Jonathan Chait gives a reliably conventional take on third-party candidate Jill Stein of the Green Party, Jill Stein Explains Her Plan to Stop Trump by Electing Him President New York 07/28/2016.
Someone on Facebook called attention in particular to this quote from Stein, "The answer to neofascism is stopping neoliberalism."
I try to be sparing in the use of the label "fascism" or variations like "neofascism." Chait sneers at Stein's comment as "jargon-laced evasion." Meaning evasion of Chait's assumption that a vote for Stein is effectively a vote for Donald Trump.
This seems like a modified version of a (relatively) famous 1939 quote from Max Horkheimer, "Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism." Horkheimer was the head of the Frankfurt School (Institute for Social Research), whose members had to emigrate once the Nazis took over. They were alert enough prior to 1933 to transfer most of the Instutute's assets to Switzerland because they were realistic about the chances for a Nazi takeover. Not incidentally, Horkeimer headed the studies on anti-Semitism sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, the most famous of which was the pathbreaking sociological study of The Authoritarian Personality, part of a larger project called Studies of Prejudice. The AJC website has the full text of all five published volumes of the Studies in Prejudice.
In other words, he was kind of an authority on the topic of fascism. The historical/poli-sci discussions of whether Hitler's regime should be called fascist or whether it was a distinct type of dictatorship came later; everybody took it for granted in the 30s and 40s that Nazism was a variation of fascism.
One of the important findings of The Authoritarian Personality study was that there was a significant amount of among white and black workers in America. And both that and the larger AFJ research project focused heavily on the role that authority structures in the family and childrearing practices play in producing authoritartian tendencies. Horkheimer and the Institute had previously done a major study based on survey results in Germany published as Studies on Authority and the Family. So that did some of the most important groundbreaking work on how family structures and psychological factors are important independent variables from economic ones in shaping people's political attitudes.
But Horkheimer's point about capitalism and fascism is still true, even when we attach "neo" to both. "Neoliberalism" is finally becoming a widely-used term in the US, at least among economists. And it has been the dominant economic-political ideology in the US and Britain since the 1980s. And it's an ideology that's very, very focused on letting corporations and especially banks run wild. And its political side has a very undemocratic tendency (to put it very mildly).
Citizens United is neoliberal political theory in action. Deregulating the banks including abolishing Glass-Steagall is neoliberal political theory in action. So is the push to privatize what is now public education. (Pioneered by the White Citizens Council back in the day.) So is the Flint, Michigan poisoned water situation. And private prisons. It's a toss-up for me which of those last two is the more obscene.
So are deregulation treaties like TPP dressed up as "trade" treaties that allow international corporations to override national standards on health and safety regulation, environmental laws and labor protections by going through a corporate-run court system. Germany dictating to Greece, Italy and Portugal is neoliberal governance in action.
There are two very descriptive sentences on neoliberal economics and politics. One is TINA, There Is No Alternative, a favorite slogan of Maggie Thatcher and Angela Merkel, meaning that governments have to do what The Market demands, not what the voters put them in office to do. Even more representative is what Angie's Finance Minister told Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis just after the Syriza government took power in early 2014, “Elections cannot be allowed to change an economic programme of [an EU] member state!”
I've paid hardly paid any attention to Jill Stein, and the American Green Party has never made much of an impression on me.
But, yeah, people who won't talk about the substance of neoliberal policies, even if they use other words for it, might as well not bother talking about fascism either. Because the social developments in the US and the EU that created the conditions for the current surge in rightwing movements have an awful lot to do with neoliberal economic policies and political practices. Not least of which is that center-left parties have largely embraced neoliberalism even to the point of, say, proposing to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits in the United States. To take a random example.
Showing posts with label frankfurter schule. Show all posts
Showing posts with label frankfurter schule. Show all posts
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Thursday, January 07, 2016
Digby on "false consciousness" and liberals getting skittish about "political correctness"
Digby Parton is one of my favorite political analysts. One of the things she's been hashing over lately is the ever-vexing question of class and race in Donald Trump's support.
This is an old issue. It was an issue for the Populists in the late 19th century, who had an appeal to white Southern workers and farmers against the power of the trusts and concentrated wealth. But the Southern planters, bankers and industrialists also had a powerful appeal to whites to beware of Populists or other lefties who might promote black equality.
Tom Watson of Georgia embodied this political dilemma. Sarah Soule wrote about his early political career in "Populism and Black Lynching in Georgia, 1890-1900" Social Forces 71:2 (Dec 1992) (The ellipses here are for parentheses that refer to other sources referenced in the article.)
11 Alive Atlanta reported in Statue of "first class hater" to be removed from Capitol 10/21/2013 on a latter-day sanction against Watson's image:
The famous study headed by Max Horkheimer on The Authoritarian Personality dealt directly with the phenomenon of racism and other authoritarian tendencies among people who would seem to have clear economic interests in economically liberal/progressive policies.
With so much of the political world and our Pod Pundits more than half-stuck in 1969, it's also worth noting that something like this was also part of the career of George Wallace. In the effectively one-party state of Alabama, Wallace always attracted significant black votes. Not because they imagined he secretly stood for racial equality, although in his 1983 gubernatorial race he made gestures toward repudiating his racist positions. It was because in a contest between two Democratic candidates, Wallace stood for policies like free school textbooks that were more beneficial to black families than the policies advocated by his opponents.
This is a large part of the background of the issue as Digby has addressed it in various places recently. In Donald Trump will make America white again: “White working-class anxiety” is a dog-whistle for racism Salon 12/22/2015, she discusses the general assumption that Trump's support is especially strong among "non-college educated working class whites." The national press uses college education as a measure of the difference between working class and non-working class; I think there's a big problem with that definition but I won't go into it here. But by any reasonable definition, white working class voters are a part of Trump's current coalition, which hasn't yet been tested in an actual election. Digby writes:
One of the places Digby addresses this issue in Donald Trump will make America white again: “White working-class anxiety” is a dog-whistle for racism Salon 12/22/2015:
Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse used the phrase and concept in One-Dimensional Man (1964). As the reader can guess from this passage, it wasn't written in the language of the average newspaper article or stock op-ed:
It's also possible to make a straightforward economic, sociological or political science case that some groups vote against their own interests in some quantifiable way. With no need to resort to Hegelian logic. In Left Blogostan we periodically see maps showing how Republican states receive more in federal spending than Democratic states, though Republicans are highly critical of domestic federal spending. Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong and other economists familiar with international economics tell us that such transfers are, among other things, part of a normal part of a well-functioning currency zone. There is an obvious case to be made that a solidly Republican state like my native state of Mississippi is voting against their own economic benefit by going Republican.
But there are other factors that go into voting, such as national security or "traditional values." And, as Digby puts it, "racial resentment exists all on its own." (A Hegelian might object that the truth is in the whole, but that's another discussion.) And some voters, a not insignificant numbers, prefer white solidarity to concrete economic benefit.
In addition to race, there are psychological satisfactions in identifying with a wealthy blowhard like Trump or a pompous superpatriot like Ted Cruz. Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud expressed this unsentimental view in The Future of an Illusion (1927):
She took another pass at the question in They don't really care about taxes, folks Hullabaloo 01/03/2016, here sounding a bit like Dr. Freud:
"Even-the-liberal" Thomas Edsall, Trump, Obama and the Assault on Political Correctness New York Times 12/23/2015. Edsall quotes President Bipartisan Obama:
As Charlie Pierce sometimes says in these case: Honky, please!
This is an old issue. It was an issue for the Populists in the late 19th century, who had an appeal to white Southern workers and farmers against the power of the trusts and concentrated wealth. But the Southern planters, bankers and industrialists also had a powerful appeal to whites to beware of Populists or other lefties who might promote black equality.
Tom Watson of Georgia embodied this political dilemma. Sarah Soule wrote about his early political career in "Populism and Black Lynching in Georgia, 1890-1900" Social Forces 71:2 (Dec 1992) (The ellipses here are for parentheses that refer to other sources referenced in the article.)
Research has recognized that Georgia was one of the most Populist of the southern states. Lead by Tom Watson, the great Populist leader who advocated a biracial union and equity for the downtrodden, the state's Populists actively sought the black vote ... Between 1892 and 1894, Georgia Populists increased their African American Representation at the State convention from less than five delegates to almost 25 ... In 1894, some districts of Georgia boasted 30% African American representation ... Some historians (Shaw 1984) argue that Georgia's Populist movement prospered in counties with a high (over 50%) black population, although other historians dispute this claim ... [my emphasis]But Watson later decided that the furthering of his political career required doing away with all this actively seeking the black vote business. And he wound up going down in history as one of the South's most notorious racists. And that's not an easy status to achieve.
11 Alive Atlanta reported in Statue of "first class hater" to be removed from Capitol 10/21/2013 on a latter-day sanction against Watson's image:
Gov. Nathan Deal quietly signed an order this month to remove the controversial statue of Tom Watson from the prominent west side entrance of the state capitol building. ...It was and is a commonplace in the labor movement that white racism is a tool of the bosses to create division among the workers. There were many examples of it in the South during Segregation 1.0, from mines in the Appalachians to factories in Alabama, where black workers were hired as "scabs" to break strikes by an all-white work force. Labor has always understood this problems as a real impediment to the labor movement, whether they called it "working class solidarity" or something less lefty-sounding. "Solidarity" is still not a dirty word in the labor movement, though.
Watson was a late-19th century andearly-20th century state lawmaker and member of Congresswho, critics say, represented the worst of Georgia politics in the post-Reconstruction era. ...
"Tom Watson was a first-class hater and it wasn't just Jewish people, he hated Catholics and Black people too," said Anti-Defamation League southeastern director Bill Nigut, in a 2010 story on 11 Alive News.
Watson was a prominent voice in the buildup to the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman convicted of murdering of Mary Phagan. "His anti-Semitism and racism was particularly vile," said Sen. Vincent Fort Monday. Fort says Watson whipped up racist sentiment that led to a riot in Atlanta in 1906.
"I think Tom Watson stands out because of the impact he had on the psyche of the people of this state and the region," said Rep. Tyrone Brooks (D-Atlanta). "It's appropriate to remove him from the front door of the people's capitol."
The famous study headed by Max Horkheimer on The Authoritarian Personality dealt directly with the phenomenon of racism and other authoritarian tendencies among people who would seem to have clear economic interests in economically liberal/progressive policies.
With so much of the political world and our Pod Pundits more than half-stuck in 1969, it's also worth noting that something like this was also part of the career of George Wallace. In the effectively one-party state of Alabama, Wallace always attracted significant black votes. Not because they imagined he secretly stood for racial equality, although in his 1983 gubernatorial race he made gestures toward repudiating his racist positions. It was because in a contest between two Democratic candidates, Wallace stood for policies like free school textbooks that were more beneficial to black families than the policies advocated by his opponents.
This is a large part of the background of the issue as Digby has addressed it in various places recently. In Donald Trump will make America white again: “White working-class anxiety” is a dog-whistle for racism Salon 12/22/2015, she discusses the general assumption that Trump's support is especially strong among "non-college educated working class whites." The national press uses college education as a measure of the difference between working class and non-working class; I think there's a big problem with that definition but I won't go into it here. But by any reasonable definition, white working class voters are a part of Trump's current coalition, which hasn't yet been tested in an actual election. Digby writes:
He [Trump] isn’t the only one playing in that “bracket” — Ted Cruz also draws from it — but this does suggest that if you want to understand Trump and Cruz’s appeal you need to look at that group of voters and it’s natural that observers would look at their working class status as being the key to it. After all, people who are losing ground economically are going to be angry, depressed and generally upset and Trump speaks to those feelings very directly. ... President Obama talked about this at some length yesterday, saying that Trump was “exploiting” these peoples’ fears[.]
One of the places Digby addresses this issue in Donald Trump will make America white again: “White working-class anxiety” is a dog-whistle for racism Salon 12/22/2015:
Trump is pushing the racial and cultural resentment button a lot harder than he’s pushing the economic button. In fact, he’s pushing the resentment button so hard that it’s activated some very serious racists who truly had been pushed to the fringes of the right wing fever swamps. According to a rather disturbing story this week in the Washington Post there has been a surge of excitement among white supremacists. It quotes a number of different leaders of the movement who are thrilled at the prospect of one of their “own” getting mainstream credibility. Trump is often said by his followers to be “saying what they’re thinking.” These racists feel exactly the same way.Gnashing of teeth over the idea of "false consciousness" seems a waste of energy to me. Not to mention enamel. Because you could describe any campaign pitch to undecided voters as an assumption that those voters have a "false consciousness" in that they haven't (yet) decided to vote for your candidate. You could describe any sales pitch that way, as well, as assuming that your not-yet customers have the "false consciousness" of not yet wanting to buy your super-awesome product.
