I’ve been thinking, and I anticipate that next year my writing will be a lot more focused on meta-issues. I’ve been really goal-oriented for such a long time that I have developed a lot of impatience with meta. But we’re in such a different environment now as a country. We avoided catastrophe, as least in the short term, and we’ve stabilized the ship, at least for now.
The problem is that we’re stuck. We can talk about it in mechanical terms…divided government…gerrymander…filibuster…
We can talk about the legal aspects…Citizens United…Super PACs…corporations are people, my friend…
But I think we need to talk about the social problem. And that’s a challenge because being a social scold is normally the purview of conservatives.
Then I think that we’ve gotten to the point where it’s the conservatives who need to be scolded. They’ve just gone off on a national bender where all elements of truth and authenticity and respect for talent and genuine meritocracy and fundamental decency have been subsumed into a calorie-free diet of sell-out art and entertainment (of which politics can no longer even aspire to be more).
There’s a moral element to progressivism, which is mainly compassion for the unfortunate and a bias in favor of equality. We don’t want people going hungry or dying needlessly, and we don’t see income inequality of the type we see today as compatible with austerity programs for the poor. Are we broke? Okay, let’s raise taxes on the rich.
But this is only a conventional kind of moralism that you can find at any time in any country, really. We need to figure out what this country is really all about. What it should be all about.
Are we the indispensable country which must intervene in Syria to avoid an Islamist takeover or to prevent a genocide? Much of the world acts as if we are, even though we know that the moment we committed ourselves we would be the imperial oppressor now mired in another Asian quagmire.
The whole country has been adrift since the Soviet Union fell, taking a break only to have some kind of collective freak-out/demand for blood and security in the aftermath of 9/11.
Meanwhile, everything in media is more fragmented, less influential, less lucrative, less nutritious, more common and less aspirational. We’re left celebrating the irony of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert because we’re smart enough to know everything is bullshit but clueless about what this portends for the future.
The whole country has been adrift since the Soviet Union fell, taking a break only to have some kind of collective freak-out/demand for blood and security in the aftermath of 9/11.
I’d say it’s the Republicans who have been on a collective freak-out since the Soviet Union fell. They could not believe a Democrat won the presidency in 1992, and have been acting out in one way or another ever since.
<Blockquote.We need to figure out what this country is really all about. What it should be all about.</blockquote>
I’m content to have this done the same way it’s been done for hundreds of years now, post facto, by historians.
It is what it is, and will be something different tomorrow. And although it will be something different, we won’t know, in any event, what different thing it will be, or how it got there, among all the competing possibilities and their proponents, both while it’s happening, and after the fact.
In the middle of the Civil War, no one could figure out what that was all about.
The Abolitionists thought the knew what the Civil War was about. The Slave-owners knew what it was about. Historians have only confused the matter.
But, more than that, people with real beliefs and interests organized other people and had a fight to decide what the country was going to be about.
And it happened again during the Imperial Years under McKinley and Roosevelt, and again with Wilson, and again with Roaring 20’s, and again with the New Deal, and again with post-war containment policy. The country hasn’t been led or defined by historians, but by men and women of conviction and action.
Now we’re too zonked out on media entertainment to muster much more than slogans and street theater.
The other 80% of the country, including the lion’s share of the combatants — anything but clear on the issue. Which on balance is a good thing.
And thus it has always been so. Historicism isn’t the progressives’ friend.
I’m afraid that people have decided what this country is all about and that’s trickle-down economics and unending war.
Which will we see in 2013? Invasion of Syria or invasion of Iran? Perhaps I should say “which will we see first” as the Second Crusades continue.
Here’s one of the metatrends: in a few years, for the first time in a century, the United States will no longer have the world’s largest economy.
One thing that’s sorely needed is a definition of American “exceptionalism” that doesn’t rely on the US being the “biggest” country.
It is, or should be, a cause for rejoicing among Americans in general, and progressives in particular that the median income in China, India and other formerly destitute nations has risen from (roughly) $100/year to $100/month in the past generation.
