Author: Glenn W. Smith

It’s hard to ignore the irony. The wannabe Republican heirs of George W. Bush gather in New Orleans, the city Bush’s callousness and ineptitude all but destroyed, to advance a movement best called the New Confederacy.

At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference here, Texas Gov. Rick Perry invoked his love for the Tenth Amendment, the New Confederacy’s code term for “get the black man out of the White House.”

Touting his states’ rights bona fides, [Perry] said, “I believe in the 10th Amendment with all my heart. Basically what is says is that the federal government was created to be an agent of the states, not the other way around.

Sarah Palin was here. So was Newt Gingrich. Mentions of Hurricane Katrina were few and far between. “We are so over Katrina,” said a New Orleans GOP activist. But the full collapse of the moral levees that once held back a tide of hatred and prejudice was evident. The New Confederacy – despite Mitt Romney’s one-vote win and Palin’s third-place finish in the Southern Republican Leadership Conference – is now the GOP’s dominant political force.

Republicans’ coded racist appeals, beginning with Richard Nixon’s infamous “southern strategy,” weakened the Democratic Party in the South. In the wake of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, white voters fled the Democrats’ Big Tent for the Republicans’ Big Box, the wall-to-Walmart, magnolia-white land of confederate dreams.

I can’t decide now whether the Republicans have ineffectively cornered themselves  in the South (and in a few simpatico states outside Dixie), or whether they are building a viable new movement, based in the former slave states, but with enough national appeal to reverse the outcome of the Civil War, to impose hierarchical, racist attitudes on the rest of the country.

For those who’d rather wish away the role of race in American elections, I think it’s telling that Democrats’ national victories since the ‘60s have been by two Southerners and one African-American. Talk of racial transcendentalism surrounded all three of them. How long can we keep theoretically transcending racism? I don’t know.

I do know this. Democrats, especially in the South, are often fairly paralyzed by their opponents’ racist appeals to voters. Faced with a violent storm of prejudice, they can be as inept as Bush was when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.

In my own Texas, Democrats tried to hang on to rural and suburban white voters by dodging and ducking the issue. Any talk of race might alienate more whites, they figured, so they were forever trying to change the subject to something more genteel and fit for polite company.

A part of this is Democrats’ vexing habit of trying to fit themselves to the current mood of voters rather than set out to change the mood of voters. Republican consultants are far more ideological than Democratic consultants. When they get their polls back, they look at where the voters are, but only so they know what they have to do to move them. Democrats’ more, uh, politically flexible consultants mistake the map for the territory. It is an odd thing that the party of change is, tactically, the party of conformity.

In any case, it seems almost trite to say we have a moral imperative to take on the racists. As Blue Texas noted at FireDogLake last week, a new study shows us that “there seem to be an awful lot of Teabaggers who have a serious issue with race.” Right now, false gentility and wishful thinking are fogging up or moral lenses. A New Confederacy is being built. Maybe it will collapse under the weight of its own moral depravity. We shouldn’t wait to see.

We don’t even have to look forward to see it. The strategy of ignoring or side-stepping the racist appeals of Republicans has failed Democrats for nearly half a century. Why they would continue to think it will work is, well, simply stupid.

 

Let’s take the very, very long view of America’s decision to make health care available to eight million or more vulnerable and uninsured children. The crude political compromises that led to passage of imperfect health care reform might have obscured a grand achievement: an end to the sacrifice of American children on the altar of insurance industry greed and a moral setback for the bankrupt ideology that justified it.

So, let’s talk about Isaac, son of the Biblical patriarch Abraham, and Iphigenia, daughter of the ancient Greek King Agamemnon. These children lie beneath the sharpened butcher-blades of their fathers and warn humankind of the karmic catastrophe that is the willful sacrifice of children.

The images and narratives are deeply embedded in the roots of Western Civilization: Isaac and Abraham atop the dry, windswept land of Moriah; Iphigenia and Agamemnon across the waters on the rocky shore of Aulis. The “Binding of Isaac” was first written down in the 9th or 8th Century B.C. Iphigenia’s tragedy first appears in the Kypria, probably written in the 7th Century B.C. Both oral legends date to the far distant past of the Ancient Near East. Two great epics of Western culture pivot upon the theme of child murder.

Isaac and Iphigenia speak with literature’s most profoundly innocent voices. Isaac asks, “Father! Here is the fire and the wood but where is the sheep for the offering?” And Iphigenia: “I must say goodbye to the light.” Their words undam the heart and roll like a river through the troubled conscience of humankind.

Hear their voices as you consider this. In Crowley, Texas, the very week the health care reform bill was approved, Blue Cross/Blue Shield denied coverage to a newborn baby, Houston Tracy, saying he was born with an uncovered pre-existing condition. Without emergency heart surgery, Houston would die. One shudders to think that this ritual sacrifice was commonplace, and might be again if we are not vigilant.

And sacrifice it would have been, to Mammon and Moloch. Millions of children have been denied care to serve the profits of the health insurance industry. We are told the deaths are an actuarial necessity so that we may live, not so different from the ancient rationale of human sacrifice condemned by the Greeks, by the Hebrew Bible’s Yahweh and by Jesus. The Qur’an says flatly: “Kill not your children.” This ought to cause contented insurance actuaries to do a little soul searching, however much they want to gloat over a 2010 study that ranked them as holding the very best jobs in the country.

