In today’s edition (10/10/10) of my hometown newspaper, The Ithaca Journal, a letter to the editor, penned by one, Doug Laney of Horseheads, has offered up one very old (but not outmoded) phrase as an answer to the state of crackpot-ery that seems to define this U.S. election season: “The Sky is Not Falling.”
Obviously, Mr. Laney, like me, belongs to the increasingly marginalized class of voter who is frustrated to find the voice of reason drowned out by the collective voice of all the blowhards and cranks that have dominated the airwaves. Born in 1983, I personally am barely old enough to remember the days when the Christine O’Donnells and the Sharon Angles, with their whacky ramblings of imminent Chinese plots to launch a military invasion of the United States and of Sharia law taking place in some states, would be relegated to handing out cheaply printed pamphlets at the airport, alongside the Moonies and Jews for Jesus. Nowadays, people of such caliber a considered serious candidates for public office, their message broadcast unquestioningly into millions of homes by Fox News. In the old days, Hollywood could effectively combat such paranoid thinking and the paranoiacs behind it using satire in comedies like Dr. Strangelove. Nowadays, Hollywood produces plodding bore-fests like Rendition and Lions for Lambs—someone please tell me where is a flying Delorean to send me back through time, when I need one?
I am sure that Mr. Laney is a man who takes pride in wearing the pin, Reason & Logic, on his lapel. I have, however, some reservation towards Mr. Laney’s particular style of messaging. He seems to present his opinion as fact: “The good news is that no matter what happens in this election cycle, history moves relentlessly to the left. All conservatives can do is to profit in the very short term, and that's OK with them because they worship profit.” He is wrapping himself around an article of faith. However accurate it may be that progress continues to move forward despite short-term obstruction by the forces of an angry backlash, such insouciant gloating emboldens reactionaries and renders liberals unprepared.
I have always cautioned against the dangers of acting self-righteous in the face of a polarized electorate. As I wrote two years ago, liberals too often “fall into the trap of displaying the very ‘elitism’ they [conservatives] have come to believe defines [liberals].”
Make no mistake, we are in the midst of a war, whether we believe we are in the trenches or we are just on the sidelines. The war is Politics. And like any war, no one ever allows anyone to sit it out and not take a side, no matter how much one may wish to proclaim him or herself as being someone who is staying Above-the-Fray. Therein lies the paradox. When the electorate exists in a kulturkampf such as ours, the folk I call the rationalists find themselves pitted against the crackpots, but like many good rationalists we quickly find that it is impossible for us to advance, let alone win, in the climate of irrationality. Rick Perlstein writes of the “various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension.” Given this “mutual incomprehension,” it is natural for rationalists, such as Mr. Laney and myself retreat into a position where we take the role of academic observers, safe from the carnage of the fight, leaving the battle solely to the extremists on both sides. Let the familiar face of the Hard Left take on that of the Hard Right. Today, the familiar face of the Hard Left is usually associated with Moveon.org (Though, by the standards of radicalism throughout the past two centuries, I hardly consider Moveon.org to be very extreme.) This type of thinking is in itself, a false choice. It is virtually impossible to claim total freedom from both sides’ intransigencies. I certainly do not make that claim. To do so would be denying my own sympathies toward one side over the other. I am fully willing to admit that I may find myself defending the actions of extremists fighting for a cause that I believe in, all the while I am denouncing the actions of extremists with whose views I may disagree. I believe it has been the problem for traditional liberal thinkers is the constant have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too mentality. Take as an example, the events of the Student Strike at Columbia University in the spring of 1968. In an effort to mediate between the university administration and antiwar students who had occupied several buildings, one group of idealistic professors formed what became known as the Ad Hoc Faculty Committee, dedicated to resolving the conflict without violence. Though, as historian, Vincent J. Cannato, in his book The Ungovernable City, writes:
Yet the creation of the Ad Hoc Group was based on faulty assumptions. First, they saw themselves as a neutral, objective force on campus that would sort out the competing interests of the different factions. In reality, however, the faculty was not objective. Many faculty members sympathized with the protesters (p. 247).
