Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Reflections on the “After Liberalism” Essays in “First Things”

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Is contemporary liberalism (in its lowercase-L sense) an exhausted project, or simply in need of rejuvenation? Wilfred M. McClay, Yuval Levin and James R. Rogers address this weighty subject in the May 2012 issue of First Things. While the entire exchange — a lead essay by McClay, followed up with two shorter responses by Levin and Rogers — is well worth the read, one significant point from Rogers really hit home.

Responding to McClay’s reference to Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument “that emotivist propositions have replaced rational argument over objective moral ends,” Rogers advances the claim that “liberals believe that the emotivistic move reduces conflict and opens venues for conversation rather than conflict….” Why avoid conflict? Rogers suggests that the “residual horror at the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, underlined by the English Civil Wars, still prompts a visceral reaction by many to any hint of religion in the public square,” and thus by extension, contemporary politics must answer “whether religious belief is intrinsically dangerous and whether claims of absolute truth are consistent with forms of toleration sufficiently robust to offer credible assurance that devastatingly religious conflict will not be repeated.”

Put more simply: Contemporary liberals favor language and arguments that privilege individual feelings or perspectives, because doing so provides a partial block against abstract arguments sourced from absolute truth statements that, if left unchecked, could engender wide-scale social conflict. Hence the concern about Rick Santorum establishing a “theocracy” or the fear that conservative political ends constitute a “war on [insert demographic group here]” even when dispassionate observers believe the fears rhetorically disingenuous.

Take, for example, the gay marriage debate. Proponents on the left usually stake their arguments in a broad reading of human autonomy. Liberals rarely discuss marriage as a socioeconomic institution or a sacramental event and frequently dismiss communitarian objections to gay or plural marriage as inherently discriminatory. Instead, they talk about “marriage equality” or “the right to love whomever you wish” — language that elevates a person’s experiences and his emotional response thereto as an intrinsic good. When you pit a self-referential, emotional plea against an argument that prevents someone from allegedly being true to himself because of inflexible, “uncaring” institutional rules, the progressive will typically favor the former no matter how the latter’s logic unfolds. Why? Because if dispassionate social norms may be brandished to allegedly prevent a person from enjoying the fullness of a loving relationship, what other sociocultural violence may these norms inflict? Thus, the norm itself must be challenged to protect not just gays but everyone from the risk that those rules may be used as weapons against other people in other contexts.

In short: Progressives believe that sociocultural principles founded on abstract or religious truth-claims, by their very nature, increase the risk of theoretical social violence because they infringe on the self-actualization of people who don’t support those norms.  So, hey hey ho ho, your abstract norms have got to go!

Rogers’ insight illuminates in a different way the reasons that the progressive left disdains cultural authority and religion and privileges personal authenticity and a person’s emotional response. Yet it doesn’t answer the Lenin Question: What is to be done?

Commentators decry the polarization in the American electorate, yet the lion’s share of the reason has nothing to do with partisan affiliation but rather with the latent worldview differences between contemporary progressives and everyone else. No matter how you construct the arguments about the proper size and scope of government or fair tax rates or regulatory reform, you cannot escape epistemology. If a progressive by default will often reject “common good” or “historical practice” arguments because they conflict with an emotivist rebuttal, there’s no real chance for a meeting of the minds to resolve pressing political problems. You cannot negotiate or debate in good faith when the discussants haven’t resolved the stark differences in their logic models and value systems.

The central insight into the entire question raised by McClay is that contemporary liberalism faces an existential crisis; from a purely intellectual standpoint, the progressive inheritance is largely spent, with no clear path forward for the dominant political philosophy of the Western world. The question, though, is what happens next. Can liberalism adapt and reform? Will it be supplanted by something different? Will it collapse and some other value system fill the gap (as seems to be happening with the increasingly Islamization of parts of Europe)?

As a conservative in the contemporary American ideological sense, I have a vested interest in seeing liberalism as a political system rehabilitated and strengthened. Alas, it seems that the “fix” has to occur from within, but it’s not clear that anything short of crisis will help today’s progressives to re-evaluate the long-term self-destructive ends that their worldview logically entails.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Reflections on the "After Liberalism" Essays in "First Things"

