When have I ever tried to justify my arrogance, slothrop, and what would it accomplish? As for the point about Dewey, I can tell you truthfully that I came across it twenty years ago when working on a piece about the creation and growth of the Columbia Graduate School. I seem to recall that the conflict between Beard and Dewey was well discussed when it happened (in 1915 or 1916)–the basis, if memory serves, of Beard’s departure from Columbia. It received some contemporary coverage in the New York Times. Better yet, the Times came out against Beard, which is not a point in its favor! And I don’t dispute your thoughts about Strauss’s essay (they may be right). Thank you for sharing them! That particular essay is not an easy read.

Posted by: alabama | Apr 29 2005 17:52 utc | 104

But is this not, exactly, what Strauss said? Surely despair of the ability to make the rational case for good policy, and the need to instead make the case by persuading people regardless of reason is at the core of Straussianism.
Randolph cuts to the chase, imho. We are now hearing more and more from the pwog/librul side of the house about the need to “frame” — meaning imho to “spin” — a debate rather than the need for education, critical thinking, empiricism, quantitative analysis. We keep hearing that we cannot appeal to reason, that “people” (meaning “the people,” the proles, the plebs, the great unwashen) are deaf to their own self-interest, that they are (in essence) stupid, we are smart, and what we have to do is emulate Madison Avenue and figure out how to push their emotional buttons in the right ways to make them see, not “reason,” but a warm fuzzy feeling about our point of view. In other words, to do advertising instead of public discourse.
The idea of democracy — difficult enough even under conducive circumstances — I suspect is on a collision course with corporate capitalism. My reasoning is that late capitalism relies on overstimulation of consumerism to maintain its fantasy of infinite growth; this overstimulation is achieved by a relentless barrage of advertising (aka propaganda); and the advertising works best if it encourages people to be stupid and irresponsible — both mentally lazy and stupid, so as to suspend disbelief and self-preservation and actually believe the BS of the advertisers, and irresponsible so as to spend ourselves into debt. Corporate culture requires consumers to be dumb, trusting, selfish and solipsistic, with poor impulse control, a short planning threshold and deficiencies of critical thinking; functioning democracy requires people to be thoughtful, well-read, skeptical, analytical, responsible to self, family and community, and to take a long planning view. The two models, of the “ideal citizen” vs the “ideal consumer,” are wholly incompatible. And the Ideal Consumer is also the Ideal Patsy for fascists, totalitarians, etc.
Consumer capitalism wants “the public” to be fantasy-oriented — except for an elite group of CEOs, financial planners, bankers and PR agents whose job it is to direct our fantasies. Democracy would require us all to be reality-oriented, and to come to some kind of working fact-based consensus on how to deal with the realities of our collective life: peak oil, for example, or globalised trade, or environmental degradation.
Marketing departments and PR agencies are Straussians, or (to look at it the other way) Straussianism is the natural philosophy of spin doctors and PR flaks. A capitalism that is based not on manufacturing or on any sane level of resource extraction, but on fantasy (fantasies of infinite growth, fantasies of infinite resource, feverish resource looting, fantasies of infinite market expansion) is going to be owned and run by spin docs because it cannot bear too much reality — “feral facts” will upset its workings. So contemporary corporate capitalism puts spin docs and PR flaks in the driver’s seat. So it is not surprising that they reach for Strauss’ hifalutin justification of their old carny game. He makes fooling the suckers and ripping off the punters sound grand and dignified.

Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 29 2005 18:04 utc | 106

slothrop, I admit that I took your post of 11:30 AM as dismissive–but then it’s hard to judge the tone of a post, as we all know.

Posted by: alabama | Apr 29 2005 18:54 utc | 108

To the Straussians, it apparently doesn’t matter what kind of religious orthodoxy America has – as long as it has one.
The popular kind of religious orthodoxy in the US is Mammon worship. Better than pablum or soma…until the economy tanks. To what orthodoxy will Americans then submit?

Posted by: puffin | Apr 29 2005 19:10 utc | 110

B real asks – given the political realities that we face, what can we (meaning, I guess, proponents of classical liberalism and the Enlightenment) do about this situation?
Pardon me if my answer is unduly naive, but I need to retain hope that progress is still possible, if not inevitable.
Those in control want us to believe that we are atomized and alone; that the institutions of power are “natural” or are powerful because they have special access to the truth not available to everyone; that the present situation should be accepted because any attempt to change a heirarchical social structure is inimical to human nature and would lead to chaos.
We must recognize that these “truths” are fictions. All mechanisms of control are human constructs – none are foreordained – and people can change them if they want to. One person can do very little. Many people, working according to shared goals, can do a lot. We can vote for and give money to and join organizations trying to fight the anti-modernists. We can demonstrate our support for public institutions like libraries, public schools, public parks and Social Security. We can oppose censorship and limitations on the ability to communicate as freely as possible. As consumers, we can choose to spend our money wisely and vote with our dollars against corporate hegemony. We can think critically about the lies those in control want us to believe, and we can challenge the people in our lives – our families, friends, children, co-workers, etc. – to think critically about the world around them, and never to simply accept received wisdom. We can try to be generous, reasonable, compassionate, thoughtful, egalitarian, and tolerant. And to let people know that this package of good qualities comes from our acceptance, not of a “personal savior”, but of responsibility for ourselves and for our affect on others. We can pledge our eternal hostility to every tyranny over the minds of men and women.
A more just and enlightened society is not inevitable, or even probable (here in the US, anyway), but it is always possible, and we must work and think actively to make that possibility manifest itself.

Posted by: Anonymous | Apr 29 2005 20:18 utc | 112

Well, I learnt something today: Oui-Oui = Noddy.
(No offense to all the other fine posts above; maybe a bit of levity could come in handy at this stage of the thread…).
France has tried an interesting version of the elite thingy so well described by deanander: the elite is explicitly there, and the rules to get in are clear, fair, and accessible to all: be amongst the top 0.1% of your age class at age 18 to 20 in maths and science, and you’re in for the rest of your life, irrespective of your origins, and you’re guaranteed the top jobs for the rest of your life. The money will be only decent, but the perks are great.
And guess what, despite a few mishaps, it has worked pretty well. anything that went wrong is due to the temptation of money, brought by the wicked anglo-saxons…
(Now you tell me how much of the above I really believe…)

Posted by: Jérôme | Apr 29 2005 20:22 utc | 114

Diogenes:
As one arrogant pup from Patrick Henry College now working in Washington once said, “We don’t read history. We are making history!”

