[I should note what Rich and CR both picked up on; namely, that this post resembled a series of leading questions in a classroom discussion. I may waddle through the middle there, but the condemnation's fist-to-table, fist-to-table, fist-to-table. Structuring posts like lesson-plans has the occasional drawback. That said, before anyone cries liberal bias, read the post again, closely-like, for the core of Didion's criticism.]
Were I a hypocrite, I'd do my damnedest to fly below Joan Didion's radar. Blue State, Red State, doesn't matter. If your flight plan demands you show your Janus-face above 30,000 ft., she'll radiolocate it, scramble fighters and laugh as you fall burning from the clear, blue sky. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem's titular essay, the hippies earned her ire:
We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vaccum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that society's atomization could be reveresed .... As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from 'a broken home.' They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words. (123)
In "Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)"—also from Slouching Towards Bethlehem—she denatured communist talking points:
He was born twenty-six years ago in Brooklyn, moved as a child to Los Angeles, dropped out of U.C.L.A. his sophomore year to organize for the Retail Clerks, and now, as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party U.S.A. (Marxist-Leninist), a splinter group of Stalinist-Maoists who divide their energies between Watts and Harlem, he is rigidly committed to an immutable complex of doctrine, including the notion thats that the traditional American Communist Party is a "revisionist bourgeois clique," that the Progressive Labor Party, the Trotskyites, and the "revisionist clique headed by Gus Hall" prove themselves opportunistic bourgeois lackeys by making their peace appeal not to the "workers" but to the liberal imperialists; and that H. Rap Brown is the tool, if not the conscious agent, of the ruling imperialist class. (61-62)
The world Michael Laski had constructed for himself was one of labyrinthine intricacy and immaculate clarity, a world made meaningful not only by high purpose but by external and internal threats, intrigues and apparatus, an immutably ordered world in which things mattered. (65)
In Political Fictions, she assaulted establishment politics and the mainstream media's coverage of it:
Few, in 1992, spoke of the United States as so infantilized as to require a president above the possibility of personal reproach. That so few did this then, and so many havve done this since, has been construed by some as evidence that the interests and priorities of the press have changed. In fact the interests and priorities of the press have remained reliably the same: then as now, the press could be relied upon to report a rumor or a hint down to the ground (tree it, bag it, defoliate the forest for it, destroy the village for it), but only insofar as that rumor or hint gave promise of advancing the story of the day, the shared narrative, the broad line of whatever the story was at the given moment commanding the full resources of the reporters covering it and the columnists commenting on it and the on-tap experts analyzing it on the talk shows. (219)
In this sense, as some have pointed out, the "new media" is no better than its traditional counterpart. Regardless of your position on the political cant of contemporary media outlets, you can't deny the power or accuracy of her description. The media becks to the call of power, no matter whose holds it. And it becks all the harder if it can contribute to our further infantilizaiton:
We head repeatedly about "out children," or "or kids," who were, as presented, avid consumers of the Night News in whose presence sex had never before been mentioned and discussions of the presidency were routine. (233)
Winston Churchill famously claimed that "any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains." What are we to make of a writer who began her career as a vicious critic of the left and is finishing it as a vociferous critic of the right? I'd argue that the same mind which dissected the left with clinical precision in the '60s and '70s has, quite frankly failed to develop according to the Churchill's model. Why?
Didn't need to. The skills required to recognize and ribbon hypocrisy were fully developed by the time she could buy gin. Her attacks on the current administration shouldn't be read as her plotting a new political course. She attacks those who deserve it not because she has an agenda, but because of her unbridled hostility toward hypocrisy.[1] I write all this as a prelude and admonition to read her latest article, "Cheney: The Fatal Touch," in which she treats Cheney with the same respect she once doled to everyone else who avoided service in Vietnam. She discusses how he earned his way into Yale:
his high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent, introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor named Thomas Stroock who, he later told Nicholas Lemann, "called Yale and told 'em to take this guy." The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney's networking lasted three semesters, took a year off before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave.
How he dealt with that setback:
He graduated from Wyoming in 1965 and, in the custom of the Vietnam years, went on to receive a master's degree. He never wrote a dissertation ("did all the work for my doctorate except the dissertation," as if the dissertation were not the point) and so never got the doctorate in political science for which he then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin.
His love of delegation:
In the Ford White House, where he and Rumsfeld were known as "the little Praetorians," Cheney cultivated a control of detail that extended even to questioning the use in the residence of "little dishes of salt with funny little spoons" rather than "regular salt shakers."
His take on the "limits" of presidential authority:
It was the Vice President who took the early offensive on the contention that whatever the decider decides to do is by definition legal. "We believe, Jim, that we have all the legal authority we need," the Vice President told Jim Lehrer on PBS after it was reported that the National Security Agency was conducting warrantless wiretapping in violation of existing statutes. It was the Vice President who pioneered the tactic of not only declaring such apparently illegal activities legal but recasting them as points of pride, commands to enter attack mode, unflinching defenses of the American people by a president whose role as commander in chief authorizes him to go any extra undisclosed mile he chooses to go on their behalf.