Despite the ethical injunctions, our history is strewn with the bones of children sacrificed to power-mad ambition or some ideology or another. Most of us honor the inherited moral imperative. Billions of children are raised in love and nurturance, one of our best proofs that goodness survives among us. Isaac was saved from Abraham’s cleaver; a ram took his place on the altar of death. According to legend (explored by Euripides), the goddess Artemis intervened in Iphigenia’s sacrifice, replaced her with a deer and spirited her away to Tauris.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield, facing a storm of bad publicity over Baby Houston, relented and paid for the child’s urgent care. Also, the health insurance industry backed off its threat to use a loophole in the reform bill to deny coverage to children. Innocent Isaac and Iphigenia live yet in our hearts, or in enough of our hearts that the insurance moguls drop their sharpened knives when caught in the act.

But this begs the question: how has the sacrifice of children continued at all, whether in war, by neglect, or by bureaucratic insurance company edict? “We’ll buy back our own harm with what is most dear to us,” said Iphigenia’s mother, Clytemnestra, to Agamemnon. We have bought ourselves a lot of harm over the millennia.

Last year, UNICEF reported that global childhood deaths had fallen below nine million a year. Another UNICEF report tells us that between 1986 and 1996, two million children were killed in war. Four to five million were disabled and 12 million left homeless. I couldn’t find figures for the last 14 years, but it’s a safe bet that there’s been no decline.

The fundamentalists and absolutists will blame original sin for the slaughter, arguing that it’s the fault of those who refuse to follow their Law. Their oaths are hollow. It’s the fundamentalists and absolutists who are deeply implicated in the awful crimes. I can hear them screaming already at the question, but what is the moral difference between the free market fundamentalists of the insurance industry who have condemned children to death in the name of the Invisible Hand and those who bomb innocents in the name of Allah, or Yahweh, or Jesus, or the Fatherland?

“We’ll buy back our own harm with what is most dear to us,” Clytemnestra said. Her words are a warning to nations in war who shrug off the deaths of civilians, including children, with the euphemism, “collateral damage.” Violent zealots who blow up schools and markets in the name of their god or ideology should consider Agamemnon’s fate, as should insurance executives and their empowering politicians.

Today, we can celebrate some signs of an awakening, here and around the globe. According to UNICEF, the number of global, under-five deaths fell from 12.5 million in 1990 to 2008 less than 9 million in 2008. Global measles deaths have fallen 74 percent.

We should be proud of extending health care to millions of children once excluded. Still, it is just a beginning, an acknowledgment of a moral responsibility too long ignored by too many. The United States ranked last among the 21 developed nations in children’s well-being. Around the world, one billion children are deprived of services essential to survival and development.

The lion sleeps tonight, but the lion is not yet tamed. Maybe we should let the children sing that song to us.

 

In Luc Besson’s campy movie, The Fifth Element, the villainous Zorg wants to rule the world. Like many a villain before him, Zorg (Gary Oldman) makes chaos his philosophical and tactical ally. As Zorg puts it:

Life…comes from disorder, destruction and chaos…You see Father, by creating a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life.

Uh-huh. But in the aftermath of the passage of health care reform, Republicans are learning a downside of melodrama. They are hoist with their own violent, anti-health care petard, much like Zorg is smithereened by his own bomb. Keith Olbermann warned them about this several years ago, employing that wonderful French pun of a word.

The Republican leadership aggressively encouraged violent, hateful rhetoric from their flying monkeys. Casting health care reform as the coming of the communist apocalypse, they are now struggling with the growing perception that the bill just makes it possible for our hardworking next-door neighbor to see a doctor.

The Right’s eliminationist actions are disturbing, of course. When they knife gas lines, spit on congressmen, or threaten supporters of reform, the radical rightists, like all bullies, betray their own deep feelings of inadequacy. The obsequious loser Greg Marmalard in Animal House comes to mind (Babs to Marmalard on Lover’s Lane:  Greg, honey, is it supposed to be this soft?).

The Republican leadership deserves the ridicule as well as condemnation for feeding the fires of racism and hate. The mockery works because they are inadequate to their own impossible authoritarian desires. There’s no ideological integrity to their public attacks on health care reform. Mandates were a Republican idea way back in 1993, much to Mitt Romney’s current embarrassment.

But behind their attacks there is an ideology of control and authority. Health care reform is liberating. Fewer people will be locked into dead-end jobs. Young people will find it easier to get a head start on their dreams. A robust public option would have been far superior, but it’s still the case that we have taken some small steps toward liberating Americans from the deprivations of the insurance industry.

It’s our freedom the Right is most afraid of. They hide behind the rhetoric of liberty, but authority is their god. They truly believe they are God’s Elect and that they are supposed to enjoy unrestrained control. This explains, in part, their move to replace Thomas Jefferson with John Calvin in social studies textbooks. Calvin’s Doctrine of the Elect guides their political thinking.

How, you ask, can the right-wing zealots be compared to both Zorg and Marmalard? Isn’t it the case that Zorg relies upon chaos and destruction where Marmalard stood, so to speak, for order?

There is a difference between the mad and the madcap. In Animal House, the Delta House free spirits created chaos in the name of freedom. The brand of destruction favored by Marmalard and Dean Wormer came in the form of expulsion and the military draft. Otter, Boon and the boys didn’t invade the homecoming parade so they could take charge. But that’s exactly why the Zorg Republicans tried to rain on the health care reform parade.

It didn’t work. It’s their parade that’s collapsed in chaos, and it is an entertaining spectacle. The Authoritarian Party, like Zorg, is undone by the chaos it unleashed on the country. Even Shakespeare couldn’t resist the gibe, giving Hamlet the words:

For ’tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard; and ‘t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon: O, ’tis most sweet,
When in one line two crafts directly meet.

