Moral Quagmire
A few days ago James Dobbins penned a piece which nails down a crucial feature of not merely Bush's Middle East Policy and its failure but of an important pillar of the politics of the right.
Simply put, the right is intellectually incoherent, combining ultra-darwinian free market fundamentalists, with evangelics who believe that Darwin is the ultimate evil in the world. It combines big government militarists with minarchists who want to destroy the modern state. What has held the movement together is exactly what Dobbins names so concisely: moral clarity which is the product of a very simple view of political space.
There are two points that need to be made, first, the source of the right wing's moral clarity, and second is that this made conservatism the ulimate post-modern movement. From this a conclusion can be drawn, and that is that the rise of the modern "conservative" movement is losing its intellectual advantage. In no small part, because it is not conservative at all.
Instead, the conservative movement is not built on conserving what exists, but in a reactionary against an opposing sense of political space. What most people call conservative is not, because it does not protect what is, but has a definite projection in the future about what ought to be. The political space it preaches for, is not a political space which actually exists. It is therefore not conservative, but reactionary, and that is how it must be referred to.
I. Political Space
The first point has puzzled pundits and prognosticators for some time. The Reactionary movement was viewed in a mirror to the liberal movement. In the liberal movement there are "economic liberals", meaning in this context, using government to ameliorate the cycles of business and guide the economy, and there are "social liberals", meaning, in this context, using government to advance rights and equal participation. The theory of the decline of the left, rhetorically, is that economic liberals grew disgusted with social liberals, and left the party for the Republican Party to become the socially Reactionary wing of a reverse coalition.
However, this explanation failed over and over again, because the Republican Party repeatedly failed to wedge along social and economic lines. That is, the libertarian-esque Jefferson quoters never deserted the social Reactionaries, even when the social Reactionaries pushed anti-Darwinian dogma and perpetual big government. The libertarianesque wing in fact worshiped, and worships, Ronald Reagan, despite his being the architect of huge deficits. That it was intellectually implausible for the very people demanding a gold standard and a balanced budget to pay homage at the cathedral of our lady of perpetual deficits, was obvious, but it did not give observers locked in the old "economic/social" paradigm the clue they needed to understand.
Strangely, or perhaps not, one can find a great deal more wisdom about the subject in angry comments left on blogs and forums and in emails to lists, than in most sagaciously syntaxed explorations of the Reactionary mind. This is, probably, because ordinary liberals and technocrats had to deal with the Reactionary movement's followers face to face. The ordinary angry liberal was angry precisely because it was obvious what was really going on, and the political leadership, and to a somewhat lesser extent the intellectual leadership did not seem to understand it.
The important visible clue has been the cleavage of the Republican Party over anti-immigration policy. While anti-immigrant hysteria and its attendant racism are useful to the Republican Party for vote suppression, it cleaved Bush from his base for the first, and so far only, time in his presidency. What was going on here?
What it exposed was a rift in the Reactionary movement, and why that rift was the important one becomes clear when one observes what the Reactionary movement puts forward as its legendary past, and its vision of an idyllic state.
The Reactionary movement's moral clarity comes from a particular view of political "space". One reason humans are so much more capable and obvious about using intelligence to reshape the world, is that we have the ability to think about a problem in multiple different ways. Instead of being locked into dealing with the outside world by the way it presents itself, we can translate a problem into other terms, and imagine a solution. For example, we can translate sounds into letters and dots, write those letters down, and have the person on the other side sing the song that was written down. IQ is, more or less, the ability to translate from one kind of symbol to another.
So it is with politics. We can envision not just the people we see as leaders, or the people we deal with as members of a band or tribe, but we can feel how political space works. We can feel restrictions closing in on us when traveling to dangerous places, and we can feel the sense of possibility after a political victory. Political space is something we move through, and this gives human beings the ability to do what no other animal does on a regular basis, belong to groups that are larger than a single troupe or breeding group or flock. We can be loyal and protective about people that we will never see.
Political space cuts in both directions. We not only imagine the political space we live in, but our imagination of political space is something we impose on others and on the people around us. Political space isn't just a tool, it is a goal.
To understand a political movement, or a political era, means to understand the vision of political space that its followers have. Ideology, rhetoric and other facets fo the movement have their own individual existence, but it is within the sense of political space that all else curves. Political space is like gravity in Einstein, it shapes the very rulers and clocks that people use to measure reality.
II. The Reactionary Moral Clarity
To return to Dobbins' crucial point: Bush foreign policy sought moral clarity by dividing an inside from an outside, and declaring that everyone outside must be interconnected in one "Axis of Evil".
Dobbins nails the essential relationship between moral clarity and the Reactionary movement: moral clarity has been the advantage, because it has allowed the Reactionary movement to govern far above its numbers, to break rules, understandings, laws and the constitution when it suited its temporary purposes, and to, at all times, maintain a sense of steady certainty an arrogance in a seemingly uncertain world.
It also has failed to deliver the goods, but people are willing to overlook failure as long as it is other people who are paying most of the price for failure.
Let's make this more general. The Reactionary movement is about creating a hard boundary between inside and outside. From this flow two simple principles: what happens inside is justified by the rules, this is "morality", and any violation of the boundary justifies the use of maximum, indeed unlimited, violence, this is "clarity".
From this it is easy to see why the Reactionary movement worships the Federalist Republic and the early period of the Union that came after it: in that time, the job of the government was limited, in theory, to establishing a boundary, and clubbing into the ground anyone who violated the ordinary ways of doing business. Guns and a gold standard is all the Reactionary movement saw as being necessary to a successful economy and society.
It is important to stop and feel this visualization of the world, inside a tank, a world where the game itself and the normal patterns of behavior regulate everything, without any need for state intervention. Then a protective hard shell, and outside a group of foul genocidal demons from whom those inside must be protected at all cost. It is a simple world to live in. It rationalizes certain kinds of behavior, and it gives "freedom", stay in the tank, and you do not have any burden of thinking about consequences or outcomes beyond those that can be simply extrapolated from your own actions.
It also justifies an almost unlimited budget for prisons and the military - because a thicker tank is always better, and the forces of evil are everywhere. This simple view of space gave the Reactionary movement its clarity, and it also created the Reactionary movement's way of solving everything. Create a tank, demand that everything inside the tank simply run, and then hammer or slaughter any threats to the tank.
But why did this work in the United States, of all places, a country built in its modern incarnation of a super-power by a very different theory of political space? And how did it unify techno-libertarians with luddite theocrats, with corporate elites?
It did so because it could be sold to consumers, who, in fact, were presented with a system which, in their day to day experience, was what the right wing said day to day experience should be about. Consumers make decisions based on the immediate and immediately visible signals they see. The Reactionary movement's view of "inner space" corresponded with this. Threats to that are external and violent. This corresponds to the consumer's view of the world that bad events come from rapid and violent dislocations, such as a mugging or a car accident or a lay off. The Reactionary movement then argued that bad things would not happen if only the outer tank was thick enough, and the inner space was fumigated of alien influences.
