Is "false consciousness" meaningful in politics? And what does Clarence Thomas have to do with it?

This article from former British Labour Member of Parliament David Marquand, Why the left is losing the crisis New Statesman 11/25/2010, has some valuable observation about how the embrace of neoliberalism (the "free market" Washington Consensus so beloved of the International Monetary Fund for developing nations in the 1990s) has placed center-left parties in Europe in the position of losing ground in a serious way to the right. And this in the midst of a depression, in which the right is advocating Herbert Hoover economics, known as the "Treasury view" in Britain.

But somehow he felt the need to qualify his polemic against austerity economics by "punching a hippie," in the form of griping about the faults of Marxism:

The ancient Marxist myth of false consciousness dies hard on the left. It says that, if hitherto left voters swing to the right, it is because they have been led astray by racists or demagogues, or because they have been seduced by false promises, or both: in short, because they don't understand what their true interests are. Unfortunately for its purveyors, the myth does not stand up. There was plenty of false consciousness around, but its chief repositories were the leaders of the social-democratic left, not the voters who deserted them. The deserting voters sensed that the statist paradigm in which their erstwhile leaders were trapped was a busted flush: that, as the American political economist Charles Lindblom once put it, the central state consists of "strong thumbs and no fingers" and those strong thumbs were no longer enough to induce lasting change.

I have no idea what that last metaphor about the thumbs and the fingers and the "central state" is supposed to mean.

But the argument that "the left" foolishly looks down on voters who don't agree with them as people who "don't understand what their true interests are" is a favorite theme of American conservatives. It's a stock feature of rightwing verbal populism. George Wallace in the 1960s sneered in his speeches against "pointy-headed intellectuals" and perfessers who ride bicycles. Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann regularly remind their fans of who the libruls and the "lamestream media" look down on the Real Americans.

There's also a highbrow version of the same argument popular among neoconservatives. I don't know that Christopher Lasch was ever considered a a neoconservative. But his version of the argument in introduction to his The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991) makes a case with which neocons would feel comfortable. In the preceding pages, he has made it clear that he is discussing "the left" as everyone from self-identifying Marxists to Democratic Party liberals:

The left had no quarrel with the future, I discovered, but only with the backward, benighted, or simply misguided opponents of progress whose blind resistance might prevent the future from arriving on schedule. It was the belief in progress ... that explained the left's curious mixture of complacency and paranoia. Their confidence in being on the winning side of history made progressive people unbearably smug and superior, but they felt isolated and beleaguered in their own country, since it was so much less progressive than they were. After all, the political culture of the United States remained notoriously backward - no labor party, no socialist tradition, no great capital city like London or Paris, where politicians and civil servants mingled with artists and intellectuals and encountered advanced ideas in cafés and drawing rooms. In America, the divorce between politics and thought had always found geographical expression in the distance between Washington and New York; and the culture of Washington itself, for that matter, seemed light-years ahead of the vast hinterland beyond the Alleghenies - the land of the Yahoo, the John Birch Society, and the Ku Klux Klan. [my emphasis]

That's how you do a highbrow mocking of the pointy-headed perfessers riding bicycles.

This comes from the last years of Lasch's life and career. And by this time, he had clearly embraced some rightwing perspectives. As we see in that excerpt. And, like my puzzlement at Marchand's metaphor, it's hard for me to even guess what real-world entities might have some correspondence to those Lasch is mocking. "In America, the divorce between politics and thought had always found geographical expression in the distance between Washington and New York"? Say what? And for that matter, what the heck is a "drawing room," really? Have you ever known anyone who had a part of their house they called a "drawing room"?

Okay, that's my own little bit of mockery. But, honestly, looking at the political scene during the Reagan and the Old Man Bush Administrations, who is he talking about here? Walter Mondale? Michael Dukakis? Bill Clinton? Al Gore? Please. One would have to look very hard in The Nation or The Progressive to find articles that expressed such a viewpoint. It might be marginally easier to find in the New York Review of Books. But it certainly was not the attitide of the broad group he takes as "the left."