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Unidentified White House official
Quoted by Ron Suskind in the New York Times Magazine
October 17, 2004
You’d think these idiots would get tired of imitating The Triumph of the Will all the time. But nobody ever claimed the conservative mind was original. Kind of defeats the whole purpose, in fact.
Diogenes:
If we bury ourselves in Strauss trying to decode them, our conclusions get progressively more remote from any of the reality of the Average American and we even lose our ability to describe to them what is happening in any meaningful way.
I agree with this, which is why in the end I’m not really interested in going beyond the “Cliff Notes” Leo Strauss. As I said in my post, what I’m really looking for are insights into what makes the neocons tick. I’ve been hearing about Leo Strauss for years, and decided to take a peek at this work, with Shadia Drury as my tour guide.
I don’t know how much the neocons were influenced by Strauss’s ideas, and how much they were simply enamored by their own ability to shoehorn his ideas into their will to power. But even an echo tells you something about the objects it bounces off.
Unfortunately, what Drury tells me is that the alliance between the neocons and the theocons is based on more than just political convenience. Maybe because many of the neocons were once Democrats, I had hoped (faintly) that they would eventually recoil from the obvious irrationality and superstition of the fundamentalist right. In other words, I thought the neocons shared, deep down, the intellectual assumptions of classic liberalism. I thought their big beef was with the New Left and the cultural revolution of the ’60s.
Now I understand that they are the real “paleoconservatives,” which means there’s probably no limit on their support for an Americanized fascism — particularly since the Jews have been granted the status of honorary Caucasians and turned into team mascots for the big Rapture Super Bowl.
DeAnander:
We are now hearing more and more from the pwog/librul side of the house about the need to “frame” — meaning imho to “spin” — a debate rather than the need for education, critical thinking, empiricism, quantitative analysis.
This is something I wanted to get into in my post, but I had to draw a line under it somewhere. The point is that the Straussians are taking advantage of the same contradiction in classic liberalism that every other totalitarian or authoritarian movement of the 20th century has tried to exploit: the fact that liberals set limits on their own discourse, and regard demogogic appeals to emotion (not to mention outright lying) as illegitimate tactics.
It’s the same old story: tolerant people feel obliged to tolerate those who would ship them off to concentration camps in a New York minute if they had the chance.
Economists talk about a Gresham’s Law — “bad money drives out good” — because rational utility maximizers will always hold on to the store of value they trust and try to pass the counterfeit stuff off on others. Which means that unless the counterfeiters are thrown in the slammer, money as a means of exchange soon disappears.
I think we face something comparable in U.S. politics these days, which is why I don’t have an answer for b real:
given the increasing public awareness of the influence of deceptive tactics & corrupt philosophies routinely shaping our present and future survival, what are we going to about it? at what point does one have enough information to do something w/ it? the opportunity cost of over analyzing seems pretty high.
The only thing I know how to do is keep talking — not out of any faith in the ultimate power of the truth, but because silence gives consent. And the day I consent to these bastards is the day they plant me in the ground.

Posted by: Billmon | Apr 29 2005 20:41 utc | 116

Marketing departments and PR agencies are Straussians, or (to look at it the other way) Straussianism is the natural philosophy of spin doctors and PR flaks.
Not at all. Marketing is profoundly democratic. You can work hard to find the psychological buttons that sell people whiskey without having the hubris to consider yourself among the elite who should decide what gets sold and without considering yourself above being sold other crap.
I would go so far as to say that marketing is revolutionary in that it is the attempt to rationalize non-rational persuasion. Since humans use the beauty of calculus to aim cannon balls and the wonders of medicine to prolong torture, one cannot task the discipline of marketing with being any more disgusting than anything else. If “liberals” refuse to use marketing to sell enlightenment, that is no more ethically compelling than a refusal to use machine guns on the SS.

Posted by: Anonymous | Apr 29 2005 21:22 utc | 118

DeA – as officially part of that 0.1% (but not of the top 1% of that 0.1% – the 10 guys who will be the bosses of EDF, Total, Renault and AXA 30 years from now), I can tell you that the majority of my co-alumni are either kids of alumni or of teachers, i.e. the two groups that know the system the best. On the other hand, a really bright school, even in the worst banlieue, will be seen as such and pushed towards the right doors and he will get in – and one in, he is in, even if his name is Mohammed Ramdane or the like, or if his single mother is still cleaning windows back home.
The thing is – the State gets the best students, and uses them for the good of the community. (And they really are the best – and they really work for the common good). The tension comes when some of these people, feeling that they are working for the good of the community, start feeling that the rules applying to all should not really apply to them. The key is how effective the internal policing of the system is, and how much it is visible to outsiders….
Or am I trying to justify some form of rational straussianism?

Posted by: Anonymous | Apr 29 2005 21:37 utc | 120

@DeAnander & Billmon
The point is that the Straussians are taking advantage of the same contradiction in classic liberalism that every other totalitarian or authoritarian movement of the 20th century has tried to exploit: the fact that liberals set limits on their own discourse, and regard demogogic appeals to emotion (not to mention outright lying) as illegitimate tactics.
It’s the same old story: tolerant people feel obliged to tolerate those who would ship them off to concentration camps in a New York minute if they had the chance.
This is exactly the point that seems most promising for developing a more cohesive liberal dialog (one that also produces real alliances). I cited on the open thread Robert Parry’s latest columns on liberal media projects because liberal media seems to be a kind of space in which liberal consensus could be achieved. With progressive radio in every town, it seems we could carrot/stick politicians to re-commit to political projects that aim to recreate honest consensus and commitment to social goods. Why couldn’t liberal discourse make itself synonymous with hypocrisy-busting? Look at the history of abolition, suffrage, civil rights, and it seems that overthrowing hypocrisy is our one perennial strength – and it is mainly our own disorientation (admittedly abetted by a few assasinations) that keeps us from reclaiming this mantle.
The outright lying seems to be an essential part of the demagogic appeal, not just an extreme. Wouldn’t it be possible to come up with a good set of standards based on which to ostracize those who proved themselves inveterate deceivers? It seems we should be able to be the people of discourse amd also be the people with the best BS detectors.

Posted by: citizen | Apr 29 2005 23:05 utc | 122

the doggerel is ABOUT goethe’s hero, but the verse is by william makepeace thackeray

Posted by: mistah charley | Apr 29 2005 23:30 utc | 124

Thank you Mistah C — it must then be V and W in which I read it, and here is the full text!

Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 30 2005 0:00 utc | 126

You are of course right Anon. It will all play out, unfortunately.
The question is, will anyone see this utterly abysmal farce playing out at all levels for what it is?
I have hope, but not all that much.

Posted by: FlashHarry | Apr 30 2005 1:22 utc | 128

By the way, I try not to use American dictionaries from after 1930s. The definitions get mushier and mushier – more about being correct and less about grounding incisive thought. Anyone else notice this?

Posted by: citizen | Apr 30 2005 2:33 utc | 130

citizen k, American Heritage?
I will look for that ’67 (ish) dictionary.

Posted by: citizen | Apr 30 2005 2:56 utc | 132

If a large (red state) segment of our population finds no trouble in living within giagantic cultural contradictions, many of which form an intrinsic aspect of their cultural identity and historic legacy — it should come as no suprise that the lie, necessarily, should also be endemic. Because the first lie in this case is personal (&being to itself), it would follow that the interpersonal/political/social/etc. be expectant also of the lie as a reflection of national identity. Hence, we see a less than earth shattering outrage, over even the most blatant lying by the government. This (ad-hoc) logic would place the greater emphasis on not so much the lie itself, but on the effectivness of the lie in relation to what ever initiative it’s in service to. So many are willing to shrug off even a really big (WMD) lie, because relatively speaking, admission or acquessence to such a lie would carry an equally large consequence of incompetence and worse, vulnerability and weakness. This all works really well for Bush because he is more than a caricature of the contradictory culture, he pretty much embodies it, and so goes with it, the implicit normalization of the lie.