His commitment to hiring those who challenge his beliefs:
As secretary of defense for George H.W. Bush, Cheney made Addington his special assistant and ultimately his general counsel. As vice-president for George W. Bush, Cheney again turned to Addington, and named him, after the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in connection with the exposure of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA agent, his chief of staff. "You're giving away executive power," Addington has been reported to snap at less committed colleagues. He is said to keep a photograph in his office of Cheney firing a gun. He vets every line of the federal budget to eradicate any wording that might restrain the President. He also authors the "signing statements" now routinely issued to free the President of whatever restrictive intent might have been present in whichever piece of legislation he just signed into law. A typical signing statement, as written by Addington, will refer repeatedly to the "constitutional authority" of "the unitary executive branch," and will often mention multiple points in a single bill that the President declines to enforce.
Signing statements are not new, but at the time Bill Clinton left office, the device had been used, by the first forty-two presidents combined, fewer than six hundred times. George W. Bush, by contrast, issued more than eight hundred such takebacks during the first six years of his administra-tion. Those who object to this or any other assumption of absolute executive power are reflexively said by those who speak for the Vice President to be "tying the president's hands," or "eroding his ability to do his job," or, more ominously, "aiding those who don't want him to do his job."
His ability to rethink his theories in light of old information:
If the case for war lacked a link between September 11 and Iraq, the Vice President would repeatedly cite the meeting that neither American nor Czech intelligence believed had taken place between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague: "It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attacks," he would say on NBC in December 2001. "We discovered...the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague," he would say on NBC in March 2002. "We have reporting that places [Atta] in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center," he would say on NBC in September 2002. "The senator has got his facts wrong," he would then say while debating Senator John Edwards during the 2004 campaign. "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11."
What the Vice President was doing with the intelligence he received has since been characterized as "cherry-picking," a phrase suggesting that he selectively used only the more useful of equally valid pieces of intelligence. This fails to reflect the situation. The White House had been told by the CIA that no meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence had ever occurred.
His intellectual curiosity:
At the point he had reached by September 2002, going to war was not even about the consequences. Not the issue, he had said. The personality that springs to mind is that of the ninth-grade bully in the junior high lunchroom, the one sprawled in the letter jacket so the seventh-graders must step over his feet. There was in a June letter from Senator Arlen Specter to Cheney, made public by Specter, an image that eerily conveyed just that: "I was surprised, to say the least, that you sought to influence, really determine, the action of the Committee without calling me first, or at least calling me at some point," Specter wrote, referring to actions Cheney had taken to block his Judiciary Committee from conducting a hearing on NSA surveillance. "This was especially perplexing since we both attended the Republican Senators caucus lunch yesterday and I walked directly in front of you on at least two occasions enroute from the buffet to my table."
How he makes America safer by outsourcing:
Private firms in Iraq have done more than build bases and bridges and prisons. They have done more than handle meals and laundry and transportation. They train Iraqi forces. They manage security. They interrogate prisoners. Contract interrogators from two firms, CACI International (according to its Web site "a world leader in providing timely solutions to the intelligence community") and Titan ("a leading provider of comprehensive information and communications products, solutions, and services for National Security"), were accused of abuses at Abu Ghraib, where almost half of all interrogators and analysts were CACI employees. They operate free of oversight. They distance the process of interrogation from the citizens in whose name, or in whose "defense," or to ensure whose "security," the interrogation is being conducted. They offer "timely solutions."
His opposition to genocide:
As a member of the House during the cold war and then as secretary of defense during the Gulf War and then as CEO of Halliburton, the Vice President had seen up close the way in which a war in which "our goal will not be achieved overnight" could facilitate the flow of assets from the government to the private sector and back to whoever in Washington greases the valves. "The first person to greet our soldiers as they arrive in the Balkans and the last one to wave goodbye is one of our employees," as he put it during his Halliburton period.
As you can guess, I highly recommend reading the article itself and connecting these damning strands. But before any knees jerk or anyone lets the condemnations fly, I ask you to remember Didion's independence, her reputation for skewering those who deserve skewering. She is no partisan attack dog, so her comments must be motivated by something stronger than a simple hatred of this administration.
1 I had intended here to discuss her recent work in some detail, but I don't want to bore to death the few who've lasted this longer. So, if you're interested in reading more about Didion, check out my first anti-psychoanalytic broadside, in which I discuss her Fixed Ideas, or her essay on "Mr. Bush & the Divine," which I've saved for your convenience.
An attack on hypocrisy is actually rather weak. People who disagree with fundamental Republican goals really should hate this administration. If they dislike it, but their strongest objection is to its hypocrisy, there's something wrong.