Here Lasch explicitly embraces on of the favorite themes of conservatives, segregationists - and also the now-defunct Democratic Leadership Council (DLC):

The conviction that most Americans remained politically incorrigible - ultranationalistic in foreign policy, racist in their dealings with blacks and other minorities, authoritarian in their attitudes toward women and children - helps to explain why liberals relied so heavily on the courts and the federal bureaucracy to engineer reforms that might have failed to command popular support if they had been openly debated. The great liberal victories - desegregation, affirmative action, legislative reapportionment, legalized abortion - were won largely in the courts, not in Congress, in the state legislatures, or at the polls. Instead of seeking to create a popular consensus behind these reforms, liberals pursued their objectives by indirect methods, fearing that popular attitudes remained unreconstructed. The trauma of McCarthyism, the long and bitter resistance to desegregation in the South, and the continued resistance to federal spending (unless it could be justified on military grounds) all seemed to confirm liberals in the belief that the ordinary American had never been a liberal and was unlikely to become one. [my emphasis]

Lasch was considered a serious intellectual, and I don't mean "Serious" in the contemporary sense of embracing Beltway Village conventional wisdom. But this stuff was downright tendentious. Liberals were very aware that only a minority of the US public self-identified in polls as "liberal." But, then as now, on major policy issues, clear majorities and pluralities poll as supporting liberal positions on policy issues.

Now, real live liberals and progressives today do make the argument that in some cases, notably abortion rights, that advocates have become complacent about mobilizing political support for their causes, in part because the legal rulings were favorable to the cause in question. Yes, Brown v Board of Education ruled that public school segregation was unconstitutional. But the Civil Right Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were enacted by, uh, Congress. Lasch's argument is nothing but his version of the endless segregationist whine about the alleged tyranny of the courts.

That he was making this argument against "the left" in a book published in 1991 has an especially ironic sound today. The biggest judicial controversy of the Bush I Administration (1989-1993) was the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. The federal courts have since become heavily dominated by Republicans. The Supreme Court decisions in Bush v. Gore (Rehnquist Court, 2000) and Citizen's United (Roberts Court, 2010) were blatantly partisan and anti-democratic, and rank with the Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson decisions as some of the very worst in the entire Court's history.

Today's Republicans have no problem with using the federal courts for blatantly partisan and ideological purposes, enacting in reality a mirror-image of the false claims the segregationists always made against desegregation decisions. The Cheney-Bush Administration had all their Supreme Court nominees vetted through the crassly ideological and partisan Federalist Society. Clarence Thomas is currently receiving well-deserved criticism for his overtly partisan associations and the big money his wife takes from partisan conservative groups; she has herself been a prominent Tea Party activist. On Thomas' ethical challenges, see Mike McIntire, Friendship of Justice and Magnate Puts Focus on Ethics New York Times 06/18/2011; Digby's Today's Court is just another political player Hullabaloo 06/19/2011; and, Ian Millhiser, Clarence Thomas Decided Three Cases Where AEI Filed A Brief After AEI Gave Him A $15,000 Gift Think Progress 06/21/2011. Digby observes:

I think the Court sees itself as an explicitly political branch now and any attack on Thomas is done in that light. Bush vs Gore was a watershed --- the idea that the Court was above crass political considerations (even if it often wasn't) was fully abandoned and there's no going back. (Recall that Chief Justice Roberts worked on the Bush recount.)

To gripe about how "the left" relies too much on the courts to achieve their goals is a bad joke in today's judicial reality in the US.

Oh, and one of the three cases referenced in Ian Millhiser's piece is Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), a school desegregation case. Thomas filed a concurring opinion emphasizing what sounds like his opposition to the federal courts allowing any school desegregation plan that was anything but a one-time remedy for previous legally imposed (de jure) segregation in that school district. Justice Robert's opinion for the Court at the end cites Brown v. Board of Education as banning the recognition of race in a plan to alleviate actual (de facto) racial discrimination. The opinion didn't reverse Brown explicitly. It's safe to say it stood the Brown ruling on its head.

Justice Breyer, in a dissent joined by the other three dissenting Justices, said:

The plurality pays inadequate attention to this law, to past opinions’ rationales, their language, and the contexts in which they arise. As a result, it reverses course and reaches the wrong conclusion. In doing so, it distorts precedent, it misapplies the relevant constitutional principles, it announces legal rules that will obstruct efforts by state and local governments to deal effectively with the growing resegregation of public schools, it threatens to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation, and it undermines Brown's promise of integrated primary and secondary education that local communities have sought to make a reality. [my emphasis]

The ruling banned a desegregation plan that was adopted by the school district on its own initiative, not as a result of court orders. But remember, it's "the left" who wants to use the courts to impose their political views!

Justice Stevens filed his own separate dissent describing memorably the cynicism of the majority's reasoning:

There is a cruel irony in THE CHIEF JUSTICE'S reliance on our decision in Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U. S. 294 (1955). The first sentence in the concluding paragraph of his opinion states: "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin." Ante, at 40. This sentence reminds me of Anatole France's observation: "[T]he majestic equality of the la[w], forbid[s] rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread." THE CHIEF JUSTICE fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered; indeed, the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools. In this and other ways, THE CHIEF JUSTICE rewrites the history of one of this Court's most important decisions. Compare ante, at 39 ("history will be heard"), with Brewer v. Quarterman, 550 U. S. ___, ___ (2007) (slip op., at 11) (ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting) ("It is a familiar adage that history is written by the victors").

