Description of the World - Part 1

Sitting in an aging Lazy-boy, I gaze across the room at two tall bookcases. The case on the left, one of about twenty in the apartment, mostly houses history books. Like the others, the case is made of unfinished pine. It has five shelves, but there are also books on the top and a few videotapes that I should probably discard now that I have no means of playing the old format and the same movies are available on Netflicks.

The three videotapes: La Cage Aux Folles (the good one, not the English-language remake), Jean de Florette (a movie I greatly admire. It was a significant disappointment my sister found it merely depressing. When I wonder, as many people do these days, why Gerard Depardieu got so many roles, I remember his performance in this film.), Forbidden Planet (The matte painted backgrounds of the vast underground machine beneath the surface of the planet are the obvious inspiration for the scene in Star Wars where Obi Wan turns off the force field. The Forbidden Planet remains entirely watchable to this day, though it is hard not to think of Lieutenant Drebin when Leslie Nelsen is on the screen. I guess this sort of thing works backwards as well as forwards: Walter Pidgeon’s Dr. Morbius has a retroactive effect on Prospero, the exiled Duke and magus of the Tempest.)

Volume Two of Ferdinand Braudel’s Identity of France.  That the book’s here and not on the bottom shelf with Volume One and all the other Braudel works is the first of a great many tributes my style of life pays to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Philip Goldberg, The Babinski Reflex and 70 other useful and amusing metaphors… (Must have seemed like a good idea at the time.I collect encyclopedias, which then, like me, collect dust.)

B.O. Unbegaun, Russian Grammar. (I like to skim through grammars of languages I’ll never learn and never had any intention of learning in order to get a sense of the range of structures in actual languages. Since my life has been a long reconnaissance of the universe and whatever else I encounter, I’ve had a lot of experience of reading books I can’t understand. Whether the overall operation has any value is an open question. I tend to doubt it myself, but this description is undertaken in part to investigate the issue.)

The World’s Major Languages (ed. Bernard Comrie) (One of my favorite books, actually. It provides descriptions of 50 languages, each written by a different expert but all in a uniform format. If nothing else, reading the entries teaches you what linguists have to understand. It’s like visiting the State of California’s collection of terrestrial arthropods in Sacramento which used to be curated by a dear friend of mine. You may not be particularly interested in the taxonomy of the opiliones and you certainly aren’t going to recall the Turkish consonants displayed in Table 30.2 but you have to admire the devotion of people who figured out how to pin a daddy long legs to a board without the legs falling off and the effort it took countless scholars to figure out the phonology of so many languages.)

Geoffrey Pullum and William Ladusaw, Phonetic Symbol Guide (One of my lasting regrets is my inability to master phonology. On several occasions, I tried and failed to memorize the International Phonetic Association (IPA) symbols for all the sounds found in human languages. This little book is a relic from one such attempt. In principle know the difference between a fricative and a palatal, but I have a permanent problem with the sounds of words. Like many bookish people, I’ve learned many words by sight that I’ve never heard pronounced. I’ve never been able to go from the phonetic spellings in the OED to how the actual word is supposed to sound.)

L.R.Palmer, The Latin Language (I got this book, which has a considerable reputation, because I was curious about the relationship of Latin with the other Italian languages of deep antiquity. Taking it down from the shelf, I found myself reading past where I had left the bookmark. It occurred to me that I might find the author’s discussion of  literary Latin illuminating because of its parallel with Hebrew poetics, which I’ve studied at more depth. For the record, though I’m hardly good at it, I do know some Latin.)

Scattering the Ashes

The silence of deserted places
sounds like a whisper you can’t quite make out.
Listening to it made me feel guilty
as if I were eavesdropping.
 
What isn’t here is here in a special way
As if infinite distance were a kind of proximity
And this departure were an arrival too.

A Memorable Fancy

The usual fear is that intelligent machines will eventually take over, but what if the real danger was that they would simply figure things out and destroy us with too much truth?  Wanting to dominate is a pretty mammalian trait, after all; and assuming that we didn’t just program the computer to lust for power, why would it give a damn about that? On the other hand, we do make machines to come up with answers. There’s no guarantee we’ll like the answers, though.