I don't know whether Didion actually is attacking hypocrisy in her piece on Cheney -- the quotes that you list seem like fairly standard biographical criticism. There is nothing hypocritical about being a straightforward power-seeker who games whatever system is available.
But the three earlier extended quotes that you chose do have a certain type of link. They're linked by dislike of people who try to create meaning. The hippies make the "desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community". The communist has "an immutably ordered world in which things mattered". The media are only interested in "advancing the story of the day, the shared narrative, the broad line of whatever the story was". In combination with the common put-down in all three (the hippies are childish, the communist "moved as a child", the media infantilizes), there's something very tiresome about this theme. It's not a critique of the hippie's impracticality, the communist's doctrinalism, or the media's herd mentality, really; it's Didion lecturing children to leave the creation of meaning to grown-ups like herself. And why do they care so much, anyway? Can't they float above the fray, as she does?
I'm not sure whether this is really Didion coming through, or whether it's more of an artifact of your choice of excerpts and framing, but I suspect that it's some combination of your desire to not have Didion's writing on Cheney dismissed as partisan and Didion's own attitude. That last being why, despite her undoubted skill as a writer, I've never thought much of her as a social essayist.
And the Churchill quote, by the way, was probably never really said by Churchill.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Wednesday, 20 September 2006 at 09:29 PM
Whoa. I've really been agreeing with Rich lately. A lot. Jesus, Scott, you self-prophylacticization against partisanship makes you sound like a CNN anchor or a Times editor or something.
Why now, this anxiety about taking sides? I mean "now" in the last-five-years sense...
The bad guys played no better card since all of this started than the "bias" card. All of a sudden, the word "bias" has become one of the go-to words even in my students' papers. (I have, since I noticed, prohibited its usage in written work for my class - it is a useless word, a shortcut for non-thinking.) Outside of my utopic classes: all of a sudden, there are two right sides to every point, there is a need to have all sorts of compromising discussions with those who wish us ill, with those who not only won't be convinced but who willfully refuse to be convinced.
Sigh.
But I agree with Rich.
Posted by: CR | Wednesday, 20 September 2006 at 09:46 PM
You suspect correctly: my classroom-like attempt to create a Didion palatable to both sides of the aisle is an artifact of this post being cross-posted to a conservative blog. Demonstrating that Didion's judgments are independent of what's now called "bias" is, I think, essential to having her thought on Cheney taken seriously by those who'd otherwise be inclined to dismiss it as, well, baldly partisan. (Which it isn't.)
That said, you're right about Didion's tendency to lecture others. I suppose I put up with it because she does so in damn near perfect prose ...
I see this danger, but I think, in the end, Didion's condemnation of Cheney and the current administration is unequivocal. Still, I see how the pedagogical tactics I've employed here seem to leave in the air, well, at least the possibility that there's another valid conclusion to be drawn. Needless to say, Didion doesn't draw it, nor do I.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Thursday, 21 September 2006 at 03:11 AM
I understand, but one problem is that the ( disclaimer / pedagogical technique / frame / demonstration of nonbias / whatever you want to call it ) is obscuring the actual material. It isn't really a set of leading questions; it's a set of claims that Didion attacks hypocrisy. And I'm really not sure that is what she does -- at least, the quotes that you chose don't demonstrate it. Not even the Cheney-related ones do. Look at the piece on Addington, for instance, and you will see a depiction of a true believer in executive power. There's nothing hypocritical about that.
So that's the first-order problem. The second-order problem is with Didion's writing itself, at least as presented by this set of quotes. I wrote before that they are all attacks on the creation of meaning; perhaps a better way to put it might be that they are attacks on true believers. But they aren't the kind of attacks that you might see from someone demanding evidence, reflection, or reason instead of faith; they represent Didion scorning people as childish because they have some kind of political belief. The adult, the expert writer, the apolitical -- i.e. Didion herself -- knows better than to do any such thing.
That's not just lecturing, which I have no intrinsic objection to. It's a form of condescension. And as such, it's a very weak attack on Cheney. Look at this paragraph near the end of her piece:
"There remains a further reason why "other priorities" still nags. It suggests other agendas, undisclosed strategies. We had watched this White House effect the regulatory changes that would systematically dismantle consumer and workplace and environmental protections. We had watched this White House run up the deficits that ensured that the conservative dream of rolling back government will necessarily take place, because there will be no money left to pay for it. We had heard the Vice President speak as recently as January 2004 about our need to recolonize the world, build bases, "warm bases, bases we can fall in on, on a crisis and have present the capabilities we need to operate from.""
So Cheney is rolling back environmental law and running up deficits to defund the government and building bases to recolonize the world. That's not an undisclosed strategy. That's GOP boilerplate. Didion must present this is if it is some hidden mystery, objectionable because it is hidden, because she can't bring herself to say that it's wrong whether it's hidden or not. The problem that she harps on with the contract interrogators in Iraq is that they are "free of oversight", not that they are torturing people under the direction of our government. She has to make it appear that Cheney's problem is that he is hiding something, when he is not -- "I had other priorities" couldn't be clearer -- because otherwise she would have to, finally, condemn, and admit that she too believes in something.