1 Comment

Is contemporary liberalism (in its lowercase-L sense) an exhausted project, or simply in need of rejuvenation? Wilfred M. McClay, Yuval Levin and James R. Rogers address this weighty subject in the May 2012 issue of First Things. While the entire exchange — a lead essay by McClay, followed up with two shorter responses by Levin and Rogers — is well worth the read, one significant point from Rogers really hit home.
Responding to McClay’s reference to Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument “that emotivist propositions have replaced rational argument over objective moral ends,” Rogers advances the claim that “liberals believe that the emotivistic move reduces conflict and opens venues for conversation rather than conflict….” Why avoid conflict? Rogers suggests that the “residual horror at the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, underlined by the English Civil Wars, still prompts a visceral reaction by many to any hint of religion in the public square,” and thus by extension, contemporary politics must answer “whether religious belief is intrinsically dangerous and whether claims of absolute truth are consistent with forms of toleration sufficiently robust to offer credible assurance that devastatingly religious conflict will not be repeated.”
Put more simply: Contemporary liberals favor language and arguments that privilege individual feelings or perspectives, because doing so provides a partial block against abstract arguments sourced from absolute truth statements that, if left unchecked, could engender wide-scale social conflict. Hence the concern about Rick Santorum establishing a “theocracy” or the fear that conservative political ends constitute a “war on [insert demographic group here]” even when dispassionate observers believe the fears rhetorically disingenuous.
Take, for example, the gay marriage debate. Proponents on the left usually stake their arguments in a broad reading of human autonomy. Liberals rarely discuss marriage as a socioeconomic institution or a sacramental event and frequently dismiss communitarian objections to gay or plural marriage as inherently discriminatory. Instead, they talk about “marriage equality” or “the right to love whomever you wish” — language that elevates a person’s experiences and his emotional response thereto as an intrinsic good. When you pit a self-referential, emotional plea against an argument that prevents someone from allegedly being true to himself because of inflexible, “uncaring” institutional rules, the progressive will typically favor the former no matter how the latter’s logic unfolds. Why? Because if dispassionate social norms may be brandished to allegedly prevent a person from enjoying the fullness of a loving relationship, what other sociocultural violence may these norms inflict? Thus, the norm itself must be challenged to protect not just gays but everyone from the risk that those rules may be used as weapons against other people in other contexts.
In short: Progressives believe that sociocultural principles founded on abstract or religious truth-claims, by their very nature, increase the risk of theoretical social violence because they infringe on the self-actualization of people who don’t support those norms.  So, hey hey ho ho, your abstract norms have got to go!
Rogers’ insight illuminates in a different way the reasons that the progressive left disdains cultural authority and religion and privileges personal authenticity and a person’s emotional response. Yet it doesn’t answer the Lenin Question: What is to be done?
Commentators decry the polarization in the American electorate, yet the lion’s share of the reason has nothing to do with partisan affiliation but rather with the latent worldview differences between contemporary progressives and everyone else. No matter how you construct the arguments about the proper size and scope of government or fair tax rates or regulatory reform, you cannot escape epistemology. If a progressive by default will often reject “common good” or “historical practice” arguments because they conflict with an emotivist rebuttal, there’s no real chance for a meeting of the minds to resolve pressing political problems. You cannot negotiate or debate in good faith when the discussants haven’t resolved the stark differences in their logic models and value systems.
The central insight into the entire question raised by McClay is that contemporary liberalism faces an existential crisis; from a purely intellectual standpoint, the progressive inheritance is largely spent, with no clear path forward for the dominant political philosophy of the Western world. The question, though, is what happens next. Can liberalism adapt and reform? Will it be supplanted by something different? Will it collapse and some other value system fill the gap (as seems to be happening with the increasingly Islamization of parts of Europe)?
As a conservative in the contemporary American ideological sense, I have a vested interest in seeing liberalism as a political system rehabilitated and strengthened. Alas, it seems that the “fix” has to occur from within, but it’s not clear that anything short of crisis will help today’s progressives to re-evaluate the long-term self-destructive ends that their worldview logically entails.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Saul Alinsky, Reconsidered

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My friend Duane loves it when people attribute political ruthlessness and dishonesty to Machiavelli. The Prince is one of those books that all the literati think they understand but never bothered to read; Machiavelli’s actual writings were much more pragmatic, with a strong ethical undercurrent, than the popular misconceptions would credit.

Apparently, the same phenomenon holds for Saul Alinsky. As a red-meat-eating, cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking, dyed-in-the-wool Republican, I’ve listened to the anti-Alinsky propaganda for years. You know the type: Obama is an Alinskyite, and we all know those Alinskyites are pinko commie bastards who want a Soviet-style Revolution that elevates the brain-washed union workers and tears down the mighty citadel of Capital.

But … not so much, it seems, if you look at what the man actually says.

A few days ago, I purchased Rules for Radicals; I began reading it last night. I’m not too far in — I’ve covered the prologue and the first chapter, “The Purpose.” What I’ve read reveals a man and a mission that don’t quite mesh with the dehumanization of the mad activist as caricatured by the far right. Although I reserve the right to be horrified by the chapters yet to come, so far Alinsky seems far more reasonable — in principle, anyway — than the angry diatribes from Limbaugh and Hannity would have led me to believe.