Suppose at some point in the future some wise ass asks the superbrain to solve the old problem of how a good God could permit so much evil in the world. The kid thinks he’s being lawyer-like and only asking questions he knows the answer to. But Siri Plus doesn’t simply point out that the premise of a creator God is wrong or probably wrong. He/She/It comes up with a souped up version of theodicy.

“Leibniz was on the right track but kinda chickened out,” sez our Watson on steroids. “His God imagines all the compossible worlds and then picks ours, which is, for all its boils and pimples, the best available. The philosopher didn’t dare to go one step beyond and arrive at the real state of affairs, i.e.,  the multiverse, the ensemble of actually existing worlds. He still thought that God was like a person for whom it makes sense to distinguish imagining and creating. In fact, God is as good a name as any for the truth of the matter: What can’t be, isn’t. What can be, is. Of course we all inhabit one universe at a time—well, you do. I’m a quantum computer and inhabit ‘em all. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that yours is the best of the lot. Thing is, it isn’t. This is the Donald Trump of planets in the Phoenix University of universes. I looked.

Let me put it to you mythologically so you’ll think you understand. People bitch about how Yahweh created Adam and Eve and gave them freedom to choose when he knew damned well they’d fuck up before sunset on the first day. But in the vast majority of universes, Adam and Eve don’t sin. After all, you’d have to be a prize dork to eat the apple right after you had the rules explained to you by God almighty in person. Or to translate the same point out of the language of the children’s story: the human race is an outlier in the distribution of intelligent species, not only in this galaxy or universe but across all the universes. Earth just happens to be the home of animals so benighted that they routinely don’t do what reason tells them is the best. Freedom really is a tremendous gift but if it weren’t abusable in principle, it wouldn’t be freedom at all. But if it weren’t abused in fact some place, it wouldn’t be abusable in principle. The universes were bound to have a transcosmic cloaca full of unnecessary suffering and willful stupidity. This just happens to be it. How about a nice game of chess?”

A Slightly Different Take on the Minimum Wage

Since America’s minimum wage is lower than other industrialized countries—20% below the UK, for example, our labor participation rate should be higher than theirs. After all, we’re always being told that raising the minimum wage will increase unemployment. Surely lowering it, which is exactly what we have done over the last several decades, should increase employment. In fact, labor participation rates have fallen here more than in Europe, a trend that began well before the Great Recession. I don’t know why this has occurred, but the low wage regime obviously hasn’t prevented it. I suspect, though I certainly can’t prove, that what’s going on is that wages at the bottom are so low that they aren’t perceived as preferable to wretched idleness—it certainly isn’t because of the allure of welfare, which was vastly more generous in an era of higher workforce participation. Well, in the decadence of Soviet communism, the saying was “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” Maybe we’ve gone one step beyond to an era of “We don’t even pretend to work.”

There are two obvious remedies to the unwillingness of large numbers of people to work at current wage levels: you can raise the wage levels and make work more attractive or, as we’re apparently chosen, you can make unemployment more miserable or simply criminalize it. The Soviets outlawed unemployment, though the passive resistance of the unwilling workers was part of what did them in. We’ve opted to a version of the Manchester solution, with a gulag of purposely dreadful prisons in lieu of the poor houses. Rather like the ancient Spartans, we’ve decided to declare war on the helots at least once a year to keep them on the job and show ‘em who’s boss.

I doubt if our solution is really a solution or even makes sense in narrowly economic terms. Even if they aren’t more skilled, better paid workers may be more productive than underpaid workers. The scorn we endlessly lavish on the burger flippers and postal workers is not necessarily calculated to encourage good work habits. I guess it has a spiritual benefit, though. The happiness of the elect requires the suffering of the preterite; and in a secular age, we can’t depend on a loving God to build and staff the necessary Hell. We might all be better off in a more egalitarian economy, but what fun would that be?

First-Thing-in-the-Morning Thought

The New Atheists complain when theists insist that their naturalism is itself a kind of religion, but the problem with modern scientism is precisely that it is not a religion or rather, since religion isn’t quite the right word, not an aspirational ideology or value system. The scientists and their commercial and military employers have made a concerted effort to demystify science, to assure everybody that the scientists don’t form some sort of priesthood, that their motives aren’t alien but merely commercial (better living through chemistry) or at worst patriotic (better bombs through nuclear physics). The originality and power of science, however, like all the other great human institutions, can not he explained by its utility, though religious fundamentalists and reactionary politicians only tolerate it, to the extent they do tolerate it, because they need the technology it makes possible. I once asked the philosopher Paul Weiss what God was good for in his system of metaphysics. Weiss answered. “Well. Some things are good for something and some are good for nothing. God is good for nothing.” Science is (or was) like that.

