present

"first law of American politics is: Flatter the rubes."

Exactly who is being offended by this remark? Presumably only someone who considers himself a Rube?

Lighten up.

Jennofark,

Perfect formulation.

Hillary plugs into the same GOP rhetorical methods. You have this long list of things (call them 'truth') that can't be said, so we only can have a debate with shopworn cliches from 40 years ago.

So you've got some ridiculously denuded 'debate' that is really just a contest to see who can be the most 'sincerely' disingenous.

Yes, I have to say that Hillary has definitely framed McCain as the vastly superior Republican in this race. Do you want a real war hero or a faux Annie Oakley?

Thanks for the tip about archive oblivion. While the tech-heads are figuring out what to do about this glitch in the new software, I'll take the liberty (and an inordinate expanse of square inches) to post my "Fundamentals and Interests: An Open Letter to Thomas Frank" from July 26, 2005, followed by Frank's reply:

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Dear Tom,

I haven’t passed much time in Kansas in my life. What do I know? In the fall of 1965, I made my first foray into the state—to K. U., of course, to give a talk against the Vietnam war. The fellow who drove me around Lawrence showing me the sights and regaling me with his impressive knowledge of the ins and outs American left-wing history later surfaced as an FBI informant. Shows what I know about Kansas.

So I can’t quarrel with the particulars of your tale. I’m also going to leave aside the many pleasures of your book—the character portraits, tours of the endless horizon, twitting of Republican fools, hilarious take-downs of the Bible Belt booboisie and its junior partners in the wackotariat. In my high school years I was a big fan of Mencken’s, too, and believe me, it wasn’t easy to reconcile my budding socialism and my budding snottiness. (No less an expert in such vexed reconciliations than my former friend Christopher Hitchens used to tell me that his biggest challenge as a writer was overcoming snobbery.) But I think you have some of the same trouble reconciling your affection for class sincerity with your disaffection from the actually existing members of the class that bears the redemptive mission.


You’ve done a service by sharpening the debate about where we go from—gag—here, so everything I say from here on out needs to be considered against your excellent service certificate. Let me start with a question. Why would it be unfair to call your book the cleverest piece of vulgar Marxism ever written? It would be no small compliment. The competition is stiff, or at least the entries are myriad. Whole stacks of university libraries are filled with analyses to the effect that the workers would rise—or would have risen, or might someday rise—were it not for the false consciousness (you call it “derangement”) with which they are sadly, thoughtlessly, manipulatively afflicted. It’s one hell of a genre. A lot of it is very erudite—most of the Frankfurt school, for instance. It even includes some great songs—consider “Pie in the Sky” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” for openers. You win, hands down.

The big trouble is with your deep premise, which first shows up on the way from page 1 to page 2: “People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of derangement is the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on which all else rests.” The point crops up a few hundred more times in your pages.

The problem lies in those glimmering words, “fundamental,” “interest,” and “wrong.” What’s a fundamental interest anyway? You appear to be a pure utilitarian. People ought to be rational calculators, dammit. They may not live by bread alone but when they get stampeded into church by bakery tycoons they should realize they’re being taken for a ride—nothing more. But Marx thought more of religion than that. Religion for him was, after all, “the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions…the opium of the people." That’s potent stuff. An opiate of the people gets you high. People get excited about it. They care about it. They will die for it.

In fact, Americans have been excited during much of our national history (and even before there was anything like an American nation) by an actually- or quasi-religious passion—to know Jesus, to build a city on the hill, or, in Tom Paine’s best Deist rendition, to start the world over again—if, that is, we are the people of Great Awakenings, one after another (with intervals), so that over and over Americans are consumed by a rapture of conviction that we are God’s special children, or the masters of the universe. Then why is the belief that we deserve to be so, or that we are already so, and that even the meanest of us burns and deserves to kick the asses of pointy-headed bureaucrats and nattering nabobs of negativism, not “fundamental”?