A few salient points:

  • Alinsky, writing in 1971, seems to think the radical student movement with its violence and nihilism was a Very Bad Idea (here, we agree). He professes a deep respect for democratic institutions and the rule of law. Indeed, what I know of his history suggests that this isn’t merely lip service. Alinsky sometimes played dirty, but he generally didn’t advocate operating outside of the law.
  • He apparently has no love for communism, arguing strongly in favor of American patriotism and against the murderous collectivism of Russia, China and Cuba. For example, he thinks that the 1968 radicals were idiots for burning the American flag, because the alternative isn’t communitarian utopia but totalitarianism. Alinsky doesn’t appear to hold any illusions about the virtues of the very far left, which he argues becomes indistinguishable from the very far right.
  • He views the world dualistically; there are good/evil, rich/poor, etc., etc., dichotomies. Not much appreciation for shades of grey, except insofar as he points (correctly, I think) to the push/pull relationship of the middle class relative to the very rich and very poor. I’m not sure I like this framework — it seems dangerously simplistic — but it explains much about the why of some his theory. His whole intellectual apparatus appears colored by a contemporary Manichaeism.
  • He seems to respect one of Tocqueville’s core theses — that America works best when there’s a healthy mediating layer of civil society that buffers and guides the nation in its relationship between a single person and government. To the extent that his professed goal is to empower individuals to live happy, healthy and free lives, he recognizes that part of the radicals’ struggle is to keep those mediating institutions on the level.

Don’t misunderstand; I’m not an Alinskyite and will not become one. As much as Alinsky claims to be non-ideological, only the Progressive Left seems attracted to his modus vivendi, and as long as the sort of “radical change” he articulates effectively works like a leftward-twisting ratchet, then Alinsky’s approach is functionally ideological — even, were one to be charitable about it, if the ideology is a manifestation of later misappropriation instead of being inherent to the system as he defined it.

More to the point: Radical change of any kind requires polarization to get people to accept strategies that fall outside the centrist norm. He apparently defines strategies to effect this polarization later in the book, but the general principle is this: You identify a problem; you mobilize support by presenting positive arguments while simultaneously isolating/demonizing your opposition; you keep it up until you can score a success at the ballot box; you declare victory and move on to the next target. This strategy requires the manipulation of voters through tactics both thuggish and outlandish. In the end, the idea unspoken premise is that the average voter is a dolt who needs to be “guided” to the preferred position of the activists at the ballot box, whence the activists derive their claim to moral authority.

I don’t favor the broad outlines of Alinsky’s approach, for three reasons:

  1. I don’t like activists. At all. Of any stripe. (Hey, I’m a conservative by dispositon.) Activists work outside the system to pressure people to engage in specific behaviors that they otherwise wouldn’t countenance: Think, for example, of the Occupy movement. If something needs to be changed, then change it. From the inside — Win elections. Write laws. Persuade voters to adopt them. Don’t play the outside pressure game to short-circuit the process. And for the record, I don’t even care much for “my” activists; you won’t see me standing at a Life Chain, for example.
  2. Alinsky’s formula for radical change, rooted as it is in a pseudo-Manichaeist worldview, requires a black-and-white split of virtue to remain tenable. Activists are good people; people who oppose the activists are bad people who must be shamed and punished for their bad attitudes. The political struggle therefore becomes one of good versus evil, with the opportunity for finding a middle way eroding with every passing epithet. Wonder why Congress is polarized? It’s practically a case study in Alinskyism at work. More to the point, solutions that hail from a distinct ideology are rarely a good idea; better that people of varying perspectives gather around a complex problem and negotiate a solution than to push for an all-or-nothing resolution.
  3. The politics of shame-and-conquer rewards the outrageous and the audacious, but the virtuous and the commonsensical may thereby suffer. When voters — many of whom may lack a deep understanding of the situation — cast their ballot for the best “show,” politics descends to the level of ancient Greek juries. You know the kind: The person who won the case earned favor through theatrics rather than from having more solid legal grounds for victory. Like OJ Simpson, but I digress. The political becomes the personal, and voters are manipulated to vote for people rather than for objective, well-thought policy. This is a part of why the hard Left is much more invested in the politics of personal demonization than the hard Right. Case in point: The Matthew Shepard murder in 1989 and the James Byrd Jr. murder in 1998. Very bad people tortured and killed innocent men because of race (Byrd) or sexual orientation (Shepard). These were horrific crimes, and the perpetrators deserved severe punishment. But for the hard Left, punishment wasn’t enough; with a cast of heroes in villains conveniently supplied by each murder, radical activists pushed for bias-crime legislation to make “hate crimes” more legally offensive than other crimes. Such a position was opportunistic; lost in the torrent of outrage against the criminals was any meaningful defense of the First Amendment and the silliness of criminalizing bad opinions. But those who defended freedom of thought — even odious thought — were themselves demonized as closet racists, sexists or homophobes. In the Alinsky world, discrediting your opponents is fair game no matter how reprehensible the tactic as long as you advance the chance of a political victory.