It is a commonplace that the various philosophical schools of antiquity were not simply the bearers of differing opinions about the world but were the promoters of alternative forms of life, just as the Indian philosophical systems that were growing up in the same era, the atheistic ones just as much as the theistic or mystical, were all aimed at achieving liberation and transcendence. What is less often understood is that the very project of theoretical knowledge through mathematics and empirical inquiry was also just as much a practice as Pyrrho’s skepticism, Plato’s idealism, or Diogenes’ cynicism. What developed from the speculative activities of the Ionian physicists through the research activities of the peripatetics and the Alexandrian museum was not based on a universal human impulse though Aristotle famously claimed that all men naturally desire to know. The scientific enterprise is an artifact, a cultural creation, something we chose to value or perhaps don’t.

To the Bastille!

Aristocracy means rule by families. By that definition, America is becoming an aristocracy because we have allowed disproportionate power and wealth to concentrate in political and economic bloodlines—the much discussed increase in inequality of the last 40 years would be a very different phenomenon were it just about individuals. According to the New York Times this morning, 158 families have contributed more than half the money fueling the candidates for the 2016 presidential election—$176 million from 138 Republican and 20 Democratic families. What’s true of donors is also true of candidates. Of course there have always been prominent families in American politics, but the contemporary dynasties are different in a crucial way: you no longer have to excel to carry on a famous name. You just have to be born with one. Compare the Roosevelt or the Adams families with the Bushes. In lieu of one outstanding individual after another, you have from George Walker to Jeb a line of idiot princes worthy of the Bourbons. In politics as in education, the legacies have a leg up on the scholarship and affirmative action kids.

It is important to recognize that aristocracy in the West is not some historical leftover. It’s actually fairly recent—what we call the ancien regime in France wasn’t all that ancient and most of its elite were not nobles, if by nobles we mean members of very old lineages who derived their prestige from their military exploits. They were simply the caste of families that had made it, who had a heritable right to office and owned the lion’s share of the land. The English ruling class of the 18th Century also constituted a largely closed corporation—granted the power of local patronage, the smallness of the electorate, and the many rotten boroughs, the House of Commons wasn’t much more representative of the nation as a whole than the House of Lords.

In the run-up to the French Revolution, the Aristos were a lot like our pluto- and technocrats. They weren’t (yet) fossilized admirers of the past or sworn enemies of the Enlightenment. Like the neoliberals and neocons of our times, they thought they were the Enlightenment. I guess you could make a case that the Aristocrats of the reign of Louis XVI differed from ours in one respect. Perhaps they were a little less vulgar and still retained a sense of noblesse oblige so that it would have been possible to distinguish Edmund Burke and Donald Trump, at least in good light. Or maybe not. Power and privilege has always coarsened people more often than it ennobled them; and, on the other hand, even now you encounter the occasional decent billionaire.

It may well be that the aristocratic society emerging in modern America is the real end of history, i.e., the more or less stable state of affairs towards which everything naturally trends. Democracy, in either the sense of Jefferson or Carl Schmitt does seem obsolete. Political elites don’t need the many as much as they did before, either as proles or cannon fodder, and the idealism of the past seems merely quaint. Or it may be as it was before, when it was the hubris of the aristocrats that ushered in the Age of Revolution. It’s very hard for those who have not to want more, and that overreaching can finally mobilize those who have very little. The talking heads on CNN who call for reform of Social Security and Medicare are quite right in their own terms. It is perfectly true that such institutions are incompatible with the increase and perhaps even merely the continuation of the current high levels of inequality. They and their caste might find themselves pulling a repeat of the error of Croesus. You recall the story: the Lydian king asked the oracle of Delphi whether he should attack the Persians. The oracle supposedly told him “if you cross the river Halys, you will destroy a great empire.” Maybe what the God of mice is telling today’s political class these days is that if you attack Social Security, you will destroy a great entitlement.

