system than any of his opponents' campaigns. In the post political world, the campaign that is less political and less issue-based but is savvier in using new modes of communication technology will be the campaign to win the greatest market share of the electorate. The candidate in this case, Obama, was not a political entity but, in essence a product, an ornament that made his supporters feel better about themselves.

One of the most telling facts about the Obama's constituency outside of African Americans (whose support needs no explanation) is that it is a coalition of people who need or demand the least amount of social benefit from our government. They are the under politicized younger voters and upper middle class whites. The two groups, coincidently, are the ones most influenced by trends in consumer popular culture and have the greatest of ease using the latest technologies....

His very presence, the color of his skin, the very strangeness of his name is the best guarantee of his betrayal of the expectations of the constituencies that will vote to elect him. Barack Obama is in short order a far more reassuring prospect for the continued dominance of the financial elite than another four years of neo-conservative rule which in an almost historically unique combination of greed, ill will, incompetence and stupidity have brought the country to the edge of disaster.

Audacity yes, change hardly.

Bloody brilliant.

January 20, 2009

Neck deep in the campaign, few are thinking concretely about what happens after the inauguration. Peter Beinart has given it some thought, and has suggested that the Republicans would win by losing. Noting that Congress is certain to be firmly in the hands of Democratic majorities, a President McCain will be forced either to veto many bills that could offend "the base," or more likely (particularly given the theme of last night's convention, and Joe Lieberman's speech especially), make compromises with the Democrats that may be fatal to a process of Republican re-definition that will be needed over the next while. Playing defense, it will be uncertain what Republicanism will stand for - particularly with a self-defined maverick as a standard bearer.

But there are severe perils for a President Obama as well. Beinart writes, "Democrats have a history of overreaching when they win huge majorities. Franklin Roosevelt did so after his re-election landslide in 1936; so did Lyndon Johnson after 1964. Obama could as well. With big majorities in the House and Senate, he'd probably take another run at universal health care, which is what helped prompt the Gingrich revolution in 1994. He could hike taxes and impose tough new environmental regulations on business. He might preside over a messy withdrawal from Iraq and perhaps see Iran complete development of a nuclear weapon. Any one of these things could pump some life into the near catatonic GOP."

An Obama presidency will be celebrated by many as a kind of religious apotheosis. Expectations for transformation of America and the world - "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal" - are running feverishly high. With the likelihood of substantial majorities in a Democratic Congress and a slew of promises to fulfill, it is easy to imagine Obama overreaching. Nothing would galvanize a demoralized Republican party than a Democratic Washington against which to run. And lest we think that the current economic recession will cease on January 20, the next President will have a set of challenges unseen perhaps since the days of FDR. Obama could succeed by calling for sacrifice and a change of behavior by America's citizens, but while his words about responsibility have soared, his programmatic proposals have suggested an exceedingly activist government that will likely increase the deficit and decrease incentives for true self-governance. We will go from expecting a free ride from Wall Street to a free ride from Washington.

The problem that Republicans face in this likely scenario is that they will remain the party that is best defined by what they are against. Having been in the position to govern with a Republican-controlled Presidency and Congress, they achieved their position by lambasting the tax-and-spend Democrats even as they showed that they are tax-cut-and-spend Republicans who above all enjoyed power for the sake of power. If Republicans are reasonably against the anti-realism of a Messianic Obama presidency, then Republicans must find a way to be for something. Douthat and Salam's Grand New Party may be a blueprint or at least a prolegomenon to a redefinition of what Republicans are for, but they are very young men who don't yet have the attention of the leaders of their party. Rod Dreher's "Crunchy Conservatism" draws ever-more adherents, and has the potential of bringing together city-based environmental types and small town populists, but he remains something of an apostate within the conservative inner citadel (not enough free market dogma to assuage the fund-raisers. I say cut them loose and let them form a libertarian party with the Democratic elites. We'll be poor, but happy). What is striking about the Republican convention is the advanced age of most of its delegates, and the suspicion by this viewer that it will be some time before they can begin to articulate a positive vision that moves beyond knee-jerk and frankly tired opposition that translates poorly into a governing philosophy.

A President Obama would doubtlessly give Republicans the opportunity to define themselves against an over-reaching opponent. He remains sufficiently undefined for voters to remain unsure whether he will be able to resist his own party when it seeks to increase government spending by scales of magnitude, as it surely will. His words give some hope, but the evidence of his actions is thin and does not inspire confidence in standing up to liberal orthodoxy. His debt to an electoral base composed of readers of "Daily Kos" and "Huffington Post" is problematic. Dogged adherence to their demands will have one certain outcome: a rejuvanation of a demoralized and disorganized Republican Party. Losing the election may be the best thing that could happen to the Republicans, and the worst for the Democrats. Politics is a funny business.

Good Advice From Andrew Sullivan

But I doubt the Obama campaign and its surrogates will take it. Indeed, the vicious reaction by the Left to Palin's candidacy has been breathtaking, sadly confirming the East/Left Coast mentality that dominates the Party elite.

Sullivan quotes this email from an Alaskan:

What the Republicans missed about Sarah Palin then--and what the Democrats seem poised to miss now--is that she is a true political savant; a candidate with a knack for identifying the key gripes of the populace and packaging herself as the solution. That keen political nose has enabled her to routinely outperform her resume. Nearly two years into her administration, she still racks up approval ratings of 80 per cent or better.