Consumers accepted this: keep out the bad guys, fumigate the people who don't "act like us", who are merely infiltrating bad guys, and all will be well. It is "The Wisdom of Crowds".
In fact, the society that consumers lived in was the reverse - the tank which they saw as normal, omnipresent and stable, was a product of a great deal of deliberate planning, and a great deal of deliberate engineering. Prices, advertisments, goods and services were all regulated, activity was subsidized, the economy monitored constantly. There was no consumer tank, except in the minds of consumers.
However, this created a complex and uncertain sense of political space, where as the Reactionary movement, in its various forms, presented a simple view of political space. Kill the baddies, keep them out, and all is well, is about a simple a view of political space as can be drawn.
This worked because of the hypnotic power of nomos - the ordinary laws and customs which a community runs on. The nomos is what is normal. Morality is nothing more than the brain's way of organizing the normal patterns of behavior internally.
Moral clarity on the right was, and is, the fundamental principle, because maintaining the simple view of political space, and the simple faith in simple rules the sole end of intellectual and rhetorical activity. Nothing else matters.
III. Reactionary Movements
To generate a Reactionary movement, all one needed to do is create a demon, a nomos and a boundary that separated the two. Rhetoric falls out of this almost immediately, since it is all about either emphasizing the evils of the demon, the self-justifying good of the nomos, and the importance of having an absolute and simplistic boundary between the two. This means that not even a speck of evil can be tolerated, not a single example. It also means that whatever is inside the tank, once all corrupting influences are removed, must be pure good, and therefore even questioning it is evil.
In short every Reactionary rhetoric could be reduced down to "zero tolerance" and "axiomic good". Reactionary attacks boil down then to proving that someone or something isn't pure good, and therefore must be pure evil. The swift boating of John Kerry is a simple example - it wasn't that his accusers were credible, they weren't, but it was that he was accused at all. There are only two places, inside and outside, and the testimony of insiders is enough to place someone outside.
This is how Reactionary movements that disagree with each other violently on actual issues worked together with such seemless efficiency. The were all defending an inside from an outside, and they were shoulder to shoulder with people who were emotionally like themselves. More important than agreement on dogma, as an agreement about the enemy. The enemy wasn't a particular enemy, it was a concept, a concept of a different kind of political space. While government, terrorists, gays, inner urban street toughs, activist judges might have been the nominal enemies, the real enemy was having to be present in ones own actions. The real enemy was having to look where you were going, and think about the implications of what you were doing.
The steps are simple:
First, assert axiomic good. Anyone who doesn't agree with this is blown off the board, because at that point everything they say is untrustworthy.
Second, assert evil, if A is good, then not-A is not-good. Anyone who disagrees with this, is accused of not believing in axiomic good.
Third, create a tank within which all is permited. If there is axiomic good, then anything inside the tank is good, so long as it can be rigidly shown to not include any evil.
Fourth, demonize, demonize, demonize.
This worked because it was targetted at people who had fled from urban areas to suburbia. The Reactionary movement really argued that when there was a break down of boundaries in the 1960's there was a break down of society and the economy. Suburbia good, cities bad. Quiet good, noise bad. Four legs good, two legs bad.
Let me take an example of this works in practice, with the academic war between "the Western Canon" and various attempts to bring in works which were not inside "the Western Canon".
1 Assert axiomic good: The West is Good. Seems pretty self-evident to people who drive cars and live well, and whose only vision of outside the west are vast slums and primitives, combined with various sinister attempts to raise the price of oil.
2. Assert evil: anything which is not part of this manicured intellectual suburbia must, therefore, be a threat. The Western Canon movement argued that you'd no more want a black person on to your child's reading list, then you would want black people moving into your neighborhood. "The Color Purple" might as well be Niggas With Attitude. After all, one sends a child to an elite college for the same reason one lived in an elite suburb, for the economic value.
3. Assert a boundary. The Western Canon is what divides those inside from those outside. Those outside don't understand the Western Canon, and don't quote it endlessly. This creates both a shibboleth to identify insiders, always important, and a rigid protection against examining the contradictions. Anything that might lead to examination of the contradiction is tossed off the canon as being a precursor. Rousseau, Marx and Romanticism. Out. Out. Out. All "counter-enlightment" emotionalism.
4. Demonize, demonize, demonize. See "The Closing of the American Mind" for an example.
So long as Reactionaries could recognize other people as being involved in the same project: namely, building the tank and demonizing those who do not build the tank, harmonizing rhetoric was a matter of verbal gymnastics. Techno-anarchists could rub shoulders with plutocrats and theocrats and dry as dust academics, because they were all about the same intellectual program: prove the inside is always good, prove the outside is always bad, prove that you can rigidly and accurate separate the inside from the outside, by brute force if necessary.
IV. The Market for Madness
It doesn't take long looking at various Reactionary movements to realize that something is badly out of joint. Consider the case of free market libertarianism. No movement in the history of mankind has produced more words for free than the libertarian movement. And yet, its fundamental ideology is that people do everything for money, that being how markets send signals about what makes people happy - giving money to the people who do them. One could understand communists or Christian missionaries - but free marketeers? Either they must believe that there is so much prosperity waiting for them on the other side of the revolution that years of unpaid labor is worth it, or they don't really believe what they say they believe.
One can see immediately how free market fundamentalism fits the model - the market is good, and there must be a hard boundary between the market, and evils which corrupt the market. All problems are corruption from the outside the tank world of statism. Market good, not market bad, create a hard tank between the two. Demonize.
Related to this was a worship of an ultra-darwinianism which asserted that selection, and selection alone, uncombined with any other force or explanation, would solve all problems. That is, that selection through competition is "the theory of everything" the "consilience" that re-unified all of science. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others were the priests of this movment, but it was, for a time, everyplace.
It is impossible to overstate how pervasive a folk movement this became. Even today there are people arguing that Ayn Rand is a major "liberal" theorist, and fighting to preserve her holy memory on the internet. This from a philosophy that starts out from two questionable tautologies and worships getting cancer. No rhapsody anywhere in Rand's books surpasses her paean to smoking. For a time science fiction's written fandom was virtually a cult of memes and markets, with tales of how getting the seed meme would overcome all (Snow Crash and The Diamond Age) or how heroic disorganized traders overcame evil mind control disease carrying statists. An examination of the Hugo novel winners shows that this was not merely a wing of Science Fiction writing, it was the dominant ethos of the post-cyberpunk era.