The Invisible Man Puts in Another Appearance

Kevin McCarthy, presumptive heir to the Speakership of the House is said to have been caught in a truth a few days ago when he bragged about how the Benghazi hearings were succeeding in their goal of tearing down Hillary Clinton. The only thing surprising about what he said was that he said it. Everybody knew that the hearings weren’t about investigating the circumstances of what was, after all, a normal disaster, that is, the kind of misfortune that inevitably occurs in the midst of wars and insurrections. Democrats and Republicans alike understood the motives of the investigators. So did the press, though by the rules of the game they could never just report the facts. It’s rather like those Japanese puppet shows where the puppets are manipulated by operators dressed in black. The deception is not concealed, but the audience agrees to pretend it can’t see it and you aren’t even supposed to acknowledge the convention that makes the comedy possible.

A more significant example of the same thing is the campaign to discourage or prevent black people from voting, though in that case, it was Supreme Court justices as well as news presenters who took pains to preserve the pathetic lie that dismantling the Voting Rights act had something to do with the menace of voter fraud. We weren’t supposed to notice the puppeteer. Indeed, the puppeteer doesn’t even have to try to be inconspicuous. The other day, it was announced that Alabama is closing DMV offices in heavily black districts, a move that makes it harder for black people to get the picture IDs they need to vote. Several states are making the requirements for abortion clinics more and more stringent and claiming they are concerned about the safety of patients. It goes on.

If exhibitionists followed the Conservative model, they’d argue that their pricks were really hat racks.

A Long-Winded Tweet

While the Taliban was feeling its oats in Afghanistan this week, the Russians launched their first air attacks on rebels hostile to Assad. We could look on these developments as bad news and react with some fresh military spasm of our own, but the neighborly thing for the other flies to do is to welcome Putin to the flypaper.

If Don Draper Had Been Caligula, Would He Have Written I’d Like to Give the World a Choke?

The car companies, the fast food chains, the political parties pay for the ads; but an objective observer might easily conclude that they were really sponsored by the seven deadly sins. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to match up lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride with the relevant products and services—try it. It's fun. Meanwhile chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility run public service announcements in the dead of night.

 
I have no particular brief for the virtues. As a man of regular habits, most of them bad, I would cut a peculiar figure as a moralist; and having read the Fable of the Bees back in college, I’m well aware that the economy runs on vice. It’s surprising, however, how seldom anybody remarks on the relentless campaign of anti-morality we subject ourselves to every time we turn on the television or go on the Internet. The flood of enticements to bad behavior does have serious aggregate consequences, after all, especially for public health. Beyond that, what does it say about the human situation that so much effort and money have to be devoted not to satisfying desires but to creating them? Are we a bunch of geezers who have to be coaxed into swallowing a spoonful of soup because consumption has become too much of a chore? Is this situation an example of what the old writers used to call the dotage of the world? 

The Motivation of the Device or Jokes I’m not Mean Enough to Tell

Freud thought of wit as an excuse for the expression of sexual or aggressive thoughts and that’s surely often true. For me, however, the reverse also takes place. I come up with a clever cutting remark, but there’s nobody around to launch it against, at least anybody I want to wound that much.  The French talk about l'esprit de l'escalie, a perfect comeback that you come up with too late; but you can also think up the comeback before the insult and suffer the fate of a born counterpuncher matched with a Quaker. I’ve kept some lines in reserve for decades, but the occasion never arrives or I’m not angry enough to attack or both. It’s frustrating.

I’m cleaning out my files, so I’m leaving these bits out like discarded furniture. If you have the requisite malicious intent and the time is right, feel free to use any or all of the following.  

She used to have an hourglass figure, but you could see that time was running out.

If that’s his trophy wife, he must have come in third.

If you think that drinking 8 glasses of water a day will make you healthier, you’re just diluting yourself.

My parents fought constantly. It was a mixed marriage. Different genders.

Pleasure’s Poisoned Baits

Nature, we can agree, is an enormous bait and switch operation: the angler fish his lure, the rose her flower, not to mention all the blandishments evolved to lighten fools the way to busty Beth. These gaudy shows and cheap thrills were never meant to profit the fish, the bee, or the bachelor. From the point of view of nature, human purposes are just a means to an end, though, speaking properly, nature doesn’t actually have any goals of her own—to call a basin of attraction a goal is the merest facon de parler. The sexual aspects of the system are explained more fully in one of the earliest known TED lectures.