 

You could see it coming in the eyes of Walker Evans’ Depression-era tenant farmer, Allie Mae Burroughs, and it’ll make you cry, that razor’s edge of a sad smile about her that says, “You, too.”

You could see it coming. Somewhere, a young boy in a dinosaur t-shirt holds his dying mother’s hand and remembers that the distant voice on the phone, the Insurance Voice, said simply, “No.” He could be forgiven for fearing he’d spoken to someone he shouldn’t have.

You could see it coming. Wall Street banks are too big to fail, and the black-souled ghouls of hate radio and FoxNews tell us our neighbors’ lives are too small to save.

Schoolbooks are being rewritten to redeem Joseph McCarthy, make of Phyllis Schlafly something like an authoritarian madonna, and turn the Separations Clause into a guarantor of theocracy.

Andrew, Son of Schlafly, is rewriting the Bible, too, no doubt replacing Amos with Milton Friedman and “justice like a mighty stream” with trickle-down economics. Joseph saw seven years of famine in Pharaoh’s dream. “Merely the lower strings of a cats cradle in the Market’s invisible hand,” Schlafly’s Joseph will say, adding with certainty, “It’s the business cycle.”

Joseph’s coat of many colors is back in his father Jacob’s mournful hands in the traditional American tune, “When First Unto This Country.” It was an Austin group, The Gant Family, who brought the song to folklorists in the 1930s. Bob Dylan called it “my foreign language song, my only foreign language song.”  And I wonder what he means, because isn’t Jacob’s 11th son a little like us, post-Declaration America’s 11th generation, give or take? In a dream our ancestors hold our bloodstained coat and say, “We warned you to be careful.”

It’s an authentic American Joseph who sings “When First Unto This Country.” He wears his innocence like his “cap set on so bold.” He loses it, along with his coat of many colors. Still, we should remember that Joseph had enough sense to outsmart Pharaoh and to make sure his people got his bones out of Egypt.

How fine it would be for the young man with the dying mother to sing this song to the Insurance Voice on the other end of the phone line. But that’s the thing. He did, and if you don’t believe me ask Walt Whitman, who heard it and knew the young man and all America learned it from the delicious singing of their mothers.

Look again at Evans’ Allie Mae. It’s not condemnation in her eyes, it’s defiance and a promise of solidarity. Sure enough, we brought rats with us when we came to this country, and those of us who would have made peace with the Natural and Free Human Beings already here soon found ourselves outnumbered. But not silenced.

When we elected America’s first African-American president in 2008, it seemed we’d earned a song like Whitman’s tribute to Lincoln: “O Captain My Captain! Our fearful trip is done.” Ours was not a requiem, of course, but a christening, a raising of the sails. We cheered departure, not arrival. Democracy means we come new unto this country, every day.

We saw it coming, of course. Those frightened of freedom and equality heard our singing and set about banging their pans. There’s nothing new about this. Some see the open country and the untamed spirit that makes America what it is. But others see only a place to be conquered and a people to be subjugated.

Why this song, now? To remind ourselves of the mighty stream of justice and hope that courses through the people’s America. Tactical demands of the day require us to look down at our feet as we walk along a precipice. But when we raise our eyes to the horizon, we find that the singer of “When First Unto This Country” might just be ending the song where it began, on a new departure. We’re always strangers in a land of possibility and danger, and maybe that’s what Dylan meant when he called it a foreign-language song.

Here’s Dylan’s apparition, caught among the voices of the crowd, the videoed soul of a nation singing our varied carols.

Tags: ” Walker Evans, “When First Unto This Country, Allie Mae Burroughs, Andrew Schlafly, Bob Dylan, health care reform, Jacob, Joseph, Pharaoh, Phyllis Schlafly, Texas State Board of Education

 

Stories are impossible, but it’s impossible to live without them. That’s the mess I’m in.

–Filmmaker Wim Wenders

Progressive storytellers looking to advance transformational change have a problem. The problem is melodrama, our culture’s dominant mode of story. A virtuous hero overcomes obstacles and saves an innocent victim from an evil villain. Melodrama is fundamentally conservative. It’s popular because it assures the fearful that Sam Cooke was wrong. A change isn’t gonna come.

All of us who try to advance progressive change by writing, talking to friends, making films or ads, appearing on television etc. need some understanding of the force of popular narrative in the public sphere. Our thoughts take narrative form, a form learned by our bodies’ movements in space and time. Next time you’re thirsty, note that the act of reaching for a glass of water and drinking has a beginning, middle and end. So does sex, and so does life itself. That’s how intimate we are with narrative.

When we want to engage others in the struggle for an egalitarian, popular democracy, we have to pay attention to the stories we tell. And we don’t get to tell these stories in a narrative vacuum. Our bodyminds are full of stories, from novels to films to religious celebrations to pop songs to family dramas. That’s why attention to popular culture is vital. But so many popular stories are melodramatic, over-simplified and reassuring tales of good and evil that you might say we live in a melodramocracy. As political scientist Elisabeth Anker says:

[Melodrama] is not merely a type of film or literary genre, but a pervasive cultural mode that structures the presentation of political discourse and national identity in contemporary America.

The Right is expert at exploiting the melodramatic habit. Look at the health care debate. In stories paid for by the insurance industry, innocent Americans are to be saved from evil, socialist President Snidely Obama by heroic and selfless Republican Dudley Do-Rights. Emancipating change becomes the enslaving rope Snidely uses to tie Little Nell to the railroad tracks.