Posted by: anna missed | Apr 30 2005 5:19 utc | 134

I submit that it is faster and easier to create and promulgate a lie — or a myth or an urban legend or sloppy research — than it is to do the grunt work of uncovering it and documenting it. real research is time-consuming, expensive, and arduous compared to Just Making Stuff Up. as the pharmacorps well know.
therefore we’re back to Gresham — disinformation tends to displace real information, because real information takes longer to create and disseminate, whereas disinformation is easy and relatively cheap. it can also be made more palatable to the consumer as it doesn’t have to conform to reality. in other words, it is far easier to tell people what they want to hear — they’ll accept that quite quickly — than to make a convincing argument for something they don’t want to hear (that takes time, repetition, painstaking substantiation, etc)
if the lie machine spits out lies fast enough then the overworked “truth brigades” [yikes, that sounds Orwellian to the max] simply cannot keep up with the rate of lie-generation (because it takes more of them working longer hours to do so — whole teams of people per lie, when it only takes one Rumsfeld or Rice or Bush to utter the lie in the first place!)… this is the secret of BushCo and of Mad Ave (not surprisingly) — that novelty bullshit distracts the listener from the deficiencies and inconsistencies of the previous load of bullshit. people are still working diligently on the lies and scandals from Bush Year One, and now we are in Bush Year Five — it’ll take years before we can document what happened in Bush Year Four. they count on that.
even I, fairly literate and with an attention span greater than that of a sugared-up 12 year old, find the grisly details of complicated scams rather tedious to follow — Kofsky’s book on the airline industry’s conspiracy to ratchet up the war scare of ’48 is a case in point. it’s a great book and meticulously researched; it’s well written with a fairly sprightly, wry humour; and it’s an essential book because this incident set the direction and tone of the mil/ind complex and its influence on national politics for many decades to come (we are still living with the consequences in a big and scary way). and yet it’s tedious and arduous reading unless you have a taste for the kind of classic English detective novel with tens of suspects and a very complicated railway time table 🙂
so it takes determination and grit on the part of the reading public to follow the complex stories of investigative journalism, the money trails, the Byzantine scams and the ever-changing cast of characters and the legal shenanigans and technicalities. The Pentagon Papers was a hefty tome, and the average American is conditioned by a deficient education and years of TV and movies to expect a simple plot with a small, identifiable cast and a satisfactory resolution in 90 minutes or less.
having said all that I don’t know what eventually motivates societies to get sick of corruption and lies and experience a convulsion of reform. needless to say these convulsions of reform have not been without their own lies, hypocrisies etc., but on the whole the reign of FDR appeals to me more than the reign of McKinley. if I knew how to motivate large numbers of people to “Throw the Rascals Out” or get “Mad as Hell and Won’t Take It Any More” — even if they were a bit fuzzy on the fine details of BushCo’s potentially impeachable offences (hell, I’m losing track of them myself at this point, there have been so many) — I’d be out there motivating. any ideas?

Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 30 2005 5:59 utc | 136

citizen,
Nothing wrong with you’re plan except the folks its intended to enlighten, don’t much care for enlightenment. Once had an old highschool buddy who got a job on the railroad and just happened to occasionally dead-head to the town where I was going to college. He used to complain endlessly about how he hated those minority lazy shits who got to spend his hard earned tax money as a welfare check. Once I asked him, how many of these lazy minorities are in you’re railroad union? His answer was, we can’t have those lazy shits in our union, it would ruin it. Typical in one sense, but what I found interesting was the contradiction to him ment nothing, and my pressing the issue was seen as a personal attack. In a nutshell, this is typical of what the (fundy) right both hates about the (mythical) left (elite) and their reaction to it — they don’t want to hear about it, and they take it personally when they do. In some ways the’re probably right in that objective analysis will surely illustrate an image of themselves most contrary to their own plight, and so reject it out of hand, even if it would be to their own benifit to learn from it. Its still someone else telling them who they are and what they should do, and here objectivity, even with a heavy burden of proof, is met as rhetorical elitism. Which as it should, drives them deeper into the tit of religion and cultural identity where faith and the honor code pay tribute to their personalized oppression, in exchange for political obedience — in effect choosing power over truth. It’s an inverted catch-22, they can’t embrace factual truth because it would compromise their faith in truth, so they embrace faith to ward off the facts.

Posted by: anna missed | Apr 30 2005 10:20 utc | 138

Strauss wrote to Löwith in May 1933, five months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor and a month after implementation of the first anti-Jewish legislation, that “Just because Germany has turned to the right and has expelled us,” meaning Jews, “it simply does not follow that the principles of the right are therefore to be rejected. To the contrary, only on the basis of principles of the right–fascist, authoritarian, imperial [emphasis in original]–is it possible in a dignified manner, without the ridiculous and pitiful appeal to `the inalienable rights of man’ to protest against the mean nonentity,” the mean nonentity being the Nazi party. In other words, he is attacking the Nazis from the right in this letter. He wrote that he had been reading Caesar’s Commentaries, and valued Virgil’s judgment that, “under imperial rule the subjected are spared and the proud are subdued.” And he concluded, “there is no reason to crawl to the cross, even to the cross of liberalism, as long as anywhere in the world the spark glimmers of Roman thinking. And moreover, better than any cross is the ghetto.”
http://www.logosjournal.com/xenos.htm

Posted by: dk | Apr 30 2005 15:04 utc | 140

Tolerance of the flase is the problem. Put another way, all insiders give up their credibility to be an insider. Disagreeing doesn’t gain anything. Disagreement by a credible person who is not an insider can be devastating. The trumpeted interview with the U of Minn doctor where the doctor pointed out the clown interviewing him was a fool and the doctor they were citing was a quack floored the interviewer. The doctor was credible, not an insider, not playing patty cake with jack asses. Now, turn to the classic Democrat operative and ask whether they are like this doctor…….. No, the truth has not been used in this era of American politics by either side.

Posted by: razor | Apr 30 2005 15:36 utc | 142

Ah, here’s the comment thread! Thanks to Enchidne for the link; I was pow’ful dry.
The Heine quote is exquisite: could you cite, please?
Two points (they may have been made: too many comments!)
The Straussian neocons demonstrate historical irony most forcefully when they claim that the liberal state lacks adequate moral grounding to defend itself against tyranny and, though lacking any dependence on moral values, ally themselves to fascist zealots to create the tyranny that may destroy the liberal state in the name of traditional moral values.
Ordinary people (“everyman/woman”)are more likely to claim religious values than “liberal” values as a motive to action. This needn’t be alarming; American history is full of justice movements led by, among others, religiously committed people: abolition, women’s rights, anti-imperialism, workers. Perhaps the crisis of the liberal state (to borrow a historical phrase) might be addressed by coalitions which affirm religious values/ commitment.
Now to Amazon for the Drury. Great post: thanks!

Posted by: jb tamp | Apr 30 2005 17:39 utc | 144

dk
Thanks for the cite to the 2004 spring logos. That quote is stunning. Strauss was a nut and many of the insane things I have been reading for years – like that Athens Jerualeum non sense, and only the Western cannon matters, death to multi culturalism – follow naturally from Hannibal Lectern Strauss himself.
Reading that follow up convinces me more than ever that the problem is more the incompetence of the opposition than the clever lies of the Straussians, whatever-ians.

Posted by: razor | Apr 30 2005 20:36 utc | 146

The Heine quote is exquisite: could you cite, please?
I first came across it when I was in college and writing a paper on the historical antecedents of facism in German society. It was quoted in ome of my texts. But I can’t remember where the quote itself appears in Heine’s work. I’ve long since tossed the paper, and I didn’t think I would be able to find it again. But Google is an amazing thing and I came across it in the middle of a long incoherent article about the Nazis. But with no citation.
dk:
Strauss wrote to Löwith in May 1933, five months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor and a month after implementation of the first anti-Jewish legislation, that “Just because Germany has turned to the right and has expelled us,” meaning Jews, “it simply does not follow that the principles of the right are therefore to be rejected.
This reminds me of the scene in Dr. Strangelove where the president is reaming out the general played by George C. Scott for giving a madman the authority to launch a nuclear attack.
President: Clearly, the system has failed?
General: Sir I don’t think it’s fair to jump to conclusions before all the facts are in.

