The Paranoid Style in American Politics

Of utmost relevance for coming to grips with the fanaticism on the right is Richard Hofstadter's great essay of 1954, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." That this short work remains so important a half century later only testifies to a chronic condition lying deep within the American social matrix: the tendency for those of a long standing ideological discomfort to join others who are suddenly facing marginalization and/or dispossession, and then to divide the world into two. They see, on the one hand, that their troubles are caused by an enemy conspiracy (at one time or another, the Catholics, the Masons, the Jews, and now, the Liberals, who, present day believers claim are, in fact, dreaded Marxist Socialists), led by an agent of virtually apocalyptic evil, (in today's version, bent on centralizing and concentrating power in the executive branch of the federal government*). They see themselves, on the other hand, in a mirror image of their foe, this time, an in-gathering of the faithful, led a clarion caller** who will form them into an army of the righteous while announcing the coming if not arrival of a messianic deliverer** ready to lead them into an Armageddon-like struggle that will end in victorious reconquest of what was, and now again will be, "our America."

As Kurt Vonnegut would have said, "And so it goes."

*These very same persons, by the way, see no contradiction in their anger about supposed Obama-led concentration of power with their support for the Bush-Cheney idea of the unified executive. This latter would surely bring about a massive alteration of constitutional values,for it would place the president above the law. Why? Because the attorney general would no longer serve the constitution, only the president, and thus could never seek an indictment for presidential usurpation of power. And there goes John Locke, Jefferson, and the US Constitution.

**Today, an amalgam of Christian and American revolutionary imagry: Glen Beck, who thinks of himself as a modern Tom Paine, as Sarah Palin's John the Baptist; the faithful now organized into updated 1773 Boston Tea Party units, minute men-like patriots (some already armed), ready, in Beck's words, to "take back our America."

Decency on the Right: Andrew Sullivan

It is most useful to remember that right-populist demogogery has traditionally found enemies within conservative as well as liberal circles. Indeed, American conservatives whose ideas have their provenance in the writings of Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson are reacting to the cheapening and vulgarization of American political discourse by the demogogues about us. No finer example of the power of solid and authentic conservative thinking is Andrew Sullivan's. Please reflect on his heartfelt credo, "Leaving the Right," posted Dec. 1, 2009,on the Atlantic website.

For those on the Obama left, read Howard Kurtz's commentary on both Sullivan's and progressives' outlooks.

Politics of Polarization in America?

Is it possible that the vicious rhetoric and the threats of violence coming from demogogues such as Glenn Beck, and the organized mobs known as Tea Parties, are potential prelude to a politics of violence? John Naar, an artist and political activist for most of a century, has coined the term "Weimarization" to stand for just what might be happening to American society. The historian Fritz Stern, who lived through the Weimar era in Germany, saw the rise of Nazism but escaped to the US to survive into the present, has just published a letter in the November 9, 2009 New York Times to offer a similar point of view. The cleavages between the political parties are growing, with the Beck/Palin partisans ousting moderate Republicans and thereby pushing the Republicans, who are always more disciplined than the Democrats, into a unified position on the far right. Think of the many proto- and not so proto-fascist parties, e.g., the French Poujadistes; Le Pen's followers; the late Haider's in Austria; and so many others, that had a similar rightwing-militant lower middle class anti-tax, anti-immigrant, racist, outlook. History offers too many lessons about the formation of a social base of the angry, the disenfranchised, and the alienated, all set for a neo-fascist politics that leads by its very nature into mob violence.

Current Fiction

I’ve been reading some fiction, most current, most but not all with political tones or overtones:

Horacio Castellanos Moya, SENSELESSNESS
Stuart Arthur Cohen, THE ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC
Mohsin Hamid, THE RELUCTANT FUNDMENTALIST
Michel Houllebecq, PLATFORM; ATOMIZED; POSSIBLITY OF AN ISLAND
Ferenc Karinthy, METROPOLE
P.F. Kluge, GONE TOMORROW
Jonathan Lethem, CHRONIC CITY
Boualem Sansal, THE GERMAN MUJAHID
Kamila Shamsie, BURNT SHADOWS
Mario Vargas Llosa, THE BAD GIRL.

Realities within Realities/Comix

I've just finished Jonathan Lethem new CHRONIC CITY, which poses realities within realities, and is thus in clear resonance with, among others, Philip K. Dick's THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH and Paul Auster's NEW YORK TRILOGY. But where Dick was realistic in understanding how power manipulates and even "creates" reality, Auster and Lethem offer tours de force of puzzle making, detective work and puzzle solution (of sorts). Lethem, in addition, offers Pynchon-like wacko characterization and endless spinning out of plot. Why Manhattan as locus for Auster and Lethem's realities within realities? My friend JJ Penna offers as explanation the fact that a Manhattan dweller or frequent visitor (CHRONIC CITY takes place on Manhattan’s upper east side) is continuously shocked by the rapidity of turn-over of shops and sites – one’s bagel shop today is a GAP shop tomorrow. Second Avenue in Manhattan is in the throes of a cacaphonic excavation for the development of a new subway line that is uprooting cherished neighborhoods north and south. In other words, the visible and virtual commonwealth of civic life is overthrown: one finds oneself in foreign terrain. For upper east siders, this is especially tough because much of the old neighborhoods have withstood the changes that had engulfed so many others over the last decades.