All this is a long way of saying that Marquand's argument about "the left" and "false consciousness" is a whopping red herring. Every political party, like every sales person in any business, tries to convince those to whom it's marketing itself that it better represents their interests than the alternative (voting for another party, not buying the product). In other words, it assumes that the skepticism or indecision of the targeted customer toward the party marketing itself in a political campaign is a form of "false consciousness," which the campaigner seeks to change.

In other words, in the context used by Marquand and by Lasch, the argument simply takes ordinary political persuasion and tries to paint it as elitist arrogance on the part of "the left." I don't know if there's any way for it to be meaningfully measured. But I'm guessing that the notion that people are too stupid too understand their own real interest is far more often expressed by the Tea Party types groups than by "the left." At least that's the only place I recall hearing it lately.

But in the context of electoral political activity, it's a silly play on the concept of the most elementary political marketing.

Tags: clarence thomas, christopher lasch, david marquand, republican supreme court, segregation

Liberal "elitists", race and the "culture war"

"Elitist intellectual" Pennsylvania coal miners on strike, 1910s

(This is the second of 2 posts discussing Christopher Lasch's 1991 book The True and Only Heaven; link to Part 1)

Lasch in a brief autobiographical section described how he grew up as and long remained someone who was distinctly to the left of even most Democratic liberals. Which can mean lots of things, including a thought-out position, a type of active engagement or a sense of political purity that allows one to stand happily outside the dirty business of actual political decisions in the real world. In any case, by the 1980s, he was feeling like a burnt-out leftie and didn't want to associate himself with those Yippies and Hippies and stuff from the 1960s.

Fortunately for the quality of his analysis, he doesn't seem to have quite gone over to the dark side of neoconservatism. Although in part of the book, he seems to treat academic sociology in general, and both liberal and conservative social analyses, as more-or-less equivalent to political liberalism. So he winds up citing conservatives like Seymour Martin Lipset and (neocon) Daniel Bell as examples of how liberal thinking got on a wrong track from his viewpoint. A strange approach, to say the least.

But he gets around to making some decent points. After repeating some stock "culture war" tropes, which I discussed in the previous post on this book, Lasch gets around to acknowledging that plain old raw racism played a role among some of the "culture warriors". Discussing the busing controversy of the 1970s with particular reference to the Boston area where it was especially bitter, he does his best to be sympathetic to the antibusing activists in the following passage, but can't overlook the obvious, either:

The wrongs suffered by black people in America were so glaring and their demand for reparation seemingly so compelling that advocates of busing found it impossible to admit that white workers had important grievances of their own, especially when those grievances were couched in the idiom of racial abuse and championed by leaders who exercised no control over their own followers. Liberals were predisposed to see nothing but racial prejudice in the antibusing movement, but the movement itself did very little to correct this misunderstanding. Antibusing agitators sometimes appealed to the example of the civil rights movement, but they had no understanding of its moral self-discipline. They deplored violence but subtly encouraged it by dwelling on the duty to repel the outside "invasion" of their communities. They protested that "although we're opposed to forced busing, we're not racists," in the words of Dennis Kearney, a South Boston politician; but antibusing mobs undermined such claims with their favorite slogan, "Bus the niggers back to Africa!" "We are racists," said a white senior at South Boston High School. "Let's face it. That's how we feel about it." Ione Malloy, the English teacher who recorded this defiance in her diary of the busing conflict, tried to persuade her students that South Boston's position was more complicated than that. When students complained that "blacks get everything," she challenged them to change places. When they threatened to "start trouble so the plan won't work," she predicted, quite accurately, that the authorities would close the school. She urged them to avoid violence and provocation, to no avail. As the situation deteriorated, she confessed to a feeling of "futility." "We seem to be going to a dead end."

The best argument against busing was that an "ethnically or racially homogeneous neighborhood respected another community's integrity more easily than a weak, threatened neighborhood did." According to this way of thinking, "strong neighborhoods were the solid building blocks of a healthily diverse city." The "preservation of community," accordingly, should have been recognized as a "value competitive with - yet ironically essential to - equality." But these were the words of a sympathetic observer from outside, Anthony Lukas, not an indigenous analysis of the issue. Leaders of the antibusing movement never resorted to this argument. They seldom rose above the level of resentment, self-righteousness, and self-pity. "We are poor people locked into an economically miserable situation," said Pixie Palladino of ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights). "All we want is to be mothers to the children God gave us. We are not opposed to anyone's skin. We are opposed to forced busing." (my emphasis)

But is it true that "advocates of busing [i.e., liberals] found it impossible to admit that white workers had important grievances of their own"? Cue up Fred Harris again, the former Oklahoma Senator who played a prominent role on the "Kerner Commission" studying urban violence, from his 1973 book The New Populism. Harris argued for the virtues of local and neighborhood government and democratic city governments, and said:

But how does this square with busing? If neighborhoods are to be given real control over essential services, why should they not have control over neighborhood schools? Neighborhoods should control their own schools - unless neighborhood control really amounts to racial discrimination and inequality of educational opportunity. In this instance, the more fundamental promise of the American inheritance for equality before the law must take precedence.