Posted by: Billmon | May 1 2005 4:33 utc | 148

From citizenk (with a quote by Billmon)
It’s the same old story: tolerant people feel obliged to tolerate those who would ship them off to concentration camps in a New York minute if they had the chance.
I’m completely mystified by this sentiment. I think it is essentially an immoral evasion of responsibility. The enlightenment is not a dinner party, comrade. It does not come from the sky, as a gift. Freedom is never granted willingly. The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants. And don’t let your mouth write checks that your ass can’t cash.
..and..
I think it’s much a matter of style. That’s why the cult of toleration is so objectionable. Being a racist superstitious ignoramus is evil and toleration of such evil, respect for it even, is complicity
–I think the problem is that people who believe in tolerance are taken by surprise by those whose worldview is entirely built upon intolerance. Extremist religious fundamentalists of any version fit into this category, as do totalitarian leaders of either left or right.
It is the foreigness of these attitudes that makes it hard to develop an initial defense against them. It is the belief in “let us reason together” that keeps liberals from responding in kind initially.
Toleration of objectional opinion is part of free speech. It may not be pleasant, but you can be on the other end of that objection to some people.
When the views, racist or dominionist or fascist, whatever they are, move from speech to actions, then, yes, they must be opposed. Challenged. Physically confronted, first through non-physical legal means, and, if need be, by self-defense.
I’m encouraged to see people like Wallis speaking out about another view of Christianity. Also the nun who spoke about the religious right being pro-birth, not pro-life, because they don’t give a damn about those children’s well being once they are born. Hyprocrisy is the achilles heel of the religious right.
But I’m also concerned about the influence of the religious right in the military. I wonder if large parts of the military would defend the constitution or the dominionists.
Obviously the guy at the AF Academy in Colorado Springs who was called a “filthy jew” would not go along with a “Christian” army…but how many people like him are there?
And the military gets fed a daily diet of Rush Limbaugh vomitus. Do they also get Air America? do they get The Daily Show?
These are the machinations that worry me. Military indoctrination. This is where Strauss’s objections from the right can find expression in current American life.
Since 2000 I have seen the unthinkable happen, then happen again. I have grave questions about the level of complicity or neglect among a select few vis a vis
9-11.
People talk openly about another attack, engineered by insiders, not outsiders, to make a draft possible.
At the same time, the majority of Americans don’t seem to care what is happening to the Iraqis, and want to believe what they are told in order to avoid responsibility for their compliant and passive acceptance of the abuse of power that signifies this administration.
So, yes, it is important to find a local group that you can be a part of to work in opposition. Peace and Justice. The Quakers. Interfaith Alliance. Local dems if they’re not co-opted. Local greens if they have any real influence. Environmental groups that lobby at the state level…because these fights have to be won at the state and local level considering the current federal flaccid response.
It’s important to step away from the computer and act rather than just talk.

Posted by: fauxreal | May 1 2005 14:11 utc | 150

The domination of the media by extremist wingnut propaganda is a result of the repeal of the fairness doctrine under Reagan.
what do you suggest that people should do, citizen k? how would you stop people like Limbaugh?
I, for one, am not pretending Limbaugh is just another citizen, but tell me what the answer is to his presence on the air?
Liberals do need their own voice and their own attacks on the right wing. And funny, as this has happened more and more, the right wing suddenly accuses the left of “the politics of hate,” as though we invented it.
The left needs a South Park that talks about the bullshit from the religious right, the political right, corporations, and the complicity of other politicians who let such power structures stand without calling them out…asking what the ultimate goal is for people like Robertson…quote Ralph Reed back to him about the need to hide their goals…but it’s okay if it’s in the service of the Lord.
the coalition between liberals and libertarians is where the fight back may lie. Stupid drug laws that both parties have brought about. Stupid “personhood” for corporations.
But, in light of the last sentence of your comment, tell me. what solutions do you have?
Rather than accuse people, what do you do to stop the current situation?
My solution is calling them on the bullshit. My solution is talking to people who dont’ spend time reading about all the crap and pointing out the crap. My solution is to compare what’s going on here with what has gone on in the past, and note the simliarities to fascism and theocracy. I’ve marched in Washington, and little good it did. I’ve contacted my reps, written to Bush, attended town hall meetings with reps and city councils to pass anti-patriot act manifestos, for what little good that would do. I volunteer for an organization that presents alternative news and views.
So please tell me what the solution is to the current situation.

Posted by: fauxreal | May 1 2005 16:29 utc | 152

The fairness doctrine wasn’t really killed by reagan/fowler. Fed courts have merely ruled the FCC may choose not to enforce the doctrine. Basically, Red Lion, the famous late ’60s SC case upholding fairness doctrine in broadcasting, is good law.