Years ago, James Fallows—at a time when there was much fear-mongering about the rise of Japan’s economy—wrote a book titled “More Like Us”, in which he argued that America needed to recognize and build on its own social and cultural strengths rather than try to emulate the strengths of nations (like Japan) that, in many ways, are radically different from us.
When it’s $3000/month to match ours, I will rejoice for then the job hemorrhage will cease.
Well there are two prongs here, political and social.
On the political prong, the “conservative” movement deserves much more than a “scolding”. It needs to be constantly denounced and vilified in the strongest terms by the most eloquent and powerful voices as a degenerate, regressive movement of callous cruelty, willful ignorance and perpetual failure. Our nation has succeeded at virtually nothing since the rise of the “conservative” movement around 1980. We have made virtually no meaningful advance on any national problem in that time and indeed, have seriously regressed on every policy front imaginable. This era of multitudinous failure can be laid at the doorstep of this braindead political movement.
The social prong has a much longer pedigree—what this country is “about” is commerce, consumerism and economic “growth”. That is our real religion. That is what we actually made of our founding, our national myth of Exceptionalism notwithstanding. Of course the rise of mass media in the 20th century has mostly aided mass marketing and resulted in greater and greater corporatism and ever larger Big Bizness. Thus our great corporatists have destroyed the small biznessmen of the Babbitt Era.
And as mass consumerism and advertising and braindead consumption as a lifestyle have grown over the past century, the progressive movement has receded and greatly weakened. Hence the mass zonkout in front of the tube with all its delectations….
As for the meta of the future–what we should be “about” as a country—we might perhaps want to try participating in the urgent global movement to save the 11,000 year old stable climate from being destroyed for about three millenia, and thus perhaps save the earth for future generations to enjoy like we have. As well as perhaps protect all the millions of innocent species who really don’t deserve to go extinct so Mr. “Conservative” Asshole and Kiddies can drive their fucking gas guzzler 40 miles round trip to get a Dairy Queen double cone and scratch off game card. Just a suggestion.
I mean “scolded” in old-fashioned moral terms. I think progressives need a moral narrative beyond fairness, beyond equal opportunity, and beyond license. We need a moral narrative for our role as citizens and for our county’s role in the world. We need a vision for de-fracturing some significant part of our culture and giving it higher collective purpose.
I am not enough of a wordsmith to come up with the most impactive terminology, but basically, I think, our side is more of a “we are all in this together” type of morality. Most would tend to agree with Donne’s no man is an island ideology.
The right is more of the rugged individualism, I’ve got mine, screw you, type of morality.
American military action needs to be much more firmly-grounded in international institutions. No more go-it-alone, cowboy stuff.
We may be indispensable in terms of our unique ability to project forces, but that doesn’t mean we have the best judgement about when to use them. We should have listened to the Canadians, French, and Germans about Iraq.
This is great, much needed. Looking forward to the conversation.
We need to figure out what this country is really all about. What it should be all about.
This: http://www.crazywebsite.com/Free-Galleries-01/USA_Patriotic/Pictures_WWII_Posters_LG/Four_Freedoms_N
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Building a society in which people come together as equal citizens. We need to rediscover the egalitarian ideal that inspired “All men are created equal” during a period of inherited, landed nobility.
Let’s revive disdain for royalists and aristocracy, and compare the way our elites are seceding from the general population to the creation of a noble class.
I’m three-fifths of the way there with you…
Was there meant to be a point in that, or was it just easy snark?
Surely, you can’t be arguing that there wasn’t an anti-aristocratic ideal at the time of the War of Independence. Could you?
well, the concept of “man” of the time required revisioning which didn’t happen without a fight. Also it’s been shown that the concept of “man” was not “humanity” i.e. it didn’t include women. My point would be history is essential to our upcoming discussion – that’s why Boo is a great blogger and blog captain, because he really knows US history. Understanding where we came from is part of envisioning where we can go.
Oh, sure, there were all sorts of screwed-up ideas (by modern reckoning) at the time, including the one you pointed out. Nonetheless, there were also some very progressive and admirable ideas. Recognizing the former shouldn’t compel us to dismiss the latter.
I agree with you, and that is why Obama’s race speech was so great.