Court-ordered busing of schoolchildren can be made more understandable if people know that it is a stop-gap measure and that there is an alternative that permits neighborhood control. That alternative, advocated by the New Populism, calls for knocking down the racial and class barriers to housing, so that people can live where they want to live. And it calls for evening up the imbalances in wealth and income, so that people can afford quality education wherever they live.

Supporters of "busing" for desegregation also worked to develop alternatives such as "magnet schools" with a particular emphasis like arts or sciences to attract diverse student bodies on a voluntary basis.

The notion that liberals "found it impossible to admit that white workers had important grievances of their own" (my emphasis) is just silly. But the false accusation - which Lasch should have known better to repeat in this form - fits well with the "culture war" narrative about liberals elitism.

He repeats essentially the same claim in another form, "Liberals were predisposed to see nothing but racial prejudice in the antibusing movement". Nonsense again, for the same reasons. And as Lasch goes on to describe it, since the antibusing movement on which he was focused there presented a blatantly racist and even violent front, why does he think that liberals were "predisposed" to see "nothing" but racism in that movement? Actually, liberal politicians looked hard to find other interests of the protesters which they could address as a way of diffusing racial tensions.

Lasch may have been feeling burnt-out when he wrote this book. But he does give some good insight into the political-ideological-marketing approach conservatives used to redefine the pro-labor, pro-civil-rights Democratic Party as "elitist". They created a framework of a "new class". The "new class" concept had various antecedents, as Lasch explains. It built on economic theories that stressed the significance of scientists and engineers in the production process. And also on the notion of the "managerial revolution" that meant that managers of corporations rather than owners of the company's stock made most of the actual decisions about business behavior, a notion associated with the economists Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means in the 1930s.

Those descriptions were realistic and empirically based. But the brand of intellectuals we now know so fondly as "neoconservatives" contributed their own twist to the notion of a New Class, eventually applying concepts they used to describe Soviet and Eastern European Communist societies to domestic US politics. Lasch writes:

Those who had been raised on the Marxian theory of history ... - and this category included a number of intellectuals who later became neoconservatives - ... needed [to define] a ruling class [to oppose], if only to sustain their own self-image as a lonely band of truth tellers who dared to question the reigning orthodoxy, and they found it in the makers of the "managerial revolution."

Lasch even traces the New Class notion back to critics of the French Revolution liek Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville which made much of the irresponsibility of revolutionary intellectuals.

The neocons gave a highbrow version of the New Class which provides a framework so that the Kathleen Parkers and Rush Limbaughs of the world can sneer at the "elitism" of Democrats while they themselves defend the narrow interests of billionaires and plutocrats:

Neoconservative intellectuals' restatement of these well-established traditions of speculation - in which the new class was described variously as practical and efficient, domineering and repressive, alienated and adversarial —represented these intellectuals' most important contribution to the rise of the new right. New-class theory enabled the right to attack "elites" without attacking big business. Businessmen, it appeared, were responsible and public-spirited: they were accountable to the consumers to whom they sold their products, just as practical politicians were accountable to the voters; and the market thus limited any power they could hope to exercise. The new class, on the other hand, was accountable to no one, and its control of higher education and the mass media gave it almost unlimited power over the public mind. Yet the members of this class still felt marginal and isolated: the more power they achieved, the more they resented their lack of power. (my emphasis)

Rightwingers, apparently since the beginning of time, have been convinced that colleges are full of dangerously subversive professors, however little reality on the campuses conformed to that delusion:

[Lewis] Feuer spoke of the "intellectuals' acute authoritarianism, arising from frustrated desire for power." Commentary [the leading neocon journal] caricatured the "radicalized professor" as a "man who has wandered through life, never testing himself outside the university," "envious, resentful," unable to bear his exclusion from the "magic circle where power, glory, and virtue reside."