Posted by: slothrop | May 1 2005 17:25 utc | 154

Bill Mon – I just finished reading this. I must say that I find your writing to be the best writing I have come across in the blogosphere. This piece on Strauss and the Neocons was fascinating, and explained well a complex situation. It has spawned multiple ideas, of which I can’t help but feel compelled to write at length about.
What I find troubling is the importation into American politics, 19th Century German philosophical tradition, almost all of it marinated in nihilism, and the infusion of this philosophical tradition into our tradition of politics. The German system of politics is ideology based and such politics destroyed Germany and much of Europe. Indeed philosophy is dangerous, because it tries to simplify the human experience into one simple unifying thought, statement or philosophic trajectory. Real life is more complicated than that.
The Anglo world avoided this German tendency by being heavily reliant upon “Realism” as in “Legal Realism” – As Oliver Wendell Holmes articulated, in the face of German legal theorist and their drenching philosophy “the life of the law is based upon experience” or in other words pragmatism.
What is often overlooked is that the legal framework is to much of society, culture and politics, what Churchill said of architecture: “We shape it and it in turn shapes us.” The notion of Liberty evolved out of English Common Law jurisprudence, and at some point, made the jump to Politics and Economics.
In the Anglo tradition, the philosophers trail behind the events, articulating what has happened, not articulating in advance but retrospectively. Locke articulated not a new idea for government, just what English constitutional government had evolved into after England’s Glorious Revolution – which itself was new or more advanced than anywhere else. Same with Adam Smith – Smith describes capitalism, but he is describing that which is already occurring and at work, (in my view) he did not invent it. That these Anglo philosopher’s were so accurate is that they were using hindsight to describe something in their present, not projecting some nonexistent theoretical into the future (as in the case of Marx – my view anyway).
The point is: By way of pragmatism Common Law – by way of pragmatic judicial decision – decides on a case by case basis what philosophic perspective prevails in a given instance for a given set of specific circumstances. In such a way evolves a sophisticated patchwork of philosophical islands where they rightly belong, and not where they don’t belong. (In the German tradition however, a general philosophy prevails universally – both where it does and doesn’t belong – creating a weaker aggregate reality). In the Anglo-American system you have, philosophically, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, where they are optimized, which combined creates a modern, highly sophisticated society that is both liberal and traditional where appropriate.
This all maps to Holmes liberalesque view that each idea has to compete for itself in the market place of ideas – a sort of free market Darwinianism for ideas: but all done on a case by case basis. This protects society from ideological heavy-handedness and with it, nihilism.
Politics lumbers along behind the legal culture in a similar manner. But the importation of Straussianism into our political culture brings with it anti-pragmatic/anti-‘realism’ dogmatism into the American political and legal culture. And we see these Straussians assaulting, with great vigor, the legal culture, which is the underpinning of the political culture. A broad ideology can’t prevail politically in America unless you eliminate the common law system and its system of pragmatism. And please note that one man’s hypocrisy is another’s pragmatism.
Unfortunately, politics does not evolve as quickly as the legal culture, but perhaps it is because our political system is fairly new – less than 250 years old. For instance: The law, long ago, compensated for disparities in bargaining power so that litigation occurs on a fairly level playing field to better insure a just out come – our politics is struggling under a crisis of fairness in a playing field distorted in favor of the wealthy.
The essence of the current struggle involves how our system responds to the distortions created by the invention of the limited liability corporation in the 1860s.
America was conceived in liberty and the principle of freedom, especially the principle of free contract. In 1776, most free people earned their living through contractual relations between individuals, each bargaining on fairly even playing field: individual to individual – with the caveat that if an equitable deal couldn’t be arrived at, the frontier beckoned.
In 1776 freedom was fairness. After 1862, and the invention of the modern limited liability corporation these principles proved less congruent. The contractual playing field was no longer level. Individuals increasingly bargained with powerful collectives, the corporations, for their earnings. The situation was made worse by the closeing of the American frontier sometime in the 1880s. This spawned the gilded age with its unheard-of concentrations of both wealth and diffusion of squalor in America and throughout the liberal world, which before World War I, was spreading everywhere.
The strains of World War I, on top of the strains of societies already unfairly balanced, triggered the collapse of liberal systems in many countries following the great war. Reactionary systems emerged on the left (communism) and right (fascism) and threatened the existence of liberalism for the rest of the 20th century. Liberalism prevailed against these challenges, but only after it began to address its problems with unfairness (through collective bargaining).
The solution was to somehow restore fairness: The political process’ response to the invention of the corporation, an investment collective, was collective bargaining for workers specifically and ‘The New Deal in general.’ The wisdom of this response was a post World War II economic boom which doubled global productivity in less than 30 years.
Who could argue with this kind of success? Well a few elites, who liked the way the Gilded Age had sent them to the top of the pyramid – that is who. Prior to the Gilded Age, nothing like the Gilded Age’s social distortion existed in America. But, once you create an elite, the next thing they want is to become a permanent elite, or an aristocracy (and an end to the aristocracy tax also known as estate tax).
(This creates a curious situation – the Gilded Age distorted American Society, creating an Aristocracy unheard of in America, this Aristocracy of course embodies a culture that is alien to America, this culture does not map to the political institutions that stress equality – thus you have a tension created between the political institutions and a subset of American culture, one alien to it because of its inherent inequality – In this way the elites become the revolutionaries trying to tear down existing democratic institutions to impose new institutional arrangements. As suggested below, this is not possible without altering the culture, which means ultimately is best accomplished by altering the legal culture. Thus we have a massive revolution driven by a discontented elite.)
The New Deal solution was brilliant, but not perfect. And reaction by the wannabe elites was bond to follow suit, if it could gain traction. Today we know it did gain traction. But how? Three events I think, gave them traction.
First: The Vietnam War – Because of McCarthy (in my view) no Democratic president wanted to be seen as weak on communism or losing Vietnam as Truman had lost China. Johnson thus was compelled, to the extent of fabricating a pretext(Gulf of Tonkin) to invest heavily in Vietnam. American liberals pealed away from the Democratic party in the late 1960s.
Second: Assasination – Liberal leaders disappeared: John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and often over looked, the plane crash that killed Walter Reuther.
Third: The Japanese Company Union The Japanese had constructed a different economic/social model in regard to collective bargaining: Company Unions. Whereas we had trade unions. Our mix caused industrial sclerosis, tended to thwart competitiveness by causing consolidation in industries and entrepreneurialism by way of pattern bargaining. The Japanese system allowed for more entrepreneurialism and was resilient to consolidation: thus in an underdeveloped market Japan sent eight entrepreneurial automobile companies to compete against our four oversized sloth like behemoths in an over developed market.
When the Japanese system collided with the American system beginning in the 1960s, The Japanese model triumphed over our model.
Entrenched interest prevented the U.S. from adopting Japanese style company unions (and today Japan has the broadest distribution of wealth in the first world among major economies) – but one wonders if perhaps had Walter Reuther not died in the early 1970s if he would have help reorganize the labor movement towards the direction of the Japanese model – he certainly had the kind of vision and that kind of clout. By not adapting the Union movement has hurt itself and with it liberalism in America.
The first and the third events are rooted in the 1950s. The third begins in 1964 and ends in 1972. These three events created an opening for Neocons to gain traction in their assault on the New Deal social contract. American’s began to blame the unions for America’s competitiveness problems.
How could such a powerful economy with powerful corporations be losing to Japanese upstarts? RCA, Motorola were losing out to Sony and Fujistu (Panasonic). Japanese steel was cheaper, and Japanese cars were of higher quality. “It had to be the Unions fault.” Never mind the fact that Japan had unions too, just a different kind.
The proper response to this would have been to alter our collective bargaining system to look like the Japanese system: Break up the oversized companies, like General Motors, and Break up the monopoly of Trade Unions to create company unions. Entrenched interest kept this from happening.
GM and perhaps Ford should have been broken up during the 50s but a Corporate friendly Eisenhower Republican Regime wouldn’t allow for that – in the mean time, during the 1950s GM reorganized itself into a giant “hair ball” that couldn’t be pulled apart – preserving the Empire of Alfred Sloan’s corporate heirs. Had Eisenhower broken up GM into 5 companies, Ford into two the U.S. would have entered the 1960s with nine auto companies and a higher level of competitiveness. Today the market is doing what Eisenhower should have done but with Japanese, Europeans and Korean’s walking away with the American Market.
The combination of Vietnam, Assasinations/deaths of liberal leadership, and the Japanese economic onslaught created the opening and the traction that the reactionaries were looking for. Without a strong union movement to influence the working class into leaning left of center, there was little to stop religion from using its influence to go the other way. Meanwhile reactionary economist were creating extensive treatise against unionization as creating distortions in the economy. The decline of the Unions and collective bargaining only means that we are backing our way back into the Gilded Age.
But the real problem is the reactionary elites. One can ask the question, in regard to the Straussians: What came first, the Chicken or the Egg? Did Straussians create the Neocons or did the Economic Elite find and develop the Straussians?
I think if you are an Elite and you want to perpetuate your position, if you were one of the Gilded during the Gilded age, you want to recreate that era – then you are going to go shopping for philosophies that support it. (In the middle ages, the emerging bourgiouse found Calvinism with a theology where wealth and salvation were merged.) My guess it was such republican elites that were endowing universities with chairs for the likes of Strauss and Neocons in other disciplines such as economics, politics and philosophy – all interrelated.
But this doesn’t totally explain their behavior. The movie “Its a Wonderful Life” lays out the politics quite well. There are two kinds of economic elites: Sam Wainwright and Mr. Potter. Wainwright is out to get ahead, but is not concerned with holding back his fellow Bedford Fallsian brethren of lesser means – in fact he is inclined to help them when and where he can. Mr. Potter, on the other hand, is not only trying to get rich, but is also trying to hold others down. (“What does that [giving the working man hope and decent housing] get us but a discontented lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class.”) Moreover, Wainwright gets rich by building new factories, new industries that create wealth for everyone, whereas Potter gets rich, not by building new, but taking a bigger slice over what exists – weakening others, and creating nor building nothing new. In the end it’s really the mentality of the Mr. Potter class of our elite that is driving everything in the Neocon agenda.
Which really comes down to whether you believe if people are basically good or bad. This takes us back to a question of jurisprudence all over again. 80 to 90% of all people are decent. For discussion I’ll just use 80%. 80% sees how the system works, how if everyone does their part and cooperates everyone benefits so it doesn’t make sense to cheat, lie, steal. Maybe 20% are intrinsically selfish and narrow-minded and can’t understand the logic of cooperation – they would lie cheat and steal if they could or if they had to to get ahead – they cant understand the logic of the system. Of these 20% maybe 90% of them are manipulated by the legal systems combination of carrot and sticks to not cheat (at a gross level). That means maybe only a few people are truly and irreparably bad for the system and society.
Now if you are one of the people who are bad, you are going to look at other people and see them as being bad as well. This leads you to a Straussian position that suggests that people need to be controlled by religion. The irony of this, if true, would mean that we have an elite that is basically bad or maybe even evil, that seeing the world as basically evil, believes that men need to be ruled over illiberally. This creates the curious situation where the very people who should be ruled over (incarcerated perhaps), are instead attempting to become the rulers, to rule over the 80% who are basically good and don’t need to be ruled over anyhow. The fact is this creates a dangerous situation that can lead to tyranny.
In my view, without the economic clout of the elite this movement never occurs. Without their funding the movement would be moribund. The religious right would never be properly organized nor have the resources to have an impact. But without the religious right the Neocons would never have the numbers to succeed. The situation starts to look a lot like the Nazi’s and the grafting of reactionary nationalist with conservative industrial interests. The elite quickly lost control as the zealots would settle for nothing less.
Will the center hold?
If you read the new book by Richard Evans “The coming of the Third Riech” the Nazi’s were intent creating a single party state in Germany. The Modern American Neocon tactics and events are similar to Germany’s – except, instead of ethnicity they use religion as the tribal marker: From coming to power during a constitutional crisis, and being installed to power by back room bargaining of very old men, to claims of being a persecuted majority that has been stabbed in the back (dangerous because it can lead to stabbing back as German nationalist did to horrific extent), to loathing international institutions, to concordats with the Catholic church, to breaking up of the independent labor movement, to remanufacturing history and mythmaking that emphasized their constituents being the creators of the nation (Aryan’s in Germany/Religious fundamentalist as founding father’s in the U.S). The parallels are frighteningly similar. In the end, economic elites lost control to nationalist zealots.
The center, I believe, is the perpetuation of traditional Common Law jurisprudence. The Nobel Laureate, Economic Historian, and Washington University Professor, Douglas North, said that Institutions, be they economic or political or otherwise, are shaped by ideology and belief systems. They reflect the culture. Democracy is based upon restraint. We belittle political correctness, but it is an act of cultural restraint, where the majority restrains itself for the sake of allowing a minority to flourish. This is the mark of an advanced civilization. The religious zealots are in fact of another culture. The reactionary Elite still another. They are “the discontented rabble”. The modern institutions of American government do not reflect their culture. They want institutions that reflect their culture, beliefs and ideology. They want and need a tyranny of the (bare)majority (which is easier to manufacture than supper majorities); therefore they attack and tear at the institutions and long to make them or remake them to a shape that reflects their culture. This is what the Nazi’s did as well.
At the bottom of all of this is the legal culture. We shape the law, but the law in turn shapes us, including our culture, our ideology and our institutions and our politics. We created laws of equality but then have had to work hard and evolve to a society of equality. If the reactionaries alter the legal culture, the rest might follow suit, paving the way for a permanent alteration of the political institutions and the political culture. Take a hard look at banana republics.
All of this makes this climatic battle of the religious zealots fantastic to behold as well as frightening. The battles going on in the senate over filibusters are as epic as the Battle of Britain. I suspect that this is the center. That means, perhaps, Senator Reid is a sort of Churchill of our times and our politics. If a simple majority in the Senate can overturn the legal culture than we will be in a more difficult situation. What angers me the most is the fact that a few rich people imported Strauss, and with Strauss, not just his philosophies, but the whole German tradition of a politics of dueling philosophies over our government and our society. The likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes should never be traded in for the likes Strauss, Nietzsche and Marx.