The above notwithstanding, the more of Alinsky I read, the more I simultaneously see his theory at work in various strands of contemporary Progressive Left politics, and the more sympathetic I am to Alinsky as a political thinker. I will never be a disciple of his, but engaging his thought directly — instead of the caricature presented in the conservative media — gives me a deeper respect for the man as a noble adversary rather than a demonic bomb-thrower.

And if his tactics can be unleashed on the Progressive Left, so much the better.

Politics & Culture

It Goes to 11: Ideology and the Increase in Ad Hominem Political Discourse

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A wise man will study the opinions from all sides of a question to improve his knowledge of the underlying dispute. Whether this scribe counts among the wise is open to debate, but modeling the behaviors of the wise is surely a start, on the theory that a journey of a thousand steps begins by letting a hundred flowers bloom.  As such, although I’m a center-right conservative, I frequently read the perspectives of libertarians, liberals, socialists, anarchists, reactionaries, centrists — the rich range of contemporary political discourse. I’ve found this engagement has helped me to better define my own arguments while occasionally giving me an opportunity to correct various distortions or elisions that “my” side may perpetrate, sometimes accidentally and sometimes not.  I’ve even changed opinions on some things (e.g., civil unions) based on reasoned argumentation posed from outside my tribal echo chamber.

Alas, over the last few years, it seems that the investment in this process pays ever smaller dividends.

What fascinates are two simultaneous trends, both fueled by bloggers.

First, within the conservative movement, the mainstreaming of a handful of influential bloggers has led to a sharpening of the knives — with blades directed inward. The folks at Red State are perhaps the most top-of-mind, but they’re not the only ones. Divorced from the need to actually win elections, they content themselves to play the kingmaker, with ideological purity and loyalty to a self-defined “conservative base” serving as the paramount virtues.  That folks like Erick Erickson and the activists at Heritage Action believe they’re empowered to define what constitutes authentic conservatism (i.e., “what Mitt Romney isn’t”) is bad enough; that more established and more prudent voices haven’t mounted a healthy defense of a more robust and well-rounded definition of contemporary conservatism smacks of kowtowing to the barbarians at the gate without even bothering to pour flaming oil o’er the rampart to see if the ruffians will scatter.

Second, within the progressive movement, it seems like snark and invective increasingly substitute for coherent argument. Once upon a time — those far-away days of the second term of the Bush administration — I’d read the headlines from FireDogLake or Talking Points Memo; although I rarely agreed, at least on balance I’d encounter well-formed opinions to make the effort worthwhile. Nowadays, vulgar epithets reign supreme and simply asserting that someone is a Very Bad Person is considered the “QED” part of the argument. Contemporary progressive bloggers — with notable exceptions like Hamsher, Kaus and Mitchell — usually engage in more spleen-venting than discourse, and bumper-sticker sloganeering constitutes the breadth and depth of most progressive writing nowadays. Even local bloggers get in on the act; Michigan Liberal refuses to refer to Gov. Rick Snyder as anything but “benevolent overlord Rick Michigan.”

And don’t get me started on the libertarians; reading Reason sometimes enlightens, sometimes infuriates, with clear fact-based reasoning in one piece and smug condescension dripping from the next. The ultimate political box of chocolates.

So. Picture American ideology as a spectrum. It’s not black-or-white, or even a tri-color bar. Instead, it’s a sliding scale of opinion animated by value judgments that date to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Inasmuch as some would like to identify a laundry list of personal policy preferences and ascribe them as the only authentic form of whatever -ism they favor, the average person doesn’t break into a clear, pure ideological archetype. Except, of course, for politicians who vote according to their ideology, but that’s more a matter of cynicism than belief.

In the current environment, some conservative bloggers are looking more and more like mafioso enforcers, whereas progressive bloggers are looking more and more like spoiled six-year-olds simultaneously deprived of a favorite toy and effective parenting.

Is it any wonder that people feel like contemporary political discourse is more polarized?