If millions of people are galvanized into politics by a quivering passion to save “the babies,” that is, fetuses, why is their passion not fundamental?

When millions of all colors marched for civil rights, were their passions not “fundamental”? Did they have no “interest” in racial equality?

You and I share a passion for social equality. If we had our druthers, our taxes would surely go up in the interest of that equality. Not as much as a CEO’s, I daresay, but some. I would still insist that our politics are fundamental to our beings—more fundamental, in fact, than our bank balances—and I doubt this is because you and I are victims of a species of false consciousness promoted by diabolical new-class levelers. Are our interests in equality not “fundamental” or “interests”?

On the question of whether the derangement of the movement conservatives is significantly the fault of liberals for having abandoned populism, I’m not so sure. I have a soft spot for populism but it has downsides, too, don’t you think? When it worked in Kansas, it didn’t work for William Jennings Bryan nationally. I’m not sure that the mysteries of politics can be solved in a single-factor stroke. In 2002, for example, if I recall accurately, populist Democrats and centrist Democrats got clobbered about equally. In their drives toward the Democratic presidential nominations, Fred Harris, Tom Harkin (for whom, I confess, I voted in the 1992 California primary), and Jerry Brown in his populist incarnation all went nowhere. Neither did John Edwards. On the other hand, John Kerry could surely have used a more convincing story of America’s economic travail and what to do about it. So point to you there.

In some states, the right populist might trump the wrong neoliberal. In some others, the right neoliberal might trump the wrong populist. In 1992, Bill Clinton was both. In Kansas or elsewhere, I wouldn’t want to see the next great Democratic politician shot down for failing the populist test any more than I’d like to see the next insufficient Democrat lionized because he or she punches the populist ticket to kingdom come.

Best,

Todd Gitlin

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Marxisms Vulgar and Otherwise

By Thomas Frank - July 26, 2005, 10:09AM

I believe Todd Gitlin when he says he means to compliment me with his remarks about “vulgar Marxism.” Still, it is a compliment I will have to decline. Here is why:

The primary field identifier of Marxists, I have noticed over the years, is that they quote Marx or some prominent Marxian as an authority; they look to these figures for theoretical guidance. I do not. In fact, I can’t be a Marxist because I haven’t read the man, except for a few of the shorter works. Generally speaking, my guiding lights are Richard Hofstadter—a leader of the “consensus” school of American historiography—and Christopher Lasch, a man of the left who was about as far from vulgar Marxism as it’s possible to be.

Secondly, an essential feature of Marxist thought, of course, is a belief in historical determinism, in the machine-like functioning of the dialectic of history. As a believer in free will, this is something I abhor—indeed, the only people around these days who employ such a monstrous contrivance are the free-traders and New Economy gurus who argue that laissez-faire capitalism, driven by the inexorable workings of Moore’s Law (or some other crackpot libertarian historicism—there were dozens of them being tossed around in the Nineties), will inevitably conquer the planet and crush all opposition and drive the Dow to 36,000. I am proud to say that my reputation for opposing such mechanistic nonsense (for example, see the final chapter of my 2000 book, “One Market Under God”) is solid enough that one prominent libertarian actually includes me in a book bearing the Trotskoid title, “The Future and Its Enemies.” That’s right: I am a bona-fide enemy of the future. Congratulate me.

Lastly, I have no time for the famous “vulgar Marxist” conception of culture in which the relationship between the two is simple and, again, mechanical: The overclass makes culture to flatter itself and keep the workers down; every cultural product encodes the relations of production. In my view this theory is so laughable that it doesn’t merit consideration: Obviously the relationship between culture and economy is extremely complicated, with all sorts of false steps and ironies and small victories for the good guys and a million acts of genius that cannot be predicted or categorized by any “scientific” scheme. Indeed, if I really believed in such a mechanical view of culture, I wouldn’t spend my life studying it. It wouldn’t be interesting.