Posted by: Timka | May 1 2005 21:55 utc | 156

Larry Lessig and Cass Sunstein are recent purveyors of legal positivism (“fidelity” theory of adjudication). Really depressing, because these guys are as “progressive” politically as you’ll find in legal studies (critical legal studies excepted). Positivism just knocks the air of really needed critique of constitutional law. big bummer. By degrees of creeping false-consciousness, legal positivism vindicates the “straussians” anyhow.

Posted by: slothrop | May 1 2005 22:53 utc | 158

And speaking of climactic battles, T W Croft has an interesting additional explanation for the assault on US pensions.
He suggests that the pension funds have been leaders in corporate reform and “responsible investing,” supporters of SOX and other anti-corruption laws, and that the neo-thugs want to get rid of this collective expression of the common people’s ethics. So aside from looting the piggy bank and transferring wealth into the pockets of the investment banker class, destroying pension funds would remove a fairly powerful lever for corporate reform. Sounds plausible.
It’s a longish op/ed but imho worth the time. Croft thinks — or is he just trying to rally the dispirited troops — that the neocons have had their high tide and are on the run. I would sure like to believe him.

Posted by: DeAnander | May 1 2005 23:52 utc | 160

razor
I didn’t say common law/stare decisis is legal positivism. legal positivism is a way to justify judge-made law.
The “source” question doesn’t even exist for positivism in general because it is only concerned about procedure, which is also another way to say: concerned about defending the status quo. The status quo for law is defense of property.
See ANTHONY J. SEBOK, LEGAL POSITIVISM IN AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. Good one covering this issue.

Posted by: slothrop | May 2 2005 0:51 utc | 162

Slothrop
I didn’t mean to sound abrupt about reading the constitution. However, I am an atheist in the church of the capitalist mode of production. How “Congress shall make no law” supports your conclusion I don’t get.
Nor do I believe that procedure is only about defending the status quo. I would suggest, quite to the contrary, the history of procedure evidences what was suggested above, that the wealthy elite is attacking the system because procedure is its enemy. Jury trial is a nice example. And the New Deal evasion of jury trial’s to justify administrative law is a nice example of how the Left provided a new source of power for the wealthy, by getting out of the common law and federalising control of the economy. Sooner or later the robber barons will take that power.
We are agreed there are no source questions in legal positivism, and I assume, all postivisms, including Friedmans seminal paper using positivism to justify ignoring reality in doing economics.

Posted by: razor | May 2 2005 1:23 utc | 164

Slothrop, aren’t you being anachronistic? 1700’s USA did not really enjoy the concepts of “entities” that we have today not did the drafters live in our world where “economics” is considered a separate sphere.
Of course, the drafters of the constitution were men of property and believers in order, but that’s not all they were.

Posted by: citizen k | May 2 2005 1:56 utc | 166

oh…As it turns out, even the days of revolution proved accommodating of elitist, straussian(!) controls of the dissemination of public record and culture. Lone pamphleteers were indeed lonely.

Posted by: slothrop | May 2 2005 14:27 utc | 168

I could provide many more examples of the way elite “founders” of the early nineteenth century exploited emerging communications technology –(subsidized expansion of post network ahead of demand, early telegraphy capture by elite politicians (F.O.J. “Fog” Smith’s obstruction of a “postalized” telegraph system, etc.)–demonstrating how the coordination of law and deployment of technology assured elite control of economic development resulting in consumer capitalism. Only businesses and elites used the post until postage reforms in 1840, and even by tyhe end of the century under 10% of uses of the telegraph were personal.
The history amply demonstrates how elites consciously mobilized the use of communication and transportation resources to organize competition among capitals and exclude individuals.
Any “vulgar” analysis would retain the profound mystification that early elites were not primarily interested in advancing capitalist class interests.

Posted by: slothrop | May 2 2005 16:56 utc | 170

Rocketman and b: I’m reduced to a “sure, but so what?”. We know that the elites were the elites and that they wanted to (a) look after themselves and (b) improve the prosperity of the nation – something that they certainly did not see in terms of a network of proletarian communes. And they stole land from the Indians and enslaved Africans people too. But how does putting that in the language of academic marxism advance knowlege in any way? Jefferson’s class role does not in any sense rob the “inalienable rights” of any power, and Hamilton’s ties to finance don’t mean that habeus corpus is a fraud.