This is not to say that all Trump supporters are white supremacists. But it’s also not fair to say that the Trump voters who are hostile toward immigrants, Muslims and African Americans are simply reacting to economic inequality. As Bouie pointed out, this isn’t necessarily a case of classic Marxist false consciousness, or at least that doesn’t explain or excuse their love for Trump. Their racial resentment exists all on its own.
When Donald Trump says he will make America great again, what they hear is that Donald Trump will make America white again.
Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse used the phrase and concept in One-Dimensional Man (1964). As the reader can guess from this passage, it wasn't written in the language of the average newspaper article or stock op-ed:
Certainly it is quite natural, and does not seem to call for an explanation in depth, that the tangible benefits of the system are considered worth defending--especially in view of the repelling force of present day communism which appears to be the historical alternative. But it is natural only to a mode of thought and behavior which is unwilling and perhaps even incapable of comprehending what is happening and why it is happening, a mode of thought and behavior which is immune against any other than the established rationality. To the degree to which they correspond to the given reality, thought and behavior express a false consciousness, responding to and contributing to the preservation of a false order of facts. And this false consciousness has become embodied in the prevailing technical apparatus which in turn reproduces it. [my emphasis]Marcuse's analysis is based heavily on Hegel's Logik. Which it's safe to say to say that neither our Pod Pundits nor the average political activists pay much attention to. That's not a criticism, it's a way of stating that Marcuse is making a philosophical/sociological point, not asserting that anyone who doesn't agree with him is a dummy. Which is how conservatives use the term to claim that the Mean Libruals are lookin' down their noses at the regular old white guy who just wants to read his Bible, drank him some beer and hate on the blacks and the gays.
It's also possible to make a straightforward economic, sociological or political science case that some groups vote against their own interests in some quantifiable way. With no need to resort to Hegelian logic. In Left Blogostan we periodically see maps showing how Republican states receive more in federal spending than Democratic states, though Republicans are highly critical of domestic federal spending. Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong and other economists familiar with international economics tell us that such transfers are, among other things, part of a normal part of a well-functioning currency zone. There is an obvious case to be made that a solidly Republican state like my native state of Mississippi is voting against their own economic benefit by going Republican.
But there are other factors that go into voting, such as national security or "traditional values." And, as Digby puts it, "racial resentment exists all on its own." (A Hegelian might object that the truth is in the whole, but that's another discussion.) And some voters, a not insignificant numbers, prefer white solidarity to concrete economic benefit.
In addition to race, there are psychological satisfactions in identifying with a wealthy blowhard like Trump or a pompous superpatriot like Ted Cruz. Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud expressed this unsentimental view in The Future of an Illusion (1927):
The narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal is also among the forces which are successful in combating the hostility to culture within the cultural unit. This satisfaction can be shared in not only by the favoured classes, which enjoy the benefits of the culture, but also by the suppressed ones, since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their own unit. No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen, one has one's share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws. This identification of the suppressed classes with the class who rules and exploits them is, however, only part of a larger whole. For, on the other hand, the suppressed classes can be emotionally attached to their masters; in spite of their hostility to them they may see in them their ideals; unless such relations of a fundamentally satisfying kind subsisted, it would be impossible to understand how a number of civilizations have survived so long in spite of the justifiable hostility of large human masses. [my emphasis]In a follow-up post, she states the case more
I wrote about the fallacy that drives too many liberals to assume that Trump's appeal is a matter of Marxist false consciousness: they may think they hate Mexicans and Muslims and Blacks but really they're just frustrated that they aren't doing better economically. (I have to assume these people have never met a rich bigot...) This is the Sanders pitch to Trump voters and I don't think it will work any better than it ever has because it just isn't true. Unless Sanders says that he's ready to deport immigrants and support abusive cops and surveil Muslims and worse, they're just not going to respond. Their world is not organized around economics, it's organized around bigotry toward other races and ethnicities (also, feminists and liberals...) Trump gets this and he's articulating this perfectly --- American will be "great again" once we put all these people in their places. [my emphasis in bold]I think it's useful here to make a distinction between hardcore Republican voters and potential swing voters. The former for the most part won't be deterred from voting for a White Power candidate like Trump over economic issues. Among the latter there are more people who make take a less-than-enlightened view of non-white minorities, but aren't so committed to it politically that they will give it priority over economic or other issues.
She took another pass at the question in They don't really care about taxes, folks Hullabaloo 01/03/2016, here sounding a bit like Dr. Freud:
... these candidates [like Trump] don't have to run on lower tax rates for the middle class. All they have to do is promise to stick it to the "others" whether it's by denying benefits or a path to citizenship, deportation, abusive policing, long prison sentences, legalizing discrimination or war and more war. If lowering taxes will help accomplish those goals, these voters are all for it. But the taxes themselves are a means to an end.Digby, Well look who's voting for Donald Trump Hullabaloo 12/31/2015
That's what is animating the Trump voters --- which, at this point, makes up over half the Republican Party if you count Cruz's nutcase talk radio followers and Carson's kooky Armageddonist social conservatives. And as long as the Democratic party agrees to include all those undeserving free-loaders in their party, even if they promise to lower middle class taxes to zero, these Trump folks won't be joining up.
They are being screwed economically, for sure. But most of them care a lot more about people of color and foreigners challenging their status bruising their pride. Money isn't everything.
"Even-the-liberal" Thomas Edsall, Trump, Obama and the Assault on Political Correctness New York Times 12/23/2015. Edsall quotes President Bipartisan Obama:
I’ve heard of some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative. Or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans, or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. And I’ve got to tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of views.Bob Kuttner, who normally is not an "even-the-liberal" liberal comes up with a Sistah Soljah type example of "political correctness" to criticize (Thinking Harder about Political Correctness Huffington Post 01/03/2016):
Some of the ultra-P.C. stuff is silly and makes it easier for the right to lampoon liberals. At Oberlin, a college of which I'm a proud alumnus, the students have lately been protesting something called "cultural appropriation."This past Saturday Donald Trump gave one of his White Power rallies to what in the pictures and video looks like a crowd so white I can't remember the last time I was ever part of such a white crowd. Paul Hampton reports on it in Trump pummels his opponents - and the press Biloxi Sun-Herald 01/02/2015:
That turns out to mean the campus food service contractor offering ethnically-themed meals and doing a lousy job of preparing such dishes as General Tso's Chicken and presenting pulled pork masquerading as Vietnamese bahn mi. Surely students have better things to argue about.
When I was an undergraduate there, we also protested the food -- not because it was culturally insensitive but because it was just plain disgusting. The ethnically indeterminate chipped beef was an equal opportunity offender.
Each of Trump's barbs was met with ever louder roars. But the crowd didn't find its full throat until Trump started picking on "the media."Were those whites howling at some cameraman who has no editorial control over anything because they were upset about food protests at Oberlin College in Ohio?
His beef this time, beyond his usual charge that "some of them are crooked"? He didn't care for the TV photography. Particularly a cameraman at the center of the risers, where the national media was perched.
"These cameras back here will never show this crowd," said Trump, who estimated there were 15,000 in the Coliseum and 10,000 more in the adjacent Convention Center. The crowd began cheering and jeering, then urging the TV people to "spin camera."
"Look at him -- he doesn't turn the camera," Trump said. "The only time they turn the camera is when we have a heckler . I like hecklers. That's the only time they show the crowd."
The crowd, as they say, went wild. And many spent the rest of the evening trying to get a photograph of that infamous cameraman "in the middle."
As Charlie Pierce sometimes says in these case: Honky, please!
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Kant's revenge?
Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued that human beings could never fully know the objects we perceive outside ourselves. The "thing-in-itself" of the object would be forever unknown to human cognition.
As Max Horkheimer and Theordor Adorno put in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1969), "Kant combined the doctrine of thought's restlessly toilsome progress toward infinity with insistence on its insufficiency and eternal limitation." (Edmund Jephcott translation, 2002)
A key limitation of the ego's ability to perceive objects has to do with the categories that the human mind imposes on its perceptions. For Kant, time and space were both such qualities. Subjective qualities, in other words, rather than objective qualities of external reality.
Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity explained that spacetime was a quality of the universe itself. Quantum physics revealed some aspects of subatomic reality that weren't fully compatible with Einstein's theories. But Einstein's theories are still "operative." They still explain observed reality, if not all its quantum features.
As Horkheimer and Adorno argue, science has set itself the task of infinite mastery of external nature. Whatever caution against hubris Kant's conception contained, the science of the 19th and 20th centuries developed in the direction of seeking total knowledge for asserting total dominance over nature:
But old Kant may not be out of the game yet. For one thing, we know much more today about the concrete physical mechanisms in human perception, which take us far from David Hume's view of the ego being basically the passive recipient of raw empirical perceptions from the outside, a view that heavily influenced Kant. Hegel wrote that Hume's historical notability was the fact that "Kant really took the starting point of his philosophy" from Hume. (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie II.1.C.2.A.2, 1908, my translation) Where Hume recognized that the ego formed empirical impressions into concepts, he believed that such concepts directly reflected the empirical data, although in a weaker form. But the complexity of the physical mediations between the empirical phenomenon and the formation of a human concept of them could be an argument on the side of the unknowability of the thing-in-itself.
The human reception of information isn't mediated only by concepts. Those impressions take a physical path to the brain for such concepts to be formed. Charles Liberman explains the path of sonic perceptions to the brain in Hidden Hearing Loss Scientific American 313:2 Aug 2015:
Kant's concepts of space and time were transcendental categories of human consciousness. The physical mechanisms of sensual cognition theoretically don't touch them at all.
But, on Kant's side, there is the possibility that physics could turn out to require the rejection of time as an objective condition. Philosopher Craig Callender writes (Is Time an Illusion? Scientific American 302:6 June 2010):
Physicists as yet haven't yet generally discarded the concept of time. But the problem remains unsolved. Still, Callender writes, "Physicists are able to compactly summarize the workings of the universe in terms of physical laws that play out in time. But this convenient fact should not trick us into thinking that time is a fundamental part of the world’s furniture." For more on this particular topic, see: Carlo Rovelli, Forget Time FQXi Community 08/25/2008.
Somewhere in the transcendental Beyond, Kant is chuckling at us.
(By the way, in explaining the above, Callender mentions another hitch in understanding the physics of time: "Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann [1844-1906] ... reasoned that, because Newton’s laws work equally well going forward or backward in time, time has no built-in arrow." Physics is awesome.)
But surely our scientists can reassure us on the existence of space? They must have ruled out the possibility of Kant having the last laugh on that one, right? Well, maybe not.
George Musser removes that assurance from us in "Where Is Here?" Scientific American 313:5 Nov 2015. Einstein, it turns out, caused trouble there, too:
 |
| Immanuel Kant: still out of space and time? |
As Max Horkheimer and Theordor Adorno put in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1969), "Kant combined the doctrine of thought's restlessly toilsome progress toward infinity with insistence on its insufficiency and eternal limitation." (Edmund Jephcott translation, 2002)
A key limitation of the ego's ability to perceive objects has to do with the categories that the human mind imposes on its perceptions. For Kant, time and space were both such qualities. Subjective qualities, in other words, rather than objective qualities of external reality.
Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity explained that spacetime was a quality of the universe itself. Quantum physics revealed some aspects of subatomic reality that weren't fully compatible with Einstein's theories. But Einstein's theories are still "operative." They still explain observed reality, if not all its quantum features.
As Horkheimer and Adorno argue, science has set itself the task of infinite mastery of external nature. Whatever caution against hubris Kant's conception contained, the science of the 19th and 20th centuries developed in the direction of seeking total knowledge for asserting total dominance over nature:
Both subject and object are nullified. The abstract self, which alone confers the legal right to record and systematize, is confronted by nothing bur abstract material, which has no other property than to be the substrate of that right. The equation of mind and world is finally resolved, but only in the sense that both sides cancel out. The reduction of thought to a mathematical appararus condemns the world to be its own measure. What appears as the triumph of subjectivity, the subjection of all existing things to logical formalism, is bought with the obedient subordination of reason to what is immediately at hand.This approach, they argue, is focused on the "abstract spacial-temporal relationships" of objects "by which they can then be seized" by human perception and hands. It reduces knowledge to "mere perception, classification, and calculation."