The IDEA that a slave was only 3/5 of a person – not to mention in the Constitution- was screwed up from the point of view of the Founders’ times not just today. In fact, equality was a Stoic principal for just one example from pretty long ago, in Roman times. This is why I keep harping on history.
The IDEA that a slave was only 3/5 of a person – not to mention in the Constitution- was screwed up from the point of view of the Founders’ times not just today.
That fact that the founders themselves put that into the Constitution, and a Constitution stating that was able to win approval from all of the colonies, seems to suggest the opposite.
There’s some obviously easy snark as well as some substance. As in all things this is a matter of perspective – there was indeed an anti-aristocratic ideal at the time, but at the same time those same men didn’t think that disenfranchising the majority of the population was replacing one aristocracy with another, so I might call it an anti-aristocratic idea. I believe in giving full credit for progress – baby steps even – but I’m not one to romanticize a past that was at best muddied, much like our muddied present, and our sure-to-be-muddied future. We can do better and I support that, but I don’t revere the founders of this nation or the “Spirit of ’76” any more than I revere the current elected officials of this nation in this new age. Honor to whom honor is due, reverence to none on earth.
but I’m not one to romanticize a past that was at best muddied
Teasing out the good strands is not idealizing the period in its entirety.
You asked a while ago about what progressives should be negotiating for and willing to give up as President Obama negotiates w/ the American Taliban. Some of that question is what moral stance one should take. It has been my contention that the President has gone down a good moral social path, i.e. homosexual rights, human rights; women’s rights but a poor moral economic one; banks and bankers are immune to the law.
Perhaps you can forward this to him as a moral argument to remember,
“As money gets more concentrated in the hands of people who are less inclined to spend it, the only way to stabilize capitalism and enable economic growth of some kind, is for the government to put money into the hands of people who are inclined to spend it. The means available to government are various forms of government spending, including old age and disability pensions, low cost public health insurance that frees up private money for discretionary purchases, as well as payment for labor, goods and services from the private sector in the process of operating the government and creating government projects. The governments of most advanced economies have for the last 80 years used these solutions to stabilize their economies, building a social welfare state that also manages the economy as a matter of course. In the context of these efforts, we have seen wealth shared between social classes and, in historical terms, relative social peace.”
“But this is only a conventional kind of moralism that you can find at any time in any country, really.”
Yes, that is true. But it would be a major achievement merely to get this kind of morality back in the driver’s seat in this country. Really, you don’t have to be a card-carrying “progressive”, and of course it becomes far stronger politically if issues are not so identified.
The problem is that in the 1980s, there was a huge “perception management” operation to get people to think “greed is good”. I remember it well, because in my whole life I had never seen this before, on that public level anyway. I’m sure there are many readers of this blog that have grown up with this.
People have always been fascinated by the doings of the rich and famous, but this was way beyond that. It was more like Ayn Rand, in fact it was Ayn Rand. The meltdown of 2008 shook the foundations of this kind of sociopathic anti-morality, but obviously it dies hard.
On the “Meta” idea, I am very much in favor of it. May I suggest a topic? I believe strongly, and I feel it is very important to notice, that extreme positions on the left and extreme positions on the right are symbiotic.
This may sound like a moral equivalence argument, or “both sides do it”, but I don’t see it that way. Because we have been dragged so far right, huge advances can be made towards solving problems by going for the middle, whereas to go for the ultimate left achieves nothing concrete except to provide propaganda fodder for the extreme right.
This is very obvious, for example on the issue of guns — I come to this fairly fresh because it’s not an issue I’ve ever been much involved with. I have absolutely no investment of any kind in the gun culture, but I also know that the vast majority of gun owners are responsible and, especially in rural areas, have perfectly legitimate uses for them. At the same time, I think the NRA is a totally disreputable organization that feeds off a lot of fears, but many of these fears are stoked by extreme anti-gun positions, such as repeal of 2d amendment.
I really look forward to this meta-view conversation. It is an area of persuasion that would greatly benefit me going forward. I seem to do well enough in efforts to converse on issues of the day, but have had some difficulty with making the larger case as to why a progressive vision of collective responsibility is better than the “rugged individualist” version of so many people I know. It is hard to dissemble their macro arguments, as they have a very emotional appeal.