The parallel to institutional Catholicism is astonishing. Over the years, bishops largely stopped exercising the role of moral authority, delegating those functions to those with an agenda more politically tactical than ecclesiologically strategic. The bishops wasted their moral capital, to the point that even Barack Obama thought he could roll the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops over the recent contraception flap.

In like manner, mainline political leaders either ignored the problem of hyper-aggressive activists or pandered to them. Very few have actually stood up to them in a meaningful fashion, despite that they don’t really represent even their respective bases.  Where’s WFB’s successor when we need him? Or the next Daniel Patrick Moynihan?

Instead, we have weak political leaders who respond more readily to a small sliver of their home ideology’s activist base than to the demands of responsible governance.

I’m not sure that America is substantially more polarized, recent statistics notwithstanding. I think people are more willing to fit themselves into certain canned ideological categories, but much like with ethics, no one really fits well into a single bucket. The difference is that it’s easier in the Age of the Internet for self-appointed commissars of purity to purge their ideological segment of the kulaks than for political leaders to stand up to the bullying.

Just like with the bishops in the 1960s and 1970s, but I digress.

The TL;DR version: If you’re tired of increasing ideological polarization, look no further than the unchecked ad hominems flowing from those who’ve been most successful at seizing the megaphone. Until political leaders step up and actually lead, we can look forward to more of the same.

Politics & Culture

You Go To The Polls With the Candidates You Have

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Don Rumsfeld: “You go to war with the army you have.” Alas, the GOP will go to the polls with the candidates it has — but the Party of Lincoln seems to have opted to bring knives to a tank fight.

On a federal level, the nomination battles continue, although the Keystone Kops routine of these incessant televised debates benefits no one as strongly as Barack Obama. Where else can he get hundreds of hours of sound bites of various Republicans drawing blood from whoever will be the eventual nominee?

Depending on the day of the week, phase of the moon and polling outfit under contract, Mitt Romney is either the obvious front-runner or a distant second behind Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul, the Republican version of Crazy Uncle Lester, won’t go away no matter how plain the writing on the wall. Rick Santorum heckles from the wings, having performed well in Iowa but without any sort of dollars or infrastructure to perform well anywhere else in the country. Newt Gingrich seems to be in full-frontal Looney Tunes mode; one day he attacks, the next day he retracts, the day after he’s boldly reorganizing the floor plan of the House chamber to accommodate the new Congressmen from America’s pending lunar state.

Meanwhile, the pundits wage a battle for the soul of the conservative movement. Some — most prominently Erick Erickson of RedState — define conservatism as being whatever Mitt Romney’s not, irrespective of what Romney’s for. The Majarushie, Rush Limbaugh, seems almost as scattershot about the candidates as a Rick Perry debate answer. Mark Steyn is so consumed by the debt bomb that he may not have noticed that New Hampshire had a primary. George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Peggy Noonan speak as voices of reason, but in a season when National Review and The Weekly Standard are reviled as centrist organs of some nefarious “Republican Establishment,” it’s not clear that what passes for reason nowadays even deserves a voice — let alone three. Ask any two prominent public conservatives for an opinion and you’ll wind up with seven conflicting answers.

The real lesson here is that there’s a dangerously wide gulf between boots-on-the-ground activists (often, prominent bloggers) and elected officials. The former often insist on purity at all costs. The latter, frequently demonized as “establishment types,” worry more about electability and skill at governance even if you have to suck up a bad logroll at times. Conservatives used to grudgingly obey the WFB dictum that you support the most conservative candidate electable. Today, the rabid wing of the conservative movement values symbolic purity over substantive success. Look no further than the way groups like RedState and Heritage Action have targeted U.S. Rep. Fred Upton for extinction. Upton is a genuinely decent and honorable man (I met him several times while an officer in the College Republicans at Western Michigan University) who has assembled a solid career of center-right policy wins. But because he didn’t pinky swear to someone’s pledge or have a hissy fit about light bulbs, he’s persona non grata. Never mind that if Upton were to be successfully primaried, the seat would likely fall into the Democratic column. Kalamazoo and its environs aren’t exactly staunch Republican territory (MI-06 went +8 for Obama). But hey, apparently it’s better to purge the kulaks even if it kicks the GOP back into minority status.

Speaking of Michigan — Pete Hoekstra still appears to be the leading nominee to challenge Sen. Debbie Stabbenow, although the powers-that-be that usually meddle in state Republican politics have resurrected an old ally to oppose the Holland-area native. Why? Probably because Hoekstra, when he first won his seat in Congress, launched a surprise and successful primary challenge against an obviously corrupt but very well-connected Congressman, and that man’s allies still bear a grudge. Hoekstra would make an outstanding addition to the U.S. Senate — his even-handedness as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee remains particularly laudable.