Posted by: citizen k | May 2 2005 17:35 utc | 172

This marxist tangent is revealing.
First, it helps explains why Bush is in office. Some just won’t let go. Hegemony for me, not you!
Second, marx and strauss are cousins. Both are out of a European tradition where their comprehenive philosophy gave them the truth of it all from which to pass judgment on other lives.
Third,there seems to be no room for people in this theory, exactly like U of C economic balderdash, which is the scientific materialism side of the marxist approach, with Strauss and such picking up the psudeo philosophical side.
Isn’t it more sane to stick to the choices at hand, and not push the human struggle for power behind the curtain of jargon? The historical test has conclusivel proved that marxist analysis is the definitive tool for exploiting ones fellow man. Kim Il Sung. Castro. Yuk and yuk.

Posted by: razor | May 2 2005 18:32 utc | 174

One of the points I was trying to make is that Politics in Anglo societies follows Common Law.
Common Law developed a bias towards liberty. The real reason is quite practical. Decisions were easier and cheaper to enforce if they were both just and in that vein, Common Law developed a bias towards liberty. Common Law competed against a variety of legal systems inside England and waiting in the wings were Canon Law, Equity Law, among others and on the Contintent Rome derived civil law – from Justinians corpus juris (as I recall). Common Law prevailed partly because of its bias towards fairness, liberty and practicality.
As I said, the culture of the law sets the stage for politics to follow. Our founding fathers like the ring of liberty out of justice and applied it to politics.
But in common law, its a bias, not an absolute. So it gets applied when and where it is appropriate. Our Democracy was following suit. But Straussians are dispatching with pragmatism and introducing philosophy based dogma. Where Straussian philosophy is the optimal solution it will work best (which I doubt really it does – personally I disagree with it – as Europe and Japan are fine examples that prove Strauss false). Fine. But where it is inappropriate it shouldn’t be applied. But because of the addiction to dogma and ideology it gets applied. Our politics then descend into a battle of domga’s, philosophies, and ideologies, like european contintentals. I prefer the pragmatic approach that we had to be better.
Different illness require different cures. No ideology covers all illnesses. Liberty is great, but we all know that fairness and justice require more than just freedom.

Posted by: Timka | May 2 2005 18:54 utc | 176

to the comrades
poor old slothrop – seems to be holding the fort here in the midst of anti marxist hysteria
as i’ve sd often here – i am convinced that many people – scholars included – who attack marx – have never read him except perhaps in some form of primer. the energy invested in investigating the fool strauss could be worthily invested in the works of old karl & his pal, engels
to call him an economic determinist seems to miss the point. as slothrop has pointed out – the basis & vision of his critique have stood the test of time & is still transforming
to ridiculise – it by reference to kim il sung or kim song il seems to me to be plain hysteria & not scholarly in any sense. vulgar
i see no references here to the holy family, the german ideology, the grundrisse etc etc
contrary to the hysteric approach taken here – that marxism in the academy was limiting – the contrary is the truth – there are disciplines that wouldn’t exist without the foundation work of karl & his infinite & continuing colleagues – in economics, history, anthropology, philosophy etc etc etc
you will of course speak of a popper, or a bell, or an arendt or a whole series of minor workers in the field of knowledge but they are bare shadows if they are even that
i was, i am & remain a marxist who uses marxism throughout my day to day work & find it always transforming & limitless in its possibilities
a good poem for me is one that can literally be toran apart by its own contradictions & then is rebuilt through tose very contradictions – oppositions as a sign of health. marxism remains for me the only science that really alows for those configurations
venceremos

Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 2 2005 19:13 utc | 178

there is a level of ahistoricism that i find disturbing
documents, constitutions, treaties do not exist in & of themselves – they also possess a social reality. & the social reality of the two constitutions have so much written about them that is rich & fullsome that i find them here – as if they are naked & neutral. they are not. their clothes are particular & they are not innocent even tho the great ho chi minh had a bit of festichistic realtion to the american constitution

Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 2 2005 19:21 utc | 180

slothrop
so what is it that an Englishman reifies in his constitution?
You are being silly and apparently are not familiar with how text, in marxist’s societies, is used to specify the allocation of power between decision makers. Silly silly silly.

Posted by: razor | May 2 2005 19:59 utc | 182

Slothrop, giap, et al
I guess we must agree to mutual terror.
The idea that subtleties of marxist societies not yet being in being can’t be appreciate by a reifier like me …………..
makes me feel tired all over. You have both completely missed the point or wouldn’t be throwing reification around. Which, is illuminating in its own way.
Apologies to the rest.

Posted by: razor | May 2 2005 20:15 utc | 184

christopher hill, ep thompson, eric hobshawn, george rudé, barry carr amongst many many others place constitutions, treaties, accords, text – in theor proper – non reified context

Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 2 2005 20:41 utc | 186

Slothrop: “because history is class conflict” is either false or tautology. Old Ben Franklin was surely motivated by his class and economic interests, but he clearly thought about pussy at least as much as money and he wanted also to be famous and to do good deeds. Calling some of these “superstructure” is as useful and informative as Hayek’s equally reductive view of human beings. Marx, writing before Freud, and Jane Goodall, and Crick&Watson, and at the dawn of archeology, and without the benefit of post-Marx historical work like Braudel, and deeply influenced by the silly totalizing ambitions of Hegel and the racist and eurocentric strictures of his time, cannot be faulted for the limits of his analysis, but fetishization of Marxian terminology is absolutely bloody useless.
Giap – I agree that Marx is surely more interesting than Strauss, or Popper for that matter, but real historians argue about the One True Faith of Marx about as much as real biologists insist on Darwin’s specific formulations of evolution.

Posted by: citizen k | May 2 2005 20:56 utc | 188

I don’t think the Constitution or Magna Carta were ever intended by their authors to protect “the common man” or anyone lower than that on the pecking order. Women, slaves, debtors, peasants, none of these were the intended beneficiaries of these “sacred documents” iirc.
What these documents did — if I renember my history books — was to limit the power of the Throne (hereditary kingship, or in latter days “The Gummint”) over the baronage and yeoman gentry. Not that this was a Bad Thing (TM): this limitation of power was slowly extended to protect lesser persons (up to a point) and resulted in the (embattled) notion of equality under the law, universal suffrage, and “inalienable rights” for persons even outside the original bastion of whiteness, maleness, and property-ownership.
But at the time the Constitution was written, one of the simple, “non-ideological,” contractual relationships or transactions it enshrined and protected was the sale and purchase of a living human being at a slave auction. What was at issue for the framers, iirc, was the Crown’s (imperial) right to charge arbitrary tax on said sale or interfere with this “private” business deal. It took an old-fashioned (European, too) ideological movement with an overarching Kantian/Christian agenda (the anti-slavery movement) to assert that this particular contractual relationship was immoral and invalid per se.
On purely pragmatic non-ideological grounds, slavery is justifiable in business terms [though never ideology-free in practice, as ideology always functions in defining the slave population by race or caste or gender]; imho the oligarchs are working their way around to it again with the assault on workers’ rights and pensions, the debt-slavery bill, etc.
The workers’ rights they are battling so earnestly to destroy are presumably equally repugnant to e.g. razor, as they are not enshrined in the Constitution nor the MC; they were won at great risk over a period of decades, by direct action on the part of committed ideologues with an absolutist moral and philosophical agenda (Wobblies and other labour organisers), often influenced by the teachings of that bad old boy Marx.
whether their moral absolutism — the reification of Marx, perhaps? — was ideal or less than ideal, I am still grateful for the 8 hour day, the weekend, the minimum wage, the grievance process, and other landmark achievements which Big Business — in the name of sacralised and abstracted property rights — literally killed people trying to prevent. I am grateful also (of course!) for what limited protection the Constitution offers me from authoritarians in government; but until it also protects me from the growing reach and power of the authoritarian pseudo-governments we call “corporations,” it remains an inadequate guarantee of human rights.
sorry if this is somewhat breathless, I write in haste when I really oughter be doing something else…