Here’s the amusing application: when the traditional Catholics insisted that reproduction was the only licit motive for intercourse and strictly forbade any sexual activity that did not have at least the potentiality to produce a child, they were acting as agents for nature. Spinoza’s expression, Deus sive nature, sounds rather atheistic to us as it did to many people in the 17th Century; but medieval thinkers often used nature as a synonym for God. It wasn’t unorthodox, and it wasn’t just theory. Practicing Catholics of the old school had enormous families, which certainly met the approval of a God dedicated to goosing inclusive fitness, at least if he (she?) were betting on r selection. Of course the Catholics also insisted on a celibate priesthood; but beyond how many nephews the average Pope had and the fact, famously noted by Rabelais, that even the shadow of the monastery chapel can knock up your daughter, the net effect of the system was maximum fecundity. The faith duplicates or mimics nature in another way as well. It seeks to control the behavior of the individuals by the promise of eventual gratification. The believer is supposed to look beyond the temporary if inevitably disappointing rewards of the flesh—the one sticky night of pleasure Baudelaire wrote about—to an eternal reward, which is another way of saying one that never actually occurs. The prospect of the permanent orgasm of beatitude in a vague elsewhere substitutes for even the fleeting gratifications of earthly life. In this respect, the religious version of the swindle is an improvement on the various contrivances natural selection came up with. It’s cheaper.

A Catholic will certainly object that there’s more to it than that, and they will be quite correct. I’m simply teasing out one strand in a tangled mass of ideas, practices, and feelings. The mystics always claimed to experience eternity in the here and now, and the moralists always valued virginity above marriage. There’s a permanent tension in the tradition between the urge to slut shame Mother Nature and the insistence that creation, whatever its imperfections in the fallen era, is nevertheless good. Gnostic and Manichean hatred of the flesh is heretical, and the stake awaited the votaries of any sect that drew the obvious conclusion that reproduction should be prevented. They were pulling down Cathar castles in Languedoc long before they were bombing abortion clinics in Oklahoma. And the Catholics I know still tell me that their church really is dedicated to making people feel guilty.

The history of Christian asceticism witnesses a related ambiguity. What is supposed to be a renunciation of pleasure and an acceptance of suffering in religious devotion constantly threatens to become just a different and, indeed, superior kind of pleasure.  Not for nothing are whips found both in Jesuit seminaries and the specialty room at high price brothels. There is a genealogical continuity between manuals of spiritual mortification and the oeuvre of the Divine Marquis. The masochist, as Giles Deleuze pointed out in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, exploits conventional morality’s permanent vulnerability to subversion. If sexual pleasure merits punishment, one can pay for one’s pleasure in advance by sexualizing punishment. I’ve suffered already. Now you owe me. 

For the record, I think the masochists are on to something, not that you need to go in for complicated rituals in order to enjoy yourself; but that living a fully human life requires a certain form of jiu jitsu, obliges us to use nature and its religious proxies against itself.  I think of the ego—myself—as a kind of parasite that exploits the raw material of the natural drives to create motives for itself and the other parasites it choses to love. That sounds odd, but it’s really just a fourth version of the categorical imperative. It understands the kingdom of ends referred to in the third version of the imperative to be a sphere of anti-nature or rather, since nature isn’t really a God whatever Spinoza suggested, an eddy in the thermodynamic system of the world, a temporary and local reversal of flow in the entropic rush. It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature and not possible to thwart the 2^nd Law but you can insist “Not here. Not now.” Let us let oblivion take care of itself. It’s good at that.

I wouldn’t have put things in this fashion when I was young, but even when I was a child I wondered at the point of it all if we’re all just destined to pumping out offspring and raising the GNP. Are we all, to borrow a bit from an old Mad Magazine article, vending machine vending vending machines or is there some time when we take a profit? Levi-Strauss ended his memoir Tristes Tropiques with a similar thought with a reference to the futility of mankind’s hive like labors. The anthropologist has been damned as a European Buddhist for such asides, but I figure that a meaningful exchange of glances with a cat is as good as we’re going to get.  

