Reading the Entrails

Signs and omens.  A leftist with mental problems shoots a popular right-wing Congressman, and reactions on both left and right are entirely predictable and entirely useless.  The right blames leftist criticism of Trump, while the left cannot resist a good bit of snark about the fact that Scalise’s life was saved by a black lesbian cop.  But no amount of snark is going to get the GOP to face up to its role in legitimizing political violence and in making the tools of violence readily available to all, and the left doesn’t have much else to offer, on this or any other matter.  

     It looks very much like the Democrats are getting ready for a Clinton/Sanders rematch in 2020.  Since the GOP will most likely put forward Pence, it’s just going to be old white people again.  (Full disclosure:  I am an old white person.  Even worse, I’m male.)  And yes, I am pretty convinced that Trump’s tantrums will have led by then to some sort of permanent timeout, perhaps in a rubber room drooling on his shoes.

     Juries refuse to hold murderous cops accountable.  Trump has monetized the presidency, and his administration colludes with the corporate sector to screw the public.  White supremacists campaign openly.  Freedom of speech is under attack on college campuses, of all places.  Government, under either party, spies on the citizenry constantly while conducting the public’s business in secret.  Can anyone doubt that our political culture is in the final stages of putrefaction?  The stench is overpowering.  Perhaps it is time to call in a haruspex to see if we can deduce anything about the future from the rotting entrails of our democracy.

     Meanwhile, we are starting to hear more and more and more and more about how divided we are.  This isn’t news, really—race, sexuality, religion, economic policy, international responsibilities and countless other things have always divided us.  But these divisions do seem to be particularly, even dangerously abrasive these days, perhaps because they are all inflamed at once.  At the heart of many of these divisions is a fundamental issue of metaphysics about which both conservatives (from mainstream Republicans to those farther on) and liberals/progressives (from mainstream Democrats to those farther on) are very confused.

     Neither conservatives nor liberals understand change.  William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, articulated the conservative attitude to change quite well.  In the magazine’s mission statement, he said that it “stands athwart history, yelling Stop….”  Buckley, being an intelligent fellow, knew that stopping history would likely prove to be a futile task in the end.  But many contemporary conservatives seem to think it is a perfectly reasonable political agenda.  Indeed, many conservatives seem to think we can role history back a bit to a time when the country was better, that is to say, whiter

     Liberals/progressives, on the other hand, love change so long as it moves in the “right” direction.  But it so seldom does, and that is why they must be constantly hectoring everyone about everything—what we can eat, say, hear, think, see, wear, smoke, be.  If everyone would just embrace the right values and do what they should…but they don’t.

     We’ve got to get rid of the two major parties.  Both are hopelessly in debt to the corporate sector, and both are driven by ideological commitments that are remarkably immune to any sort of logical or empirical criticism.  And we have to move past trying to force all political thought into the simplistic dualism of liberal and conservative.  Twenty-five years ago, in a lecture to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, I explained what is problematic about this way of understanding our political culture.  What I said then seems even clearer today:  modern conservatism and liberalism are but fragments of the Classical Liberalism that originally shaped US political culture.  Neither has the philosophical tools to understand, much less address the issues of the day.

     Meanwhile, here’s another explanation of how we got to be in such a mess.