The reason of course is that memetics, as it termed itself when ensconced in academia, claimed that all organization of thought could be broken down into memes, and that memes spreading would reach the best possible intellectual organization. Once again, the tank within which all is self-justifying. It is trivial to discover from there how this relates to contractual self-justification, that is the doctrine that contracts are always right and should never be examined, or with biblical literalism.
Whatever the rhetorical inconsistencies, mathematical problems or logical fallacies of the view, however, it is also clear that there was a huge pent up demand for exactly the world view, for the sense of political space, that the Reactionary movments sold. There was, and to a lesser extent is, observably, a huge market place for madness.
In no small part because this mode of thinking - inside/outside, disinefect the inside - is the mode of thinking for debugging computer programs. Isolate the inside of the code, makes sure it works, and move on to the next thing. Complex interactions befuddle ordinary programmers, and are kicked up to the gurus who understand that memory addresses change, compilers have bugs and that there is no way in a multi-tasking distributed environment to really create isolation of one bit of code from the rest of the universe. One can only make it look that way. It also prevails in agriculture - create a tank for crops, by killing everything that threatens them.
The reason for this market of madness is that having a tank really is efficient – as all of the small actors within it, relieved of complex information acquisition and processing tasks, make quick decisions. The problem with the entire conservative movement is that maintaining a tank is the wrong kind of space
V. The Nomos of the Camp
In 1967 sociologist Peter Berger reintroduced the English speaking world to an old Greek concept: the nomos. Nomos is often translated as "law", but it is far better to translate as "normative," which includes laws, but also includes customs, manners, assumptions and expectations. In 1982 Robert Cover expanded the concept by combining expressly post-structuralist views about narrative into the idea of nomos in his often controversial paper Bob Jones University. He then argued that the collapse of the old state mythology would come at "some unruly moment." Perhaps he would have pointed to Bush v Gore, but we will not know, he died in 1984 at the age of 42.
The problem with both of these arguments is that in order to create myth or to share narratives, there first has to be enough of a normative universe to do so. The chicken and the egg problem. To tell stories is to have some normative backdrop to tell them against. Nomos isn't narrative first, because narrative requires enough nomos to tell. And myth, of course, relies on narrative.
However, a new basis for nomos has been advanced, and that basis, as implied earlier in this piece, is space. A nomos is a space within which actors create, interpret and respond to normative messages. For example, writing about society with the nomos of a camp. A "camp" here is a space separate from the permanent spaces, which allows the denial of usial norms of behavior.
The nomos of the reactionary movement is the nomos of a tank – the hard enclosed space, within which actors have a sense that so long as they obey rules so conditioned into them that those rules are invisible, they are free to act. The division of this movement is not then between "economic" and "social", nor between populist and elitist, nor between rational and religious, but between passive reactionaries, and active ones. Not over whether to build a tank, nor the superiority of living in one, but in the vision of the external forces and the nature of the walls of the tank itself.
This may sound theoretical, but let me show a practical example. For one wing of the reactionary movement, immigration is always good, because it creates more labor competition and more consumers. Lower prices for lower labor costs, and greater economies of scale. There is a revolt over exactly this point, because the costs of immigration fall very heavily on poorer reactionaries, not just in border areas, but wherever that cheap labor manifests itself. It is competition for jobs, for education, and for access to affluent living. The reactionary at the bottom is more than willing to have the cheap labor, so long as it is consigned to a legal slave status – unable to drive, be educated, get basic health services, or any other sign of legal status. The elite reactionary understands that the possibility of becoming a citizen is what draws many of the illegals in, and allows them to pay much lower wages.
V. Moral Clarity becoming Mortal Quagmirity
This divide is symptomatic of the divide over a larger issue: Iraq. Iraq was invaded under the vision of political space which required that oil extraction be inside the American political tank – that Iraq be pacified and turned into a weak and corrupt state which would happily sign over its future oil revenues in order to prevent uprising today. It is here that the very moral clarity which the reactionary movement based its success on began to crumble.
Moral clarity is valuable because it reduces an actors choices to a few, even to one, and gives them an imperative to act. Moral clarity makes people active and aggressive, and therefore politically powerful. This any writer who has displayed "liberal bias" can tell you by the waves of hate mail that the reactionary movement can generate. Even established media outlets such as the New York Times felt compelled to create public editors to mediate between their editorial policy and this large active group of people who are absolutely certain that there is no global warming, and that Osama and Saddam plotted to explode an atomic device.
However, moral clarity is an internal concept, and it has very little relationship to what must be done to create the tank in which it lives. The riptide of rhetoric in Iraq was this: Bush needed to tell the reactionary movement that he was creating an expanded tank for them to play in, that Iraq would be an annex of Texas, filled with cheap oil for them to drill. He therefore had to claim that he was expanding the reactionary nomos, not just invading a country to steal the oil. This was in direct contradiction to what needed to be done – which was to impose a strong man system which would sign contracts with a few major players.
Power is its own policy. To have power, Bush and his executive needed to tell their followers that Iraq would be a safe place for small contractors to go and make huge amounts of money. The insertion of contractors was not an accident, but a necessity of the very purpose of the invasion, to create a colony where a certain class of people could become rich in a free market fundamentalist paradise. The creation of a weak government nominally elected was needed to convince enough people that the war was "about" democratization. However, these two actions, along with a host of others, while rhetorically required, were pragmatic disasters.
The reactionary core has not abandoned the project, but it must be recalled that the reactionary core was never anything resembling a majority, and is deeply divided within itself on practical grounds. Instead the success of the reactionary movement was the wider range of people who accepted the narrative equivalence of their own lives in suburbia, which consisted of keeping disruptive influences out, and the larger narrative that the whole world was a giant green lawn waiting to be eaten by bugs unless constantly sprayed with pesticides.
This group did accepted the tank as the metaphor for political space, but it did not accept that the creation of the wall between inside and outside deserves unlimited resources, and it did not accept the absolutism of nomos which the reactionary movements presented. They might like tax cuts that the reactionaries promised, but they did not want to give up social security. They might like having a more moral and pious church going world where they could say "God" without fear of an atheist giving them an argument, but they are not willing to give up the benefits of living in a society with modern medicine and agriculture.
The collision course, between those willing to accept the narrative of the reactionary movement, and its true believers, was only made visible by the collision course between the reality of power, that is what the reactionary movement had to do to maintain itself, and the rhetoric of power, that is, what it had to tell people it was doing. When the cost of keeping up appearances became larger than could be born, the policies of the reactionary movement, never economically sound, moved from bleeding, to bleeding out. From deficit, to an ever spiraling pit. At this point the internal contradictions, between extreme localists who believe that the purpose of government is to make the outside world go away, to extreme imperialists, who look at the outside world as a means of exploitation for profit, became visible, simply because it was not possible to both bribe the localists with military pork, and feed the machine that expanded America's financial and economic web over the world.