But old Kant may not be out of the game yet. For one thing, we know much more today about the concrete physical mechanisms in human perception, which take us far from David Hume's view of the ego being basically the passive recipient of raw empirical perceptions from the outside, a view that heavily influenced Kant. Hegel wrote that Hume's historical notability was the fact that "Kant really took the starting point of his philosophy" from Hume. (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie II.1.C.2.A.2, 1908, my translation) Where Hume recognized that the ego formed empirical impressions into concepts, he believed that such concepts directly reflected the empirical data, although in a weaker form. But the complexity of the physical mediations between the empirical phenomenon and the formation of a human concept of them could be an argument on the side of the unknowability of the thing-in-itself.
The human reception of information isn't mediated only by concepts. Those impressions take a physical path to the brain for such concepts to be formed. Charles Liberman explains the path of sonic perceptions to the brain in Hidden Hearing Loss Scientific American 313:2 Aug 2015:
Hearing begins as the outer ear funnels sound waves through the ear canal to the eardrum, which vibrates and sets the bones of the middle ear in motion. The resulting vibrations then make their way to the inner ear’s fluid-filled tube, the cochlea — the location of hair cells that occupy a spiraling strip of tissue called the organ of Corti. These cells get their name from hairlike protrusions known as stereocilia that extend in bundles from one end of the cells. Hair cells most sensitive to low frequencies lie at one end of the cochlear spiral, and those most sensitive to high frequencies lie at the other end. As sound waves bend the “hairs,” these cells convert vibrations to chemical signals, emitting a neurotransmitter molecule — glutamate — at the other end, where the hair cells form synapses with the fibers of the auditory nerve.So, between raw empirical perception and a concept in the mind, the sound signal has to go through the outer ear, the ear canal, the eardrum, the middle ear's bones, the coclea and its Corti organ, and the chemical signals created by the coclea's hairs that form glutamate that stimulate the synapses that transmit the signal to the auditory nerve, which in turn transmits it to the brain, where the brain stem, midbrain, thalmus and auditory cortex using various chemical processes to allow it to turn it into a concept. This doesn't prove the unknowability of Kant's thing-in-itself. But it is a reminder of the physical components of human perception.
At the synapse, the glutamate released from a hair cell crosses a narrow cleft to bind to receptors on the end, or terminal, of an auditory nerve fiber. Each terminal is at one end of a nerve cell that extends a long fiber, an axon, to its other end in the brain stem. Glutamate bound to nerve fibers triggers an electrical signal that travels the entire length of the auditory nerve to the brain stem. From there the signals move through a series of parallel neural circuits that traverse various regions — from the brain stem to the midbrain and thalamus—and finish their journey at the auditory cortex. Together this complex circuitry analyzes and organizes our acoustic environment into a set of recognizable sounds, whether it be a familiar melody or the wail of a siren.
Kant's concepts of space and time were transcendental categories of human consciousness. The physical mechanisms of sensual cognition theoretically don't touch them at all.
But, on Kant's side, there is the possibility that physics could turn out to require the rejection of time as an objective condition. Philosopher Craig Callender writes (Is Time an Illusion? Scientific American 302:6 June 2010):
The equations of physics do not tell us which events are occurring right now — they are like a map without the “you are here” symbol. The present moment does not exist in them, and therefore neither does the flow of time. Additionally, Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity suggest not only that there is no single special present but also that all moments are equally real ... Fundamentally, the future is no more open than the past. [my emphasis]Quantum mechanics in seeking to describe quantum gravity has produced a real puzzle for physics:
Canonical quantum gravity emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, when physicists rewrote Einstein’s equations for gravity in the same form as the equations for electromagnetism, the idea being that the same techniques used to develop a quantum theory of electromagnetism could then be applied to gravity as well. When physicists John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt attempted this procedure in the late 1960s, they arrived at a very strange result. The equation (dubbed the Wheeler-DeWitt equation) utterly lacked a time variable. The symbol t denoting time had simply vanished. [my emphasis in bold]Kant would presumably be pleased to hear that!
Physicists as yet haven't yet generally discarded the concept of time. But the problem remains unsolved. Still, Callender writes, "Physicists are able to compactly summarize the workings of the universe in terms of physical laws that play out in time. But this convenient fact should not trick us into thinking that time is a fundamental part of the world’s furniture." For more on this particular topic, see: Carlo Rovelli, Forget Time FQXi Community 08/25/2008.
Somewhere in the transcendental Beyond, Kant is chuckling at us.
(By the way, in explaining the above, Callender mentions another hitch in understanding the physics of time: "Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann [1844-1906] ... reasoned that, because Newton’s laws work equally well going forward or backward in time, time has no built-in arrow." Physics is awesome.)
But surely our scientists can reassure us on the existence of space? They must have ruled out the possibility of Kant having the last laugh on that one, right? Well, maybe not.
George Musser removes that assurance from us in "Where Is Here?" Scientific American 313:5 Nov 2015. Einstein, it turns out, caused trouble there, too:
Although the shape shiftiness of spacetime explains away the kind of nonlocality that Newton talked about, it produces a new variety. It comes out of relativity theory's core innovation: that there's no such thing as a place outside spacetime, no external or absolute standard to judge it by. This seemingly self-evident proposition has remarkable consequences. It means that spacetime not only warps but also loses many of the qualities we associate with it, including the ability to define locations. ...Yeah, it looks like Kant is still in the game on space and time.
The ambiguity of localized measurements is a form of nonlocality. To begin with, quantities such as energy can't be situated in any specific place, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as a specific place. You can no sooner pin down a position than you can plant a flag on the sea. Points in space are indistinguishable and interchangeable. Because they lack any differentiating attributes, whatever the world consists of must not reside at points; space is unable to support any localized structure. Gravitational quantities must instead be holistic properties of spacetime in its entirety. [my emphasis]
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Humor, satire, ridicule and politics
Rick Perlstein weighs in on a persistent question about the effect and usefulness of satire and mockery against demagogues and dictators in What Ronald Reagan Teaches Us About Donald Trump Vice 09/25/2015. He argues that Charlie Chaplin's famous 1940 movie The Great Dictator lampooning Adolf Hitler was actually helped Hitler more than hurting him.
He refers to the judgment of Ron Rosenbaum in Will They Never Learn? 11/29/2006, who wrote:
It's an interesting history. And I'm basically in agreement with him and his conclusion, "But more than that, Reagan, and now Trump, reveal our own tendency to repress our fear of demagogues by dismissing them. And ultimately, it's all about us. Follow the bouncing beach ball. Take demagogues seriously. Voters love them. And they're only a joke until they win." (my emphasis)
I doubt that Rick Perlstein thinks very favorably of Herbert Marcuse's work, although I don't really know. But in his 1972 book Counter-Revolution and Revolt, Marcuse wrote, referring to conscious radical left strategies of mocking the existing order:
Marcuse is actually making a very similar point to Perlstein's, for all the differences in underlying assumptions there may be. Since Donald Trump's popularity in 2015 so much resembles that of George Wallace's in the 1960s and 1970s, and Marcuse refers to Wallace's popular support in that same book as evidence of "a proto-fascist syndrome" at work, it's likely that were he still around today, he would share Rick's concerns about trivializing Trump as a political figure.
Marcuse also emphasized in that work the point that, despite the rhetoric and genuine fears of the radical left and many liberals in 1972, many of which he obviously shared, the Nixon Administration, he wrote, "is not a fascist regime by any means." (emphasis in original) A topic worth exploring elsewhere. But I'll note here that the Republican Party in 1972 not only harbored proto-Trump Democratic convert, Vice President Spiro Agnew, but had senior elected officials who were actually moderate and even some who could legitimately be called liberals, like Oregon's Mark Hatfield and New York's Jacob Javits. The Wallace brand of "proto-fascism" was largely a phenomenon of the Southern segregationists in the Democratic Party. The party-based ideological alignments of today are qualitatively different. And therefore more conducive to the possible of the further advance of authoritarianism in the Republican Party.
On the Great Dictator matter, as Marcuse indicated and Perlstein states, "Chaplin [later said] that had he know about the horrors Hitler was responsible for at the time, '[I] could not made have fun of their homicidal insanity.'"
Karl Kraus (1874-1936) was a Viennese satirist, publisher of a magazine called Die Fackel from 1899 to 1936, and such works as The Last Days of Humanity. I enjoyed this graphic novel version of the latter published in 2014:
Marcuse in the quoted comment on Kraus is presumably referring to the caution Kraus begin exercising in published satire critical of Hitler and the Nazis after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. And maybe to his 1934 book, Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint (Why the Fackel Isn't Appearing).
I share Rick's concern that because Trump sounds like a clown, people opposed to what he's advocating may not take him seriously enough.
That doesn't mean to me, though, that all spoofing or mockery of Trump's posturing are damaging. And Rick's piece got me thinking about the various ways we use humor in politics.
Some political satire is just funny because it expresses a general truth, even though that truth could be spun different ways.
For instance, one of my Facebook friends shared this photo without any mention that it could be a satire. And I really don't know whether it's fake or not. But in this case, it's funny either way.
It's supposedly a poster in support of Michael Häupl, the social-democratic (SPÖ) mayor of Vienna. It says, "We want you to vote for the SPÖ. Otherwise you can kiss my ass." The German version is actually a touch nastier than the American one. But that's close enough.
It's funny because it refers to a near-universal pretension in political campaigns, that every candidate is showing the deepest respect for the general good and for all their potential voters.
On the other hand, some alleged humor is actually political propaganda. A good sign of this version is that no one but partisans of the position think it's funny. Rush Limbaugh's brand of "humor" is pretty much exclusively of this kind. But his "humor" is not just partisan but plainly mean-spirited. The late great Molly Ivins described his still-typical style 20 years ago in Lyin' Bully Mother Jones May/June 1995.
Other kinds of political humor are partisan but not mean-spirited, which means they will mainly be popular with those in general ideological agreement, but can also be entertaining or even persuasive. Molly Ivins herself could serve as an example. Esquire's Charlie Pierce is a current example, with his Menckenesque style displaying his solid political analysis. But while the humorous is a key part of the style of both, their emphasis was on the political.
Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart could be seen as variations of this type, but in their case they are comedians who found a major niche doing political humor.
Then there is comedy generally, ranging from the club versions to Saturday Night Live, plays, movies and TV series. Politics comes into these at various times, sometimes hitting on political themes, typically leaning toward the provocative but often designed not to tick off the audiences by being too overtly partisan or nasty. Much of this probably has little or no political significance.
One growing field of political humor that I find particularly problematic is the increasing merger of politics and show business. The White House Corrrespondents' Dinner is the most prominent example of this, in which the President plays stand-up comic to Beltway Village media types and various Hollywood celebrities. Such events not only blur the boundaries between the press and the politicians they theoretically covering with a critical eye. It also contributes to the blurring between politics and show business. And both trends contribute mightily to the depoliticization of public affairs and even politics itself. It substitutes spectacle for substance. Much to the advantage of the Establishment that Marcuse was writing about in 1972.
Ridicule and mockery do have their place, even in dictatorships. They may have been more risky in, say, East Germany than they are in today's Germany. But cynicism and humor are part of the way humans cope with the miseries and frustrations of political life.
He refers to the judgment of Ron Rosenbaum in Will They Never Learn? 11/29/2006, who wrote:
... there is no more trivializing, over-rated, treatment of Hitler than Chaplin’s dimwitted, laboriously unfunny Great Dictator. Yes Chaplin made some funny movies, but when he tried his hands at politics Chaplin made a movie that did nothing but help Hitler because he made him seem like an unthreatening clown just at a time, 1940, when the world needed to take Hitler’s threat seriously.Rick uses The Great Dictator as a lead-in to his main topic, a caution against taking Donald Trump too lightly, referring to people who regarded Ronald Reagan that way as a cautionary tale.
Yet Chaplin’s film makes it seem like Hitler was nothing but a harmless fool (like Chaplin, same mustache and all). And he made it at a time, during the Nazi-Soviet pact, when the world most needed to mobilize against Hitler’s threat. And yet Chaplin, to his eternal shame ended the film not with a call to oppose fascism, and its murderous hatred, but rather – because he was following the shameful Hitler-friendly Soviet line at the time – ended his film with a call for all workers in the world to lay down their arms–in other words to refuse to join the fight against fascism and Hitler. [emphasis in original]
It's an interesting history. And I'm basically in agreement with him and his conclusion, "But more than that, Reagan, and now Trump, reveal our own tendency to repress our fear of demagogues by dismissing them. And ultimately, it's all about us. Follow the bouncing beach ball. Take demagogues seriously. Voters love them. And they're only a joke until they win." (my emphasis)
I doubt that Rick Perlstein thinks very favorably of Herbert Marcuse's work, although I don't really know. But in his 1972 book Counter-Revolution and Revolt, Marcuse wrote, referring to conscious radical left strategies of mocking the existing order:
Liberation here is having fun within the Establishment, perhaps also with the Establishment, or cheating the Establishment. There is nothing wrong with having fun with the Establishment - but there are situations in which the fun falls flat, becomes silly in any terms because it testifies to political impotence. Under Hitler's fascism, satire became silent: not even Charlie Chaplin and Karl Kraus could keep it up.In that passage, Marcuse is making is actually conflating the life-practices of communes, which were enjoying a surge in popularity as an alternative lifestyle, and satire in literature and film. He is actually fretting in that argument that such popularity was contributing to withdrawal from political activism. As he wrote immediately preceding the sentences just quoted, "They [the communes] continue to be possible nuclei, 'cells,' laboratories, for testing autonomous, nonalientated relationships. But they are susceptible to isolation and depoliticization. And this means self-co-option or capitulation: the negative which is only the reverse of the affirmative - not its qualitative opposite."