There are countless other reasons why I don’t identify with this way of thinking, ranging from my personal disgust with left-wing sectarianism to the horror that all reasonable people felt towards the Soviet Union.

But this should be obvious. To talk about economics isn’t Marxist. Alan Greenspan does it all the time; so does the WSJ editorial page. To talk about the relationship between economics and culture isn’t Marxist, either: They do it in every issue of Advertising Age. To think that economics are more “fundamental” than culture is also not Marxist; it’s common sense. It’s the shared assumption of every banker and Chicago-school economist in America, along with every person who’s ever had trouble paying rent or doctor’s bills or tuition or buying food.

Perhaps most importantly, it is not Marxist to criticize the political order we live under from the perspective of working people. This is deep in the American grain; it goes all the way back to the founding; it was once the province of the Democratic Party as well as the labor movement and countless home-grown radical movements (such as the early SDS), none of them doctrinaire or Marxist. If we rule all this out as the territory of vulgar Marxism, not only are we doing violence to figures like Franklin Roosevelt and Bob La Follette, but we are damaging our own movement in the here and now, putting a huge range of the human experience—work, money, the economy—off limits to ourselves.

(Another thing that’s not Marxist is to have a “false consciousness” theory for why people aren’t flocking to your movement when obviously you believe your movement is best for them. Every social movement that I have ever heard of has developed such a theory, including the laissez-faire conservatives. Hell, Bob Dole invented one to explain why he wasn’t winning in 1996. Indeed, the only time the phrase “false consciousness” comes up in my book is when it’s used by a Johnson County conservative to describe Republican moderates.)

The problem these days isn’t that we’re beset with critics who believe that culture is unimportant or insignificant or a simple extrusion of economic reality. On the contrary: We live in a world where culture is everything, where everyone knows about movie stars and hip hop and advertising schemes and offensive art—and it is the making of things that has been eclipsed, forgotten, deleted. This is one of the reasons that culture wars have supplanted the old class politics of another age. I can attest to this in a personal way, since I used to be one of those people who wrote about culture absolutely apart from economics; I fought and fought with my friends over the merits of this or that rock band; I raged against fundies and believed that pissing off Jimmy Swaggart or someone was the noblest goal to which one could aspire. Then, one day, I was assigned to write about a strike in central Illinois, and suddenly I remembered that there was this wide world of production out there, and that people like me knew absolutely nothing about it. This was a secret world, hugely important and yet utterly unfamiliar.

Okay. I’ve now spent an hour discussing a single point that probably nobody gives a damn about. Todd makes dozens of other points that are equally important—our shared fondness for Mencken, for example—but those will have to wait for another day.

Saturday, April 12, 2008
Obama says he regrets remarks about "bitter" small-town Americans

“Obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that,” Obama said in a phone interview with the Winston-Salem Journal.

Yup the worst thing you can do "The worst thing you can do when you're right is apologize."

Look forward to hearing your spin on how this isn't an apology

And I will watch Hillary sail to the nomination.

Dude, don't bogart that joint!!! Pass some of what you're smoking around to the rest of us.

“Obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that,” Obama said in a phone interview with the Winston-Salem Journal.

Yeah, couldn't help but notice that you left off the next part of his statement, the one that started with "but". As in "I'm sorry if I worded things in way that made people offended BUT I stand behind the idea I was trying to express which is that people in a lot of these areas have given up on the idea that government will ever address their economic concerns, since for 30 years no one has, and so they vote on issues like guns, religion, etc - so at least they won't lose those parts of their lives they've managed to hold onto despite being economically crushed." (paraphrased)

There are apologies, which mean "I'm sorry; I was wrong" and then there are explanations, which mean "I'm sorry if I expressed myself poorly, but I'm not wrong."

This was one of the latter.

One irony is that it's Obama who is most often criticized for speaking in platitudes. And as soon as he doesn't? Well... here we are.