Mao Zedong famously observed this tendency among western liberals to engage in such “faulty assumptions:”
People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well--they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves. They keep both kinds of goods in stock and find a use for each. This is how the minds of certain people work.
Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism. It is negative and objectively has the effect of helping the enemy; that is why the enemy welcomes its preservation in our midst. Such being its nature, there should be no place for it in the ranks of the revolution.
I first read Combat Liberalism [and Discipline] when I stumbled upon it online around five years ago. I suppose I should be wary of my admitting this, for fear of suggesting my guilt-by-reading-material. I can see my inevitable shrill denunciation at the hands of Glenn Beck right now (“Don’t listen to this deluded young man’s traitorous opinions. He reads the writings of Chairman Mao, so he too must be a Marxist/Socialist/Progressive/Muslim who is bent on destroying this country with promises of free healthcare and fluoridated water!!!”)
I’ll be run out of town, of course, just like Anita Dunn, when she made the cardinal sin of calling Mao one of her “favorite political philosophers.” Naturally, Glenn Beck considers his red baiting to be on safe ground. After all, he reasons, "It would be like me saying to you, 'you know who my favorite political philosopher is? Adolf Hitler.' Have you read Mein Kampf? [She wants to] fight your fight like Hitler did." This is a truly fallacious argument. Plenty people may find edification through the writings any number of historical figures, however genocidal. One fan of a Mao biography was none other than George W. Bush. Surely, I can’t think of many NRA-loving, gun-toting conservatives who would disagree with Mao’s famous slogan, “all power comes from the barrel of a gun.” But I doubt they would be so likely as to admit it and find themselves lumped together with all the “Marxist/Socialist/Progressive/Muslims” that are behind every corner. As for fans Mein Kampf, Beck, needn’t look further than his fellow right-wing radio shock-jock, G. Gordon Liddy, who freely admitted to an admiration of Adolph Hitler—his “first political hero.”
As for yours truly, I may have read copies of Combat Liberalism, (which aside from skimming some parts of Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, is the only work by Mao I have actually read), but I also have been known on occasion to read books by such luminaries as Orestes Brownson, Russell Kirk, and Joseph Schumpeter—men who are hardly transmitters of progressive thought. Beck, might take an interest in such Classical Liberal 19th Century philosophers as Orestes Brownson, or mid-20th Century pioneers of the modern intellectual conservative movement like Kirk and Schumpeter, if only he weren’t so busy reading the works of fringe oddballs like W. Cleon Skousen.
Let’s face it: a then-22-year-old senior at Franklin Pierce College (now, University) in 2005, perusing Mao Zedong’s Combat Liberalism online, isn’t quite the same radical bona fides as “voting with your feet” in People’s Park, Berkley, in 1967, now is it? Anyone wish to cast Joe the Mailman as an enemy of the state?
The chances are, Mao would most definitely have ordered my execution as a counterrevolutionary. After all, I am indeed guilty of just about every liberal sin that Mao rails against in Combat Liberalism, especially “taking a liberal attitude towards oneself.”
Back to the political “war” I write of. I admit to being somewhat fast and loose with labels when I use the term kulturkampf—in English, “culture war” or “culture struggle” to define the shout-a-thon that is politics today. As D.A. Boxwell of the United States Air Force Academy recounts the term’s etymology:
Actually, the phrase “culture war” is nothing new, nor is the concept of a culture at war with itself. In the modern era, we can go all the way back to Germany in the period after the Franco-Prussian War, when (as the OED informs us) the word kulturkampf (literally, culture struggle) entered the lexicon to describe the convulsive conflict between the Bismarck’s government and the Papacy for control of schools and Church appointments (1872-87). The bitterly contested effort to secularize the nascent German empire wasn’t unique in the 19th century, but it was this particular one that articulated it as something more than just a debate or even a conflict. The opposing forces of church and state, if not considered krieg (war), was a “struggle,” according to the phrase’s maker Rudolf Virchow, the scientist and Prussian liberal statesman, who declared in 1873 that the battle with Roman Catholicism assumed “the character of a great struggle in the interest of humanity.” Note that Virchow universalized the conflict in terms larger than the German people, inflating the rhetoric circulating around the controversy, to argue that it had import for all of mankind. As in all struggles, there are wins and losses; in this first kuturkampf, most of the anti-Catholic legislation had been repealed, moderated by Bismarck, or fell by the wayside from a lack of enforcement and public resistance to it.