Marcuse is actually making a very similar point to Perlstein's, for all the differences in underlying assumptions there may be. Since Donald Trump's popularity in 2015 so much resembles that of George Wallace's in the 1960s and 1970s, and Marcuse refers to Wallace's popular support in that same book as evidence of "a proto-fascist syndrome" at work, it's likely that were he still around today, he would share Rick's concerns about trivializing Trump as a political figure.
Marcuse also emphasized in that work the point that, despite the rhetoric and genuine fears of the radical left and many liberals in 1972, many of which he obviously shared, the Nixon Administration, he wrote, "is not a fascist regime by any means." (emphasis in original) A topic worth exploring elsewhere. But I'll note here that the Republican Party in 1972 not only harbored proto-Trump Democratic convert, Vice President Spiro Agnew, but had senior elected officials who were actually moderate and even some who could legitimately be called liberals, like Oregon's Mark Hatfield and New York's Jacob Javits. The Wallace brand of "proto-fascism" was largely a phenomenon of the Southern segregationists in the Democratic Party. The party-based ideological alignments of today are qualitatively different. And therefore more conducive to the possible of the further advance of authoritarianism in the Republican Party.
On the Great Dictator matter, as Marcuse indicated and Perlstein states, "Chaplin [later said] that had he know about the horrors Hitler was responsible for at the time, '[I] could not made have fun of their homicidal insanity.'"
Karl Kraus (1874-1936) was a Viennese satirist, publisher of a magazine called Die Fackel from 1899 to 1936, and such works as The Last Days of Humanity. I enjoyed this graphic novel version of the latter published in 2014:
Marcuse in the quoted comment on Kraus is presumably referring to the caution Kraus begin exercising in published satire critical of Hitler and the Nazis after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. And maybe to his 1934 book, Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint (Why the Fackel Isn't Appearing).
I share Rick's concern that because Trump sounds like a clown, people opposed to what he's advocating may not take him seriously enough.
That doesn't mean to me, though, that all spoofing or mockery of Trump's posturing are damaging. And Rick's piece got me thinking about the various ways we use humor in politics.
Some political satire is just funny because it expresses a general truth, even though that truth could be spun different ways.
For instance, one of my Facebook friends shared this photo without any mention that it could be a satire. And I really don't know whether it's fake or not. But in this case, it's funny either way.
It's supposedly a poster in support of Michael Häupl, the social-democratic (SPÖ) mayor of Vienna. It says, "We want you to vote for the SPÖ. Otherwise you can kiss my ass." The German version is actually a touch nastier than the American one. But that's close enough.
It's funny because it refers to a near-universal pretension in political campaigns, that every candidate is showing the deepest respect for the general good and for all their potential voters.
On the other hand, some alleged humor is actually political propaganda. A good sign of this version is that no one but partisans of the position think it's funny. Rush Limbaugh's brand of "humor" is pretty much exclusively of this kind. But his "humor" is not just partisan but plainly mean-spirited. The late great Molly Ivins described his still-typical style 20 years ago in Lyin' Bully Mother Jones May/June 1995.
Other kinds of political humor are partisan but not mean-spirited, which means they will mainly be popular with those in general ideological agreement, but can also be entertaining or even persuasive. Molly Ivins herself could serve as an example. Esquire's Charlie Pierce is a current example, with his Menckenesque style displaying his solid political analysis. But while the humorous is a key part of the style of both, their emphasis was on the political.
Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart could be seen as variations of this type, but in their case they are comedians who found a major niche doing political humor.
Then there is comedy generally, ranging from the club versions to Saturday Night Live, plays, movies and TV series. Politics comes into these at various times, sometimes hitting on political themes, typically leaning toward the provocative but often designed not to tick off the audiences by being too overtly partisan or nasty. Much of this probably has little or no political significance.
One growing field of political humor that I find particularly problematic is the increasing merger of politics and show business. The White House Corrrespondents' Dinner is the most prominent example of this, in which the President plays stand-up comic to Beltway Village media types and various Hollywood celebrities. Such events not only blur the boundaries between the press and the politicians they theoretically covering with a critical eye. It also contributes to the blurring between politics and show business. And both trends contribute mightily to the depoliticization of public affairs and even politics itself. It substitutes spectacle for substance. Much to the advantage of the Establishment that Marcuse was writing about in 1972.
Ridicule and mockery do have their place, even in dictatorships. They may have been more risky in, say, East Germany than they are in today's Germany. But cynicism and humor are part of the way humans cope with the miseries and frustrations of political life.
Friday, August 21, 2015
Trump as Radical Right agitator
Digby takes another pass at Donald Trump's demagoguery today in Donald Trump’s campaign of terror: How a billionaire channeled his authoritarian rage — and soared to the top of the polls Salon 08/21/2015
In a field report during his research, Lowenthal wrote a memo to Horkheimer dated 10/09/1945, on the topic "Christian Front Meeting in Queens Village, Oct. 8, 1945." (Available on the AJC Digital Archive as "Surveillance report on a Christian Front meeting in New York")
I usually try to avoid use the "fascist" description for groups operating today. Polemical use of the terms over decades has resulting in its meaning in ordinary political conversation or analysis in the US being considerably more blurred than it was in 1945.
Trump hasn't made even indirect anti-Semitic appeals that I'm aware. But his "threat of violence" is hardly "veiled."
Lowenthal included an unflattering description of the Christian Front speakers in a section called "Physiogonmy of Speakers":
It’s easy to dismiss Trump’s ramblings as the words of a kook. But he’s tapping into the rage and frustration many Americans feel when our country is exposed as being imperfect. These Republicans were shamed by their exalted leadership’s debacle in Iraq and believe that American exceptionalism is no longer respected around the world — and they are no longer respected here at home. Trump is a winner and I think this is fundamentally what attracts them to him:Back in 1945, Leo Lowenthal was working with Max Horkheimer's project on prejudice for the American Jewish Committee (AJC), that later became famous especially through the book by Theodor Adorno and other collaborators on the projects, The Authoritarian Personality (1951). Lowenthal co-authored with Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949). I posted on that book in six parts, beginning with Studies in Prejudice: Prophets of Deceit (1 of 6) 05/14/2011.
I will be fighting and I will win because I’m somebody that wins. We are in very sad shape as a country and you know why that is? We’re more concerned about political correctness than we are about victory, than we are about winning. We are not going to be so politically correct anymore, we are going to get things done.But his dark, authoritarian message of intolerance and hate is likely making it difficult for him, or any Republican, to win a national election, particularly since all the other candidates feel compelled to follow his lead. (Those who challenged him, like Perry and Paul, are sinking like a stone in the polls.) And while Trump’s fans may want to blame foreigners for all their troubles, most Americans know that their troubles can be traced to some powerful people right here at home. Powerful people like Donald Trump.
Still, history is littered with strongmen nobody took seriously until it was too late. When someone like Trump captures the imagination of millions of people it’s important to pay attention to what he’s saying.
In a field report during his research, Lowenthal wrote a memo to Horkheimer dated 10/09/1945, on the topic "Christian Front Meeting in Queens Village, Oct. 8, 1945." (Available on the AJC Digital Archive as "Surveillance report on a Christian Front meeting in New York")
Devices: All speeches proved clearly our previously offered theory that fascist agitation rests on the handling of a relatively small number of stimuli devices which recur ever so often. I enumerate a few of them:Trump, like all the Presidential candidates, poses as a victim of so-called "political correctness" imposed by the Mean Libruls. (In a crackpot far-right theory, it was actually the Frankfurt School of thinkers around the Institute for Social Research of which Horkheimer was head and Adorno and Lowenthal part of the core group that invented political correctness.)
(a) the persecuted agitator (finds no printer; encounters travelling dif[ficulties?]
(b) the agitator as a little guy (wants to go to the movies, have his glass of beer)
(c) the agitator as messenger. "I have to speak because nobody else does it"
(d) the necessity of "awakening" America
(e) the enemies as wolves in sheep' [sic] clothes ("they cry persecution and are the persecutors; they ask for tolerance and are the most intolerant)
(f) indirect antisemitic devices (agitator and his people are "crucified"; the phrase of the Asiatic hordes; the phrase of "anti-something" and so on)
(g) the simple-mindedness of the agitator (difficulty in pronouncing high-falluting and foreign words)
(h) the secret machinations ("a lot of things are going on in this country" etc.)
(i) the veiled threat of violence ("I am strong, I can take it up with everybody", etc.)
(j) direct antisemitic references (Jewishness of the New Deal, Jewish monopoly of mass mediae [sic]: newspapers, radio, movies.
I usually try to avoid use the "fascist" description for groups operating today. Polemical use of the terms over decades has resulting in its meaning in ordinary political conversation or analysis in the US being considerably more blurred than it was in 1945.
Trump hasn't made even indirect anti-Semitic appeals that I'm aware. But his "threat of violence" is hardly "veiled."
Lowenthal included an unflattering description of the Christian Front speakers in a section called "Physiogonmy of Speakers":
Almost every speaker represented an outspoken or nearly outspoken example of those psychopathic types which can be found in the American as well as the European camp of fascist agitators.
There was Kurtz, the stocky, brutal, pycnio [a rust fungi reference?], maniac [sic] depressive type switching from grinning, clowning, to somber threats and outbursts of yelling. His grin which is always in readiness has an almost psychotic note as can be observed in the facial expression of violent insane maniacs. His whole bodily appearance has a faint resemblance to Goering's body type.
There was Maertz who with his little mustache and the studied fierce looks imitates the Hitler pose. He was by far the most effectful [sic] speaker equipped with the intensive and fanatic voice of the schizoid demagogue. Of all the speakers he was the only one who probably would have the power to create an atmosphere of hate and fury.
There was Kister, a boyish-looking man, the type of thin-lipped fanatical followers of a fanatical leader, a watered-down miniature edition of people like Rudolf Hess.
There was Mrs. Brown and her secretary, homely women of the middle fifties' with nothing to boast but real or imaginary sons, symbols of frustration for corresponding female listeners.
Finally one general observation on the outward appearance of the speakers and their henchmen: almost everyone of them was so-to-say a biological stepchild. Kurtz and his chief aide obese; Kister somehow crippled; the women speakers and their female audience were ugly, most of them wearing glasses; among the male followers a one-armed old man, several short-sighted younger people. It was a "racial elite" in reverse.
Saturday, March 28, 2015
José Pablo Feinmann on why he rejects postmodernism
José Pablo Feinmann explains his own reckoning with postmodern philosophy in Vattimo, dialectos y transparencias Página/12 22.03.2015. He does so in the context of commenting on the thought of Gianni Vattimo, a postmodern philosopher who was recently visiting Argentina.
Feinmann quotes Vattimo to give a description of the aspect of postmodernism on which he focuses in this brief but dense essay. The development of the media of communication, in this postmodern model, allows for the abolition of the Cartesian ego and of the unity of opposites in the Hegelian philosophy, which latter Feinmann references here as the One:
There's a nice word play there in the sentence, "Nadie descentró al sujeto." I translated it above as, "No one removed the Subject from its central place." It could also be translated, "No one put the subject off its game."
In my reading - to use the polite postmodern expression! - Feinmann is arguing that postmodernism as derived from Heidegger and Foucault has a tendency to remove any intellectual basis for challenging the established order because it effectively gives up the concepts of Reason and objective truth. It does rule out efforts to change. But it puts the claims of the powerful on the same level normative as those of the weak, the claims of the tyrants on the same normative level as the claims of their subjects demanding freedom.
Feinmann isn't willing to give up the Hegelian historical subject, nor the Enlightenment standard of Reason, nor the Humeian/Hegelian goal of perceiving objectively material reality accurately.
Feinmann here is on the side of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Gary Aylesworth in his 2015 entry on Postmodernism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes the criticism that "second generation" Frankfurt theorist Jürgen Habermas makes of postmodernism:
Feinmann also makes his own reckoning with Hegel's unifying concept of the One in the context of Islam's role in world history in El estruendo de los fanáticos Página/12 22.03.2015.