So your desire to pitch this for conservative consumption interacts with Didion's own problems. It's a denial on top of a denial. As such, I don't think that it convinces, and I don't think that it meets the pedagogical standards that you would have in an actual teaching situation.
So I'm back to my partial agreement with Tim Burke on the thread on Althouse. It simply isn't worth it to argue with conservatives. By the time you've produced something that you think may make it past their barriers of irrationality, you've crumpled the source material.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Thursday, 21 September 2006 at 06:50 AM
It simply isn't worth it to argue with conservatives. By the time you've produced something that you think may make it past their barriers of irrationality, you've crumpled the source material.
This may be true - indeed, I know arguing with creationists is a lose-lose scenario, but still, I'm glad Scott is doing it. We may never convince the creationists/conservatives, but we might make them think twice about trying to rewrite our textbooks.
Resistance is not futile.
Posted by: Brian | Thursday, 21 September 2006 at 11:28 AM
But then, I'm not one of those people who likes "free speech zones" either. And besides, I've since quit teaching, so what do I know?
Of course, I might point out that simply prohibiting the use of the word rather than insisting on its proper deployment is, well, "a shortcut for non-thinking." Which, there's a certain irony to that I must say I quite enjoy.
And don't try to convince me I'm wrong. I'm a conservative (though I'd call myself a "classical liberal," but hey, Scott's site, Scott's designations), and so it is clearly not worth arguing with me.
QED.
Posted by: Jeff G | Friday, 22 September 2006 at 07:50 AM
No, you're not worth arguing with.
But it's worth giving people here a brief reminder of what I'm talking about. Here's a quote from the last blog post of yours that Google turned up (http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/20352/):
"At worst, such mandated hiring practices will hurt men, who have entered the hard sciences in greater numbers. Meaning the few women who have entered the hard sciences will almost all be guaranteed jobs, while the majority of the men will have to fight over the remaining positions.
Not only does this paradigm remove merit from the equation in favor of bringing “feminine sensibilities” to the hard sciences, which are supposed to be largely empirical, but that aside, haven’t we been told for the last 20-30 years that “gender” is largely a social construct, making the sensibilities in question dependent on something other than physical plumbing or brain chemistry?
It’s like the progressives can’t get their message straight."
It's all there -- your willingness to write in ignorance about a field that you know nothing about, your hackneyed reliance on boilerplate phrases, your quotes around "feminine sensibilities", which did not appear as a phrase or even a concept in the article that you are criticizing, your confusion between progressive and academic-theoretical messages. If this post is representative of the quality of your thought, as I suspect that it is, then there is nothing to be lost by not considering your ideas. You may or may not eat paste -- but since you write paste, I can understand how the confusion arose.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Friday, 22 September 2006 at 08:25 AM
Meaning the few women who have entered the hard sciences will almost all be guaranteed jobs, while the majority of the men will have to fight over the remaining positions.
Jesus Fucking Christ. I mean there's ignorance and stupidity, and then there's this...
Posted by: Brian | Friday, 22 September 2006 at 10:53 AM
About Didion:
I believe I pointed this out in our last Burkeborkin' go-around about "symbolic politics", Scott, and this confirms my suspicion that it didn't register any more than anything else I said in that exchange. Anyway: the repellent thing about Slouching Toward Bethlehem is the way that Didion insulates her depiction of the counterculture from any whisper of the war (knowing this lacuna is glaring, she then tries to compensate by writing a self-contained section on the army and war itself, cordoned off from the other critiques). The "spoiled" "infantilism" of the hippies is rhetorically created by making it appear in a vacuum, as if all the 'feminine,' lovey-dovey stuff sipmly appeared out of nowhere & was not dialectically related to a brutal war machine grinding up its own children. Sure there was plenty of Oedipalized infantilism in the sixties, but a culture that doesn't want a generation of "infantilized" teenagers blundering their way blindly into self-assertion without adult guidance would do well not to have parents putting guns to their kids' heads and saying they need to suck it up and die in the jungle with a smile so the family won't lose face with the neighbors.
It's not that Didion misses this. It's that she sees it quite clearly and works very, very hard to keep it out of representation. Which is germane to the issue of hypocrisy.
Rich articulates quite precisely for me what I dislike about Didion's writing: the unearned condescension coupled with the "transcendent" posture of being above mere human politics, which forces her to compact apparently moral critiques into the language of procedure (secrets!) or pathology (infants!). Her critique is actually and carefully just aesthetic: events and people repel her, the way that bad wallpaper or a foul order might. Camille Paglia writes like this, much less skillfully; it's the same unfalsifiable modality and with Didion it's more creepy because it's applied to high-stakes politics & not just literature.