Hell to the Yeah, Purple State. Exactly.

Thanks for that.

Always good to consider Orwell's rules of political writing. I find 1 and 6 most useful, here.

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

His point was that these traps also trapped thought into ruts, precluding reasoning.

"A man who was really religious would not refer to anyone as clinging to religion"

With respect could I suggest that that may be true of you and people you know but perhaps not true of all really religious people ?

I admit to being influenced by having recently read Dreams From My Father- expecting that it would provide me with talking points to defend my support for HRC and instead finding it impossible to put down (at least till the last 30 pages which about 28 pages too much of Kenya for me).

Obama's description of finding religion was either sincere or he's extraordinarily deceitful.Having been willingto accept that Bush's finding God on the beach with Billy Graham, I make at least the same allowance for Obama. My general rule is to take comments about belief at face value until given a good reason to doubt them.

Adding credibility is the fact that Obama's discovery of religion seems pretty much in the pattern of any number of young hell raisers from St. Augustine to Thomas Merton or -God help us-Osama Bin Laden.

OBTW, this defense of Obama's religous sincerity is the opposite of an endorsement. I'm an atheist.

@Abdul Abulbul Amir

You ought to run for office. Clearly you have the savvy and appeal.

Abdul Abulbul Amir wrote:

"Rubes. What else would you call folks that are too stupid/bigoted/religious/etc to know how much better and wiser Todd and BHO really are."

I answer, in a word: "bitter."

I answer, in a phrase: "the reactionary fundamentalist evangelical base of the Republican Party."

(Don't take my "liberal" word for it, just read lifetime Republican Party analyst Kevin Phillips' enlightening book American Theocracy: the peril and politics of radical religion, oil, and borrowed money in the 21st century. Mr. Phillips does, in all fairness, describe himself as a lapsed Republican. Even some self-described "conservatives" can't abide incipient fascism.)

It has always puzzled me why Senator You-Know-Her thinks that such fearfully fascist people as the radical religious base of the Republican Party -- who loathe the very sight and sound of her -- would ever cast their ballots for her election to the Presidency. That Senator Obama even attempts to speak to these citizens as adults capable of considering serious national problems seems to me an indication that he thinks much more highly of the citizenry (I'll eschew the faux-common-man "folks" here) than You-Know-Her and John McBomb: two "elite" products of America's corporate oligarchy if America has ever produced any.

I'll skip the "stupid/bigoted/religious" conflation as attempted irony too crude and clumsy to deserve a comment.

As well, I offer the additional observation that patronizing American citizens with the homespun "folks" epithet condescendingly places them in the category of "yokel," "bumpkin," "cracker," "yahoo," or "red-neck" about as effectively as does the term "rube." I smell phony semantic unbrage-taking here.

As well, I note that properly punctuated "questions" should end with a question mark, i.e., "?" and not a declarative period, i.e., "." The difference in punctuation matters because a sincere question elicits information whereas a declarative sentence asserts an opinion. Casting an opinion in the grammatical form of a question amounts to cheap sarcasm of the sort Senators You-Know-Her and John McBomb so love to indulge. This may make me an "elitist" (or at least a high-school graduate), but I prefer my sarcasm right out in the open and undisguised by slippery word choices and/or bad punctuation.

I trust that I have (a) answered the "question" of what else one might call certain types of persons as well as (b) responded to the inept rhetorical sarcasm of the opinionated statement. As Deputy Dubya Bush likes to say: "You can fool some of the people all of the time -- and those are the ones you need to concentrate on." Senators You-Know-Her and John McBomb obviously agree with that cynical statement along with its implied sneer at the easily-terrified-and-duped American "folks."

I don't know about Todd Gitlin, but I have no problem with characterizing Senator Obama's views on society, race, economics, and culture as much "better" and "wiser" than the naked appeal to fear and unreason that so typifies the collapsing campaigns of Senators You-Know-Her and John McBomb.