Political factions have been unraveling the United States for more than thirty years and any consensus of how the republic should be governed that may have existed during the Cold War has long since vanished. Big questions of war and peace, guns or butter, honest and accountable officials in government and business or corruption, and the simple acceptance of a uniform set of facts went out the window little by little after the demise of the Soviet Union. Monstrous as it was, the Soviet Union kept American elites in check and anchored in reality. Foreign interventions, exploitation of workers at home and abroad, and discrimination by race or creed became difficult during the Cold War to sustain, if only in trying to counter Soviet propaganda.
Correlation or causation? It matters less than the results, nothing needs to be efficient or just in the US anymore. As long as organized money gets what it wants, the larger society can collapse. Elite abandonment of the public good has given rise to extremists to the double detriment of American freedom.
Not long after the end of World War II, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. published a prophetic work entitled The Vital Center where he argued among other things that the non-communist left would have to work with the non-fascist right to maintain freedom in the republic if the United States was to survive the new modernity. It is one of those odd facts of history that the idea of freedom must be explained. Schlesinger's freedom was not the flag-waving, swaggering definition that has come to dominate discourse in contemporary America. That perversion of thought should be obvious as privilege because the maniacs espousing this brand of freedom recoil in horror at the thought of granting the same "freedom" to anyone outside of their little tribe.
While this version of freedom is appallingly embraced by most American "conservatives", there are a number of fanatics on the left who have also jumped aboard this crazy train to hell. Schlesinger referred to writers and intellectuals who shoot themselves in the foot by embracing "pie-in-the-sky idealism" without keeping the other foot grounded in the real world of the possible within American politics as "wailers." Wailers used to be confined to a few left-wing journals of dissent, one could live their entire lives without encountering one. One problem with wailers was their frequent embrace of theoretical Marxist ideas without practical, real world application. This led idealists of the left to crusade for economic and social policies without regard for how they would work for a society that did not share their values. Another problem was that communism was a real, going concern in those days. Agents of communist countries often found the wailers receptive to ideas more conducive to strengthening the eastern bloc than creating a more just western world. With real espionage going on, it was hard to tell what was a genuine appeal for a better America, and what was a cynical ploy to stir up unrest for the benefit of the Soviet Union.
These things were real, not in the McCarthyesque cartoon of communists everywhere, but there was a real Cold War and spies on both sides played the game. Our side probably played the game better by offering material comforts to a broad swath of communist society, or at least the illusion of our higher standard of living. Embittering the regular people with evidence of their own deprivation is probably a more effective strategy than winning over converts to theoretical systems. Today, the situation is very different. While during the Cold War republican amateurs could campaign by red-baiting liberals (see Richard Nixon) and tarnishing genuine reform efforts with the stain of communism, at least there really was an outside force that could occupy professional servants of organized money, often drawing them into public service instead if busting unions. With the end of the Cold War, these hyper-patriots had less opportunity to screw with other countries. It is no surprise that many former anti-communist zealots have found their way into right-wing think tanks and continued their crusades on American liberals.
While Schlesinger advocated a robust non-communist left at home and abroad to blunt communist appeals within wailer intellectual circles and the labor movement, an intellectual on the other side warned how freedom in the liberal sense could undermine American institutions directly. James Burnham started his career as a Trotskyist and morphed into an anti-communist conservative of the very right-wing variety. Though outside Schlesinger's Vital Center coalition in both guises, Burnham's ideas have resonated down to contemporary politics a half-century after he wrote them. Liberalism in Suicide of the West is described by Burnham in theoretical terms akin to the Marxist literature in which real world events are less important than how theory dictates those events should play out. Liberals in Burnham's view are incapable of learning from mistakes and guilty of other transgressions against good governance, but not evil or mentally defective in the way right-wingers caricature Democrats today.
One of Burnham's most important observations about freedom in liberal America is its dependence on all political actors playing by the same rules. When a non-liberal faction refused, believers in traditional American liberties such as freedom of speech and association had no real recourse. Liberals either upheld their standards and stood by helpless while totalitarians took over by lying and cheating, or compromise the very ideals liberals most cherish. "Liberalism granted a free hand to its assassins" as Burnham wrote, comparing politics to a football game where one side played by the rules and the other simply wanted to disrupt the game (obviously these were the communist provocateurs). Many years later Thomas Frank expounded on the idea of free market-obsessed theoretical republicans gouging and kicking their way through middle-class America and the institutions built up over decades of compromise between business and the people. But Burnham could have found a parallel in Nazi agitation against the Weimar Republic. Monsters like Joseph Goebbels did not sit by and allow his enemies the freedom to think for themselves but perhaps that was too easy and did not indict communists.
Twelve years after the most deadly attack on American soil and five years after the great economic collapse our country needs a Vital Center more than ever. Whether we will actually get one is still up in the air.
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