There are also Spanish-language lectures of his on YouTube from a Canal Encuentro series on Michel Foucault (1926–1984).
T2 CAP 11: Foucault [1]:
T2 CAP 12: Foucault II:
Also one on postmodernism more generally, T2 CAP 13: Los posmodernos:
Feinmann quotes Vattimo to give a description of the aspect of postmodernism on which he focuses in this brief but dense essay. The development of the media of communication, in this postmodern model, allows for the abolition of the Cartesian ego and of the unity of opposites in the Hegelian philosophy, which latter Feinmann references here as the One:
El mundo de la comunicación permite el desarraigo de la dictadura de lo Uno y la liberación de las diferencias. A esto le debemos llamar, dice, el dialecto. Ya no hay una razón. Hay racionalidades locales, dialectos. “Minorías étnicas, sexuales, religiosas, culturales o estéticas, como los punk, por ejemplo” (Ibid, p. 17). Esto no es una manifestación irracional de la espontaneidad. Las diferencias se manifiestan, se emancipan de la dictadura de lo Uno.Feinmann responds with a contemporary Hegelian argument, one based in actual history. He looks at the end of the Cold War circa 1989 and the subsequent enormous expansion of neoliberal "globalization" and argues against what he views as a conservative tendency in postmodernist philosophy:
[The world of communication permits the uprooting of the dictatorship of the One and the liberatio of differences. This we can call, say, the dialectic. But there is no Reason. There are local rationalities, dialectics. "Ethnic, sexual, religious, cultural or aesthetic minorities, like the punks, for example." {Vattimo} This is not an irrational manifestation of spontaneity. The differences manifest themselves, they emancipate themselves from the dictatorship of the One.]
Voy a decirlo de una vez por todas: los intentos posmodernos han fracasado estrepitosamente. El sujeto cartesiano y el sujeto hegeliano están, hoy, más centrados que nunca. Nadie descentró al sujeto. Nadie lo adelgazó. Nadie lo deconstruyó. El sujeto absoluto es hoy el Sujeto del Poder Bélico Comunicacional. (Así: con mayúsculas fascistas, porque es de derecha y colonialista.) Este sujeto está globalizado y coloniza día tras día las subjetividades de los ciudadanos de este mundo. Su constitución ha sido reciente. Ni Sartre ni Foucault lo vieron. Y los posmodernos, que presenciaron su surgimiento y consolidación, lo interpretaron idílicamente, como el fruto maduro de una democracia comunicacional por cuyo medio se expresarían las distintas, mútiples voces de la libertad, sobre todo una vez caído el coloso comunista. ¿Error, ingenuidad o colaboracionismo? No son – arriesguemos – filósofos del “neoliberalismo”. Pero son –sin la menor duda– filósofos de la caída del comunismo, expresada en el colapso de la Unión Soviética. La distancia entre una cosa y la otra es demasiado estrecha.
[I'm going to say once and for all: the postmodern intentions have failed ostentatiously. The Cartesian subject and the Hegelian subject are today more central than ever. No one removed the subject from its central place. Nobody slimmed it down. Nobody deconstructed it. The Absolute subject is today the Subject of the Communicational Power of War. (Thus: with fascist capital letters, because it is rightwing and colonialist.) This Subject is globalized and day after day colonizes the subjectivities of the citizens of this world. Its construction has been recent. Neither Sartre nor Foucault saw it. And the postmodernists, who were present at its upsurge and consolidation, interpreted it idyllically as the mature fruit of a communicational democracy by whose medium the multiple voices of liberty express themselves, above all when the Communist colossus fell. Error, naivety or collaborationism? There are no - we'll take a risk to say - philosophers of "neoliberalism." But there are - without any doubt - philosophers of the fall of Communism, expressed in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The distance between one thing and the other is too narrow.]
There's a nice word play there in the sentence, "Nadie descentró al sujeto." I translated it above as, "No one removed the Subject from its central place." It could also be translated, "No one put the subject off its game."
In my reading - to use the polite postmodern expression! - Feinmann is arguing that postmodernism as derived from Heidegger and Foucault has a tendency to remove any intellectual basis for challenging the established order because it effectively gives up the concepts of Reason and objective truth. It does rule out efforts to change. But it puts the claims of the powerful on the same level normative as those of the weak, the claims of the tyrants on the same normative level as the claims of their subjects demanding freedom.
Feinmann isn't willing to give up the Hegelian historical subject, nor the Enlightenment standard of Reason, nor the Humeian/Hegelian goal of perceiving objectively material reality accurately.
Feinmann here is on the side of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Gary Aylesworth in his 2015 entry on Postmodernism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes the criticism that "second generation" Frankfurt theorist Jürgen Habermas makes of postmodernism:
Habermas argues that postmodernism contradicts itself through self-reference, and notes that postmodernists presuppose concepts they otherwise seek to undermine, e.g., freedom, subjectivity, or creativity. He sees in this a rhetorical application of strategies employed by the artistic avant-garde of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an avant-garde that is possible only because modernity separates artistic values from science and politics in the first place. On his view, postmodernism is an illicit aestheticization of knowledge and public discourse. Against this, Habermas seeks to rehabilitate modern reason as a system of procedural rules for achieving consensus and agreement among communicating subjects. Insofar as postmodernism introduces aesthetic playfulness and subversion into science and politics, he resists it in the name of a modernity moving toward completion rather than self-transformation. [my emphasis]Habermas and other Frankfurt School theorists are not only very much aware of the "nightmares of reason." They have been leaders in pointing them out. But they haven't abandoned Reason and the necessity of understanding empirical reality in doing so.
Feinmann also makes his own reckoning with Hegel's unifying concept of the One in the context of Islam's role in world history in El estruendo de los fanáticos Página/12 22.03.2015.
There are also Spanish-language lectures of his on YouTube from a Canal Encuentro series on Michel Foucault (1926–1984).
T2 CAP 11: Foucault [1]:
T2 CAP 12: Foucault II:
Also one on postmodernism more generally, T2 CAP 13: Los posmodernos:
Monday, February 09, 2015
Milgram experiment, 50 years-plus old and still of dubious value
Cori Romm reports on a professional psychological study that fairly quickly morped into some like an urban legend in One of psychology's most infamous experiments on the dark side of humanity is back under the microscope Business Insider/The Atlantic 02/07/2015.
I say "something like" an urban legend because the latter are more typically sourced from "a friend of a friend." Or, in a more recent variety, from anonymous e-mail chain letters.
The experiment in question took place in 1963 and involved participants in an experiment being asked to shock another subject. The participants were told that the shocks were real but would not cause permanent tissue damage. The results seem to show a horrifying number willing to continue administer shocks under orders even when the person was crying in pain or even became unconscious.
Milgram's paper on the results of the study was published as Behavioral Study of Obedience by Stanley Milgram The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67:4 Oct 1963.
I've blogged about this before in : The Milgram Experiment 03/19/2010 and More critical perspective on the Milgram Experiment 03/19/2010. As I explained in those two posts, I'm highly skeptical of the value of the study, relying on observations from Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) and Charles Helm and Mario Morelli, "Stanley Milgram and the Obedience Experiment: Authority, Legitimacy, and Human Action" Political Theory 7/3 (Aug 1979).
Romm reports that Milgram's study is still attracting critics:
The final article in that volume (Jolanda Jetten and Frank Mols, 50:50 Hindsight: Appreciating Anew the Contributions of Milgram’s Obedience Experiments) includes this in its Conclusion section:
I say "something like" an urban legend because the latter are more typically sourced from "a friend of a friend." Or, in a more recent variety, from anonymous e-mail chain letters.
The experiment in question took place in 1963 and involved participants in an experiment being asked to shock another subject. The participants were told that the shocks were real but would not cause permanent tissue damage. The results seem to show a horrifying number willing to continue administer shocks under orders even when the person was crying in pain or even became unconscious.
Milgram's paper on the results of the study was published as Behavioral Study of Obedience by Stanley Milgram The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67:4 Oct 1963.
I've blogged about this before in : The Milgram Experiment 03/19/2010 and More critical perspective on the Milgram Experiment 03/19/2010. As I explained in those two posts, I'm highly skeptical of the value of the study, relying on observations from Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) and Charles Helm and Mario Morelli, "Stanley Milgram and the Obedience Experiment: Authority, Legitimacy, and Human Action" Political Theory 7/3 (Aug 1979).
Romm reports that Milgram's study is still attracting critics:
One of the most vocal of those critics is Australian author and psychologist Gina Perry, who documented her experience tracking down Milgram’s research participants in her 2013 book Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments. Her project began as an effort to write about the experiments from the perspective of the participants—but when she went back through the archives to confirm some of their stories, she said, she found some glaring issues with Milgram’s data.As Romm notes, the Journal of Social Issues published a September 2014 Special Issue: Milgram at 50: Exploring the Enduring Relevance of Psychology's most Famous Studies 70:3.
Among her accusations: that the supervisors went off script in their prods to the teachers, that some of the volunteers were aware that the setup was a hoax, and that others weren’t debriefed on the whole thing until months later. “My main issue is that methodologically, there have been so many problems with Milgram’s research that we have to start re-examining the textbook descriptions of the research,” she said.
The final article in that volume (Jolanda Jetten and Frank Mols, 50:50 Hindsight: Appreciating Anew the Contributions of Milgram’s Obedience Experiments) includes this in its Conclusion section:
While Milgram may not have provided all the answers to questions one can ask about his participants’ behavior, he did develop a paradigm that has kept many a social scientist intrigued to this day. Yet while his experiments seemed initially to provide very simple and intuitive insights into human behavior, today these insights no longer appear that obvious (or even compelling). Indeed, the more one delves into his work, the more one faces questions and the more difficult they become to answer. [my emphasis]
Thursday, January 01, 2015
José Pablo Feinmann on Nietzsche's continuing influence, Philosophy Here and Now (Temporada 1-13) (Spanish-language video)
This is Chapter 13 and the final installment of the first season of Argentine philosopher José Pablo Feinmann's public TV series Filosofía aquí y ahora, "T1 CAP 13: Derivaciones de Nietzsche” Encuentro n/d Filosofía y Praxis YouTube 02/05/2013:
In this installment, Feinmann further discusses the continuing influence of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Including Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Freud, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, in particular that of Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973).
In this installment, Feinmann further discusses the continuing influence of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Including Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Freud, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, in particular that of Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973).
Monday, November 03, 2014
Jürgen Habermas on the line of Hegel's philosophical influence
Jürgen Habermas, who has been one of Germany's leading public intellectuals for decades, offers this description of the long-lasting influence of Hegel's philosophy, from the European Journal of Philosophy 7:2 (1999), "From Kant to Hegel and Back again – The Move Towards Detranscendentalization":
Their philosophical approach is heavily rooted in the classical German philosophical tradition, of whom Kant and Hegel were the leading figures.
Axel Honneth, a "third generation" Frankfurt School thinker and, as head of the Insitute for Social Research, the formal head of the "Frankfurt School," said in an interview in 1993 ("Critical Theory in Germany Today: An Interview with Axel Honneth," Radical Philosophy 65:1993), "in all the productive approaches of Critical Theory: it's always an ongoing tension between Kant and Hegel. I would say that the most productive element - one of the most productive elements of the Critical Theory tradition - is to be unable to decide which side you are on here." (my emphasis)
We could describe the history of the most interesting currents of post-Hegelian philosophy as a movement towards detranscendentalizing the knowing subject, in one version or another. But we would not include Hegel in that movement in spite of the fact that nobody did more to set the stage for it. Hegel was the first to put the transcendental subject back into context and to situate reason in social space and historical time. [Wilhelm von] Humboldt [176-1835], [Charles Sanders] Peirce [1839–1914], [Wilhelm] Dilthey [1833–191], [John] Dewey [1859-1952], [Ernst] Cassirer [1874-1945], and [Martin] Heidegger [1889–1976] are among those post-Kantian philosophers who were or, if we think of [Ludwig] Wittgenstein [1889-1951], could have been influenced by Hegel in their attempts to treat language, practice and historical forms of life as dimensions of the symbolic embodiment of reason. In his Jena period, Hegel did in fact introduce language, work and symbolic interaction as media through which the human mind is formed and transformed. Considering Hegel’s notion of spirit, it is difficult to understand why we are hesitant to describe Hegel as a protagonist of detranscendentalization. One might suppose, perhaps, that his rationalism separates him from the following generations. But though linguistic philosophy, pragmatism, and historicism undermined the status of a noumenal subject beyond space and time, they do not necessarily lead to the kind of contextualism that has given rise to the familiar debates concerning the ethnocentricity or incommensurability of rationality standards. [my emphasis; links added]Habermas writes further about Hegel's situating of reason in history:
The choice of the term ‘Geist’ [for "Spirit"] reminds us of the origin and rise of the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ after 1800. Though the great works of the founding fathers – of Leopold Ranke [1795-1886], Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm [1785-1863 and 1786-1859, respectively], Carl von Savigny [1779-1861] and the others had not yet been published, a new historical consciousness and a philosophy of historicism already formed a background for the emerging disciplines that would revolutionize the classical concept of the humanities in the course of Hegel’s life-time. They were already manifest in the earlier works of Justus Möser [1720-1794], Gottfried Herder [1744-1803] and Johann Georg Hamann [1730–1788], of Friedrich Schleiermacher [1768-1834], Wilhelm v. Humboldt, and Friedrich Schlegel [1772–1829]. With this historical mode of thought, three dimensions gained philosophical significance for the first time: (a) the historicity of the human mind, (b) the objectivity of symbolic forms and (c) the individuality of actors and their historical contexts. [my emphasis in bold; links added]Habermas is the best-known figure of what came to be known as the "second generation" of the Frankfurt School, who framed their perspective as "critical theory."