Since this concept of the New Class was an imaginative ideological construct to begin with, tweaking the definition according to the marketing needs of the moment wasn't difficult:

Although the "new class" often seemed to refer only to literary intellectuals an4 their "adversary culture," it could easily expand, when the need arose, to embrace bureaucrats, professional reformers, social workers, and social engineers as well as literary types. In this version, which derived from the theory of the managerial revolution, the "new class" seemed to refer to anyone working in the public sector. According to Irving Kristol [father of William and godfather of neoconservatism], it consisted of "scientists, teachers, and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communications industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their careers in the expanding public sector, city planners, the staffs of the larger foundations, the upper levels of government bureaucracy, and so on." Charles Murray's description was even more expansive: "the upper echelons of ... academia, journalism, publishing, and the vast network of foundations, institutes, and research centers that has been woven into partnership with government during the last thirty years." Murray included even politicians, judges, bankers, businessmen, lawyers, and doctors - at least those who were liberals. From this point of view, the new class could be recognized not so much by its culture of hedonism as by its relentless pressure for an "activist federal government committed to 'change,' " as Michael Novak put it. Professionals in the public sector wanted massive federal programs, according to Novak, because such programs created "hundreds of thousands of jobs and opportunities" for "those whose hearts itch to do good and who long for a 'meaningful' use of their talents, skills, and years." As Novak, Murray, and Kristol saw it, the culture of the new class was not just antibourgeois [i.e., permissive on culture values] but antibusiness. It aimed to replace private enterprise with a vast bureaucracy that would undermine initiative, destroy the free market, and subject everything to central control.

These wildly divergent descriptions of the new class made it clear that the term referred to a set of politically objectionable attitudes, not to an identifiable social grouping, much less a class.

This is the larger framework that allows Republicans championing massive tax subsidies to the wealthiest citizens to become down-home good ole boys who are the kind of people you'd like to have a beer with, while Democrats determined to expand opportunity for the majority and defend the poor are transmuted into stuffy elitists who look down their noses at the regular folks.

In closing, it's always worth remembering that such constructions which prove useful over a long period of time, however fantastic they may be empirically, have to hitch onto some kernel of truth to be effective. The seemingly ever-increasing role of experts and specialists in society is one of those realities in this case. I'm not going to develop the idea in this post. But the near-ubiquitous experts which we encounter daily who we supposedly need to consult to lives our lives in the correct way do provide a real-world experience of a kind of elitism that gives emotional force to the scam Republican partisan accusation.

Tags: culture war, christopher lasch, neoconservatives

Kathleen Parker, Blut und Boden and the "culture war" (Pt 1 of 2)

"Elitist" textile workers striking in Lawrence MA back when - some of them were no doubt less than 100% Americans (by Kathleen Parker's definition)

Washington Post Writer's Group Columnist Kathleen Parker, whose specialty has long been to phrase nasty prejudices for respectable white folks to use in polite company, may be losing her touch. In Full-blooded Americans Orlando Sentinel 05/14/08, she uses an approach that may embarrass some of their disciples here and there.

Glenn Greenwald (High Standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page Salon 05/17/08) calls it her White Power column. Although I would say that its only a slightly more egregious example than her standard efforts.

But I suppose I should be grateful to her for giving me an in-the-headlines opening for a follow-up post on historian Christopher Lasch's ideas on the "culture war". Parker's latest says - with attempted polite language, of course - that white folks shouldn't vote against Obama because he's a scary black man, but because Great American McCain has a longer American ancestry.

Here she makes a stock "culture war" pitch phrased for white folks who think of themselves as the polite middle-class:

Contributing to the growing unease among yesterday's Americans is the failure of the federal government to deal with the illegal-immigration fiasco. It isn't necessarily racist or nativist to worry about what these new demographics mean to the larger American story.

Yet, white Americans primarily - and Southerners, rural and small-town folks especially - have been put on the defensive for their throwback concerns with "guns, God and gays," as Howard Dean put it in 2003. And more recently, for clinging to "guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them," as Obama described white, working-class Pennsylvanians who preferred his opponent.

The "guns, God and gays" trope has haunted Democrats, and Republicans have enjoyed dusting it off when needed to rile the locals. It's an easy play.

But so-called ordinary Americans aren't so easily manipulated and they don't need interpreters. They can spot a poser a mile off and they have a hound's nose for snootiness. They've got no truck with people who condescend nor tolerance for that down-the-nose glance from people who don't know the things they know. (my emphasis)

The phrase I bolded makes it a nonpartisan criticism of those nasty elitists, you see. And it also let middle-class white folks who don't want to be completely identified with "rednecks" or with - mercy me! - low-class types who might join unions a way to remind their listeners that while they themselves aren't part of such a class of people, they still respect them as the salt of the earth and all as against those "elitists" in the "Democrat Party".