But these changes are symbolic; metaphoric, only exemplary of other changes.

Another explanation: reality is for the most of us televised. But in what reality sit those who determine what is the televised? And behind them? And think of the Bush administrator who told Rick Perlstein that the White House and associates were creating realty. So reality exists within reality. And thus back to Philip K. Dick

Lethem is a minor master of the list -- names, for example, that make him and/or his characters seemingly au courant with literature, pop and high arts, politics, etc.; but each entry at best a clever synecdoche that alludes to something else, to which he does not go, but the reader comes to feel that he/she is making connections and is thus “with it.” As for the characters -- they are themselves two-dimensional. Of course the major protagonist, Chase Insteadman, is in fact self-confessedly two dimensional, admitting his own utter banal superficiality. But the other characters are as well comic book types. Which leads me to wonder about why, along with multi-dimensionality, has arisen a major contemporary theme, the comic book. Chabon writes about comics (or "comix" as I've seen it spelled); R. Crumb and Spiegelman write and draw them, as do legions of other graphic writers, illustrators and now, film makers. Can it be that the powers of graphic lit and film lie in their ability to take us back to our childhood, rooted as it was in timeless myth and wonder, thereby retrieving for each of us a vantage point of supposed innocence and naiveté from which we can once again engage and confront reality, this time with wonder, yes, but a wonder of the world weary variety that moves dialectically into cynicism and despair?

Contra Adam Kirsch

In a recent review in the Tablet Magazine and reprinted on-line in the August 21, 2009 issue of The New Republic, Adam Kirsch takes issue with my speculations (discussed extensively in Chapter 7 of my book) as to why Bernstein died frustrated over his self-confessed failure to compose a magnum opus of political and ethical significance. Kirsch quotes me: "Bernstein's compositional frustration had its roots more in the evolving American social fabric ... than in his supposedly limited talents, his idiosyncrasies, his habits, and his psychological dispositions." He then states his disagreement with me, arguing that Bernstein's failure cannot be blamed on external conditions. If Mahler, Stravinsky and Schoenberg could compose under adverse conditions, then, he asks, why not Bernstein?

Let me begin by noting that it is rather unfair of Kirsch to compare Bernstein to Mahler, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, not on grounds of comparative talent, but because Bernstein had a uniquely different job to fulfill than theirs, and that was to intervene at the political barricades. Whereas his predecessors did not need great insight into the motivations and outlooks of varieties of political groups in order to compose, Bernstein did, for during the last two decades of his life, ending in 1990, Bernstein sought to compose an opera that would awaken the conscience of Americans on the left who were fighting amongst themselves or even moving to the conservative right. For this effort, he searched for a text, a libretto on which to compose that work. Bernstein never found that libretto, and thus never got to compose that work.

I will elaborate on this by first dismissing something Kirsch claims for me, the simplistic proposition that Bernstein, in Kirsch’s words, was “let down by Ronald Reagan.” What I did claim is that for Bernstein, as for so many others on the progressive left, Reagan’s victory in 1980 was a culmination of a long disintegration of the old progressive and moderate left coalition, a breakup that had been developing over the course of the decades from the late sixties through the eighties, when so many liberals, including millions in organized labor, supported the war in Vietnam; as progressive and liberal Jews found themselves attacked by Afro-Americans with whom they thought were allies; as so many liberals moved to neo-conservative positions; and as white and ethnic blue collar voters, in reaction to the civil rights, anti-war, counter-cultural, feminist, gay and lesbian political movements, moved from liberalism to conservativism. As old alliances fell apart and former enemies lined up against former friends, Bernstein, like many other progressives, was thrown into despair. By the mid 1970s, he was struggling to find a means to express in musical-theatrical form his upset with these great electoral and ideological realignments, and to champion the causes of the disenfranchised. He subtitled an early version of his 1977 cycle Songfest – which touched on the new politics of identity -- “Notes for an American Opera.” He searched endlessly for a method by which to turn those “notes” into a conceptually clear operatic narrative, a libretto that would inspire his musical composition, that would appeal to what he thought was Americans’ innately progressive ethical and political outlook, and thereby to inspire them to overcome their mutual animosities and hostilities. But as the years rolled on, his search remained in vain: the conservative right gained in numbers and grew more confident about itself and toward the left, more derisive, while the left became increasingly weakened and virtually drifted from its ideological moorings. (Remember that in 1988, Bernstein turned to the op-ed page of the New York Times to address an American left that was so demoralized that it cringed at the mere mention of the word “liberal.”) Bernstein died in 1990, at the height of Reagan-Bush conservatism, like so many other progessives -- see the entries in this blog under American Politics and American Literature -- unable to explain how the conservative revolution had so altered the American scene. Thus his frustration that he had not composed that work of significance.

In sum, Bernstein's failure to compose what he thought would be his magnum opus was in fact due to what Kirsch denies, namely, “the confusions of the time.”

Let me conclude by noting that Bernstein’s problem has not gone away. Do we really need to remind ourselves that the struggles to understand the causes of, and find the remedies for, the various modes of political and cultural despair, are still very much with us today? The problems that made Bernstein and his generation so despondent did not go away with Clinton’s victory, nor have they gone away with Obama’s.