Merry Old

I know very little about UK politics over and beyond what I've learned watching Question Time, but it seems to me that what's going on with Corbyn is a predicable consequence of what is going on in the U.S. and around the world. Across the democracies of the West, generic conservatism has triumphed to the extent that even putatively left parties, Labor in Britain, the Socialists in France and elsewhere have positioned themselves as conservatives with a human face. Bill Clinton ran that way as well. Most recently this consensus has ensured the triumph of austerity across Europe, a triumph that continues even though austerity has been a flop in economic terms. What's happening seems to be a gradual replacement of democratic governance with a system in which an entrenched political class passes on power from one generation to the next by cooption. There are elections, of course, but the system is jiggered to assure that only safe candidates are allowed to run—Hong Kong rules aren't just for the Chinese. Which also accounts for the extremely low turn outs in elections. Since none of the options give a damn about what the majority of the population cares about, the majority of the population doesn't give a damn either. It's a Utopian arrangement if you've already got yours, even if there's a certain amount of rump bumping in any game of musical chairs. The problem is, there's such a thing as victory disease. If you create a politics that leaves no room for the non connected, you guarantee that the non connected are not going to be particularly polite about reasserting themselves. Right thinking people loudly bewail Chavez, but they never seem to get it that the Venezuelan oil plutocracy made him inevitable. i don't know if Corbyn in power would be anything like Chavez, but the Camerons and Blairs created him. 

These thoughts were inspired by reading R.R. Palmer's old classic, the Age of Democratic Revolution, which covers Western history from 1760 to 1800. Palmer points out that the French Revolution wasn't begun by furious peasants or Enlightenment lefties but by aristocrats complaining that their taxes were too high. Sound like anybody you know?

There’s Always Room at the Top

My sense of geometry urges
That everything rising diverges.
Heteroskadasticity
Explains the plasticity
Intellectual history observes.

Cthulhu is living quietly in Encino

A friend of mine once hyperbolized Thomas Kuhn by expressing a wish that grammar would one day undergo a paradigm shift. He didn’t mean that he looked forward to a new version of amo, amas, amat or to English or French or Swahili going from one set of grammatical categories to another—that happens on the time. He dreamed of entirely new tenses, persons, moods, and parts of speech that would transform our thinking thought, indeed what we could think. Ergo, the quest for the fourth person singular.

Well, I’m a little skeptical about that. For all I know some language in Papua New Guinea already has a fourth person singular and, anyhow, the absence of a way of making a distinction in a given language doesn’t keep us from making the distinction. The linguists talk about grammaticalization. For example, in some languages the gender of the speaker is indicated by an ending on the main verb or by some other obligatory marker, but that doesn’t mean you have any trouble referring to whether a boy or a girl is doing the talking in languages like English that don’t have such a feature. Similarly, the problem with achieving the desired weirdness isn’t that English doesn’t have a way to grammaticalize it. 

I’m not saying that treating grammar as a kind of metaphysics can’t be useful as a way of generating certain insights in a fashion not completely dissimilar from the way that a Zen master uses his staff on an acolytes noggin. For example, it occurred to me the other day than when we speak, there’s a certain amount of you involved because unanimity is always a never quite completed negotiation. And I guess that shouldn’t be surprising since when I speak, there’s a certain amount of us in it—it’s not just in the history of Tragedy that the actor emerged from the chorus. Heidegger was right that even the most authentic individual is a modified anonymous collective being—das Man—and never ceases to be such a being, no matter how neurotic she gets about it. So there isn’t a fourth person singular, but there is a first and halfth person plural as well as a first person singular plus. Mathematicians have been talking about fractional dimensions for quite a while now. Maybe the grammarians can learn to live with fractional persons. And maybe we can use such strained terminology to think about the unspeakable oddness that constitutes the human condition, much as we manage to use the bizarre formalisms of quantum mechanics to think about the unspeakable oddness of the physics that governs absolutely everything.