Moral clarity, relying as it does with a rigid barrier between in and out, could not deal then with the reality that the tank is a construction, and not a particularly accurate one, of how the market mechanism functions, and how to reduce the costs of decision. These are real problems, but the political space created by the reactionary movement does not deal well with either of them, even when given trillions of dollars to do so. The pragmatic failures have not yet shaken the public's faith in the narrative of the tank itself, yet. But that is to a great extent because until recently, there was no other corresponding active and aggressive counter narrative which was attached to an economically growing society.
That paradigm, however, has started to come into being, and its challenge, both to the reactionary movement, and the more truly conservative defenders of the old modern liberal state, has reached the point where it is about to become the central debate in our political theory. It challenges the older paradigms because it has a weapon that can combat "moral clarity" as an agent of decision, and that challenge is "moral necessity".
But why the forward left exists, and what it means, is a topic for another day.
If the link to Dobbins paper in the IHT doesn't work try this link.
The only 'clarity' that Bush has ever sought was to be elected President, and then re-elected. As Billmon observes:
The bottom line,.....is that this is an administration that no longer makes any sense at all -- not even on the most formal, semiotic level. Shrub's speechwriters have literally been reduced to babbling, a relentlessly on-message babbling that shows just how ill suited the tools of domestic politics are for conducting a half-way serious foreign policy, much less an extremely serious war.
The sonic results are equally strange: Bush keeps belting the stuff out with his usual gospel fervor, even though it has degenerated into near gibberish.
and as Dobbins concludes:
An American diplomacy that recognizes the Middle East's complexities may be more difficult to sell to the American people, but it would be more likely to succeed. And ultimately, Americans are more likely to support policies that succeed than those that fail.August 19, 2006 9:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
"The only 'clarity' that Bush has ever sought was to be elected President, and then re-elected"
No, he also wanted a mandate to be able to act almost without restriction. That the reactionary movement no longer makes "formal, semiotic" sense is no suprise - it never made formal sense, it was always about a particular sense of political space. The difference before was that, when not in complete control of the organs of government, and presented as an "opposition", the incoherent and inconsistent nature of its formal meaning could be covered over by simply attacking the other side with more vigor.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
August 19, 2006 10:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
There are a couple of glaring holes in this analysis.
First, the "Right" and "Neocon" are not mutually exclusive terms. Bush's brand of Conservatism is vastly different from more moderate varieties. It is erroneous and deceptive to assume they are one in the same.
Second, your conclusions would only be valid if it were the sincere desire of the administration to invoke an effective foreign policy. Unfortunately, that has never been the true aim of this administration.
Ernest Wilson put it best a few days ago when mentioning that the stated policy aims of the Bush administration differ from the subversive goals.
This administration is interested in creating an environment by which private industry can thrive economically. Whether it be through access to oil, reconstruction contracts for Halliburton, et. al, and/or creating a permanent military presence in the region, they have largely succeeded in all of these aims.
As many have stated already, Bush is very happy to let the next president deal with creating an effective, transparent foreign policy which seeks to help the United States and its allies as a whole.
It is becoming blatantly apparent that no Neoconservative will occupy the White House again; at least not in the forseeable future. Cheney and Rove likely knew in 2000 that they had a small window, 8 years at most, to promulgate their self-serving interests.
Bush's touting of a "Global War on Terror," and his seemingly sincere desire in spreading Democracy to the Middle East, has merely been a public relations stunt. Putting whipped cream and a cherry on top of a gasoline malt.
August 19, 2006 10:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
"First, the "Right" and "Neocon" are not mutually exclusive terms. "
I didn't use the term "neoconservative" at all. It is simply one of a family of reactionary movements.
"Bush's brand of Conservatism is vastly different from more moderate varieties. "
In its essential structure of creating a tank with a hard boundary, it is absolutely the same.
"Second, your conclusions would only be valid if it were the sincere desire of the administration to invoke an effective foreign policy. "
No, that isn't what I said, I said that what they had to do to get the power to act was in contradiction to what they had to do to get the benefits of acting.
"Ernest Wilson put it best a few days ago when mentioning that the stated policy aims of the Bush administration differ from the subversive goals."
That's a simplistic way of looking at the situation. More correct is to say that the stated goals present a view of the universe which is now hindering the pragmatic implementation of his policy.
"This administration is interested in creating an environment by which private industry can thrive economically"
No. It is interested in creating an environment where economic elites no longer have to pay any attention to the consequences of their actions. Private industry hasn't been thriving under Bush, quite the contrary, almost all of the growth in the US economy has come from either fiscal or monetary stimulus, and as these are being reduced, not even removed, the economy is headed into a down turn.
"It is becoming blatantly apparent that no Neoconservative will occupy the White House again; at least not in the forseeable future. "
Perhaps, but given that one of the top polling contenders for the Republican nomination to the Presidency is Secretary of State Rice, a bald assertion that this is clear is simply not in keeping with the available facts.
"Bush's touting of a "Global War on Terror," and his seemingly sincere desire in spreading Democracy to the Middle East, has merely been a public relations stunt."
It is more than a public relations stunt, it is the means by which he secured a mandate. The problem is that there is no way to both maintain the patina of a "Global War on Terrorism" and the effective conquest of Iraq. Bush' policy is failing on its own terms, and the result is visible cleavage within the reactionary movement, and between those willing to consent to it holding complete power over government and the reactionary movement as a whole.
It is interesting that the vehemence of your attack proves a contention in the essay, namely that while the public is rejecting Bush, it has not yet rejected the reactionary nomos. Much of the public is looking to try and do the same thing the same way and get a different result.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
August 19, 2006 11:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
I could see just that notion of moral clarity, defined by what protects us from them, on CNN today. Covering the visit of prospective presidential candidates to Iowa, the reporter said that people were looking to the candidates for quick reassurance on what they themselves want most. You can already see a difference between a candidate who shares a policy perspective or even caters to your self-interest.
But more strikingly, they then asked some people what they were looking for. The first interview caught a couple, with the man speaking for them: he's looking for "tax cuts" and "values." The frame here is "preserve my world, my space." Tax cuts intrude and take from me; values define and preserve my way of life apart from you. Even the shot of the couple and the dominance of the male gave a sign of a space rather than a voice.
It may seem contradictory from a perspective in which "leave me alone" entails "I'll leave you alone so long as you do." It may seem contradictory, too, if it's seen in terms of self-interest, so that the couple should realize they'll be worse off economically from tax cuts that cut survices to them while in fact shifting the tax burden to them. To see that would imply that the one's interest may depend on others, a breach in the tank.
I think that's what's wrong with the "what's the matter with Kansas" "values" thesis and the plea in response to play to economic interest. It assumes a contradiction people themselves don't see, or it assumes people overlook economics, whereas they simply see first the "private" in "private property."
