Saturday, June 29, 2024

So What Else Is New?

Adlai Stevenson is the politician I keep thinking of, the policy wonk with good ideas who rallied the delegates at the ‘52 convention and reluctantly won the nomination. He went on to lose against Ike in ‘52 and ‘56.
Stevenson dramatized the complex feelings of educated elites, some of whom came to adore him not because he was a liberal, but because he was not...he spoke a language that set apart from average Americans an increasingly college-educated population. His approach to voters as rational participants in a process that depended on weighing the issues attracted reformers, intellectuals, and middle-class women with time and money (the "Shakespeare vote", joked one columnist). Or as one enthralled voter wrote "You were too good for the American people."
Ike was hardly a narcissist, but Nixon was hardly Ike. Among GOP presidents in the 20th century, in fact, Ike is the anomaly. Nixon had Watergate; Reagan Iran:Contra (and damned near Reykjavik, another kind of scandal); Poppy was eyeballs deep in Iran/Contra and effectively self-pardoned his way out of it; Shrub had the gross incompetence of Katrina and Iraq (WMD that weren’t), and Dick Cheney running the Administration as he and Rumsfeld saw fit; and Trump was Shrub on steroids: even more incompetent, but without even Cheney and Rumsfeld to cover him.

Trump is the apotheosis of GOP Presidents of the last 100 years. And of course he’s a narcissist. You have to have a pretty strong ego, at least, to rise that far.

But the system has always favored bullshitters. Government has always served those with power. The government set up by the Constitution tried to disseminate that power: to land-owning white men, who happened to be all the delegates in Philadelphia. Only after a bloody civil war, which was a fight for power, did that start to change. Even then women got the vote before blacks got the Voting Rights Act (which the Roberts Court then took away).

Machine politics favored the Democrats and those who ran the “machine.”  But Republicans were pretty much interested in rule in the 20th century: McCarthy and Nixon wanted the power to decide who was, and was not, a communist, the better to decide who was, and was not, fit for American society. Reagan was little different, but he did it against “welfare queens in Cadillacs,” for political power. Shrub let Rumsfeld and Cheney act like Masters of the Universe. Closing the circle, MTG aspires no higher today than McCarthy and Nixon did. She even uses the same, now woefully outdated, vocabulary.

Wielding power is all about being selfish enough to think you know how to do it “right.” That’s a necessary evil, but it always exposes us to the rule of the narcissist. That’s a necessary evil, too. The system can’t be closed to it anymore than a more formal system can produce all the answers to all the questions it can generate.  There is no closed system that suits all needs, answers all will questions, meets all threats to its function. Nor do we have anything like a closed system in American politics. It used to be a more controlled system: Stevenson won the nomination in 1952 because of his speeches to the convention. Reformers democratized the convention to give power to people, not party satraps; to open the “closed system” to the people. And so we got: Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan; and Bill Clinton; and Shrub (both undistinguished governors from overlook estates. What quality if governor has either state produced since?); and, again the apotheosis of this process: Trump.

And a lot of incumbents in Congress who used to be marginally, at least, interested in the goals of their parties; but now are only interested in their social media status or staying the incumbent. Either way it seems to require no legislative effort whatsoever, and a lot of attention to taking care of oneself.

Such is the nature of progress.

As for the “public debate:” Jules Verne’s world traveler Phineas Fogg crosses the American plain and comes across a small town where a riot is in progress. Except it’s not a riot, it’s a political campaign: for the local dog catcher. American politics has never been a debate in the agora among gentlemen farmers. To read Plato’s “Apology,” it seldom was in Athens, either. If you’ll recall, Socrates antagonizes the Athenian citizenry for what are really his own selfish reasons. And honestly, no small part of Socrates’ “wisdom” is just Plato favoring Socrates’ “bullshit answers.” Plato makes sure Socrates wins the argument, mostly by keeping the rules of discussion unnaturally narrow. Power is all about who’s in control.

Real solutions to real problems is a matter of consensus that is the result of argument. But real solutions are ephemeral and short-lived when found. The Civil Rights Act was a real solution to a real problem; but its real implementation in affirmative action is all but dead, because it’s seen as unfair to white people.

And now there are politicians and would-be power brokers who want to take the vote away from women and revoke the civil rights act. These, too, are real problems, with real solutions.

Those solutions are at the ballot box.

There was no public consensus when LBJ, the only modern president to be more productive than Joe Biden in four years, passed the CRA and the VRA and Medicare and so many laws that basically created the America we take for granted now. There never is, even long after the fact. The public consensus was that the South well and truly lost the war. Within a generation the loss was the betrayed “Lost Cause.” and it was about sovereignty and independence and “state’s rights,” and never about something as ugly as slavery. And that “consensus,” held by a diminishing few, is still creating real problems; and is still a form of group narcissism, if such a thing can be said to exist.

The tendency towards selfishness will always be with us, as will its extreme in narcissism. Reinhold Niebuhr understood that society’s must act in their self-interest, or forfeit their rights to being a society (which exists, after all, to provide for its members). A truly selfless political leader would be as disastrous as a truly narcissistic one. It’s up to the political structure of the society to avoid the one as much as the other. Nothing else can do it.
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