I posted before about Christopher Lasch's 1991 book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. In that book, he was addressing the question that engaged conventional wisdom so intensely at the time, of how the Democrats could ever win the Presidency again in the face of the Republicans' successful "culture war" appeals.

A large part of that discussion, then and now, missed or ignored some bedrock basics about the American political scene. Two major regional political shifts have occurred in American politics since Richard Nixon began the Republican Southern Strategy in 1968. The South now votes Republican in national elections. And California votes Democratic.

The later shift had not yet occurred in 1991. Bill Clinton carried California in 1992. And that fool Republican Governor Pete Wilson had the dandy idea to support the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994. Since the polite language of nice white ladies like Kathleen Parker couldn't hide the nativist and racial bigotry displayed by many of Prop 187's supporters, it had the effect of galvanizing Latino voters to register and go to the polls in higher proportions than ever before, a habit that has continued. It also reminded them dramatically that the Republican Party is the one that doesn't like black and brown people all that much and thinks Spanish is some kind of sinister plot against regular white Americans.

Since then, the state that gave the country Presidents Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon has generally voted Democratic in statewide elections ever since, the Rovian political coup of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003 and his re-election in 2006 being exceptions.

Now Democrats cannot expect to win the Presidency without carrying California. That fact sometimes gets obscured by press discusses of "the West" leaning Democratic. But California's huge electoral vote prize and the significance of Silicon Valley and Hollywood fundraising clout for the Democrats means that the Dems have to keep California Democrats reasonably happy. And while California voters rejected gay marriage in a statewide referendum - unconstitutionally so, as the state supreme court happily just ruled - the need to keep California in the Democratic column means that the national Democratic Party can't afford to pander too heavily to conservative hot-button issues.

And what had already become true in 1991 is that the South was something close to a Solid South for Republicans. And today, the Republicans are more dependent on the South, both in Presidential races and in their Congressional delegations, than the Democrats ever were.

The Democratic Party prior to the Second World War involved a coalition of Southern segregationists with Northern liberals, city-dwellers and the labor movement. That doesn't mean that there was no support for liberal economic ideas among Southern whites, on the contrary. Mississippi's Theodore Bilbo, who was to become one of the Senate's most notorious racists ever, entered the Senate as a New Deal partisan.

But while the postwar Democratic Party in the South remained the protector of segregation, the contradictions in the national party increasingly showed. Truman in 1948 faced party splits on the left with Henry Wallace and his Progressives and on the right from Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats. Democrats in the 1970s assumed that the recently-enfranchised African-American vote might give them a shot at holding on to the South. However we weigh the role of race and the so-called "white backlash" in the shift to the Republicans in the South, voters there clearly trended more conservative.

So as long as black voter participation in the South was relatively low compared to whites, and as long as California was presumed to be a more-or-less safe state for Republicans in Presidential elections, the national Democratic Party felt strong pressure to mitigate the effect of "culture war" issues in the South. It also meant that there was more pressure to bring swing voters in states outside the South into the Democratic column.

In other words, the idea of a massive cultural shift among working-class voters or voters in smaller cities from Democrats to Republicans nationally can be highly misleading. At least according to one count I've seen discussed recently, working-class voters (the definition of which can vary greatly) nationally vote more consistently Democratic today than 40 years ago. And that makes perfect sense. In the 1960s, the now-extinct species called "liberal Republicans" was still extant in the person of politicians like Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Jacob Javits of New York and John Lindsey of New York City (who switched to the Democrats later).

Failure to take that distinction into account leads astray a lot of the writing from the last 25 years or so on how Democrats can deal with "culture war" issues. And to a certain extent, that happened with Christopher Lasch's book, as well.

In Part 2: Liberal "elitists", race and the "culture war"

Tags: culture war, christopher lasch, kathleen parker, neoconservatives

The "culture war" against "elitism"

Glenn Greenwald is using the 1988 Presidential election as an important reference point for this year's contest. He talks about it at his blog, The media, the right and 1988: Endless deja vu 05/04/08, and he says there that a significant part of his new book Great American Hypocrites is about the 1988 campaign.

In those days, it was widely thought that the Democratic Party was divided into two major factions, the old-fashioned New Deal liberals and a more pragmatic, future-oriented group that for a while were called "Atari Democrats", until the Atari Corporation tanked. For reasons I won't belabor here, it was always a pretty weak description of reality.

But in 1988, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who was taken to be one of those pragmatic, reasonable Democrats, not like those old-fashioned pro-labor New Deal Dems, won the nomination. Now, a more inoffensive type than the bland Dukakis would be truly hard to imagine. But Old Man Bush's campaign painted Dukakis as a dogmatic, unpatriotic leftwing radical weirdo.

