One of the great things about my little vacation was an opportunity to read stuff I haven't had a chance to read in years. One of them was a collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. I first read it the summer I was married, fourteen years ago, and have read an essay or two in it but not the whole thing at once since. I have also started a later collection, The Proper Study of Mankind. All of this is a springboard to reflections on our current situation, an analysis that may or may not be correct, but certainly helps me figure out where we are, and maybe - just maybe - where we are headed.
When George Bush was re-elected in 2004, my wife and I were both quite down about it. "I don't understand it," she told me. My response was, "Maybe people have to let things get really bad before they want to change." I said that thinking people were accepting of the status quo until a crisis emerged that forced them to question their acceptance of it. I also thought, at the time, that things couldn't get much worse than they already were. I honestly couldn't imagine the level of base criminality and stupidity, not just of the Administration, but of elected Republicans in general. I feel quite chastened as I think about this now; the pervasive corruption of the entire Republican establishment should serve as an object lesson to all those who wonder about our political culture. There is little that impedes the corrosive and seductive effects of power when those who hold power believe themselves ordained by God to rule.
In the two-and-a-half years since the election, a series of political and cultural and natural events have highlighted (as if there was ever any question) the evident failures not just of the Bush Administration, but of the Republican Party and its dominant ideology. Hurricane Katrina and the failure to save New Orleans, Terry Schiavo, the on-going war in Iraq (for some reason, our dismal performance in Afghanistan, allowing the ousted Taliban to reform is rarely mentioned; consider it mentioned), the pervasive corruption and unresponsiveness of the Republican-led Congress, the destruction of the integrity and independence of the entire federal bureaucracy as the Bush Administration used it to serve narrow, partisan ends. This list, of course only highlights the most egregious and most obvious faults and flaws. It would seem, however, that the total effect of these has been to create a situation where not only the President, but Congress, too, sinks in public esteem (although that is a general institutional rating; Democrats in Congress, especially when they are acting in the public interest, get much higher scores than when they capitulate to dominant narratives of "bipartisanship"). The public clamors for release from the Bush Administration and its misrule. How are we to navigate these strange waters in which we find ourselves?
The most important point to consider when trying to make sense out of our current political dilemma is that the public, more intelligent than the combined wisdom of our pundits and national journalists, recognize not just malfeasance but maladministration, and seek a remedy within the context of the available options. For too long, our political choices have ranged over a very narrow band of acceptability; with the Bush Administration's - indeed, the Republican Party in general - abject failures, there is the realization that the kind of taboos that have existed for a quarter century no longer apply because the circumstances within which we find ourselves are unique. Bill Clinton attempted to govern within these new realities, and was remarkably successful at it. The struggle, in the six-and-a-half years since George Bush's election, has been over the plurality that refused to recognize these changed realities - and our dominant media's refusal to grant these changes the status of acceptability. From redefining what "liberal" and "conservative" mean to rethinking the role of the United States in world affairs to questions of domestic policy from taxes to suburban sprawl, we have tried to engage an entire new way of living as the United States, while our dominant media and politicians continued to pretend we had just won World War II and were the biggest kid on the block with the biggest stick (the "lone superpower" delusion).
Over the coming weeks I am going to examine the changes that I think have occurred, what they mean, how the public has reacted to them, and the obstinate refusal of our dominant elites to grant these new realities the status they deserve. Let me state my theses - yes, they are plural - clearly, as I shall be defending and fleshing them out over time:
- The end of the Cold War caught our elites by surprise. Most have continued to act as if the US "victory" provided an opportunity for us to act unilaterally as the "lone superpower", aided and abetted by media elites who continued to live within this no-longer-controlling paradigm. The public, however, has reacted differently, and only now are politicians catching up.
- As the Goldwater campaign of 1964 was to conservatism, the 1972 defeat of George McGovern was a Pyrrhic defeat of liberalism. McGovern's campaign and platform, even with all its limitations, failures, and comedic aspects, reflects a post-Cold War political ideology that events have finally allowed to flourish. We are, now, McGovernites.
- Our dominant media elites, while certainly craven and stupid, are also blinded by their adherence to outmoded ways of thinking and presenting the world to us. The most interesting aspect of this disconnect is the public, by and large, recognize the reality not given by the elites' interpretation, and refuse to go along with their dominant narrative. Thus the elite call the public stupid, ignorant, misguided, or even unethical or immoral. Rather, it is the elites who are ignorant, blind, and stuck in a past that no longer applies.
- There are intellectual and historical tools available for interpreting what is happening, the best including the views on pluralism voiced by Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor, on pragmatism and social hope voiced by Richard Rorty, and inclusion voiced by Miroslav Volf.