(You and your fairfairminded proceduralist heroes like Burke and Berube, by the way, always fall into just this kind of ew-repellent writing whenever you start to go on about the nebulous evil-infantilized street-theater 'left', as if there is actually some powerful paraliberal 'left' political culture in the U.S. that balances out the right so liberals can be in middle, like Goldilocks, just right! and as if any leftward para-party political ripple in the noosphere can always be dismissively explained by "infantilism." Rich, too, when he's in a mood.
In practice, proceduralist fairfairmindedness only applies to constituencies that have large pluralities and therefore enough social power that rhetorical seduction is deemed worthwhile in a power-seeking sense: in this culture, for liberals, it only ever faces right. The nearly nonexistent 'left' doesn't qualify numerically, so it is never engaged dialogically, given Fukuyman 'recognition,' or represented with anything approaching fairfairminded accuracy. But at the same time, its nebulous influence is exaggerated into a monstrously influential counterweight to the right, pinning noble liberals in a two-front war!
Please focus and listen carefully: it is possible, at a basic human level, to find this set of rhetorical moves cowardly and morally disgusting without having any institutionally "leftist" commitments that might provide you boys with the hook for the easy 'infantile' dismissal. Kind of like your basic human concern about 'hypocrisy,' hey Scott? Yet I haven't found a single alpha liberal on the internets, not one, who can treat an argument like this with respect or even have the self-discipline to momentarily stem the logorrheic tide of GreenpuppetNadertyedyeCounterSDSPunch attribution insinuation & hatemongering if someone should try to make it. As a simple and linear result, my philosophical & moral assessment of American academic liberals, O let me tell ya, has changed a great deal over the last five years.)
(Anyhoo, I'm not so surprised that you like Didion; I'm actually kinda suprised that Rich doesn't.)
(Okay, that's all.)
Posted by: T.V. | Sunday, 24 September 2006 at 10:33 PM
Yes, T.V., I'm still not "you're kind of leftist." To wit:
Maybe there could've been, you know, if the left had followed the path taken by the now powerful paraconservative "right" political culture. Despite backing down from numerous earlier objections in posts you didn't comment on, that's still my point. Still will be, for the foreseeable future. That's thing about What If... scenarios: you deal with the evidence you have and reevaluate it in any you acquire. If I see reason to believe that the left couldn't have done what the right did, I'll bite. The but-but-but WHAT ELSE COULD THEY HAVE DONE? rhetoric satisfies as much now as it did then, but it only tempers my condemnation of what they did do; it does nothing to convince me that they could not, in fact, have done more. (To wit: I increasingly blame the failures of the New Left on those of the Old. Still revolves around ideas you'd dismiss as complicit, but at least we share a target, eh?)
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Monday, 25 September 2006 at 06:35 PM
In practice, proceduralist fairfairmindedness only applies to constituencies that have large pluralities and therefore enough social power that rhetorical seduction is deemed worthwhile in a power-seeking sense: in this culture, for liberals, it only ever faces right. The nearly nonexistent 'left' doesn't qualify numerically, so it is never engaged dialogically, given Fukuyman 'recognition,' or represented with anything approaching fairfairminded accuracy. But at the same time, its nebulous influence is exaggerated into a monstrously influential counterweight to the right, pinning noble liberals in a two-front war!
Please focus and listen carefully: it is possible, at a basic human level, to find this set of rhetorical moves cowardly and morally disgusting without having any institutionally "leftist" commitments that might provide you boys with the hook for the easy 'infantile' dismissal. Kind of like your basic human concern about 'hypocrisy,' hey Scott? Yet I haven't found a single alpha liberal on the internets, not one, who can treat an argument like this with respect or even have the self-discipline to momentarily stem the logorrheic tide of GreenpuppetNadertyedyeCounterSDSPunch attribution insinuation & hatemongering if someone should try to make it. As a simple and linear result, my philosophical & moral assessment of American academic liberals, O let me tell ya, has changed a great deal over the last five years.)
If this is pretending to be a response to "Berube and Burke" as well as Scott, then this is about as stupid an account of liberal-left critiques of the further-"left" as I've ever seen. Because really, the last thing T.V. wants one of his "alpha liberals" to do is to undertake a long, dry, point-by-point critique of the "radical" "left," as I did on my blog from August 7-11 of this year (when one wing of that "left" was charmingly chanting "we are all Hezbollah now"). Critiques like mine, which quote "radical" "leftists" at considerable length and proceed to argue with them, are especially unacceptable (the usual term for them on the T.V. "left" is "smears"), because what the Turbulent One wants, finally, is complete and total agreement with whatever "radical" sentiment he's feeling at the moment. Anything else falls under the heading of (a) ignoring the "left" because it is not a sufficiently powerful constituency or (b) exaggerating its influence so as to make a fraudulent pitch to the "center."