I hadn't seen this put the same way before, as that it's more important that business do what it wants than thrive economically; I'd say instead "just as important," because generally corporate careers do benefit from the short-term frame implied here, and because corporations get the lion's share of the handouts, minimizing the contradiction. For them, outcomes can still be pursued, even if competence need not be pursued.
I'm hopeless, since the media can't challenge this frame, but if there's a "forward" in store next time, I'll look forward to reading it.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
August 19, 2006 12:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Fascinating analysis.
Let me see if I can encapsulate it as best I can:
1)We find ourselves in a Reactionary environment in government, and to a lesser extent, amongst the people.
(I assume you mean 'reactionary' in the sense of a reflexive, uninformed movement that seeks and may actually obtain power)
2) I'm not quite sure how nomos fits in, other than in the sense of 'arbitrary law' or perhaps the amalgamation of pre-existing and ad hoc invented belief-systems So that
2a) this particular strain of proto-nomos gets fused into an artificial ideology which is then used to sharply separate those who adopt this ideological mix from those that don't: The creation of a tank.
3) The fusion of these various strains of nomos has no consistency and would normally divide the constituency of the ideology into different camps were it not that they are--in some way--committed to the whole package.
4) Moral Clarity. First 'moral' is an adjective modifying an abstract noun. It is also ambiguous. The noun is MORALITY, which is also ambiguous. It can refer to a) what is in fact moral, or 2) what a particular individual or group consider to be or proclaim to be moral. So in the first sense "murder is wrong" is a true sentence in morality, while
"slavery is the will of God" is an example of the latter. This is important because those who proclaim moral clarity conflate these two sense all the time. So it is possible to be morally clear in the latter sense and actually maintain something to be true that is in fact false. Hitler for example was crystal clear (in his mind) as to the evil nature of Jews; he was morally clear in the latter sense, but morally wrong in the former sense.
Having said that when the "us/them" distinction is drawn by the Reactionaries they draw these distinctions by proclaiming moral clarity in the former sense when in fact all they are doing is making it clear what they expect people to believe is moral. In other words, they are clear as to what they proclaim to be moral, not clear on morality itself whatsoever.
5) The World. Indeed, having constructed this artificial structure it turns out--not surprisingly--not to work well when applied to the world. That is, when this synthetic doctrine is applied to the real world, it has proven to be unsuccessful from a pragmatic point of view: it does not achieve the goals it is intended to achieve.
6) The internal contradictions that were there all the time start to gain more prominence and fracture develops, and the structure eventually collapses for lack of success.
I don't quite yet see that the internal cohesion which--as you say--is artificial, is starting to crack, fundamentalist Christians are still holding hands with Imperialists. So the Myth is still working.
The solid conclusion to draw from this model is that since the structure is not functionally sound and does not seem to work, it will collapse from the outside in rather than from the inside out.
August 19, 2006 12:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let's start with the concept of nomos itself - nomos is the whole of the normative universe - what tells you what the boundaries of acceptable behavior are.
Nomos is managed by narrative and myth, but it is created by a sense of space.
The Reactionary system predicates, not a formally coherent set of beliefs, but a particular sense of political space. It argues that if people adopt particular a particular nomos, and rigidly separate "inside" from "outside", then that is the best possible society.
While what, exactly, the inside is about is a matter of wild disagreement between reactionaries, the kind of nomos is not. It is one where people do not have to think about the consequences to others of their actions beyond a very limited range. That's "freedom" as they define it.
The process of creating a reactionary movement then is to assert that some particular way of life is axiomically good, that outside of it is therefore evil, and then assert that what is good comes from a particular normative universe which can be protected from attack by a particular rigid boundary.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
August 19, 2006 1:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
When they use the term Moral Clarity, they do it in a supposititious way. At best, one can say that they are decisive in what moral judgements they make. Being decisive is not the same as being right. In fact most fools are very decisive and mostly wrong. Being decisive in your moral pronouncements also does not mean that you believe what you say. Televangelist seem very decisive in their presentation, but I suspect they know better.
August 19, 2006 1:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Moral clarity may be a run away bulldozer, but that is cold comfort to the people in its path.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
August 19, 2006 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, Had left out the axiomatic (axionomic?) nature of the system. Getting back to nomos, you say:
The Reactionary system predicates, not a formally coherent set of beliefs, but a particular sense of political space. It argues that if people adopt particular a particular nomos, and rigidly separate "inside" from "outside", then that is the best possible society.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by adopting a particular nomos.
Let's go with this entry in Greek Philosophical Terms by F.E. Peters (NYU Press, 1967)
nomos: custom, convention, constitutional or abitrary law
1. the intrusion of 'nomos' into philosophical discourse in the fifth century [BC] followed upon the shift of the notion of nature (physis) from the physical to the ethical realm [the normative of which you speak]. This might have been the result of medical influence ( "On the Nature (physis) of Man" appears in a title in the Hippocritic corpus), but can be seen as well in the ethical coloring of the concept of 'kosmos'. From the other side there was an increasing understanding of the purely arbitrary and relative nature of nomos ( see for example the two anecdotes in Herodotus III, 38).
The first explicitly to embrace the position that justice and injustice are questions of nomos and not physis was Archelaus (D.L. II, 16), though it already sems implied in Heraclitus (fr. 102). THE VIEW BECAME COMMON ONE AMONG THE SOPHISTS, AND THEIR RELATIVIST VIEWS WHETHER IN MORALITY, (Protagoras in 'Protagoras'), (Thrasymachus in Rep. II), or epistemology (Protagoras at 152a) are frequently cited by Plato. Plato's own ethical and epistemological absolutism is not, of course, based on any defense of the old-fashined notion of physis, but on the unchangig eide, and, as he grows older, on the existence of God. In Laws 716c Protagoras' homo mensura theory is finally corrected: God is the measure of all things (theios nomos).
2. The idea of divine law had already been advanced by Heraclitus, fr. 114, and there were subsequent appeals to "unwritten law" (agraphos nomos), which far from being mere convention, has divine sanction ( so Xenophon, Mem. IV, 4, 5-25; Sophocles, Oed. Tyr. 863-871, Ant. 449-460; Aristotle, Rhet. 1368b, 1373a-b.) But none of them rests on a philosophical conception of a physis that grounds nomos; this appears in Stoicism with its docrine of physis as an immanent logos (Seneca, De benf. IV, 7-8), and its definition of virtue as "living according to nature" (D.L. VII, 86-87) where "nature is to be understood both in its cosmic and individual sense (idem VII, 89. It is this "nature" the "divina ratio" that is immanent, eternal and immutable (Cicero, De leg. II, 4, 8; De republica III, 33) that founds human law. Its operation is most eminently visible in man's first "instinctive" (physikos) impulse towards self-preservation that gradually extends to embrace all of mankind.
