CHARACTERISTICALLY AMERICAN:

If You Had to Put Your Finger on the One Thing that Cost the Dems the Election It Was ... (Jim Sleeper, November 10, 2004, Yale Daily News)

Since I teach a seminar on "New Conceptions of American National Identity" here at Yale, where George W. Bush, John Kerry and I overlapped as undergraduates in the late 1960s, I couldn't avoid showing my students last week how Bush is reviving an old conception of our national identity. That conception depends on assumptions about free markets and spiritual salvation that are necessary, indeed, but nowhere near sufficient -- and often even counterproductive -- to sustaining republican freedom.

Bush backers think they've met the republican test set by Alexander Hamilton, who wrote that history had destined Americans, "by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force." After all, "swift-boat" creepy crawlies and gay-marriage bans aside, the Bush campaign was relatively free of the malevolence that drove the Whitewater hearings, the Clinton impeachment gambit and the untrustworthy 2000 election. This year's election seemed "clean" because the force and fraud had come earlier and were already coursing through the republic's bloodstream more powerfully than at any time since the early Cold War.

What's happening was anticipated in "Death of a Yale Man," Malcolm Ross' long-forgotten memoir of his early post-college struggle to organize poor miners and farmers in Kentucky in the 1930s in order to help them govern themselves through reflection and choice. He watched them swept up instead in the raptures of tent revivals led by itinerant preachers such as Billy Sunday. They backed "monkey trials" like the Scopes case against teaching evolution in Tennessee. Driven, sometimes subtly, by force and fraud, they followed demagogues to mystical certitudes or to war and voted for politicians who stimulated their fears, not their hopes.

Hamilton's republican standard relies on expectations of civic truth-telling and trust that are compelling enough to sideline such escapism and to deepen trust itself. But trust has declined lately in favor of more and more litigation, gladiatorial entertainment, enemy hating and, failing all that, the diffuse rage you see on roadways and in body language in public places. No wonder so many cling to a commander in chief and answer the call to a huge, new national tent revival. They crave something more reassuring than the myopic, multiculturalist relativism of George McGovern; the overconfident Great Society "social engineering" of Lyndon Johnson and even the "highly rationalistic" Social Security liberalism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Dewey and John Maynard Keynes. We are going all the way back to Bush strategist Karl Rove's favorite president, William McKinley, champion of robber barons and the Spanish-American War but also, in Bush's view, of economic dynamism and Christian passion.

The vision was explained soon after Ronald Reagan's 1980 election by James Lucier, an assistant to conservative Republican Sen. Jesse Helms. The liberal "leadership groups that run the country -- not just the media but also the politicians, corporate executives … have been trained in an intellectual tradition that is … highly rationalistic," Lucier told journalist Elizabeth Drew in The New Yorker. That training -- the liberal education that Bush, Kerry and I encountered at Yale -- "excludes most of the things that are important to the people who are selling cars and digging ditches," Lucier explained. "The principles that we're espousing, have been around for thousands of years: The family …, faith that … there is a higher meaning than materialism. Property as a fundamental human right … and that a government should not be based on deficit financing and economic redistribution …. It's not the 'new right' -- people are groping for a new term. It's pre-political." [...]

To some extent, American liberals asked for this. A rights-obsessed liberalism that respects even anti-social, anti-republican selfishness as "difference" and suspends moral judgments still depends for its own survival on virtues and beliefs which liberalism alone cannot nourish much less defend: Rumpus may pose as liberating, but subtly it alienates people from one another and themselves enough to make them more pliable to Authority. Combine that deceiving relativism with liberalism's equally misguided respect for the supposed free speech "rights" of the corporate marketers who are ever more swaggering and intimately intrusive in our lives, but whose only "political" speech is dedicated to increasing profit and market share at any social cost, and you have millions leading lives of quiet desperation and degradation, looking for a Billy Sunday or a commander in chief.

Liberals' challenge isn't to mock those around us who are being drawn, like magnet filings, into this darkening, doomed crusade, but to acknowledge American liberalism's own estrangement from a national character that is often -- heaven help us -- a balancing act as weird as that of a Jack Nicholson movie character, tottering along on a tightrope between rampant materialism and faith.

There's real insight here but it needs to be extended--what the Ownership Society and the voucherization/privatization of government programs does is to insulate the citizenry from the political class, to make even what will remain at bottom a welfare state a nonetheless pre-political one. That is a weird balance to strike but it is quintessentially American of the president to think it can be done.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 17, 2004 1:44 PM