Charles Pierce did an interesting and thorough job of examining David Brooks’ latest column. I might be tempted to just leave it at that, but there’s a nugget of something I agree with in the Brooks column. I mean, overall, it’s one of the most astonishingly crazy things Brooksie has ever had published. He literally complains that the Vietnam War Memorial doesn’t do honor to “just authority.” For that alone, he should be put in a North Vietnamese reeducation program. Apparently, he’d learn something…probably in more ways than one.
At its root, Brooks’ column is a long complaint about how Americans have grown cynical and disrespectful of just authority. He believes that the designs of recent monuments (for FDR, World War Two, the Korean and Vietnamese Wars, Eisenhower and MLK Jr.) are indicative of a cultural discomfort with celebrating power and authority. Again, I defer to Mr. Pierce in taking this apart piece by piece, but Brooks hits on something that has been on my mind in a different context. The following is garbled nonsense, but parts of it I agree with:
But the main problem is our inability to think properly about how power should be used to bind and build. Legitimate power is built on a series of paradoxes: that leaders have to wield power while knowing they are corrupted by it; that great leaders are superior to their followers while also being of them; that the higher they rise, the more they feel like instruments in larger designs. The Lincoln and Jefferson memorials are about how to navigate those paradoxes.
These days many Americans seem incapable of thinking about these paradoxes. Those “Question Authority” bumper stickers no longer symbolize an attempt to distinguish just and unjust authority. They symbolize an attitude of opposing authority.
I have to work hard to salvage any of that, but I have been concerned about how the Left is reflexively in a Question Authority mode. Lord knows, for at least fifty years our elites have been justifying that disposition, and the last twelve years have been particularly devastating. Our government has been operating on a lot of assumptions that really ought to be contested and debated. But I think one of the Left’s biggest problems is that taking a really strong anti-authority stance is disempowering. After a while, the cynical disrespect for authority winds up being just as delegitimizing to the federal government as the right-wing’s “the government is the problem” rhetoric. Failing to distinguish between power properly exercised and power misused winds up politically marginalizing the Left and leaving the government without defenders.
And this anti-government disposition plays out differently on the Left and the Right. On the Right, there is a positive agenda, which is to get elected and then paralyze and starve the government. On the Left, it’s just an invitation to drop out. You can see this in the differences between the Tea Party, which is very politically engaged in our elections, and the Occupy movement which is more interested in changing the conversation.
As the Left, or at least the Far Left, concludes that the whole edifice is rotten and must be torn up root and branch, it tends to cede the field of legitimate power to those who move in to fill the void. Whether because of the influence of the military-industrial complex or the power of corporate money or for some other reasons, many on the Left are concluding that “legitimate” power isn’t possible and is not worth pursuing.
And this leaves legitimate government programs vulnerable. The problem, as I see it, is one of demoralization and of an inability to believe in any unique or distinguishing role for America to play on the international stage. Who are we, after all, to exercise any leadership in the world when we have Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and torture and phony wars on our hands? When we have granted our elites the power to act, they have brought many disasters upon us. Perhaps our best bet is to deny them the power to act. One can focus on the treatment of Native Americans, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the decision to use the Atom Bomb, the excesses of the Cold War, our misguided military adventures, and our increasing income disparity and political dysfunction, to paint a very negative and delegitimizing picture of our country. Of course, that’s very one-sided. One can also focus on the political genius of our founders, the courage and conviction of Abraham Lincoln, the great political maneuvering of our elites through the riptides of the Great Depression, the rise of communism and fascism, and the atomic age. You can focus on the far-seeing wisdom of the folks who created the modern international system for conflict resolution, humanitarian relief, and nuclear non-proliferation. You can focus on the great sacrifices the American people have made for the well-being of others.
I think the Left needs to find a vision of power that it finds legitimate and that it wants to obtain and wield. And it has to go beyond the mere preservation of the accomplishments of the mid-twentieth century. We need to get to a point where we are comfortable replacing our Question Authority bumper stickers with Seize Authority bumper stickers. I say this because no one gives power to people who won’t even seek it. The Tea Partiers are seeking power. We, on the Left, are really not.