3. This is what may be called the immanent tradition in natural law; the transcendent tradition, based on nous of a "separated God" can be seen in Plato, Laws 713-714a and Philo, De migre. Abr. 32, 179-181.
August 19, 2006 2:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
While the term nomos draws from the greek sense of law, which was different from the roman and anglo-saxon, its use as a modern term probably can be said to date from Berger in 1967. It has since been used in legal studies as well.
In this context nomos is a construction of the moral universe. That is, either the entire normative system of a society, or more specifically an individual construction of the moral universe. For Berger the key denominator was myth, that is religion as the means of making normative the experience. Later a post-structuralist interpretation based on narrative was advanced.
In this piece nomos is the moral universe, but it hinges first on a sense of moral possibility, of social space, even though it is mediated by narratives, these narratives are created in the image of the space that they inhabit.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
August 19, 2006 2:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
You have put your finger on why conservative critics of the administration (such as George Will and Francis Fukyama) do not challenge the "moral clarity" that asserts that any inconvenience the march of progress might inflict upon those who do not yet echo the "narrative" is unfortunate and awful but involves processes beyond our control. The glue bonding these two groups you have identified is the belief in an historical inevitability.
It is important to have the right demons on hand to give the narrative an inescapable sense of urgency but convincing people of the futility of any dynamic that might change the sitiuation is what binds together those who would otherwise have nothing to do with each other.
A perfect example of this is the National Security Strategy that was used to validate the invasion of Iraq. On the face of it, it represents the U.S. as the most natural protector of the world order because we have the right values and the physical power to make sure those values are defended. What is not said (but of more lasting consequence) is that the U.S. has abandoned the development of laws and institutions that would bind the world to a shared fate but has elected to maintain the Frontier, which protects evil but permits us the greatest freedom to oppose it.
Discredit that last sentence and you (we) will have challenged the dimensions of the existing political space.
August 19, 2006 3:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
For an example of the feel of the concept, see 625d of Plato's Nomos, which has a Cretan saying that not only are legal arrangements, but meal times, activities and weapons part of the nomos which was divinely given, but given because of the underlying realities and praticalities of Crete and its geography.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
August 19, 2006 3:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have not been able to connect to http://www.bopnews.com
for several days, at least. On Firefox, I get a Connection timed out error page. I'm connecting thru an ATT/SBC DSL service.
Just thought I'd mention it. I have no other connectivity problems on my end.
August 19, 2006 3:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Basically you are using the term ‘nomos’ as the Sophists did prior to Protagoras' shifting from "Man is the measure of all things" to "God is the measure of all things". Namely, that it is not anchored in physis (Stoics) nor in the Idea (Plato). That it is not anchored in reality at all but is intrinsically relative. The former path leads to natural law/state of nature theory the latter to Divine Command theories. In the ur-sense of the word it is a relativistic term that the Sophists used. And I think that's the way you are using it. Not as Plato understood the word.
Which brings me to this piece of irony. As much as this bunch bleats about Moral Clarity--indirectly implying that they are clear on what is right and wrong--they are really moral relativists of the worst kind. They are not even Cultural Relativists or Divine Command Theory Relativist they are whatever-we-want-goes type of Relativists. So really they are moral obscurantist at heart
August 19, 2006 4:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
A couple of weeks ago, I saw the documentary, This Divided State, about students inviting Michael Moore to speak at Utah Valley State College, in one of the most "conservative" counties in the country, two weeks before the 2004 elections. Your analysis, here, seems to me to help to make a lot of sense of what the film documents. The sense, among opponents of Moore's visit, that Moore, representing the outside "real world", is going to contaminate their little local paradise is a remarkably strong theme.
On a completely different tact, the recent hysteria over the explosive potential of shampoo and other carryon items, reminds me of the critical role of anxiety over one's own mortality played in Bush's support. [I knew a gay venture capitalist, who simultaneously became a major Thune supporter and obsessed with the possibility that he might die suddenly. Every time he heard of someone having a heart attack or of a small plane crash (a pilot, he flies himself everywhere), he redoubled his positively compulsive conservatism. I understand polling confirms that consciousness of one's own mortality was indeed a factor driving Bush's support.]
In regard to your comment about the political market for madness, it seems to me there is a connection between the absolutism of "moral clarity" and the authoritarian character of Bush's politics and the willingness of people to sublimate their consciousness of limits and mortality. In some fundamental way I cannot quite fully identify, I recognize that there is a real "Birth of Tragedy" aspect to accepting the futility of mortal life. If you can accept that you cannot control everything, or even, ultimately, that you cannot anticipate all danger and you cannot, in an absolute sense, protect yourself and those you love, you can gain a certain realistic competence in relation to the world.
If you cannot bear the anxiety attendant on a fragile mortality, then you are condemned to madness, or, at least, unrealistic notions of what will work to make the world better, safer, etc. If you cannot bear the anxiety of the limits of powerlessness, you are condemned to ritualistic behaviors in response to perceived threats, like confiscating shampoo at airports.
The necessity of systematic process and procedure, and the acceptance of tentativeness and probability, which is part and parcel of effective intelligence and police work, is completely lost on people, who are so fearful that they think standing on line for 3 hours so a moron can confiscate shampoo is making them "safer".
I guess I am rambling myself. I really just wanted to thank Sterling Newberry for giving me new ideas and frameworks to think about the political and economic world.
August 19, 2006 4:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
"On a completely different tact... "Birth of Tragedy"
Interesting observation...
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
August 19, 2006 4:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
"A perfect example of this is the National Security Strategy that was used to validate the invasion of Iraq."
Indeed so. But I will go further, one of the reasons that the United States was the dominant post-war power was that we exuded a particular way of doing, a particular nomos, that other nations wanted to participate in, or at least emmulate. The Bush doctrine has called into question that fundamental value.
That is, the sense of space that Bush is promoting is no longer one shared by the majority of our allies and trading partners.
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
August 19, 2006 4:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Basically you are using the term ‘nomos’ as the Sophists ..."
That's not the case, I was fairly careful, with one exception, not to talk about what nomotic structures are rooted in, but that doesn't imply that I accept the structuralist notion that they are arbitrary simply because they aren't linear results of physical laws. There are other alternatives than either the top down view of morality as nature, or the bottom up view of morality as rooted in nature.
In this essay the concept was strictly used to denote the whole of the normative sense and structure, and not to assert directly where they come from (thought of course the cited works have their own explanations).
Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com
August 19, 2006 5:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
They are not even Cultural Relativists or Divine Command Theory Relativist they are whatever-we-want-goes type of Relativists. So really they are moral obscurantist at heart
I don't find this at all inconsistent with the Neocons' fascination with Leo Strauss.