Greenwald is right in his post linked above that the emerging Republican and GOP-friendly Establishment press script for Barack Obama is very similar. Unlike in 1992 or 2004, that tried-and-true "flip-flop" accusation doesn't play much role in the anti-Obama narrative.

The 1988 election was quite a jolt for the Democrats. Michael Dukakis was the kind of pragmatic, non-ideological candidate that received opinion of the time assumed would be the ideal Dem candidate. But even he got tagged by the Reps as an ally of black rapists and flag-burning hippies. Liberals and social analysts generally were really beating their heads against the wall in those days trying to discern the contours of what we now know as the "culture war". It's a sign of how far we've come that when Pat Buchanan openly talked about a cultural war going on in the US at the 1992 Republican convention, it was considered shockingly rightwing even for the Republicans. How times have changed!

Historian Christopher Lasch in his 1991 book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics wrestled with the same sorts of issues that have come up in the debate over Obama's alleged "elitism" and his black pastor that so frightens and offends Big Pundits and Republican white folks.

He has a chapter called "Right-Wing Populism and the Revolt Against Liberalism" that focuses on these issues. I'll probably post more than once from it. He recognizes that white racism and other forms of social conservatism did play a role in the Democrats' difficulties with many working-class white voters. He punctures the prevailing wisdom of the time on some factual questions, and has a very good explanation of the practical meaning of the Republican claims of liberal "elitism".

But here I want to focus on the fact that, like too many liberal writers of the time, including some who were taken to be liberal (ahem, Thomas Edsall), accepted some ideas of the Republican stereotype. The Establishment press in those days was in its pre-Whitewater days, so they hadn't gone off that cliff yet. But pundit wisdom also reflected a lot of the Republican anti-"elitism" narrative even then.

In this paragraph, for instance, he gives a fairly conventional picture, referencing several culture-war hot-button issues including "busing":

"Two hundred years after the inception of our 'Great American Dream,' " wrote Alan Erlichman, a spokesman for the antibusing forces in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, in the mid-seventies, "the middle class now finds itself in the midst of a 'Great American Nightmare.' " It was not merely a threat to its standard of living that defined this middle-class nightmare but a threat to its way of life—its beliefs and ideals, its sense of propriety, its distinctive conceptions of justice. Communities like Canarsie were painfully aware that they had become objects of educated contempt. The student radicals of the sixties mocked their patriotism. "Here were these kids, rich kids who could go to college, who didn't have to fight,... telling you your son died in vain. It makes you feel your whole life is shit, just nothing." Liberals dismissed their demand for law and order as "proto-fascism," their opposition to busing as "white racism." Feminists told women who wanted to stay at home with their children that full-time motherhood turned a housewife into a domestic drudge, the lowest order of humanity. When social planners tried to determine the racial composition of schools, they assigned blacks and Hispanics to separate statistical categories but lumped whites indiscriminately together as "others," ignoring the way in which white workers, according to [Jonathan] Rieder, "viewed themselves not as abstract whites but as members of specific ethnic groups."

Reality-check, 17 years later:

There was a threat to the standard of living of working-class white, from the Nixon recessions of 1971 and 1973-75 to the class war against workers known as the Reagan administration.

As Lasch himself makes clear in the same chapter, the concept "middle class" had even then become about as empty of meaning as the current phrase "market economy", and to speak of some general "middle class way of life" or "its distinctive conceptions of justice" was pretty much nonsensical.

Fuzzy concepts like "middle class" gave a lot of leeway for people to elaborate their own narratives without much reference to facts on the ground.

Had communities like the Canarsie section of Brooklyn "become the objects of educated contempt"? To the extent that "educated" here means people with college degrees, it wasn't exactly an innovation of the 1960s that wealthier people sometimes indulge the very human though not very admirable impulse to consider themselves better than those less economically favored.

But does this mean intellectuals in the normal sense of the word (professors, writers, social critics) held working-class communities in contempt? After the effects of the 1960s on academia, I would be surprised if this were actually true, especially for the 1970s.

Did the student radicals "mock their patriotism", those working-class whites in Canarsie? It's true and can be documented that there was the occasional flag-burning. But did "student radicals" actually mock the patriotism of working-class whites? I'm guessing such a thing would be hard to document. Republican rich kids were more likely, at least in private, to ridicule working-class guys who went of to war for being suckers. Most of the rich kids "had other priorities", like our esteemed Vice President. But most of them knew to sound very patriotic in public.