Jeffrey Mason puts the fear of change this way in his book, Melodrama and the Myth of America:

If society can change, if it can evolve or transform into something new rather than experiencing restoration to its former condition, then it is possible for such change to leave the subject behind, rendering him marginal, rejected, and out of place. This is the fear of erasure or of displacement, of being cast aside and left alone.

In the Right’s recent “Mount Vernon Statement,” conservatives were explicitly melodramatic, warning Americans about the dangers of change:

Some insist that America must change, cast off the old and put on the new. But where would this lead — forward or backward, up or down? Isn’t this idea of change an empty promise or even a dangerous deception?

The change we urgently need, a change consistent with the American ideal, is not movement away from but toward our founding principles.

Conservatives promote change of a sort, call it restorative change. Progressives, on the other hand, see redemption not in the restoration of the past but in the realization of futures both wild and just.

Relying on the work of Anker, Harold W. Simons, Kenneth Burke and others, we can see three ways melodrama works against effective progressive gains.

Dividing the world into simplistic, melodramatic or Manichean models of good and evil is no way to advance an egalitarian society in a complex world of systemic and not direct or simple causation. However, it is a good way of promoting outrage. It’s no accident that blog posts about our evil opponents get the most attention and comments. And often, outrage is warranted. Bad people should be called bad. Scholars, from Burke to Anker, admit the paradox is difficult to resolve.

Second, if the very form of melodrama promotes conservative resistance to change, aren’t we moving one step forward and two steps back when we employ the form?

Lastly, Manichean melodrama can lead to bizarre outcomes that subvert progressive values. Michael Berube, in his book, The Left At War, writes:

For the Manichean left, as for the Manicheans of the early Christian era, there are two forces in the world, those of good and evil, and everyone and everything that is not on one side is on the other…if Israel is in the wrong, the Hezbollah must be in the right (and, as the Manichean-left slogan of the 2006 war in Lebanon had it, “we are all Hezbollah now”)…

How do we untie the progressive movement from the railroad tracks of melodrama?

First, we shouldn’t confuse melodrama and theatricality. We can tell moving stories without resorting to the simplified, melodramatic mode. Buddha did it. Martin Luther King, Jr. did it. Vaclav Havel did it. The historical Jesus did it. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison did it. Open-ended parables that require creative interpretation provoke imagination. Honest analysis that recognizes our universal fallibility and the potential tragic consequences of all our endeavors can open minds and hearts to the new while making clear our mistakes of the past.

Second, both humor and humility can take the melodramatic steam out of necessary attacks on bad behavior that deserves the name “evil.” This is Kenneth Burke’s solution. Burkean Harold Simons mentions Jon Stewart as an example. We can be dramatic and entertaining without over-simplifying.

Lastly, we can do more than one thing at a time. One messenger can promote outrage while others take a humorous, humble, open and transformative approach that recognizes the future for what it is: uncertain, but full of promise.

Tags: Elisabeth Anker, framing, Harold W. Simons, Kenneth Burke, Melodrama, Michael Bérubé, narrative

 

In the late 1930s, Depression-weary Americans turned to a movie (based upon the James Hilton novel), Lost Horizon, about a hidden Himalayan paradise, Shangri-La. In the 2000s, anxious Americans turned to Lost, a sophisticated sci-fi mystery television show set on a hidden island. As Lost’s Mr. Eko warns, we shouldn’t mistake coincidence for fate. Still…

There’s more than escapism to the popularity of Lost and Lost Horizon. Both stories call upon the yearning for freedom and for solidarity among a people challenged by divisive circumstances and their own irascibility. Freedom and solidarity aren’t idle fantasies. America was founded upon their possibility.

Storytellers have long understood that character is best revealed in crisis. Just think of the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Iliad and Odyssey. Our contemporary economic, political and environmental crises are producing just such character-revealing moments. Conservatives want to turn back the clock to some imagined paradisiacal past. Progressives want to do what their name implies, move onward through the fog.

This tug-of-war in time has always been a part of our culture, if not every culture. It is certainly represented in both Lost and Lost Horizon. Both tales are marked by conflict between characters who want to press forward and those who want to go backward.

In recent decades, the backward-tugging team is winning. The rise of the Right has pulled the nation further and further from its true horizon. Fear, retrenchment and retreat have weakened the promise of popular democracy, of freedom and empathic solidarity.

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama seemed to understand and speak to a hopeful, yearning, forward-looking spirit. He was Robert Conway, the optimistic seeker of Lost Horizon. John McCain was like Conway’s brother, George, whose fear made him want to return to the past, for a yesterday he at least could understand. George persuades Robert to leave, with tragic consequences. While I hate to say it, the Republicans appear to be turning Obama away from the future as well. At the end of Lost Horizon, Robert Conway heads again for Shangri-La. We’ll have to wait and see what Obama does.

Looking at political realities through popular cultural narratives can often tell us more about ourselves than dry analyses can. Lost deserves a look in this regard, though the series is far more than a simple political parable.

Lost is in its sixth and final season. The story does, of course, draw upon Lost Horizon and many, many other movies and films. Plane crashes land the heroes of both stories in their strange new worlds. However, their respective presences in Tibet and on the mysterious island are not accidental. Others manipulated their arrivals. The unnamed island of Lost is no paradise. It is home, though, to the odd Dharma Initiative, a Buddhist name for a distinctly Western,  scientific experiment whose participants live odd, Stepford-Families-On-An-Army base lives.