Scott, please focus and listen carefully as I condescend to harangue you: you shouldn't waste a second of your time worrying about T.V.'s "philosophical" and "moral" assessment of anyone. He's merely the kind of fellow who shows up in your comments section to say, "I find liberals -- that is, my caricatures and mischaracterizations of them -- cowardly and morally disgusting, and furthermore, not one of them can treat an argument like this with the respect I think it deserves." That way, when someone on the liberal left calls him on the sheer foolishness of this "argument," he can say, "see! I told you so."
Not that that's infantile or anything.
Posted by: Michael Bérubé | Monday, 25 September 2006 at 07:26 PM
I always figured the great payback I got from being an ineffectual liberal is I get to examine my conscience more than other people.
Ooh! Honey! Come look what it's doing NOW!
OK, T.V., I'm going to have a go at second-guessing you, which is pretty stupid, but I'll guess that actually you wouldn't mind that much if liberals really stuck to "ignoring the 'left'" when more directly dangerous targets are bearing down on us or (depending on where and how we live) already suffocating us under their big funky bottoms.
Posted by: Ray Davis | Monday, 25 September 2006 at 09:32 PM
I suppose that I might as well comment on this, although my better judgement says not. T.V., "proceduralist fairmindedness" doesn't mean that people shouldn't criticize a different political philosophy that they actually disagree with. I understand that you've already anticipated this by some combination of a) there is no unitary, politically coherent left, b) there is no powerful left. a) is troublesome in this context, but b) is not. Liberals might criticize leftism for purposes of helping to define liberal ideas, to make liberalism look better to centrists, to forestall resurgent leftist ideas, or for any number of other perfectly ordinary political reasons that are not invalidated by leftism's lack of power. Socialism and left-liberalism have a long history of conflict, and the "left", insofar as it is socialist, is not merely the radical fringe of liberalism.
Also, one of the reasons that I decided to comment was that almost everyone in this thread, including the esteemed alpha liberals, appears to be falling into a confusion between power, or political effort, and bloggy chitchat. Which is not surprising; the people here are mostly academics and writers. But really, even though I engage in arguments in these fora as a form of amusement, in terms of that component of actual political effort that is directed against people, it's approximately 100% against conservatives and 0% against leftists. And I think that this is true for contemporary liberaldom as a whole. My saying this was what T.V. objected to last time, if I remember rightly. But there is no liberal political action against domestic leftism that I can see.
So back to coherence. The only part of the argument that I think may have some force, indirectly, is that criticism of the New Left / hippies / protestors etc. sometimes seems cultural in nature rather than political, and that these imagined groupings are really part of liberalism that the critics are joining in a conservative critique of. Well, perhaps. But just as often, the criticisms, like Scott's, appear to be directed more at a particular direction, a path that they wish hadn't been taken. If there's a place for internal criticism of a grouping that you consider yourself to be a part of, blogs are it.
One last thing: would it really hurt liberals to become a bit more Nietzschean? Ray's self-characterization of ineffectuality is far too common.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Tuesday, 26 September 2006 at 06:52 AM
Somewhat belatedly:
It's the context of Scott's Didion essay that makes my comment something other than a troll or a narcissistic thread hijack. In appealing to conservatives, Scott has to fashion a hero who is transcendent. His appeal is something like this: you should respect Didion because she's not a mere partisan, see how she flays the "left" as well as the right. But the "left" is not something Scott identifies as his own set of beliefs. He isn't really saying (though he thinks he is): I respect her because she shreds me up as well as the Bush administration. No, the shredded "left" which credentials Didion as an "unbiased" analyst is, for Scott, an opponent, something that he disidentifies with. So the structure of his appeal to conservatives is: "See, you should respect Didion because she shreds the "left," which I also shred, just as much as she shreds your belief system." Conservatives and Scott are to come together through Didion and through the common rejection of an X, which is a subset of "his side" that he would prefer didn't exist.
This is the basic structure of triangulation that I've come to object to in liberal discourse. It's exactly the same thing I objected to in your Valve post. You can read "triangulation" in the Clintonian sense, but for me it really has a Girardian sense. I find this an ethically and politically objectionable way of opening a rhetorical appeal, and it really has little to do with the X that's put in the scapegoat position. It's almost never necessary for making the argument or the appeal to principle, but it's too frequently the way liberals choose to make the argument to more powerful interlocutors--by pre-emptively offering up some weaker effigy which cannot at the moment speak for itself. My ethical and "procedural" objection to it is very consistent; Ray knows this because he's read my weblog where the sentiment is expressed, or at least groped toward, repeatedly.