Is it fair then to call the 2010 American political divide a kulturkampf? The kulturkampf of Bismarck-era Germany was a battle between two radically different philosophies that would dramatically impact the existence of a whole society. Otto Von Bismarck’s secular forces and the religious forces of the Catholic Church were not simply vying for political control, but it was a struggle of the triumph of ideas. Today’s political ideologues seek not idea-oriented, but are more inclined to shouting down the other side. I think then, that the more appropriate term for today should be Kraftkampf—“Power struggle.”
Of course, the Tea Partiers like to claim that their fight is a philosophical one—Conservatism vs. Socialism—but if the previous eight years of governance by the Right has taught us anything, it is that the Right has generally been more interested in marginalizing and demonizing liberals than in pursuing a true conservative agenda. They may spout out antigovernment views when they are in the opposition, but are too happy to move the full weight of the government to jail antiwar demonstrators of the Left and accuse dissenters of treason. Repression is ok when your side is doing the repressing.
There should be little wonder, then, that I haven’t seen as much enthusiasm from Ann Coulter, in her current columns. Back during the Bush years, Coulter practically reigned as Top Dog of Right-Wing anti-liberal pundits. Her main theme was to attack the patriotism of anyone who dared question the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Crying “treason” was truly a winning schtick, and a lucrative one, at that. Now in the Age of Obama, Ms. Coulter hasn’t used that word so much. She seems to have been genuinely unprepared for the rise of the Tea Parties, which have portrayed themselves as just as much a revolt against the conservative Republican establishment, which she herself has been a part of, as it is against the Marxist/Socialist/Progressive/Muslims. One need only notice a developing pattern in her latest columns. She has consistently less to say regarding the political climate of the nation in general, instead opting for focusing on minor regional political disputes. In her August 11th entry she devotes the entire column to blasting a corruption scandal involving Democratic officials in a suburb of Los Angeles. Yes, it has proven hard for the one-time Queen of Cruelty to find her place among the new cast of characters on the political stage, especially now that Sarah Palin has all but knocked her out of the limelight. Apparently the best way she can refine her identity is to take positions that the Ann Coulter of 2005 would find ghastly. According to the New York Times:
Now that members of the Tea Party movement have stolen much of her thunder, Ms. Coulter is taking some surprising new positions. She called the decision to send more troops into Afghanistan “insane,” warning that it could be a new Vietnam. She has decried fellow Republicans for continuing to insist President Obama is Muslim. And perhaps most startling, she wants to bring more gay Republicans into the conservative fold.
Now, call me a hypocrite for giving so much ink to the very pundits I have previously remarked would only be worth a few pamphlets scattered around the airport alongside the literature of the Moonies and Jews for Jesus. But I think it is significant to point out that if there is anyone who truly symbolizes the conflict between the current right-wing backlash against the Age of Obama and traditional “liberal-bashing” it is Ann Coulter.
I’ve been writing this entry for hours, now. It is the first I have successfully written at home, as opposed to at a public spot downtown (or while traveling) in a long time. I suppose I should feel proud for that. I certainly have covered a lot of ground in this one. So how should I tie this all together in with Mr. Doug Laney’s letter to the Ithaca Journal? If only I could think of a hook. But it’s ten minutes to midnight and I’d like to post this while it’s still October 10th. Oh well, the sky is not falling.
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