Their philosophical approach is heavily rooted in the classical German philosophical tradition, of whom Kant and Hegel were the leading figures.
Axel Honneth, a "third generation" Frankfurt School thinker and, as head of the Insitute for Social Research, the formal head of the "Frankfurt School," said in an interview in 1993 ("Critical Theory in Germany Today: An Interview with Axel Honneth," Radical Philosophy 65:1993), "in all the productive approaches of Critical Theory: it's always an ongoing tension between Kant and Hegel. I would say that the most productive element - one of the most productive elements of the Critical Theory tradition - is to be unable to decide which side you are on here." (my emphasis)
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Liberal philosophy and democracy
My reaction to the Isaiah Berlin article I discussed in the previous post is in part based on an idea expressed well by the "1st generation" Frankfurt School scholar Franz Neumann in "Approaches to the Study of Political Power" Political Science Quarterly 65:2 (June 1950).
He describes the negative views on democracy shared by two reactionary philosophers, Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) and Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald (1754-1840), who argued that rule by the rabble would lead to dictatorship. He also cites the classical- liberal/libertarian view which "believes bureaucracy to be inimical to liberty and attempts to protect democracy by identifying it with individual liberty against the state."
He responds to those views this way:
But it gets to the positive goal articulated by Berlin. He believes that a liberal order that allows dissent has the kind of self-correcting mechanisms that would prevent a slide into dictatorship.
Neumann sees, however, that any political system can fail or be subverted if enough people are determined to do so and enough people are indifferent to that outcome. Something very much like that happened to the Weimar Republic in Germany.
Popular participation and popular rule have to be substantive for democracy to actually be at work. De-politicization can and does happen in democracies.
And in the United States, we see that Congressional war powers have effectively been abolished - for now - by decades of the Long War (Cold War and afterward). So have many Constitutional protections against government spying on citizens. The protections are still on the books, i.e., in the Constitution. Before there has to be enough popular insistence on enforcing them for them to function as they should in reality.
He describes the negative views on democracy shared by two reactionary philosophers, Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) and Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald (1754-1840), who argued that rule by the rabble would lead to dictatorship. He also cites the classical- liberal/libertarian view which "believes bureaucracy to be inimical to liberty and attempts to protect democracy by identifying it with individual liberty against the state."
He responds to those views this way:
Both reactions base themselves on what they call the tradition of Western civilization. the kernel of which is allegedly hostility to political power as expressed in constitutionalism. This is only a partial truth and, therefore, false. The tradition of Western civilization is more complex. Its richness was hinted at when we attempted to classify the various attitudes toward political power. Certainly, one may say that Rousseauism is a more important element in the political tradition of democracy than the essentially self-contradictory and arbitrary doctrines of Locke and of the natural law. That political power (whether democratic, aristocratic, or monarchic) can be abused is beyond doubt; but it is doubtful that abuses can be effectively checked by constitutionalism. The problem of modern democracy is much less the fencing of political power than its rational utilization and provision for effective mass participation in its exercise. [my emphasis]I'm a little more fond of separation of powers as a guarantee of freedom and stability than Neumann seems to have been.
But it gets to the positive goal articulated by Berlin. He believes that a liberal order that allows dissent has the kind of self-correcting mechanisms that would prevent a slide into dictatorship.
Neumann sees, however, that any political system can fail or be subverted if enough people are determined to do so and enough people are indifferent to that outcome. Something very much like that happened to the Weimar Republic in Germany.
Popular participation and popular rule have to be substantive for democracy to actually be at work. De-politicization can and does happen in democracies.
And in the United States, we see that Congressional war powers have effectively been abolished - for now - by decades of the Long War (Cold War and afterward). So have many Constitutional protections against government spying on citizens. The protections are still on the books, i.e., in the Constitution. Before there has to be enough popular insistence on enforcing them for them to function as they should in reality.
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Claus Offe on Angela Merkel and the euro crisis
Joachim Zinsen interviewed leading German political scientist Claus Offe: Claus Offe ist überzeugt: Die Krise der Euro-Zone dauert an Aachener Nachrichten 14.05.2014. Offe comments on how Merkel's austerity politics and her general arrogance as the de facto boss of the eurozone has affected Germany's image in Europe:
Offe also observes, "Angela Merkel jedenfalls hat mit der zunehmenden Armut in vielen Euro-Ländern offenbar kein Problem" ("Angela Merkel in any case clearly has no problem with the growing poverty in many euro countries").
Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, claus offe, critical theory, eu, euro, european union, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule
Was sollte Angela Merkel zu einer Änderung ihres bisherigen Kurses veranlassen? Innenpolitisch steht sie doch gerade auch wegen ihrer harten Sparvorgaben für andere Länder hervorragend da.Offe works in the "critical theory" tradition of the Frankfurt School. I believe he's considered part of the "third generation" Frankfurt School.
Offe: Gleichzeitig aber sind das Ansehen und die Reputation der deutschen Politik im Ausland im Keller. Ungefähr vier Fünftel der Italiener und Franzosen meinen, dass der deutsche Einfluss – konkret: der von „Madame Non“ – in Europa zu groß ist. Bundespräsident Joachim Gauck hat dazu sinngemäß gesagt: „Ich hasse es, gehasst zu werden“.
[What would induce Angela Merkel to a change of her course up until now? In internal politics, she is doing extremely well precisely because of her harsh austerity policies for other countries.
Offe: But at the same time, respect for and the reputation of German policy internationally is in the cellar. Around four-fifths of Italians and the French think that German influence - concretely: that of "Madame Non" {Merkel} - in Europe is too great. Federal President Joachim Gauck once said sensibly: "I hate to be hated."]
Offe also observes, "Angela Merkel jedenfalls hat mit der zunehmenden Armut in vielen Euro-Ländern offenbar kein Problem" ("Angela Merkel in any case clearly has no problem with the growing poverty in many euro countries").
Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, claus offe, critical theory, eu, euro, european union, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule
Wednesday, April 02, 2014
A Herbert Marcuse mention pops up in "The Nation"
Michelle Goldberg brings up Herbert Marcuse's famous essay, "Repressive Tolerance" in #CancelColbert and the Return of the Anti-Liberal Left The Nation 04/02/2014:
I wrote about Marcuse's essay and the two that accompanied it when it was published:
1. Are there problems with tolerance?
2. Robert Paul Wolff on going "Beyond Tolerance"
3. Barrington Moore, Jr., on science and tolerance
4. Tolerance, social analysis and radical democracy
5. Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance
6. The need for tolerance, its limits and its "repressive" form
Michelle seems to be following the Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. caricature of Marcuse, which I discuss in Political violence and "existential politics" 06/30/2013. And at greater length in Herbert Marcuse, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Political Violence and "Existential Politics."
Her reading of "Repressive Tolerance" is at best superficial. Marcuse's essay was actually a thoughtful provocation whose main goal was to highlight the restrictions which Western capitalist democracies put on freedom of expression in fact despite the general observance of classical liberal legal forms. Marcuse was certainly not indifferent to the value of the liberal political tradition, as he showed in his important essay “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State“ in Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (1968). The English text of Negations is available online in an authorized SCRIBD edition. I discuss the "Struggle Against Liberalism" essay in National Socialism vs. Liberal Philosophy (2010 paper).
Ironically, in connecting her misreading of Marcuse to speech codes and the like, she winds up echoing one of the weirder theories to creep out of the far-right swamp, one that argues that the Frankfurt School, of which Marcuse was a major figure, was responsible for "political correctness." Here's a post I did on it: "Cultural Marxism": a far-right conspiracy theory involving the Frankfurt School 07/30/2011.
Here's is one of my favorite journalists. Her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism is one of the best things I've read on the Christian Right.
I'd like to think it was unintentional that she seems to be invoking that crackpot theory. But she's dug around in the far right way more than most journalists have. And this one's been around for a while.
From the white supremacist gutter to "The Nation"? Please tell me it was just a bad-hair moment!
Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, herbert marcuse, radical right, repressive tolerance
Nor is this just happening here. In England’s left-wing New Statesman, Sarah Ditum wrote of the spread of no-platforming—essentially stopping people whose ideas are deemed offensive from speaking publicly. She cites the shouting down of an opponent of the BDS movement at Galway University and the threats and intimidation leveled at the radical feminist Julie Bindel, who has said cruel things about trans people. “No platform now uses the pretext of opposing hate speech to justify outrageously dehumanising language, and sets up an ideal of ‘safe spaces’ within which certain individuals can be harassed,” wrote Ditum. “A tool that was once intended to protect democracy from undemocratic movements has become a weapon used by the undemocratic against democracy.”Well, no, that's not exactly what Marcuse's essay said, "that social justice demands curbs on freedom of expression."
Call it left-wing anti-liberalism: the idea, captured by Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” that social justice demands curbs on freedom of expression. “[I]t is possible to define the direction in which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation,” he wrote. “Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.” [my emphasis]
I wrote about Marcuse's essay and the two that accompanied it when it was published:
1. Are there problems with tolerance?
2. Robert Paul Wolff on going "Beyond Tolerance"
3. Barrington Moore, Jr., on science and tolerance
4. Tolerance, social analysis and radical democracy
5. Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance
6. The need for tolerance, its limits and its "repressive" form
Michelle seems to be following the Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. caricature of Marcuse, which I discuss in Political violence and "existential politics" 06/30/2013. And at greater length in Herbert Marcuse, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Political Violence and "Existential Politics."
Her reading of "Repressive Tolerance" is at best superficial. Marcuse's essay was actually a thoughtful provocation whose main goal was to highlight the restrictions which Western capitalist democracies put on freedom of expression in fact despite the general observance of classical liberal legal forms. Marcuse was certainly not indifferent to the value of the liberal political tradition, as he showed in his important essay “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State“ in Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (1968). The English text of Negations is available online in an authorized SCRIBD edition. I discuss the "Struggle Against Liberalism" essay in National Socialism vs. Liberal Philosophy (2010 paper).
Ironically, in connecting her misreading of Marcuse to speech codes and the like, she winds up echoing one of the weirder theories to creep out of the far-right swamp, one that argues that the Frankfurt School, of which Marcuse was a major figure, was responsible for "political correctness." Here's a post I did on it: "Cultural Marxism": a far-right conspiracy theory involving the Frankfurt School 07/30/2011.
Here's is one of my favorite journalists. Her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism is one of the best things I've read on the Christian Right.
I'd like to think it was unintentional that she seems to be invoking that crackpot theory. But she's dug around in the far right way more than most journalists have. And this one's been around for a while.
From the white supremacist gutter to "The Nation"? Please tell me it was just a bad-hair moment!
Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, herbert marcuse, radical right, repressive tolerance
Monday, July 29, 2013
The Republicans and Conservative Revolution
Political rhetoric always has its particular strangeness. Today in the US, a particular part of the strangeness is way in which conservative Republicans use the rhetoric of sedition, nullification and even revolution without sending either their base voters or the mainstream press into orbit with such talk.
White advocates for gun proliferation talk very publicly and proudly about "the people" needing guns to protect themselves from "tyranny." In the plain meaning, that would involve using weapons to kill cops and soldiers and public officials. In practice, most of them that mouth off with that kind of thing have more in mind something like using them against the "tyranny" of teenagers wearing hoodies and carrying bags of Skittles.