Posted by: DeAnander | May 2 2005 21:20 utc | 190

Slothrop. I am not saying that the constitution is non-ideological. It had a bias towards liberty – but it was not wholey liberal (libertarian), there was much in it about a status of servitude.
I repeat (paraphrasing) Douglas North: Institutions are shaped by beliefs and ideology. Ideology and beliefs are shaped by culture.
But in regard to law their is a dialectic thing going on: we (our culture) shape the law, but then the law also shapes us.
Common Law emerges out of a patchwork system of competing legal systems. Common Law eventually has hegemony over all formal normativity (to coin a new word I suppose). Why did common law succeed? It was fair and efficent. By fair and efficient, I mean it incurred a low transaction cost upon society. Why? Because everyone was willing to submit to its decisions. Why? Well part of it was a bias in the common law towards liberty.
Liberty enters culture by way of the common law. Common law adopted a bias towards liberty. Why? because its an inexpensive rendering (no or low transaction cost to a decision.) By way of Common Law, a Liberty bias enters the culture. By way of culture liberty bias enters the into societal institutions, including the constitution. And as I just said, the constitution has a bias towards liberty, but is not an ideological manifesto for liberty (that goes, I suppose, to the declaration of Independence).
I tend to agree with the notion that the Constitution is an instrument set out to govern over the bargaining process amongst various interest in society.
In America there is only one principle: Free Contract. The constitution is construed largely around this issue. Free contract a the governing principle of society means that the ideology of liberty, in order to have free in free contract, is an integral component.
But the bigger issue is the trade off between the principle of fairness and the principle of freedom. Fairness is a communitarian value. Freedom is a libertarian (liberal) value. Sometimes Fairness and Freedom are the same. But most ofthe time they are not. Bush and the neocons want freedom, but freedom sans fairness because such an idiological combination supports what they are really after: ever greater concentrations of wealth and power. Without a notion of fairness, the Neocons don’t have to stop and ask whether or not concentrating power and wealth is fair.
The way I see it a society that is patently unfair is rendered brittle. As wealth and power concentrate, its like standing up in a dugout canoe. Calamity of epic proportions becomes increasingly likely. But a society that combines and balances the notion of freedom off and with the notion of fairness is like a dugout canoe tethered to an outrigger, rendering society immensley stable, almost unsinkable.
Bush and the neocons want freedom, they preach it all the time, but the only time they preach fairness is whent you are talking about taxing the wealthy. The rest of the time they say life is not supposed to be fair.
But from this conversation I’ve come to the conclussion that the Gilded Age created an aristocratic class that prior to then, never existed in American society. Prior to 1860s, white America was inherently egalitarian. The constitution and the legal and political institutions reflected this. The Gilded Class that came into being don’t fit into this culture, and so don’t fit into the institutions handed down from the founding generations: by that I mean the constitution, the political culture and the legal culture.
Thus we have a radical aristocratic class that wants to over through the institutions and structures that we inhereted. They are a discontented class. They want tear down the existing institutions and erect new institutions or reformulate existing institutions that reflect their culture.
But by an large, as elites they are not broad enough to alter the culture. So what do they do? They go shopping for a philosophy, an ideology and a religion that supports this, they also go shopping for other discontented groups. Strauss wraps all this up together in a neat package. So does Calvinism – but only discontented calvinism.
Presbyterians and Congregationalist long ago made their peace with the existing institutions. In fact they created them. Early formal Calvinist were anti-state religion. Calvin largely felt that when the Prince’s of northern Europe got their hands on Lutheranism, they fauled up the theology. The Calvin tradition early on was largely a non state development. In Calvin based refomations, the Princes did not lead, they followed. It was not the King in Scotland that made Scotland prostestant, Nor in Holland. And Calvinist in England bristled at the bastardization of Anglican religion.
The Gilded Class finds in Calvin and Strauss what they want and a pattern in how to proceed. But they have to find other discontents. Well basically that brings them the whole Bubba Belt of the south who are still fuming about the violation of states rights. Perhaps it was money from the Gilded Classes that breathed life a-new into the “states rights” doctrine – and got such minded folks onto the supreme court. At the intersection of Gilded Discontents and Southern Discontent, you have Fundementalist/revivalist religion.
The Neocon Republican party is a bunch of discontents – all with a culture that does not map to the institutions of our democracy as they have been handed down to us. So they want to tear them down, destory and or remake them to look like their culture. The best way to do that is to lie and say that the culture was originally fundementalistic and the founding fathers all fundementalist etc… and that they are only trying to return to the original culture and the original institutions.
They are revolutionaries. Strauss gives them a basis for living in the same tent: Religion for the masses, elitism for the elites. Calvin gives them the kind of religion to pursue – because as Calvin said, there is no surer sign of God’s election to salvation than wealth – therefore property rights are sacred, and taxation an abomination.
What Straussian analysis allows is for us to articulate a rebuttal: The Republicans are the revolutionaries, that want to disavow the founders and the framers of the republic. One can begin by pointing out that they want to destroy the egalitarian nature of American culture. They want to destory the fairness doctrine in American political and legal culture. etc. If they want to prove their fidelity to American values they can begin by restoring the aristocracy tax. That which you subsidize you get more of, that which you tax you get less of – therefor if they want to be real American’s they have to reintroduce the Aristocracy tax.

Posted by: Timka | May 2 2005 21:36 utc | 192

Giap: Try finding support for “history is class struggle” in Braudel. Of course real historians are influenced by Marx, but my objection to Slothrop’s remarks is that saying something like “Ben Franklin was bloody imperialist and worked for his class interests” tells nothing about Franklin or US history but merely labels the speaker. It’s functionally the same as a secret handshake or a gang color, except it says “I’m a member of a snobby academic sect”. As a Marxist, you should be interested more in changing the world than in, as E.P. Thompson put it, creating a orerry. (BTW: Thompson certainly took a much more serious view of Paine than as a speculator in Indian property)

Posted by: citizen k | May 2 2005 22:13 utc | 194

Imagine a government run by engineers. – who do you think runs the government of China?

Posted by: citizen k | May 2 2005 22:15 utc | 196

I think Timka is onto something with regard to Strauss and who is who, though the south had and still has its aristoracy, and that citizen k is right on the real subjects.
And DeAnander don’t assume so much. Gramps was an immigrant, a wobbly, and organized for Mother Jones, but he was no stinking commie.
The second Constitution of the United States of America is a transaction document that describes how the power of a federal government of thirteen American States will be held. I have zero interest in red baiting. I didn’t even know it was still possible. A transaction document is a transaction document is a transaction document in any stage of literate society. The Bill of Rights is an add on. All agreed that many rights were not enumerated therein. Those were the ones all could agree on. They were rights as against the federal government, which was a limited government. They never claimed to be other. I hate to belabor the obvious, but man oh man oh man….. Let’s not mispresent the record or the facts.
“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws;”
From this thread I see better why Strauss was successful, and how dangerous the game he plays, and why Bush is effectively unopposed. People living in the past.

Posted by: razor | May 2 2005 22:20 utc | 198

Commitment to equality is always achieved by people making it happen. This usually involves sacrifice. Nothing inherent about it.

Posted by: citizen | May 2 2005 22:26 utc | 200