August 19, 2006 5:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes indeed divinely given. But that is not the sense in which one "adoptsa nomus" by choice as you seem to imply. That version goes back to the Sophists which Plato--as you well know-argued against.
August 19, 2006 5:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
"In this context 'nomos' is a construction of the moral universe. That is, either the entire normative system of a society, or more specifically an individual construction of the moral universe."
The moral Universe for a relativist is always relative to some group or to somebody. You mention society (cultural relativism) and the individual (subjective relativism). However you don't consider that the expression "moral universe" might be referring to something independent of human volition and sentiment: something objective about the very nature of the Universe. So alas, you buy into the Reactionaries essentially relativistic point of view.
August 19, 2006 6:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nomotic structures are rooted in tradition and praxis. However there is another sense in which the "moral Universe" does not depend on what cultures or people actually do or believe. It is the old ought/is distinction... or as it is sometimes called the Naturalistic Fallacy. What cultures practice and what individuas do is one thing, what is right and what is wrong is not anchored in praxis, but in something independent of human volition. Just as 2+2=4 is not dependent on custom so "murder is wrong" is not dependent on habits and beliefs. A fairly significant point if we are to effectively combat the relativist that have entrenched themselves in government. Therin lies Howard Dean's crypic remark that one thing he had learned was that "morality does in fact matter", by which I take him to mean that morality is not "up for grabs".
August 19, 2006 6:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
That led to Rovian attacks on the allies. What is telling is the utter childish nature of it. "Freedom fries?"
It seems increasingly ridiculous now, and in truth I don't know anyone that bought into it at the time. Those that did gave pause to many. FEAR, even. I think that people went into disbelief mode. The sense that such foolishness wasn't likely, so there MUST be more to it. As time has worn on, I think people have figured out we have a vocal, stupid, minority running things.
Sad, but certainly it's time to put grown-ups in charge again. The grown-ups appear to be any one not currently connected to this present government.
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August 19, 2006 7:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Very interesting post, Bruce. As for awareness of one's mortality and support for Bush, I'm reminded of GWB's expression of indifference to the future beyond his own lifetime. Something to the effect of, "We'll all be dead, who cares what the verdict of history will be." I think the real quote is from one of Bob Woodward's hagiographies. It's always struck me as a symptom of Bush's basic existential deficit.
August 19, 2006 9:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is no democracy when there is no public space. Political space has subverted public space as religion has erased humanism. Public interest as a fact, discussion item, or concept does not exist.
Democracy started as a philosophy about the extending of private space into the public space, a public space where the “king” could not punish an individual for advocating beliefs. This philosophy was codified in the US constitution. It allowed the ideas in the private rooms to go out in the public spaces and establish public corridors and rooms where others of like mind could support the ideas and present the ideas to others.
These are not physical rooms but additions to the culture or society. Ideas (rooms) were proposed and either accepted by the culture or denied as extensions of acceptable reality or actions that influence the way one believes and lives life.
In the late 50's and in the 60's there were many rooms proposed and many accepted and here today. It could be described as a vibrant time or renaissance of the individual.
Today public spaces or rooms are being torn down. The public society is collapsing and the individual is greatly diminished. The motions of democracy may or may not be here, but the philosophy or the spirit is gone. There cannot be democracy when there is no public interest, no recognition of common humanity and no public space for truth in the public discussion.
Our culture's daily reality or presence is about
controlling not sharing.
It is about expecting others to toe the line
and not seeing one's self also in this line.
We are strangers in our country;
our public rooms and corridors are gone.
-------------------------------------------------------
Today, are we searching for I deals or Ideals?
-Thinking
August 19, 2006 10:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Another seminal article. Thank you.
It explains many aspects of the past years. For example, why even the media that is not directly controlled by the reactionaries rolled over so easily and thoroughly.
It also provides an Occam's razor for dealing with bizarre statements from the reactionaries: They really mean them. Statements like "if gay marriage is allowed, next is marriage with pets" or "Better to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq than in the US" make no sense at all in the real world, but from within the tank, within the world of "any crack in the wall could be disastrous", they do make sense.
Perhaps a submarine is a better analogy than a tank. Or least, they experience it more like a submarine, where a little crack in the wall really can be devastating.
I am looking forward to your discussion of the forward left.
There is a three-way game afoot: the reactionaries, the previous elite, and what you are calling the forward left. The reactionaries divide into inside and outside, so they somewhat conflate the previous elite and the forward left. The previous elite sees itself as the responsible adults fighting off the crazies of the left and right, so it can distinguish the reactionaries and the forward left but sees symmetry between them even when none exists. It will be an advantage to us if we precisely and accurately perceive the distinction between the reactionaries and the previous elite and take advantage of the differences between them when doing so is consistent with our integrity.
August 20, 2006 4:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
If we accept President Bush as a born again Christian, we can then accept that he believes in eternal life after death and because he has accepted Jesus as his personal saviour, Mr. Bush will of course go to heaven.
I am struck by the beliefs of a heavenly reward common to both born again Christians and the militant "suicide" Muslims. We kill Muslims, they kill Muslims and everyone goes to heaven.
Perhaps this is "Bush's basic existential deficit."
August 20, 2006 8:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Belief in life after death is common to all Christians (and many other religions too) not just conservative GOP types, though of course most Christians would add in a good behavior component when it comes to Heaven, and perhaps some sacramental theology too.
Meanwhile there is one huge and glaring difference between Christian and Muslim "martyrs". The Christian ones were pacifists, going to their deaths without lifting a hand against anyone. Muslim martyrs seem to want to kill as many other people as they can on the way out.
August 20, 2006 10:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
To me the scary thing about modern Christian evangelicals is that they combine a sanctimonious self-assurance about their own expected, personal eternal salvation with a millenial fascination with the prospects for Armageddon, Rapture and a Second Coming.
It is one thing to expect a personal life after death, but combine that narcissistic belief, with a belief than life on earth is coming to a quick end some time real soon now, and you have a recipe for politics completely devoid of concern with the consequences of what you do -- pretty much the politics of George W. Bush as Sterling has summarized.
August 20, 2006 11:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
so which is the Apollonian side and which is the Dyonesian side?
August 20, 2006 12:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
BTW, I don't know if the author of a post can edit it, but the link won't work because the code has a typo in it, with two letters transposed: rhef= instead of xhref=.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
August 20, 2006 1:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
And, of course "Moral Clarity"--meaning moral judgements pronounced with absolute certainty that they are correct--contrasts with "Waffling": the twin tools in Rovian political obfuscation. Kerry gets pulverized because he "waffled" on Iraq (voted for it before he voted against it) while Bush gets the kudos of the masses because he is absolutely certain that destroying a fertilized egg is murder ( as in stem-cell research). If Certainty is all it takes to achieve truthfulness then psychiatric wards are full of truthful people who proclaim they are Napoleon.