This shurff (actually police chief), for instance, presumably isn't organizing his own armed vigilante squad in order to fight police tyranny from the department he runs: (John Usalis, Gilberton police chief says YouTube video supports U.S. Constitution Republican Herald 07/24/2013). Also, according to Ryan Lenz of SPLC's Hatewatch in Oath Keepers Rally Reveals Radical Politics of Group 07/25/2013, the shurff is also part of the Radical Right Oath Keepers group. The Young Turks have images (includes profanity, sex talk), America's Scariest Police Chief 07/25/2013:
Then there's NRA Board of Directors member Ted Nugent: Josh Sugarmann, NRA's Ted Nugent Jokes About Gunning Down South Central LA Residents Like Feral Hogs Huffington Post 07/12/2013; Timothy Johnson, "Anti-Racist" Nugent's Analogy: Profile Blacks Like Dangerous Dogs Media Matters 07/24/2013. In fairness, NRA board member Nugent does suggest there are some some politicians that he might want to murder, too, as he did in 2007: Elizabeth Goodman, Ted Nugent Threatens to Kill Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton During Vicious Onstage Rant Rolling Stone 08/24/2007.
In addition, we have various rightwingers who have shot people for more-or-less political motives in recent years, like the antiabortion extremist who murdered Dr. George Tiller in his own church. I would include Congresswoman Gaby Giffords in that group, as her would-be assassin seems to have been motivated in part for rightwing extremist ideas. The media typically script those events as a Lone Nut doing the attack, even when he shows definite far-right connections. Dave Neiwert's excellent book And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border (2013) gives a good look into the violent orientation of the Patriot Militia-type fringe that has been heavily involved in extremist "border watch" actions.
The NRA is an entirely respectable group in today's Republican Party, despite featuring people like Nugent and militia/border-watch leader Jim Gilchrist on their board of directors; And Hell Followed With Her discusses Gilchrist at some length. How respectable is illustrated by this editorial from Bloomberg View/Business Week, On Capitol Hill, More Gun Control Cowardice 07/25/2013:
I was struck by a phrase I saw used in Spiegel Online during President Obama's first term to describe the Republican Party's Congressional strategy against his domestic agenda, "fundamental opposition." While I wouldn't call it a "revolutionary" approach, it's certainly a militant nullification strategy aimed at thwarting the majority will being expressed in Congress. Hearing about the Republicans' genuinely unprecedented level of obstructionism in Congress, I'm often reminded of this cartoon depicting the Cech nationalist party in the Vienna Parliament (Reichsrat) of the western part of the Habsburg Empire ("Austro-Hungarian Empire") in the years prior to the First World War. Formally, the Reichsrat was the parliament of "Cisleithanien," the western portion of the Empire; "Transleithanien" was the unofficial name for the eastern part that included Hungary.
Historian Brigitte Hamaan writes about this Czech nationalist group in Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Diktators (1996). Numerous events had lead to particular political tensions in 1908 and 1909, including confrontations among the various national-ethnic groups in the Habsburgs' often-dysfunctional empire. And those conflicts were reflected in the Parliament in Vienna, which really did come close to fitting the stereotype of a powerless talking shop. "The most dangerous obstruction," she writes, "became that of the 'Czech National Socialists'." They were furious that the German ethnic parties in the Czech homeland of Bohemia had rendered the local party unable to do much of anything.
(Hamaan notes that the young Adolf Hitler frequently observed sessions of the Reichsrat from the public gallery in those years. He claimed in Mein Kampf that his experience watching the Vienna Reichsrat convinced him of the worthlessness of parliamentary democracy. It may be pure coincidence that his later German Party took the name "National Socialists," for which "Nazi" was the popular short form.)
The Republicans haven't thrown a melodramatic hissy fit quite like that one in Congress. But it's not too hard to picture. And in any case, they're always in a hissy fit about something.
Yet the strategy of disruption and paralyzing the normal working of the institution is a similar one. And the US Congress has far more real responsibility and power than the Imperial Parliament in Vienna in 1908, essentially lacking any real power. The Czech National Socialists were causing a real ruckus by doing that, but not actually hindering any substantial business of the government by doing so. That cannot be said of the current Republican obstructionism of the Republicans in Congress, aimed at nullifying laws of which they don't approve and also nullifying majority rule. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have given a careful account of this radical approach by the Republicans in Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (2012). This summary of a Bill Moyers interview with the two authors, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann Explain Why Congress is Failing Us BillMoyers.com 04/26/2013, says:
It's said of Republicans that they campaign for office complaining that government doesn't work, then when they get into power they go about proving it true. What we're seeing now is an extreme form of that strategy. And it's accompanied by a notable and enduring radicalization of their program. That radicalization is even more pronounced in the state legislatures controlled by Republicans than it is even in Congress. Those legislature are eagerly passing segregationist laws like Stand Your Ground (which doubles as a gun proliferation measure) and enacting schemes to suppress the votes of African-Americans and Latinos. And these actions are taking place in conjunction with the Tea Party groups and their militant and even revolutionary rhetoric; the gun-proliferation lobby and their supporters; the antiabortion fanatics; and, the substantial Republican media infrastructure of which FOX News and hate radio are the most visible manifestations.
Now, the Republican Party has no shortage of blowhards. And a lot of the militant, violent and "eliminationist" rhetoric we hear coming from those parts of the political spectrum are hot air. But when we look at the popular agitation - and the occasional violent actions - of the more hardline groups over issues like gun proliferation, immigration and abortion combined with the radical obstructionism of the Republicans in Congress and the Republican-dominated Supreme Court making partisan rulings on major issues that overturn important precedents, often with 5-4 votes, I think it's reasonable to say that the Republicans are pursuing a genuinely radical strategy with even quasi-revolutionary elements to it. Handing the Presidency to Republican George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2000 against both the popular vote and what the Electoral College vote would have been had Florida's votes been accurately counted was quite a radical step. President Obama said of the Citizen's United ruling, "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. ... I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest." (my emphasis)
Which brings me to this. Reading about the political scene on the militant left in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the Untied States is a glimpse into another world. Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin recently published a history of the Black Panther Party, a leftwing Black Power group that had its political heyday in roughly 1968-1971, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2012). It looks at the political impact of that group with special emphasis to the Panthers' political understanding of their own mission and accomplishments. They write in their conclusion:
They use the term "revolutionary" there in the sense that was common among the New Left and groups like the Black Panthers to mean groups that are anti-capitalist and seek to fundamentally change both the social and political systems. There are decades of hair-splitting disputes about whether far-right groups like the Italian Fascists or German Nazis that styled themselves as revolutionary insurgent groups as they were building their power were genuinely revolutionary.
The Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse published an essay in 1972 called "The Left Under the Counter-Revolution" in a book called Counter-Revolution and Revolt. He described his perspective this way:
It's not my purpose here to judge whether the Black Panther Party had a sensible strategy or whether Marcuse's definition of global counter-revolution made sense. The Panthers did have a dramatic if short-lived success in mobilizing a significant group of African-Americans to their cause and in energizing white radical sympathizers. And one doesn't have to assume an inevitable or imminent collapse of capitalism to notice the deeply counter-revolutionary elements in both foreign and domestic policy; the latter is often explicit and, when the revolutionaries are Islamists, often supported by people who understand themselves as liberals or progressives.
All that said, the present-day configuration of the Republican Party and more-or-less affiliated rightwing groups has some elements that have a revolutionary edge in the sense of a Conservative Revolution, to borrow a term from the Weimar Republic. To borrow from the terms used by Bloom and Martin, groups like the NRA, other gun-proliferation groups, the antiabortion movement, the anti-immigration organizations, often used the rhetoric of sedition, but one can't say "they remain politically irrelevant" at the current moment. They certainly don't "lack potential constituencies in the United States," even if those constituencies are mostly some form of older white people with Christian fundamentalist leanings. And with the funding of various rightwing billionaires like the now-infamous Koch brothers and an extensive organizational infrastructure to generate "astroturf" demonstrations, they also "build common cause with ... alienated constituencies within the United States." Alienated in the sense of alienated from the 20th century form of liberal democracy with social-democratic/New Deal elements to protect the rights of poor and working people to some extent and to restrain the more catastrophically destructive tendencies of "free market" capitalism.
And its not too much of a stretch to say that the Conservative Revolution in the US has been able to "seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies, creating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease." As Digby put it this past weekend (When the inmates take over the asylum (GOP style) Hullabaloo 07/28/2013):
I don't have any big insightful conclusion on this. But in the conditions of the 21st century, the Republicans' attempts to restore something like a 19th-century, robber-baron-era approach to business regulation and social policy, and to recreate a new segregation/Jim Crow regime of race relations, look like an attempt to radically alter not only the electoral system (by excluding blacks and Latinos) and to radically change the social conditions (for the worse!) for the vast majority of the public. Whether we want to call those "revolutionary" in a political-science or philosophical sense, it certainly seems that they understand their project as a Conservative Revolution against not just the 21st but the 20th century, as well.
Tags: black panther party, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, herbert marcuse, radical right, republican party
White advocates for gun proliferation talk very publicly and proudly about "the people" needing guns to protect themselves from "tyranny." In the plain meaning, that would involve using weapons to kill cops and soldiers and public officials. In practice, most of them that mouth off with that kind of thing have more in mind something like using them against the "tyranny" of teenagers wearing hoodies and carrying bags of Skittles.
This shurff (actually police chief), for instance, presumably isn't organizing his own armed vigilante squad in order to fight police tyranny from the department he runs: (John Usalis, Gilberton police chief says YouTube video supports U.S. Constitution Republican Herald 07/24/2013). Also, according to Ryan Lenz of SPLC's Hatewatch in Oath Keepers Rally Reveals Radical Politics of Group 07/25/2013, the shurff is also part of the Radical Right Oath Keepers group. The Young Turks have images (includes profanity, sex talk), America's Scariest Police Chief 07/25/2013:
Then there's NRA Board of Directors member Ted Nugent: Josh Sugarmann, NRA's Ted Nugent Jokes About Gunning Down South Central LA Residents Like Feral Hogs Huffington Post 07/12/2013; Timothy Johnson, "Anti-Racist" Nugent's Analogy: Profile Blacks Like Dangerous Dogs Media Matters 07/24/2013. In fairness, NRA board member Nugent does suggest there are some some politicians that he might want to murder, too, as he did in 2007: Elizabeth Goodman, Ted Nugent Threatens to Kill Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton During Vicious Onstage Rant Rolling Stone 08/24/2007.
In addition, we have various rightwingers who have shot people for more-or-less political motives in recent years, like the antiabortion extremist who murdered Dr. George Tiller in his own church. I would include Congresswoman Gaby Giffords in that group, as her would-be assassin seems to have been motivated in part for rightwing extremist ideas. The media typically script those events as a Lone Nut doing the attack, even when he shows definite far-right connections. Dave Neiwert's excellent book And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border (2013) gives a good look into the violent orientation of the Patriot Militia-type fringe that has been heavily involved in extremist "border watch" actions.
The NRA is an entirely respectable group in today's Republican Party, despite featuring people like Nugent and militia/border-watch leader Jim Gilchrist on their board of directors; And Hell Followed With Her discusses Gilchrist at some length. How respectable is illustrated by this editorial from Bloomberg View/Business Week, On Capitol Hill, More Gun Control Cowardice 07/25/2013:
The ATF is responsible for conducting regulatory inspections of the nation’s more than 123,000 licensed gun dealers. A Department of Justice report released in April found that the agency is so hindered by congressionally imposed obstacles and "insufficient investigator resources" that it can’t adequately perform its duties. In addition to preventing the ATF from keeping computerized records of gun transactions, Congress passed legislation prohibiting the agency from inspecting a licensed gun dealer more than once a year. Because the ATF has only 2,500 agents to police guns, tobacco, alcohol, and explosives, the majority of gun dealers received no inspection at all from the understaffed agency during a five-year period.The antiabortion movement, which helped spawn the militia movement of the early 1990s and continues to be a source of some of the most extreme, hate-filled and violence-inclined rhetoric of any political faction in the US are happily supported by the Republican Party. If there are any Republican members of Congress that are taking care to distance themselves from the standard movement rhetoric of abortion being "killing babies" and abortions in the US being worse than the Holocaust, I couldn't name one. Yet that inflammatory talk that makes any compromise seemingly impossible is common as dirt among the antiabortionists.
From 2004 to 2011 the nation’s gun shops lost 174,679 guns through theft or loss. (That’s the official number; actual losses are undoubtedly much higher.) It’s unknown how many of these ended up in the possession of criminals. Even when the ATF concludes that a gun dealer is not complying with the law, it can take years to revoke a license. The practical consequence is that rogue gun dealers can supply criminals for years without worrying about official disruptions to their business.