Despite its presence in Tibet, Shangri-La is peculiarly Western, too. A French priest, not a Buddhist monk, founded it. Fellows named Chang introduce newcomers to the lost worlds in both Lost and Lost Horizon. Both Shangri-La and the island of Lost seem to have magic healing powers. Shangri-La is based on the legendary lost Tibetan paradise of Shambhala. Unsurprisingly, a popular song from the 70s, “Shambala,” accompanies a wonderful moment in Lost’s third season that celebrates hope, freedom and solidarity (See the clip above).

At the heart of Lost are familiar themes. A diverse and all-too-human group of people find themselves in a strange new world. They struggle to survive. They struggle with one another. They find love and lose it, too. Despite constant references to the battle between good and evil, just who or what is good or evil remains ambiguous, at least for now.

The allusions, narrative switchbacks and time displacements of Lost make it one of the most complex and puzzling shows ever to air on network television. The mysteries and head-scratching enigmas are fun — and intellectually stimulating –  for fans. Complexity itself seems a central character. In fact, one could speculate that at the core of Lost lies the question, “Can love survive in a complex world?”

Damn good question.

Lost worlds like Plato’s Atlantis or Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island focus human drama and perhaps wring it dry, leaving either utopia or hell in place of everyday life. Sometimes, though, humanity proves more than either heaven or hell can bear.  When we tell each other our dream-stories from such transformative times and places, we may be indulging in fantasy. But we should look to these stories for clues and maybe even solutions to our real predicaments.

“Did you ever go to a totally strange place and feel certain that you’d been there before?” Robert Conway asks in Lost Horizon. Every great story makes that odd feeling rise in our hearts. Freedom feels like home.

Our popular culture is full of tales of hope and liberation. We dream of communion, cooperation and individual fulfillment. If we can dream it, we can achieve it, if only we  will heed our stories of horizons lost — and found.

Tags: Barack Obama, James Hilton, Lost, Lost Horizon

 

Conservative leaders’ pompous and self-congratulatory “Mount Vernon Statement” twice refers to the line “self-evident truths” from the Declaration of Independence. Conspicuously absent, however, are two of those self-evident truths: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed with unalienable rights.

I don’t think it was an oversight. The omission gets to the heart of the deeply authoritarian personality of the contemporary conservative movement, or movements, as the case may be. Oh, the Mount Vernon document mentions “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But universal rights and equality are anathema to conservatives. How would they justify oppression if everyone was equal and had equal rights?

In the authoritarian worldview, some people are just naturally better than others. Or, as George Orwell famously put it, some are more equal than others. For conservatives, government’s only proper role is in enforcing the inequality. And that begs the question: if it’s so natural, why does it have to be enforced at all?

It is striking, in a Tiger-Woods-on-chastity kind of way, to see a collection of gouty royalists like Ed Meese and Alfred Regnery masquerade as the true defenders of the American democratic tradition. These posers are idolatrous hierarchs who have spent all their lives building their rodent tunnels under Constitutional barriers to plutocracy.

The MVS says:

The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.

These words from the defenders of the idea that corporations are people, too, people who are, incidentally members of the “most equal” club. Just where in hell is that in the Constitution? These are the people who scrapped habeas corpus and the right to privacy, who oppose voting rights and brag about how they subvert the public will with elaborate voter suppression schemes.

These are the defenders of the democratic tradition? What mad cowshit is this?

The conservatism of the Declaration asserts self-evident truths based on the laws of nature and nature’s God. It defends life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It traces authority to the consent of the governed. It recognizes man’s self-interest but also his capacity for virtue.

See, no “created equal” or “unalienable rights.” I don’t know what to make of their reference to the Declaration’s mention of the “Laws of Nature.”  These conservative corkscrews spend much of their time on their flat earth ridiculing Nature’s laws for political and economic gain. Oh, I see they also mention “nature’s God,” which gives them an out. “Did we say nature’s laws? We meant Pat Robertson’s laws.”

And what happened to the upper case “N” in the Declaration’s “Nature’s God,” which in the MVS becomes “nature’s God?” Upper cased Nature, after all, might belittle the rightful dominion of God’s Elect. It is unnervingly polytheistic. The hell with the Founders’ language! So much for the MVS signatories’ claim to be defending the Founders against the “sustained attacks” of constitutional heretics.

Still, nothing so clearly reveals the conservatives’ true authoritarian mission better than the omission of the Declaration’s very first self-evident truth: “That all men are created equal.”

That beautiful phrase does away with the cornerstone of conservative thought, which is that some are born to rule, others to be ruled. Quite conveniently, conservatives place themselves in the former category. People have an essential nature. People of unwhite skin are lazy, unintelligent, and undeserving of the rewards that naturally acrue in the bank accounts of their betters. Many are born to be poor, many to die young, many to be imprisoned.

This Declaration’s phrase puts the torch to that particular pile of manure. It tells us we are alike in our hopes, dreams and aspirations. It tells us specifically that we are not born unequal. We certainly live unequal lives, though. So if conservatives agreed that we were born equal they’d have to account for (among other things) the great disparity in wealth and opportunity.

Such an accounting, of course, would end their masquerade. It would reveal that disparity to be their only real achievement and their only real goal for the future.

 

American democracy is a better mousetrap. Unfortunately, it was born in the Age of the Rat.

It isn’t just any old rat, either. It is a magical rat that somehow convinces its victims that the fatter it gets, the better off they are. I refer, of course to the robber barons of Wall Street, the plump rats and plutocrats of the Industrial Revolution and its technology-empowered successors.

It doesn’t take a fine-grained historical account to see that our democratic mousetrap has proved inadequate to the task of catching rats, from yesterday’s railroad magnates to today’s Wall Street thieves. It took a civil war to stop the trafficking in human beings.