When I say triangulation is a feature of liberalism, I mean that it's a feature of liberal folk psychology and that it is evinced in almost identical ways in popular and academic liberalism. The register in which I am making the point is rhetorical or psychological or sociopsychological, though not psychoanalytic. (I generally agree with Scott's position on psychoanalysis while maintaining that behavior, and particularly political behavior, is driven by primarily noncognitive and emotive forces and not intellectual or historical position-taking. So we're not free from the need to find a better psychology to replace psychoanalysis.) Because it's so commonplace, sedimented so invisibly into academic and political folkways, triangulation has a large cumulative effect not just on internecine tensions within progressive thought and politics but on the way liberals are perceived by neutral or hostile others--the effect is almost entirely negative in every domain. (See the first comment in this thread.) Since it's psychological, the register in which I am making the criticism might be called prepolitical; it has effectively nothing to do the "history of left-liberal relations," which anyway has little force in an amnesiac culture and does not drive much political behavior beyond a few intellectuals. People who join the Green Party or work as Quaker peace activists or for the Christic Institute or protest in anti-war marches, even if they scorn the Dems and carry Chomsky in their back pocket, do not trace some Byzantine lineage to some arcane Maoist group in the sixties or to the Port Huron statement, or construct their political identity around the question of whether Milosevic wept. They do pay attention to the performative aspect of liberal rhetoric, and assess the character of the people talking, and gauge how much such persons could be trusted to give their voice or political work some flanking. I think what they notice is that it's a tic of liberal discourse to betray someone as an opening gesture: always, someone is expendable, and expended, as a intitial move to establish credibility. Maybe the scapegoat isn't their people; maybe next time it will be. With regard to trust, I think the strategy backfires badly over the long run.
When I try to raise the issue of triangulation to liberals, they generally try to pinion me into some ultraideological subset of the "left," organized as a binary against "liberal," and they aggressively construe what I'm saying as some commmentary on the "history of the left-liberal divide." This will happen, aggressively, no matter how clearly or how often I say that have no "leftist" political history, that I have "professed liberalism" until this problem alienated me from it. It will happen even if I carefully I try to situate this as a sociopsychological and rhetorical, not a historical or genealogical, issue. I used to think this was a epiphenomenon of the kind of scholasticism Bourdieu attributed to academics, imagining that people were motivated by hypercognitive ratiocination, or else resulted from the academics' own theological obsession with the details of "the left-liberal divide", projected onto people for whom it had little value or relevance in explaining current behavior. My point is orthogonal to all that. But patient explanation on this point never increases understanding or reduces thuggishness, so I increasingly doubt that the misconstrual is accidental, and edify myself regarding the dynamics of this issue with other kinds of provocations. (I'm very happy with what they yielded this time.)
I have no idea what Rich means when he says that liberals don't "take action" against "the left." Perhaps he means that there is as yet no plan to load them onto cattle cars, a point I concede but in which I take no particular comfort. Triangulation remains the primary tactic of the DLC, Kos rhetoric is founded on it, the tiresome Nader-Chomsky-Moore baiting still goes on unabated across liberal blogs, the Greens must be "destroyed" (Gilliard), Berube jumped on the scene in 2001 with the operatic and abolutist claim that "the left" must be permanently, now and forever, excluded from political debate, news interviews still have liberals opening with the standard triangulating gambit to establish cred with conservatives, Scott triangulates against a contemporary hippie habitus under the guise of a historical argument. The definition of "the left" is ductile in all this, but the sacrificial mentality is has not been moderated since 2001. And beyond "mere" rhetoric some Dems are attempting stealth financing campaigns to permanently prevent third party challenges at any level, something that should trouble even honest liberals who object to Nader, but which has attracted as little attention among mainstream "proceduralists" as the Diebold machines have. I regard the rhetorical tic I've identified as an index of a large, collective and stubborn (if perhaps unconscious) decision to refuse any tainting association with any group not obviously and loyal to the Democratic Party, or else to the habitus they confuse with that loyalty. I take fatalistic lectures about the historical inevitability of the left-liberal divide to express both a wish and an action plan among liberals, not a tragic sigh.
Scott, all of this bears little resemblance I can see to the beliefs you keep attributing to me. My humble point has been that triangulation is unethical, ugly, inept, and creates mostly noise. (What did your symbolic politics post create at the Valve?) If I recall correctly, you and I have had a private as well as a public exchange about this in which I've explained some of this, so your pretended magnaminity--let's agree to disagree about the Old and New Left and your leftism--seems disingenuous. I won't take up more space here, but if you'd like to take up a (brief) and nonpolemical private exchange and simply and briefly show me that you can fairly reconstruct my position about triangulation and liberalism, I'll permanently leave you alone with no obligation to agree with me. Surely this won't be hard--I just explained it again--and you can then be free to write essays on the productive value of being irritated, so long as no one actually irritates you! You can take me up on this or not, as you wish.
Posted by: T.V. | Friday, 29 September 2006 at 08:55 AM
T.V.: "I have no idea what Rich means when he says that liberals don't "take action" against "the left.""