August 20, 2006 2:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
That led to Rovian attacks on the allies. What is telling is the utter childish nature of it. "Freedom fries?"
Actually, I really love it. When my sons have friends over for a sleep-over, in the morning I announce to all the sleepy-headed teenagers that we're having "Freedom Toast" for breakfast! As they are eating I remind them that
1. If not for the French we would probably not have won the Revolutionary War.
2. The French were right about Iraq
3. My dear god-son, Samuel, is French
4. Then I usually start in about Bush being a war-criminal, at which time (plates clean of toast and syrup) they start slinking back down to the basement.
Jan Knaus
August 20, 2006 3:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Christian ones were pacifists, going to their deaths without lifting a hand against anyone. Muslim martyrs seem to want to kill as many other people as they can on the way out.
Well, that certainly leaves out the current crop of neocons, who are killing as many people in the name of god and goodness, and their own perfection, that they can find.
Frankly, taking note of all these people who plan on floating around in heaven makes me really glad I don't believe in it. I can't think of a worse place to be for all eternity, than with this bunch!
Jan Knaus
August 20, 2006 3:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Well, that certainly leaves out the current crop of neocons, who are killing as many
And which Neocons are venerated in any Church calendar as martyrs?
Perhaps I should be posting in Basque or Etruscan for all that anyone here seems to actually READ what I wrote?
Hello! History did not start the year you graduated from college!
August 20, 2006 7:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
To expand a bit on your notion of the role of rhetoric please check out and amazing story on Daily Kos, originally posted to Political Cortex. It is Asymmetrical Language by DevilsTower.
Here is a sample:
The Republican Party has become the Hezbollah of language, quite willing to bring a rocket launcher into the midst of stale phraseology, and willing to accept the risk this represents.
In contrast, Democratic use of language has been less facile. Much of the terminology we use was fixed in the time of the Civil Rights Movement. We're enthralled by the rolling cadence of Martin Luther King, jr. and the elegant phrasing of JFK. Reaching back several more decades, many Democrats still regard the energetic expressions of FDR with such reverence that they're little short of holy writ.
Like British soldiers astounded that those rag tag American rebels would not line up and put on colorful uniforms, we're appalled at the Republicans willingness to abandon the language of the past. We wave our hands over the deception embedded into their choice of words and sputter over their ability to throw a blanket of fine terms over muddy policies. We're offended by their overthrow of fine old words, and while we're busy being mad, they bloody our nose again.
Even something as overtly silly as turning French Fries (temporarily) into "Freedom Fries" shows the facility the right has adopted in turning words to their service. They recognize that they can marshal the force of phrasing like the aforementioned fries, wave a flag over it, and use it to help fan the flames of the "us vs. them" tribalism which, while it exists in every culture, is particularly strong within the Republican Party. No matter how stupid you feel the "war on all things French" to be, the Republicans were able to use it to add energy to their base and to upset the footing of those on the left.
They don't care that you think it was stupid. In fact, they want you to think it was stupid.
August 21, 2006 5:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
I did read what you wrote; my point was not about martyrdom; it was about killing other people. Do you think it is better to be responsible for the deaths of others while you remain secure, and even wealthy?
Both are equally morally wrong, in my opinion.
Hello! History did not start the year you graduated from college!
OK, let's go back to the Inquisition, which is where the catholic church got all of its wealth --> Find someone who is rich, accuse them of witchcraft, kill them, confiscate all their land and treasure, get yourself sainted, and then decide the leader of this crime syndicate (the Pope) is infallible. Are the suicide bombers worse than that bunch?
Jan Knaus
August 21, 2006 5:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yah, Like Joan of Arc
August 21, 2006 6:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
heh.
CSPAN junkies visit http://spannerbackup.ipbhost.com
August 21, 2006 9:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, they want you to think they want you to think it's stupid.
Enough with the moronic justification of deplorable and dishonest tactics. They are liars. They lied with impunity and YOU fell for it.
Trying to "rationalize" you own idiocy and culpability is just... onanism.
CSPAN junkies visit http://spannerbackup.ipbhost.com
August 21, 2006 9:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Do you think it is better to be responsible for the deaths of others while you remain secure, and even wealthy?
It depends what "others" we are talking about. Innocent people-- certainly not. But people who are actively threatening me and mine and assuming there is no alternative to deadly force, then No, I have no moral problem with the use of deadly force. The Christian martyrs may have been pacifists but I am not.
Re; OK, let's go back to the Inquisition, which is where the catholic church got all of its wealth
Huh? The Catholic Church's wealth was built up over many centuries, in part from bequests (wealthy people leaving the Church lands and treasures), in part from shrewd business deals and, yes, in part from less happy means, such as outright looting, notably of Constantinople in 1204. However the Inquisition was not one such enterprise. The estates of heretics usually passed to their heirs or sometimes escheated to the King (if charges of treason were also in the mix). The Church certainly had better judicial sense than to allow the Inquistors themselves a stake in the accused property.
Re: Find someone who is rich, accuse them of witchcraft, kill them, confiscate all their land and treasure
The Inquisition accused people of heresy, not witchcraft. In fact Torquemada considered belief in witchcraft to be a heresy itself (the medieval Church was actually uber-rational and campaigned against popular superstitions, like belief in witches; witch panics occurred mostly in Protestant countries). And if the Church had gone on a campaign of stripping wealthy, pwerful peopel of tehir wealth, it would not have lasted two months; the nobles and oligarchs of early modern Europe were already more powerful than the Church and they would have kicked the Inquisitors to the curb had any such threat been made against them.
August 21, 2006 3:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly--just check out Bush's latest mantra-Islamic Fascism--a quick trip to the dictionary will expose the absurdity of the logic behind this latest lie from the Right.
For starters, Fascism is concerned with the welfare of the State--a centralized autocracy, a nationalist regime with severely nationalist policies...
How many of these radical Islamic factions are members of a government? Al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad or the Taliban-- all stateless groups.
More neverending lies from this bunch..."Axis of Evil", "WMD's", "Yellow Cake", "Six months in Iraq", "they'll greet us with flowers", "Mission Accomplished", "no insurgency", "no civil war"...and now "Islamic fascism ..." Now, that particular lie is designed to drag us into war with Iran.
Enough! We must stop these despots from riding a wrecking ball through our country! The damage that's been done in 6 short years is staggering--think about it. We've lost all credibility on the world stage--and in this, the dawning of the Age of Globalisation--well, imo, being on the top of every other nations sh*tlist is just not a good place for us to be...but that's where we are..because George Bush and the Right put us there!
August 21, 2006 3:35 PM | Reply | Permalink