With some extraordinary exceptions – child labor laws, the New Deal, civil rights – we’ve done little more than occasionally wipe the coal dust from our faces.

What is the source of the rat-magic that has made many Americans believe their freedom depends upon the freedom of others to, well, destroy their freedom?

Some point to Calvinism. Others mention Hobbes’ description of humans as fallen brutes. (Calvin & Hobbes? Ah, the hidden meaning!) Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” became the right hand of the Calvinist God. Then there’s Charles Darwin. To the Right, biological evolution is a fraud, but social Darwinism is the cat’s meow.

Their worldview goes something like this:

A person lives in isolation from other humans and from all of nature. Life is deterministic. Freedom is acceptance of one’s place in the hierarchy. Free people accept a dog-eat-dog world in which human attachment and interdependence are seen as mollycoddling folly. Obedience to authority brings economic security and is a sign of divine favor. Extreme wealth usually proves that some are naturally closer to God than others. Importantly, economic exploitation can, sometimes, be taken as betrayal. We’ll come back to this.

The holders of this unhandsome outlook don’t see it this way, of course. They are inside the worldview. For them, it is where meaning comes from.

The progressive worldview holds that persons live in an interdependent world with nature and with one another. Self-reliance and social responsibility are recognized virtues. Individuals exist in relationship. When one is in chains, no one is free. Freedom comes with responsibilities. It is something more than a safe place in a hierarchy.

George Lakoff uncovered another key source of the difference: family. The language and values of “strict” parent types correspond to conservative political views. “Nurturant” styles correspond to progressive views. Obedience and discipline are important to the strict parent. Its first priority is the maintenance of authority. Nurturant parents focus on responsibility and concern for others. Most of us hold some of both. The strict parent at home might be tolerant and empowering at work or hold political views at odds with his parenting style.

Back to rat-magic.  In conservatives’ more confining picture of human nature, legitimate authority is more often a cleric or a CEO than a product of that suspicious, unseemly lottery called an election, unless the cleric or CEO wins the election.

And, capitalism has the neat feature of sorting people into an economic hierarchy. As their capitol accumulates, the rich really do get richer. It seems quite natural to the conservative authoritarian. Government interventions aimed at putting the rats on a diet are unnatural acts. And that’s why democracy’s mousetrap can’t catch rats.

The advantage isn’t lost on the rats. They use their heft to reinforce the conservative worldview through political bribes and a sophisticated message machine. They’ve done a great job of activating the brain networks in which the hierarchical, authoritarian models reside. How is it that so many people I know who would break their backs for a neighbor in need can hold such cold and punishing political opinions? The rats abracadrabed them. It helps, of course, that the rats can tempt politicians with a hand up the economic ladder where the partners can keep one another well fed.

We have some clues to building a bigger, better mousetrap, one made for rats. Some voters felt betrayed by President Bush and the Republicans. President Obama’s 2008 victory was due in part to this feeling of betrayal. There are goodly numbers of moderate voters who recognize betrayal when they see it. They are secular Anne Hutchinsons. Hutchinson was the 17^th Century Puritan dissident whose self-confidence and moral courage allowed her to see through the magic spells of intolerant authority. These Americans hold a less rigid view of the divine hierarchy. While not abandoning the “religion,” when betrayed they will abandon its temporary human despots and embrace new leadership.

Also, people feel a natural empathy for one another. Fellow-feeling and skepticism of divisive, abusive authority are deeply ingrained in our natures, much more deeply, I think, than either the authoritarian will to power or the weak passivity that wants only to be led. The progressive outlook is alive in the good neighbor. I call it prairie humanism. We need to draw it out into the political sphere.

Progressives, then, would be wise to incorporate two themes in their messages:  1) The need for institutional safeguards against betrayal by economic and political elites; 2) An authentic, empathy-based argument that we are, collectively and cooperatively, our own best allies. It’s easy to say, but, apparently, harder to do.

The Mousetrap game animation, “Cheese Trap”: “First quarter final project for the Computer Animation course at University of Washington — the mouse trap. Created in Maya by Dane Barney and Camden Davis in the span of three weeks (with very little sleep) in December 2004.”

 

To date, there is no authentic, 21st Century progressive movement. Those may be fightin’ words to some, but I think they’re true. The contemporary progressive resistance arose in response to a consolidation of neo-liberal, authoritarian power, maybe just in the nick of time. The resistance knows what it resists; it’s less articulate about its own vision of a progressive future.

Our collective actions have the feel of an anti-colonialist movement. Metaphorically at least, it helps to look at the advances of the Right as an imperialistic, re-colonization of America. We resist the Right with a defensive action. We lack an effective offensive, though, because we don’t have a shared sense of where we want to lead America.

Recently, there are signs that the resistance is maturing into an authentic progressive movement. Author and organizer Zack Exley’s Huffington Post piece, The New Right’s Secret Sauce, called attention to our missing worldview while pointing to the Right’s shared vision as the source of its strength. Arianna Huffington has selected Jeremy Rifkin’s fine new book, The Empathic Civilization, as her book of the month. Rifkin has penned condensed versions in recent published essays.

Jeffrey Feldman has approached the problem in many ways, most recently in his work on corporatism. I’ve tried to do my part, beginning with my book, The Politics of Deceit, and in the series, “The Promise of Popular Democracy: Origins”; “Part II: Solidarity of the Shaken”; “Part III: The Promise”.