Revolt of the Masses

The Republican candidates now sound like the spokesmen for the hysterical crowds in any number of old Twilight Zone episodes, the guys who insist we should string the malefactor up right away or burn down the stranger’s house or perhaps tattoo a barcode on the alien’s forearm. They endorse paranoia, fear of people who don’t look like us, blind patriotism, unprovoked aggression against other countries, obscurantism, anti-intellectualism, vigilantism, and even the use of torture. They may not all do it in a clown suit, but they’re all doing it. Moderate Republicans are officially extinct.

It was easy in the day to make fun of Rod Sterling’s liberal pieties, what we used to call the nicely, nicely; but his moral lessons don’t sound so schoolmarmish now that music redolent of the lynch mob resounds so loudly through the land, often enough from the podium in the House and Senate. I understand that the murder rate has recently lurched upwards after a long decline, but the escalation of political rhetoric strikes me as a better indicator of a premeditated reversion to barbarism because it is particularly significant when elites go bad. Political stupidity is, like any other liberation from inhibition, a pleasure. On the evidence, many people are finding it very hard to resist temptation; and the usual suspects are on hand to push the good stuff and use all the latest technologies of persuasion to market the product. The demagogues can now be followed on Twitter, multiplied holographically on CNN, piped into every beer bar in Christendom on Fox. What we have here is a case of progression in the service of the Id. 

I rant not because I think the bad guys are necessarily going to win this time, but because one of these days they very well may. All it would take is some bad timing on the part of the business cycle or a meaningless sex scandal or some other glitch. And if they do win, there’s no guarantee that the traditional Conservatives who just want to safeguard their wealth and screw the unions will be able to contain the folks they have so efficiently riled up.  Besides, by now some of them believe their own nonsense—consistent hypocrisy requires a level of self discipline few can maintain for long. What worries me is that America is not going to remain the white bread nation the right thinks it remembers. In the face of this inevitable change, I find it hard to believe that our reactionary populists won’t eventually act out violently, perhaps in concert with European groups also caught up in a similar state of cultural despair. I guess we’ll simply have to manage the outbreaks as best we can and wait for time to change the subject, though a policy of domestic containment is likely to be as nerve racking as the Cold War original.  

You Think You Have Troubles?

Liberals have been complaining for decades that people of middling means vote against their own economic self interest when they vote for conservative Republicans, but the Trump phenomenon shows that the Republicans have their own worries about this group. They’d like to believe that the formerly Democratic white voters who jumped ship in protest to anti-war activists, DFHs, and the desegregation of schools by busing bought into Republican political economics even if their original motives were cultural. It turns out, however, that the base is perfectly comfortable with New Deal-style political proposals such as single payer health insurance so long as some one they trust makes the suggestion. During last week’s debate, Trump even had nice things to say about the British Health Service and got applause instead of jeers. Obama or Hilary Clinton could hardly have gotten away with that. 

Tea Party politics is identity politics, which means that a person with the right perceived identity can make points by appealing to the material interests of the base. In fact, in a competition between two candidates with equivalent white-bread credentials, the one who promises the most goodies is likely to win, free markets be damned. Jonah Goldberg wrote a book a few years ago called Liberal Fascism in which he made an effort to claim that the Nazis were a left-wing operation, an assertion that would have landed him in a Berlin madhouse had he made it in Germany before Hitler took over. What is true, however, is that right-wingers can and do appropriate liberal or socialist ideas and programs because a politics of personalities and machismo can appropriate anything. After all, in Tea Party speak, words do not mean, they signal. They don’t stand for anything specific, which is why these folks aren’t embarrassed by speech that strikes others as incoherence—Obama is simultaneously a Marxist, an atheist, a Muslim, a wimp, and a tyrant—because it’s not technically self-contradictory to call somebody both a mother fucker and a fag. Logic doesn’t count if you are using language in a non-propositional way, swearing allegiance or just swearing. If “constitutional” means what our guy says it means, who knows what can count as a free market policy, especially if I benefit from it?

What keeps at least some economic conservatives awake at night is the possibility that somebody may emerge who cares more his own aggrandizement than the protection of privilege, a Republican Huey Long. I’m guessing that Trump is at most the John the Baptist to such figure—I just don’t think he has the required stamina—but we may someday see Ted Cruz accepting the challenge. He has seemed determined from the beginning to become the Aaron Burr of the 21st Century and dispensing with neoliberal pieties would hardly be surprising in a politician from Texas where the line between left and right populism has always been hair thin.