“Tis the silly season of national politics. Everyone’s jockeying for influence, and the knives of partisanship slice with ruthless abandon. This year, the conservative movement seems fractured in ways I don’t recall in my lifetime. The basic problem remains the question of ideological purity, and the degree to which we’ll accept a strong and electable candidate (for any race, in any jurisdiction) in the face of a less-qualified but more ideologically driven competitor.

The stakes are high. Let’s hope that in the end, the GOP can rally around its troops and win the battle instead of fracking each other and leaving no one left to man the barricades against the Obama blitz.

Politics & Culture

Surviving the Apocalypse

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We’ve seen the doomsday scenarios played out in countless novels and big-budget films: Some calamity strikes, civilization collapses, and only a few stragglers are left to survive against the odds. Their humanity and ingenuity is put to the test, but in the end, our heroes carry the day and lead us to hope that Earth 2.0 will be wiser and kinder than its ill-fated predecessor.

If a real doomsday arrives, though, the results will be less kind. Picture it: Famine. War. Rape. Disease. Wanton murder. Illiteracy. Prostitution.

What might a future look like? What must stout-hearted people do to survive, if the prophecies of those pesky Mayans prove accurate?

Assume a total global catastrophe, like a horrific virus or nuclear event or solar flare that kills 95 percent of the population and eradicates effective government. In the first few days, the struggle is simply to survive the event itself — steering clear of infected people, seeking protection from radioactive fallout, etc. Long-distance communication may well cease; electricity and water probably would stop flowing and gasoline becomes worth its weight in gold. Families would try to connect and people would seek supplies necessary for their short-term survival, even if acquiring them meant looting and pillaging or even killing.

As reality sets in over the next few weeks, though, a few things would likely happen:

  • The elderly and infirm would die.
  • Small children would be at elevated risk, especially if their parents died.
  • More and more aggressive, Type A folks would seek to dominate the supply chain around them, forming the nexus of small chieftains that would rule over areas not already divided along tribal lines.
  • Society would fragment along ethnic/tribal/familial lines in areas where those traditions still carry weight. People would have to increasingly make tough choices to survive, in the “If you want bread, give me your 15-year-old daughter for the night” vein.

In the unfolding months and years, a pseudo-medieval system of the strong controlling the weak would prevail. Most durable resources like transport, weapons and tools become prized objects, typically looted from “before the fall.” Odds are likely that a patchwork of communities would arise across the world. In places where a strong local community exists — think Africa and the Middle East — existing authority structures may well endure. In places like Europe, North America, Russia and China, civilization would fragment along much more strongly Hobbesian lines; picture survivalists with guns offering protection in return for labor, obedience and access to nubile young girls.

But what happens a century later? What happens when the tools break and there’s nothing left to loot? What happens when the bullets and gasoline run out? What happens when the antibiotics and canned food are gone? When the doctors are all dead?

In the Middle Ages, Europe adapted to climate and disease with “more of the same” — a feudal, agrarian society may not have a lot of excess resources, but it could subsist in all but the most horrific of conditions. If modern-day North America collapsed, would enough people remain with the skills necessary to re-create even a feudal level of society? Would we regress from high-tech to agriculture to hunter-gatherer mode? And even if we did farm for a while, who among us could mine or smelt iron or even copper so that we could replace our tools as they wear out and break? Who has sufficient woodworking knowledge to build large structures or sailing vessels? What would happen to literacy? If top-down oppression became the dominant mode of small-unit political organization, how would cooperative villages with a healthy division of labor spring up?

Tough questions. The best a person could do in the early days after the apocalypse is simply survive. After that, all bets are off.

So what prompts this blog post? Merely this: Social fragmentation and happy-go-lucky utopianism remain the hallmark of today’s left-wing ideologies. When push comes to shove, and Occupy fetishists have the chance to live the “we are family” mode of Rousseau-inspired communitarianism, will a post-capitalist, post-apocalyptic world be happier and more free? Or will it look like Europe in the Dark Ages?

Think about what it would be like to survive the apocalypse. Think about what your ideology says about human nature. Then try to reconcile the cognitive dissonance.

Politics & Culture

Liberate Wall Street! Or, Thoughts re: #Occupy Shenanigans

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The phenomenon that is “Occupy Wall Street” boggles the mind. The inchoate protests across the country that have no rhyme, reason or focus — other than to “just protest” — marks either the canary in social discontent’s coal mine, or Thermidor for the progressive Left. Regardless, watching people protest with no coherent message, animated only by their desire to benefit from taxpayer largesse, proves instructive.

Two points.