One might reasonably ask to what extent her local popularity is buoyed by the high price of oil (and thus, a budget surplus, and thus, the ability to carry a stick into meetings with big oil). One might speculate about the durability of her anti-corruption stance in light of her conflict of interest in the dismissal of her director of public safety. And only the truly feckless would not concern themselves about her dearth of foreign policy experience. But in probing this candidate, it would behoove the Democrats and the pundits to shed the notion that they are dealing with some dimwitted bumpkin (Dan Quayle seems to come up a lot lately) who’s going to start crying when they ask her to name the president of Azerbaijan; or that Palin is the townie who was brought into the Skull & Bones initiation night for the amusement of all; or that somehow the prom queen ballots got mixed up with the Alaska gubernatorial poll. Trivialize her at your own peril.

Sarah Palin is a living reminder that the ultimate source of political power in this country is not the Kennedy School or the Davos Summit or an Ariana Huffington salon; even now, power emanates from the electorate itself. More precisely, power in 2008 emanates from the working class electorates of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Sooner or later, the Obama camp will realize that the beauty pageant queen is an enormously talented populist in a year that is ripe for populism. For their own sake, it had better be sooner.

There can be little doubt that the viciousness of the attacks on Palin (Sullivan is a prime example) are motivated by fear, not confidence. Sarah is a threat to the Obama coronation, particularly inasmuch as she is the living refutation of his disdain for "bitter people who cling to their guns and religion." Palin's happy warrior visage shows that guns and religion and the values of small town America are the sources of satisfaction and joy, not what people console themselves with when they don't decamp to New York or L.A. Her very existence shines a bright white light on the underlying assumptions of "false consciousness" that the Democratic elite attribute to the working class. Nothing could be more offensive to their therapeutic worldview, and because of that, she must be crushed - feminism be damned.

Sarah, Plain and Diminished

I like Sarah. How can one not? She is what we wish all our politicians were - real, earthy, and perhaps above all in this election, someone who comes from somewhere. In her life and beliefs, she shows the values of the small town she grew up in. Revealingly, one of the main line of attacks against her is the smallness of the place from which she comes. The assumption is that, if you are going to govern something large and complicated like America, you should come from somewhere (or nowhere in particular) that is similarly large and complex. The values that might be cultivated in a small town - loyalty, integrity born of actual commitments, the courage to stand up for what you believe in, a willingness to sacrifice for those one knows and cares for, a high valuation of face-to-face trust and compromise - are deemed irrelevant among the chattering class of pundits. The longstanding disdain for smallness and "parochiality" continues to separate our elites from nearly everyone else.

But still - learning yesterday that Sarah's daughter is expecting diminished Sarah in my eyes. This diminishment had nothing to do with disapproval of the pregnancy or disappointment in her mothering skills (it amazes me that some on the Left are even going here. Really. Incredible.). We all know that people make mistakes, and what reveals character most fundamentally are not our inevitable mistakes, but how we respond to those mistakes. What has impressed, and still impresses, about Sarah and now her family is that they live the values they espouse. She appears to be the living embodiment of the values so often touted by Republicans, but so seldom carried through (the sainted Ronald Reagan and John McCain were both divorcees, it could be recalled).

Peter Lawler has rightly noted that Sarah was chosen because of WHO she IS. "Sarah energizes the "faith and family" vote because of WHO she is.... Palin represents real, young people with real marriages, real jobs, real families, a real enjoyment for sports, the outdoors, and all the good things of life, real religion, and a real sense of personal responsibility." I agree completely - and the announcement of her daughter's pregnancy undermines this narrative in a disturbing if indirect way. Knowing of her daughter's pregnancy, and knowing the sort of wringer a modern Presidential campaign resembles, could she have doubted for a moment that this would become "big news?" That every aspect of her daughter's life would now be investigated - even as the MSM would tut-tut about the way children are now dragged into campaigns, and publically wrestle over whether news about candidate's children should be covered, even as they continuously plaster pictures of Bristol on the news and report the name of the father, investigate his background, and doubtlessly will try to figure out exactly where and when the dirty deed was done...

In short, if the narrative of Sarah's ascent is WHO she IS, then we know that she was willing to accept a place on the ticket in spite of the harrowing public attention to which her daughter would be subjected. Perhaps Bristol is, or will turn out to be, a Juno-like character who doesn't give a good G-D about what other people think. Perhaps her mother knows this, and went forward in accepting the VP slot knowing her daughter would be impervious to probing, intrusive, international scrutiny. But if she is in any way a typical American teenager - and a small-town one at that - it's likely she will be embarrassed, demoralized and possibly damaged by the obscenely bright lights of attention on her now. The sad fact is that this is now an inescapable part of the the modern campaign. It was certain to be the one sure attack on Sarah, since "WHO she IS" is her most appealing feature. Sarah won't be the one subjecting her daughter to this gauntlet, but surely she had to know it awaited. If her daughter is damaged by this attention, her mother will have invited it for the sake of being named to the ticket. Perhaps this is the ultimate example of "Country First." Or, I fear, it may be another woeful instance of "Political Viability First." I wish only the best for the Palins, and hope Sarah's was the right decision for their family.