Friday, May 09, 2003
[a new blog ought to have some content, so here's a note I tossed off to my usual grumbing-group this morning.]
I've been musing about politics and ideology in my drive-time since returning from a short Cozumel dive trip last weekend. Some more or less random thoughts:
Folks are starting to think and talk a lot about the '04 presidential election, at the same time that post-war commentary from left, right and elsewhere seems to begin to be settling in to the "digestion" phase. On the latter point, I think it's worthwhile to read Margaret Drabble's anti-American screed in the Telegraph that's linked on ALDaily this morning. Drabble's essay is one of the clearest examples I've seen of a kind of European anti-Americanism that's based on an aesthetic revulsion more than any sort of principled philosophical or even ideological basis. Except for the "illegal war" and "it's all about oil" ideas, I find much of the Euro-weenie anti-American sentiment boils down to this -- "America is gauche and bourgeois, eeeewwwww." This may be a strong sentiment, but it's fundamentally reactionary and certainly not "progressive" in any meaningful sense of the word. I think this marks a basic weakness for the anti-Americans and the traditional left from which they mainly come. Thinking about this has led me to some ideas about how deeply wounded the left is, some ideas about why that is and what it may all mean ...
When I look at the left today, I see a politically balkanized front. The U.S. democratic party is a collection of ideologically disjointed constituencies: many victim groups, from blacks, to women, to gays, each fighting for their specific agenda, labor unions, fighting a sad rear-guard action based on a vision of an industrial America that doesn't exist any more, wealthy plaintiff's lawyers and media celebrates, old Marxists in academia, greens and machine politicians. The right in America is VERY different and I think can be meaningfully divided into just two distinct groups that have any chance of political impact: The "paleoconservatives" and the "neocons." The former group includes "social/cultural conservatives" with much in common, and the latter includes the corporatist and Chicago-school elites and the new foreign-policy leaders. Uniting those two groups is MUCH easier than uniting the extremely disparate groups that make up the polyglot "left" in America. The strength of the Naderite Green Party is a sign of the multiple fracture lines in what gets called the left in America. What is seen on the left is an inherently unstable shifting alliance that can be tipped over in many ways by a much more unified "right."
Why is this? I honestly think that one of the main reasons for this is that the deep philosophical foundation of the left has collapsed. That foundation -- not acknowledged, but real nevertheless -- was Marxism and class theory. With the obvious judgment of history now in, there is no ideological core. The right on the other hand has a still vital ideological core: for the paleos it's religion and for the neocons it's lassez-faire capitalism, invigorated by the mid-20th century Chicago theorists. The only group that challenges the ideological alliance is the tiny fringe to which I belong, the humanist libertarians. No one listens to us and there's no risk of any humanist libertarian being elected to office on this planet, so there's no threat the paleo-neo alliance upon which the right bases its political power can be fractured. A sign of the robustness of the paleo-neo alliance is the relatively peaceful way that the "Patriot Act" is being rolled back -- the neos knew it was wrong and they're slowly succeeding in quieting the mad dog paleos on that front. Somehow, the people who run the alliance know that Ashcroft et al. are the biggest threat to their power, and realize that curbing their excesses is the route to staying in power. The weak leftist alliance has no such political statesmanship on their side.
I'm out of time to write this evening, so I'll toss these thoughts out for your consideration ...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:56 PM