Most recently, I’ve employed the term prairie humanism to refer to a moral vision deeply embedded in the American grain. It refers to a committed and attentive neighborliness, to an understanding that we are responsible for ourselves AND for one another. I’ve spent a lifetime among folk of the West/Southwest. They’ll break their backs to help a neighbor in need; but, as individualists, they want others to mind their own business, too.

Exley captures the economic and political implications of this spirit when he writes of the balance between individualism and cooperation:

It is the tradition of Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and so many others who saw no contradiction between individual and collective enterprise. That tradition was suppressed through the rise of big capital after the Civil War, and then it was forgotten forever when the left was flooded by European Technocrats, Communists, Socialists and Fascists in the 20th century.

There are many others I should mention as contributing to this emerging progressive worldview. My own modest efforts owe a huge debt to the work of George Lakoff, William Connolly, Franz de Waal, Marco Iacoboni, Francisco Varela, Drew Weston and others too numerous to name.

Prairie humanists depend on the human biological capacity for empathy. This isn’t surprising. There would be no human culture, and certainly no democracy, without empathy, which allows us to see the world through others’ eyes.

Rifkin writes:

Empathy is the soul of democracy. It is an acknowledgment that each life is unique, unalienable, and deserving of equal consideration in the public sphere. The evolution of empathy and the evolution of democracy have gone hand in hand throughout history. The more empathetic the culture, the more democratic its values and governing institutions…While apparent, it’s strange how little attention has been paid to the inextricable relationship between empathic extension and democratic expansion in the study of history and evolution of governance.

This is true, but Rifkin doesn’t go far enough. As I noted in “The Promise of Popular Democracy: Origins,” when James Madison spoke of the need for “intimate sympathy” among a people, he was pointing to the bonds anthropologists like Christopher Boehm have found among our earliest human ancestors, bonds that led to egalitarian, proto-democratic checks on authority. The Greeks didn’t invent democratic practices. They emerged long before Ancient Greece, 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. Thorkild Jacobson, Norman Yoffee, Raul S. Manglapus, Jack Goody and others have written about these early egalitarian, democratic relations.

One possible reason it seems easier to resist authority rather than advance an egalitarian vision is that our democratic practices appear to have emerged in resistance. Empathy is a fundamental human capacity. But the will to power is also present. So is the need for leadership. When leaders became bullies, bonds among the bullied could — and did –  topple the leader. Exile, ridicule, even term limits were employed long ago by proto-democrats.

It’s also no accident that the rise of the scientific worldview and rationalism rejected empathy as dangerously emotional. Rational management and historical determinism, in both Marxism and capitalism, became hallmarks of the modern democratic era.

Prairie humanists want to return our political relationships to something like the neighborliness that marks private life across ideological boundaries. Think how much easier it would be to advance environmental initiatives and the greening of industry if we had already been re-framing progressive politics along these lines. Think how different the health care debate would be. The insurance industry argument depends upon an all-against-all worldview.

Prairie humanists drop old, liberal, technocratic talk of managed solutions. We focus upon consequences. How can our neighbors and we best secure health? What are our responsibilities to such a cause?

The unfettered pursuit of private interests obviously dooms collective opportunity and the constitutional guarantees of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have to contain — and topple –  the political and economic authority that enforces this ideological trap. As we’ve seen, humans have been doing just that for a very long time. We can do it, too.

 

At the Republican caucus retreat, President Obama showed us the potential of a real-world, unscripted partisan showdown before an unblinking camera. Proving the democratic potential, FoxNews blinked and cut away from the event. That’s how important fakery and deceit are to its mission, and to the success the Right.

It takes more than a willingness to lie to convince Americans that health care reform is a communist plot or that Obama is an illegal alien. It takes contemporary political media more welcoming of artifice than truth.  And, it takes money.

That brings us to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision. (The term “Supreme Court” has always given me pause, since too often the adjective “supreme” is taken to modify its wisdom and judgment rather than its standing among the many courts.) In this case, the Court, ignoring precedent, common sense and the law, said corporations can spend unlimited amounts to influence American election outcomes. The decision, Frank Rich writes today, gives “corporate interests an even greater stranglehold over a government they already regard as a partially owned onshore subsidiary.”

No one disputes that right wing spending over the last 40 years has warped our political opinion environment. Their think tanks, television networks, publishers, hate-radio hosts and front groups dominate the message environment. But our reaction too often reminds me of Medieval Europeans’ reaction to the Plague. To find a place for the Black Death in their worldview, only God could be responsible. He must be mad at them. Out of such nonsense were the Flagellants born, a 14^th Century group that marched around barefoot whipping themselves with scourges in hopes of warding off Death.

Before we ridicule the Flagellants, however, we ought to check our own duffel of delusions. It’s just as nutty to believe that all forms of communications are equal, that all people are possessed of pure reason, that ideas can and are judged fairly and equally by an informed citizenry who possess free and equal voices and access to information. These beliefs don’t just inhibit discovery of a cure, they help spread today’s plutocratic plague.

In order to believe that our own minds remain supremely rational and unbent by propaganda, we project that belief onto everyone (or almost everyone). It isn’t true of anyone. In order to believe the wealthy have no advantage in the universe of ideas, we believe that all forms of communication are equal. That’s not true, either. This essay can’t compete with $1 billion spent on TV advertising.

Yet, this is precisely what progressive defenders of the Court’s Citizens United opinion mean when they ask us to “trust the free market of ideas,” a phrase Adam Bonin used last week at Kos.

There is no more of a free market of ideas than there is a free market of health insurance. It is dangerous and destructive to believe otherwise.