First, the Occupy movement, despite its small size and dazzling parade of clowns, represents the same type of discontent from the Left as the Tea Party marked for the Right. The Tea Party said: “I don’t want to pay for other people’s bailouts.” The Occupy movement says: “You paid for everyone else’s bailout, now where’s mine?”

It’s easy — too easy, for some conservative pundits — to let ridicule substitute for engagement in their approach to the Occupy phenomenon. The “where’s mine?” attitude on full flower in New York is easy to dismiss as naive or to caricature as the whinings of people too stupid to realize that a master’s degree in Medieval French Feminist Literature has relatively little market power. The dismissals are on-point, to be sure, but they miss the point at the same time. The protesters are demanding personal bailouts. It’s not caricature if it’s fact, and the fact is, student loan debt (most significantly) has fanned this particular flame of discontent, and those left with more debt than they can pay back really do feel like they’ve been sold a bill of goods. Deriding it without acknowledging that people genuinely believe they deserve a personal bailout risks missing the forest for the face-pierced trees, and acting like personal bailouts are unreasonable despite our history with all sorts of public bailouts (not to mention welfare policy) constitutes willful blindness of a point that many consider to be valid in principle if not always in practice.

Second, the emergence of the Occupy movement and its sycophantic support among mainstream Democrats from Obama on down, unmasks in a creative new way the far Left agenda.  The general public so far seems less than amused. Conservatives and even some moderates snicker at some of the demands that have leaked from the “General Assembly” in New York — including immediate debt forgiveness for everyone, everywhere — but in truth, they are doing everyone a form of service. They are showing the country where the real Left pole lies. Elected Democrats shy away from this pole even though they’re beholden to it, much as elected Republicans have their own love-hate relationship with the far Right. Yet the challenge from the Left is that the old divisions (centrist, liberal, progressive, socialist, communist, anarchist) are eroding just as the internal divisions eroded within the Right in the last generation. People point to today’s monolithic Republican Party with much less internal ideological diversity as being a bad thing, yet this outcome is the end result of a process beginning with Watergate and continuing through the GWB years — and it’s only now beginning in earnest within the Left. Just as moderate Republicans are an endangered species, so also are the moderate Democrats: Just look at how the Blue Dogs were wiped off the map in 2010.

This means that in the coming years, the folks to the left side of the center almost surely will undergo the wrenching sea-change in ideology that will pull Democrats further to the fringe and impose a more rigid political and ideological template on rank-and-file politicians. The Republicans moved further Right in the 1990s and 2000s; the Democrats will move further Left in the 2010s and 2020s.

A NoLabelist third-party conglomeration of moderates is unlikely to prevail; the system revolves around a two-party duopoly, and in any case, not many beyond the ranks of self-appointed public intellectuals feel the call to rally to the cause of moderation. Instead, the independents will trend Right or tune out altogether.

It’s not hard to envision this moment — the Occupy movement, the weakness of the Obama administration, the ongoing failures of Keynesian stimulus, “leading from behind,” the backlash against Obamacare — as the point where another generational change begins. A change where the aspirations of the progressives decisively lose favor with the broad Middle America, and Democrats seem poised to devolve into decades of bitter internecine wars of ideology. Whatever the outcome for the Democrats, the progressive movement looks like its on the verge of collapse, at least as a serious contender for mindshare among educated citizens.

The progressives want to Occupy Wall Street. Fine. Yet it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if the net result is that we’re now witnessing the first wave of the liberation of Wall Street from the powers of regulation and redistribution that are only now shedding the pretext of moderation and allowing their full ideology to flower.

America is a center-right nation. Always has been. When the progressives could cloak their ambitions under the veneer of moderation, Democrats have been successful. Just look at Bill Clinton. It takes a real crisis of public confidence mixed with effective blame assignment toward the Right to elect a true left-wing president — FDR, LBJ, BHO. Under ordinary circumstances (think McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, William Jennings Bryan, or even TR’s Bull Mooses) the further to the left they drift, the less likely the odds they’ll be elected.

Market economies work. That so many graduates with useless degrees are unemployed sort of proves the point. As long as the Right presents a solid pro-market strategy that leaves reasonable room for helping out the less fortunate, conservatives will win election after election. A pro-growth agenda that holds people responsible for the choices they make while providing a safety net to help those whose choices were constrained by circumstance will lift more boats than a soak-the-rich, give-to-the-poor Robin Hood fantasy that seems to animate the Left lately.