T.V., you are apparently incapable of distinguishing between talk and action. So you're really just like that DAL guy who recently showed up here, saying that I was infringing on his essential human dignity because I wrote that conservatives were irrational and not worth arguing with.
But wait -- as I see later on in your post, you really are capable of making this distinction, with "And beyond "mere" rhetoric some Dems are attempting stealth financing campaigns to permanently prevent third party challenges at any level [...]". I won't bother to argue about why it's reasonable to take action against Republican-funded Green third parties, or about how much the comparative magnitude of this effort differs from my approximately 0% of effort mentioned earlier. But suddenly I see that you do understand this distinction, but choose to ignore it when that is amenable to a long lecture.
I brought up the problem of which left was being talked about, and whether it made sense to treat leftists as socialists, if you wanted to address that. You didn't. Bérubé was right; you're a concern troll.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Friday, 29 September 2006 at 09:27 AM
T.V., first:
That's what I wrote, way up-thread now. Now, consider your words:
I'm specifically, for sound pedagogical reasons, creating a Didion palatable to both sides for the sake of a particular argument. You protestations to the contrary, this isn't a global triangulation strategy, but a particular one, designed for a particular post in a particular venue. Sometimes, you know, rhetoric is necessary to have arguments taken seriously. In fact, let me amend yours so it's accurate:
That's the argument I made. The one you've attributed me, well, it misses the point. As does this:
Yes, it is. What part of "Old Left" isn't left? I'm far to the left of the Democratic Party, even more so from the DLC. I'd wager I'm closer to you than you're entirely comfortable with; but then again, that's because you're ignorant about my actual beliefs. Haven't a clue what they are, really; but you've spun this fantasy based on a single post in which I say I have little love for a particular set of tactics which, as I lamented previously, I believe fractured the Left and prevented it from becoming a viable political force. I know, I know, I'm a liberal, not a leftist, because I prefer the Old Left to the New...
Second, and this is something I've said before, so pardon me for repeating myself, but:
How supremely ironic, given that I've never manifestoed my politics, only complained about tactics hijacked by academics. More to the point:
I love the assumptions here: I support the Democratic Party, no wait, the DLC, and that's why I find the tactics of the New Left responsible for the current state of the Democratic Party and the rise of the DLC. Wait, though, that makes no sense. Look, I could be Huey Long reborn, advocating earnings be capped at $1M and that any more be redistributed...and you know what? I'd still think the symbolic politics of some factions of the New Left pernicious. (And I'd know, after all, 'cause if there's one thing the Kingfish knew, it was that power must be won as well as discussed and denounced.)
(And yes, you were in the queue. Unless you want your post to buried amongst 1,000 comments from "[a cellular phone company whose name I can't write because I've already banned it]," you'll have to settle for being in the queue if you post before 8 a.m.)
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Friday, 29 September 2006 at 01:44 PM
Scott, I spent about fifteen minutes here the other night, just trying to let you know why you shouldn't bother to take T.V. seriously. I guess I was thinking of operatic (but kinda illiterate) stuff like this:
Berube jumped on the scene in 2001 with the operatic and abolutist claim that "the left" must be permanently, now and forever, excluded from political debate
Actually, as you know, I published an essay in April 2002 in Context, a newspaper that is not available for sale anywhere in the United States, and is distributed only to independent bookstores in print runs of 5000. That essay ends with, among other things, a bunch of damning words about elected liberals. But the person who jumped on the scene with operatic and absolutist claims immediately after 9/11, of course, was Chomsky himself, who was belittling the effects of the attacks -- in comparison with his estimate of the effects of the US' 1998 cruise missile destruction of the al-Shifa plant in Khartoum -- before the day was out. I should've said more about this at the time, but I was in shock, and it took me months to recover.
Anyway, I was just stopping by to say that you needn't have gone to the trouble of linking to T.V.'s comment in your post at Protein Wisdom. It only feeds the guy's narcissism. But, of course, I've now made the very same mistake by commenting here (twice!), and because I don't want to play any further role in his private little fantasies about "alpha liberals," I'll leave it at that. Don't feed the concern trolls.
Good luck with cognitively-mapping Didion. I find her exceptionally annoying in places, but usually (not always) worth the time and effort. As it happens, I'm teaching Play It As It Lays next week.
Posted by: Michael Bérubé | Friday, 29 September 2006 at 02:56 PM
This has been very interesting, actually. Polemic aside, much of it does come down to incommensurable assumptions about the way that rhetoric is connected to emotion and action in relations between groups. But I take full responsibility for the polemic, since I did want to see how that played out too & that was just as much of a priority. Anyway, thanks.
Posted by: T.V. | Friday, 29 September 2006 at 09:07 PM
Yes, this thread has been most instructive. Thank you for hosting the exchange and inviting me to participate, Scott; I will adopt a more polite tone now that my latest experiment in rhetoric and affect is complete.
Posted by: Michael Bérubé | Saturday, 30 September 2006 at 08:52 AM