The person with more money to spend on contemporary communications is almost always going to prevail. It puts the lie to the superstition that equal ideas have been openly discussed and weighed rationally by equally thoughtful citizens.

When money equals speech, the person with more money has more speech. There’s nothing free or equal about it. Give me a proposal with some cash behind it and I’ll bury the impecunious idea nearly every time. There are rule-proving exceptions, of course, but not many.

Let’s look again at the Flagellants.  We’d think even less of them had they kept at their whips long after some impossible genius discovered the disease’s true bacterial cause and invented an antibiotic to cure it. I fear the analogy might fit our own behavior, except in our case it’s not hypothetical. We know the cause of our troubles, but we can’t admit it because it doesn’t fit our mythology that good and true ideas prevail because Reason ultimately demands it and because all forms of communication are equal.

While leaders have always lied, and new ways of lying were always looked for, the Framers didn’t contemplate and couldn’t have contemplated political speech in the context of today’s dizzying and costly media world. We have to adjust to our real circumstances.

The Court ruled as it did to advance plutocracy. The Court’s majority knew exactly what it was doing. You could see it in Justice Samuel Alito’s smugness at the State of the Union speech. Some, like Glenn Greenwald, say we are not to base Constitutional interpretations on outcomes. But, if we seek to avoid an unconstitutional and undemocratic outcome – the very outcome sought by the court – how in the world do we refrain? We at least must negate an outcome.

The Court was wrong for many reasons. Corporations aren’t persons. Money and speech are not equivalent. The federal government can regulate the speech and actions of entities it creates or grants benefit to.

We’ll get back on the road to democracy when we put down the flagellants’ whips and make decisions based on reality. We need full public finance of campaigns to equalize the playing field. We need mandated public affairs programming in which political opponents engage one another just as Obama engaged Congressional Republicans. We need a Constitutional Amendment stating that corporations are not persons.

There is good news in the Court’s action. Most Americans see that it threatens democracy. Many see that it’s actually meant to do exactly that. There is opportunity here. Real opportunity. There is also great danger. If we fail to act, progressive outcomes we think possible today will be impossible tomorrow.

 

History might be written by the winners, but our most profound, long-lived legends and stories are created by the folk. That’s why the stories, songs and poems are not called Elite Lore. Many of them are cautionary tales about the blindness, cruelty, hubris and dehumanizing excesses of authority.

The Framers, aware of this creative power, protected the people’s voices with the principle of free speech. The folk have never achieved political ascendency, of course. It seems rather obvious to say that authentic popular democracy has nowhere been achieved.

After a brief flourishing of grassroots, popular literature in the 19^th Century, the high costs of mass communications handed the elite some ability to keep the gates of culture and mediate or censor popular tales. I say “some ability” because a remarkable thing about human creativity is its radical persistence and resistance to authority. It was Joshua’s music that brought down the walls of Jericho. African-American creative traditions of resistance, made necessary by failure of the Framers to abolish slavery, are the ghosts in the machine of popular culture.

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission greatly strengthens the authoritarian domination of the people’s speech, reversing the intent of the Framer’s free speech principle. By freeing unaccountable, global corporations to use their nearly unlimited resources to dominate the political sphere, the authoritarian Court has sacrificed free speech on the altar of greed. They would have us believe that it is the powerful and nearly irresistible voices of the rulers that need liberating.

Moloch is unchained.

In the Hebrew Bible, it is the idolatrous Solomon who builds an altar for the sacrifice of children to Moloch, “the abomination of the sons of Ammon” (1 Kings 11.7). In early 21^st Century America, it is the five be-robed authoritarians, led by a dull, uncharismatic elitist with the unpoetic name of John Roberts.

The Iliad is a tragic and bloody tale of the failures of kings and elite warriors. The Old Testament is a colorful compendium of woeful human leadership. Buddha found enlightenment only after forsaking his royal family. Jesus’ radical parables pull the spiritual rug from under the powerful. The lone and rugged western hero of the American imagination loathes power.

The democratic revolutions of the 17^th-20^th centuries represented the political rise of the tale-tellers. Democracy was designed, in principle, to give the people a voice so that the tragedies of kings could be avoided, that Absalom might live, that there would be no Pilate in need of handwash.

But the American political elites flourish behind the walls of Jericho. We expect too much if we think any of them will, without a popular uprising on par with the abolitionists and civil rights movement, participate in the revolutionary music making that might bring down the walls.  The Supreme Court’s ruling undermines both government and the competitive marketplace (by allowing corporations to buy government-enforced market dominance rather than compete for it). But they will not see that. They will see only the possibility of more wealth and power.

Already they are accepting the Court’s decision as not all that significant.

If ever there was a voice for status-obsessed Washington, D.C. insiders, Politico is it. And Politico is telling us the outrage against Citizens United v. FEC is unjustified, that freeing corporations to spend what they want to elect or defeat whomever they want is no big deal.

Beware. The elite are coming to the realization that the Supreme Court’s decision is just the ticket. Officeholders see a new source of cash. Consultants, who work for candidates and corporations, are getting teary eyed at their potential windfalls. Pundits work for corporations. So do journalists.

The Court’s decision repudiates the Framers and the principle of free speech. It is a kind of ultimate empowerment of Moloch that spits in the face of humanity’s ancient search for liberation and equality.

Only a full-bodied revolt from Americans of all political stripes will undo what the court has done. Small, incremental legislative solutions should be pursued, but it will take a constitutional amendment or a new Supreme Court majority to reverse this awful ruling.

Sing, America, like it is our last song.