And as far as the freak shows in Zucotti Park — laugh, if you must. But beneath the unwashed hippie facade lies a discontent that could fizzle. Or explode. Conservatives would be well-advised to keep eyes wide open while they chuckle at the spectacle, lest they find themselves being tomorrow’s lion fodder.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Epistemic Closure, Revisited

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The “epistemic closure” trope seems to be making the rounds among all the really cool bloggers, for reasons that continue to mystify me.  The concept of ideological  “epistemic closure” — promulgated most publicly by blogger Julian Sanchez — is an elegant if circular system: Those affected by it are incapable of accepting any truth or reality sourced outside of a narrowly defined field of their own choosing, and their unwillingness to accept the arguments from outside of the system is thereby proof of its closure.  I applaud Sanchez’s willingness to provide additional refinements (in the linked post, published yesterday) to his original statement; its rare to find bloggers who are willing to revise and extend their own comments in light of the criticism of others.  Nevertheless, there is an “feel” to this whole enterprise that is somewhat disconcerting.

Marc Ambinder, in a piece published today at The Atlantic, seems to accept as a given that conservatives, as a movement, have retreated to an intellectually vacuous space wherein they listen only to each other and refuse to engage any idea that isn’t spoon-fed to them by Rush Limbaugh or FoxNews commentators.  A sample of Ambinder’s thesis:

I want to find Republicans to take seriously, but it is hard. Not because they don’t exist — serious Republicans — but because, as Sanchez and others seem to recognize, they are marginalized, even self-marginalizing, and the base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking.

This, from the chief political consultant to CBS News.  The journalist inside my soul shudders at the thought that a reporter of Ambinder’s stature can believe this sort of thing.

OK, so what’s the issue here?

As I mentioned, briefly, in my previous post, I think it’s trivially true that some red-meat conservatives will reject anything that doesn’t come from within, just like some evangelical Christians refuse to accept any truth that lacks a Biblical basis or just like some progressive leftists refuse to believe that the science behind anthropogenic global warming is subject to reasonable debate.  It’s human nature to identify with those with whom we feel kinship, whether this relationship is familial or racial or religious or ideological.  I prefer Rush Limbaugh to Al Franken because Rush’s politics don’t jar my sensibilities nearly as much as Franken’s does, so I enjoy Rush’s humor more.  This does not imply, however, that I am a mind-numbed robot who believes only what I hear amplified from the golden EIB microphone, or that I think Franken is “a big fat idiot.”

The fundamental problem with sweeping generalities about “conservatives” or “liberals” or “centrists” is that the whole exercise is little more than the erection of straw men. To speak, as Ambinder does, of “mainstream conservative voices” willfully choosing to accept ideas that are “‘untethered’ to the real world,” is to make such a broad demonization of half the electorate that the very discourse he purports to desire is eclipsed right from the gate. When you presuppose that those with whom you disagree are some sort of inbred tribe, you are guilty not only of a surprising degree of intellectual incoherence, but you are also creating a self-fulfilling prophecy; after all, who wishes to engage with those who have already slandered you?

Although I get the “epistemic closure” argument that Sanchez makes, I’m not all that sure he’s saying anything new or even anything unique to conservatives. What does surprise me is the way that some public commentators have seized on the concept as a way of mocking the opposition — there is a dirty feel to this, as if the chess club divided about whether Kasparov or Deep Blue is superior, and after a while, they resort to ad hominems cleverly disguised as dispassionate philosophical debate in order to score cheap rhetorical points.

The reality is this: Yes, some conservatives are inbred hicks (ideologically speaking).  So what?  So are some progressives.  So are some libertarians.  So are some holier-than-thou centrists.  This phenomenon is utterly unremarkable.

What is depressing, though, is the discounting of any intellectual vibrancy from the Right. Sanchez, Ambinder and others seem to look at the ongoing, fierce debates within the conservative movement as a sign that the jackboots of orthodoxy are on the march. In fact, I think recent debates within the conservative movement are a necessary and even salutary development — over the last decade, conservatism has moved from the Contract with America to K-Street indolence to “compassionate conservatism.” The Right frequently discusses immigration, sexual politics, drug legalization, homosexuality, war, and economics. There are more touch points of disagreement, I daresay, on the Right than on the Left, and the progressive movement today seems to be more intellectually monolithic with adherents who differ only in intensity, not in objective.  So, yes, conservatives argue and sometimes some conservatives lose (sorry, Messrs. Brooks and Frum).  Some issues see a consensus position develop among the base.  This is natural.  In fact, one could argue that the lack of this process among the Left is the really noteworthy story.

In the end, I think the “epistemic closure” issue is much ado about the utterly pedestrian, an example of armchair philosophizing by polemicists more interested in trouncing their enemies than in genuinely engaging their interlocutors with an open mind.

An OPEN mind. Not a closed one, Mr. Ambinder.