I was struck by a phrase I saw used in Spiegel Online during President Obama's first term to describe the Republican Party's Congressional strategy against his domestic agenda, "fundamental opposition." While I wouldn't call it a "revolutionary" approach, it's certainly a militant nullification strategy aimed at thwarting the majority will being expressed in Congress. Hearing about the Republicans' genuinely unprecedented level of obstructionism in Congress, I'm often reminded of this cartoon depicting the Cech nationalist party in the Vienna Parliament (Reichsrat) of the western part of the Habsburg Empire ("Austro-Hungarian Empire") in the years prior to the First World War. Formally, the Reichsrat was the parliament of "Cisleithanien," the western portion of the Empire; "Transleithanien" was the unofficial name for the eastern part that included Hungary.
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| "Die tschechische Opposition in unserm Parlament" ("The Czech Opposition in Our Parliament") |
Historian Brigitte Hamaan writes about this Czech nationalist group in Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Diktators (1996). Numerous events had lead to particular political tensions in 1908 and 1909, including confrontations among the various national-ethnic groups in the Habsburgs' often-dysfunctional empire. And those conflicts were reflected in the Parliament in Vienna, which really did come close to fitting the stereotype of a powerless talking shop. "The most dangerous obstruction," she writes, "became that of the 'Czech National Socialists'." They were furious that the German ethnic parties in the Czech homeland of Bohemia had rendered the local party unable to do much of anything.
After martial law was declared in Prague on December 2, 1908, the protest of the Czech parties of made Parliament a complete national witches' kettle. Right at the introductory words of the [parliamentary] President, the Czech National Socialists Vinzenz Lisy, Václav Fresl and František Burival advanced at a double-quick pace towards the Presidential rostrum blowing metal whistles and children's trumpets, following by more representatives whistling and crying, "Boo!" The respresentative Dr. Anton Hajn, armed with a child's trumpet sounded the Sturmmarsch [presumably the Düppeler Schanzen-Sturmmarsch, a well-known Prussian military march]. The Young Czech Prague Representative Václav Choc to the President: "There is the hanging judge!" Lisy followed: "Do you want to impose the martial law of Prague on the Bohemenian Representatives in Vienna?"That's what "fundamental opposition" looked like in the Vienna Parliament on that particular day.
[German original: Nach der Verhängung des Standrechtes in Prag am 2. Dezember 1908 machten die Proteste der tschechischen Parteien das Parlament vollends zu einern nationalen Hexenkessel. Schon bei den Einleitungsworten des Präsidenten drangen die tschechischen Nationalsozialisten Vinzenz Lisy, Václav Fresl und František Burival im Sturrnschritt, auf Metallpfeifen und Kindertrompeten blasend, gegen die Präsidententribune vor, von weiteren pfeifenden und »pfui« rufenden Abgeordneten gefolgt. Der mit einer Kindertrompete ausgerüstete Abgeordnete Dr. Anton Hajn blies dabei den Sturmmarsch. Der jungtschechische Prager Abgeordnete Václav Choc zum Präsidenten: »Da ist der Scharfrichter!« Darauf Lisy: »Wollen Sie das Prager Standrecht auf die böhmischen Abgeordneten in Wien übertragen?«
(Hamaan notes that the young Adolf Hitler frequently observed sessions of the Reichsrat from the public gallery in those years. He claimed in Mein Kampf that his experience watching the Vienna Reichsrat convinced him of the worthlessness of parliamentary democracy. It may be pure coincidence that his later German Party took the name "National Socialists," for which "Nazi" was the popular short form.)
The Republicans haven't thrown a melodramatic hissy fit quite like that one in Congress. But it's not too hard to picture. And in any case, they're always in a hissy fit about something.
Yet the strategy of disruption and paralyzing the normal working of the institution is a similar one. And the US Congress has far more real responsibility and power than the Imperial Parliament in Vienna in 1908, essentially lacking any real power. The Czech National Socialists were causing a real ruckus by doing that, but not actually hindering any substantial business of the government by doing so. That cannot be said of the current Republican obstructionism of the Republicans in Congress, aimed at nullifying laws of which they don't approve and also nullifying majority rule. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have given a careful account of this radical approach by the Republicans in Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (2012). This summary of a Bill Moyers interview with the two authors, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann Explain Why Congress is Failing Us BillMoyers.com 04/26/2013, says:
In [the book], they argue that congressional gridlock is mostly the fault of right wing radicals within the Republican Party who engage in “policy hostage-taking” to extend their political war against the president.More recently, long-time conservative Ornstein has written, "What is going on now to sabotage Obamacare is not treasonous — just sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials with the fiduciary responsibility of governing." (The Unprecedented — and Contemptible — Attempts to Sabotage Obamacare National Journal 07/24/2013) Prompting Paul Krugman to observes, "When you have a GOP so radical that Norm Ornstein feels compelled to clarify that its actions — its attempts to sabotage the law of the land — don't quite rise to the standard of treason, the old notion that equated centrism with practical politics is utterly outdated." (Things Fell Apart 07/26/2013)
What's more, Ornstein and Mann say, the mainstream media and media fact-checkers add to the problem by indulging in "false equivalency" — pretending both parties are equally to blame.
"Sadly, divided party government, which we have because of the Republican House, in a time of extreme partisan polarization, is a formula for inaction and absolutist opposition politics, not for problem solving," Mann tells Bill.
Ornstein says, "Some of this is coming from the kinds of people who we're electing to office, through a nominating process that has gotten so skewed to the radical right. But some of it is an electoral magnet that pulls them away from voting for anything that might have a patina of bipartisan support because they'll face extinction." [my emphasis]
It's said of Republicans that they campaign for office complaining that government doesn't work, then when they get into power they go about proving it true. What we're seeing now is an extreme form of that strategy. And it's accompanied by a notable and enduring radicalization of their program. That radicalization is even more pronounced in the state legislatures controlled by Republicans than it is even in Congress. Those legislature are eagerly passing segregationist laws like Stand Your Ground (which doubles as a gun proliferation measure) and enacting schemes to suppress the votes of African-Americans and Latinos. And these actions are taking place in conjunction with the Tea Party groups and their militant and even revolutionary rhetoric; the gun-proliferation lobby and their supporters; the antiabortion fanatics; and, the substantial Republican media infrastructure of which FOX News and hate radio are the most visible manifestations.
Now, the Republican Party has no shortage of blowhards. And a lot of the militant, violent and "eliminationist" rhetoric we hear coming from those parts of the political spectrum are hot air. But when we look at the popular agitation - and the occasional violent actions - of the more hardline groups over issues like gun proliferation, immigration and abortion combined with the radical obstructionism of the Republicans in Congress and the Republican-dominated Supreme Court making partisan rulings on major issues that overturn important precedents, often with 5-4 votes, I think it's reasonable to say that the Republicans are pursuing a genuinely radical strategy with even quasi-revolutionary elements to it. Handing the Presidency to Republican George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2000 against both the popular vote and what the Electoral College vote would have been had Florida's votes been accurately counted was quite a radical step. President Obama said of the Citizen's United ruling, "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. ... I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest." (my emphasis)
Which brings me to this. Reading about the political scene on the militant left in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the Untied States is a glimpse into another world. Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin recently published a history of the Black Panther Party, a leftwing Black Power group that had its political heyday in roughly 1968-1971, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2012). It looks at the political impact of that group with special emphasis to the Panthers' political understanding of their own mission and accomplishments. They write in their conclusion:
Members of revolutionary sects can hawk their newspapers and proselytize on college campuses until they are blue in the face, but they remain politically irrelevant. Islamist insurgencies, with deep political roots abroad, are politically significant, but they lack potential constituencies in the United States. And ironically, at least in the terrorist variant, they tend to reinforce rather than challenge state power domestically because their practices threaten — rather than build common cause with — alienated constituencies within the United States.But when we look at the strategy and practice of today's Republican Party and affiliated groups, how does that affect how we would understand that assessment by Bloom and Martin?
No revolutionary movement of political significance will gain a foothold in the United States again until a group of revolutionaries develops insurgent practices that seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies, creating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease. This has not happened in the United States since the heyday of the Black Panther Party and may not happen again for a very long time. [my emphasis]
They use the term "revolutionary" there in the sense that was common among the New Left and groups like the Black Panthers to mean groups that are anti-capitalist and seek to fundamentally change both the social and political systems. There are decades of hair-splitting disputes about whether far-right groups like the Italian Fascists or German Nazis that styled themselves as revolutionary insurgent groups as they were building their power were genuinely revolutionary.
The Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse published an essay in 1972 called "The Left Under the Counter-Revolution" in a book called Counter-Revolution and Revolt. He described his perspective this way:
The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. ...In one sense, Marcuse was defining the US national security state and the Long War, the unending series of military conflicts that took the form of the Cold War and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, of what we now call the Global War on Terrorism. Marcuse was seeing it from his own Marxist perspective, which saw the capitalist system as permanently destabilized by its own inherent contradictions: economic, social and political.
The counterrevolution is largely preventive and, in the Western world, altogether preventive. Here, there is no recent revolution to be undone, and there is none in the offing. And yet, fear of revolution which creates the common interest links the various stages and forms of the counterrevolution. It runs the whole gamut from parliamentary democracy via the police state to open dictatorship.
It's not my purpose here to judge whether the Black Panther Party had a sensible strategy or whether Marcuse's definition of global counter-revolution made sense. The Panthers did have a dramatic if short-lived success in mobilizing a significant group of African-Americans to their cause and in energizing white radical sympathizers. And one doesn't have to assume an inevitable or imminent collapse of capitalism to notice the deeply counter-revolutionary elements in both foreign and domestic policy; the latter is often explicit and, when the revolutionaries are Islamists, often supported by people who understand themselves as liberals or progressives.
All that said, the present-day configuration of the Republican Party and more-or-less affiliated rightwing groups has some elements that have a revolutionary edge in the sense of a Conservative Revolution, to borrow a term from the Weimar Republic. To borrow from the terms used by Bloom and Martin, groups like the NRA, other gun-proliferation groups, the antiabortion movement, the anti-immigration organizations, often used the rhetoric of sedition, but one can't say "they remain politically irrelevant" at the current moment. They certainly don't "lack potential constituencies in the United States," even if those constituencies are mostly some form of older white people with Christian fundamentalist leanings. And with the funding of various rightwing billionaires like the now-infamous Koch brothers and an extensive organizational infrastructure to generate "astroturf" demonstrations, they also "build common cause with ... alienated constituencies within the United States." Alienated in the sense of alienated from the 20th century form of liberal democracy with social-democratic/New Deal elements to protect the rights of poor and working people to some extent and to restrain the more catastrophically destructive tendencies of "free market" capitalism.
And its not too much of a stretch to say that the Conservative Revolution in the US has been able to "seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies, creating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease." As Digby put it this past weekend (When the inmates take over the asylum (GOP style) Hullabaloo 07/28/2013):
The Republican establishment is afraid of its own voters which is perhaps the most important underlying premise of democratic governance there is. They truly are responding to the will of the people. Unfortunately, their voters have been radicalized by about 40 years of increasingly nihilistic propaganda that's resulted in the insurgency turning on the system itself. Since men like [Sen. Tom] Coburn are responsible for this, it would be tempting to just sit back and munch on the popcorn as the party implodes, but unfortunately the GOP wields a tremendous amount of power in our two party system, even if it has gone nuts. [my emphasis]Both the Bloom/Martin and Marcuse quotes relate especially to the situation that obtained in the US in the early 1970s, in the first Presidential term of Richard Nixon. This is also a key period for the formation of the leaders of today's Republican Party leaders. It was the the point in which the current terms of the "culture war" were largely fixed, especially as it applies to hurrah-patriotism and race, and to a large extent on women's rights, as well. That was the point at which the Republican Party committed itself to the "Southern Strategy" on race the eventually led them to their current state of "fundamental opposition" to a Democratic Administration headed by an African-American President. Projection looms large in Republican culture war thinking. And at some level, many Republicans see today's approach as an attempt to mount a conservative version of what their culture-war collective memory tells them "The Sixites" were.
I don't have any big insightful conclusion on this. But in the conditions of the 21st century, the Republicans' attempts to restore something like a 19th-century, robber-baron-era approach to business regulation and social policy, and to recreate a new segregation/Jim Crow regime of race relations, look like an attempt to radically alter not only the electoral system (by excluding blacks and Latinos) and to radically change the social conditions (for the worse!) for the vast majority of the public. Whether we want to call those "revolutionary" in a political-science or philosophical sense, it certainly seems that they understand their project as a Conservative Revolution against not just the 21st but the 20th century, as well.
Tags: black panther party, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, herbert marcuse, radical right, republican party
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