Were there "kids, rich kids who could go to college, who didn't have to fight, ... telling you your son died in vain. It makes you feel your whole life is shit, just nothing." You can never rule out the individual exceptions. But the actions and publications of the antiwar movement are part of the historical record. Few if any of them attempted to ridicule the dead. The Rev. Phelps and his "God Hates Fags" version of Christianists weren't around in those days to protest at soldiers funerals. Lasch doesn't name the person saying that or tell us whether he actually lost a son.

If anyone bothered to look closely at the serious antiwar critics, they actually shared a sense of the enlightened mission of the United States; they just thought it should be a more anti-imperialist and less violent mission. Robert Tucker actually makes this argument at some length in The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy (1971).

Did liberals call the desire of ordinary Americans for safe neighborhoods "proto-fascism"? Not very likely. Now, some people including some liberals thought Nixon's "law-and-order" demagoguery combined with his own administration's contempt for law was leading in a "fascist" or police-state direction. After all, that's when characters like Dick Cheney, Rummy and Karl Rove were forming their political views, which they more recently had the opportunity to put into action.

This did remind me of what Herbert Marcuse had to say about the subject of fascism during the Nixon years. Marcuse was no liberal. He was a Marxist and definitely did not consider himself a "liberal", even in the American sense. But he knew a bit about fascism, having left Germany as a Jewish refugee in the 1930s and later analyzing social developments in wartime Germany for the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In an not-liberal book of 1972, Counterrevolution and Revolt, he described the Nixon administration as implementing counterrevolution against the activists of the day. But, he wrote, "This is not a fascist regime by any means." Despite some serious abuses - abuses that were not nearly so serious as what we've seen with the Cheney-Bush administration - democratic institutions still functioned. Or, as he put it in language that liberals of the day weren't using, "Decisive is rather whether the present phase of the (preventive) counterrevolution (its democratic-constitutional phase) does not prepare the soil for a subsequent fascist phase."

Now, I should mention here that Marcuse didn't really write pamphlets for the average newspaper reader. On the contrary, he wrote in an academic style that did not put a premium on accessibility, even for the college-educated reader. But he did use the word "proto-fascist" to describe some authoritarian tendencies that were visible at the time, including George Wallace's following. Wallace, we should recall, was famous as the symbol of resistance to segregation and was identified in the public mind, including those of his white followers, with Bull Conner and the use of violence against civil rights activists in Alabama. That was their brand of "law and order". Or, as Marcuse put it, "The forces of law and order have been made a force above the law."

The liberals and conservatives of the time could both be criticized about not responding more forcefully to those authoritarian tendencies. Because they actually existed. But recognizing that is hardly the same as dismissing concerns about crime. It would also be worth asking whether liberals or conservatives did more to actually put effective police on the streets to deal with actual street crimes. (Hint: wealthy Republicans can hire security guards for gated communities; they don't have to care that much about police presence in working-class neighborhoods of any ethnicity.)

Opposition to busing was criticized as being in part to do with white racism. Lasch documents in the same chapter that some of it certainly was related to white racism. In the real world, though, liberals recognized that busing of students to redress racial discrimination resulting from official discriminatory policies in housing was, at best, a sub-optimum solution. Defenders of busing recognized and said repeatedly that there were valid reasons to have neighborhood schools. The concept of "magnet schools" was a liberal response that aimed to balance desegregation requirements with parental choice.

The most glaring of all the litany Lasch recites in the quoted paragraph is the one in which those wicked feminist harpies told full-time homemakers they they were "the lowest form of humanity". That, to use the technical terms, is pure horses**t. The aim of the women's movement was and is to give women a broader choice of careers and lifestyles than were generally available in the 1960s, including properly valuing and protecting the rights of women (and the occasional man) who chose to be full-time homemakers and parents. That accusation that feminists were hostile to "housewives" was and is a staple of anti-feminist ideology. But it's all but diametrically opposed to reality.

The last complaint, that "social planners" who "tried to determine the racial composition of schools" didn't treat Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans as separate groups is true. Because the point of desegregation was to redress patterns of historical discrimination in public education. And the practices that the federal courts were rejecting in the 1970s didn't target Polish-Americans or Serbian-Americans for such discrimination. But those discriminatory practices did target African-Americans and Latinos.

The point of this "long-form" post, as Sara Robinson of the Orcinus blog calls them, is that it's one thing to recognize that there were a lot of voters who are not especially affluent and unlikely to benefit greatly from Republican economic policies were nevertheless hostile to liberals. But when the complaints offered to justify this are divorced from reality, as the ones Lasch cites here pretty much are, its worth asking by what processes people come to complain about things that are basically not true, and manifestly not true.

That was so in 1988, it was so in 1991, and it's so today.

Tags: christopher lasch, democrats, liberalism, michael dukakis, reagan democrats