In Reinventing Political Culture, I argue that there are four components to Barack Obama’s project in reinventing American political culture: (1) the politics of small things, using new media to capture the power of interpersonal political engagement and persuasion, (2) the revival of classical eloquence, (3) the redefinition of American identity and (4) the pursuit of good governance, rejecting across the board condemnations of big government, understanding the importance of the democratic state. I think that there is significant evidence for advances on all four fronts. The most difficult in the context of the Great Recession was the struggle for good governance, but now the full Obama Transformation, responding the Reagan Revolution, is gaining broad public acceptance.

The election was won using precise mobilization techniques. Key fully developed speeches by the President and his supporters, most significantly Bill Clinton, defined the accomplishments of the past for years and the promise of the next four. Obama’s elevation of the Great Seal motto E pluribus unum (in diversity union), defining the special social character and political strength of America, has won the day. And now, the era of blind antipathy to government is over.

The pendulum has finally swung back. The long conservative ascendancy has ended. A new commonsense has emerged. Obama’s reinvention of American political culture is rapidly advancing. The full effects of the 2012 elections are coming into view. The promise of 2008 is being realized. The counterattack of 2010 has been repelled. The evidence is everywhere to be seen, right in front of our eyes, and we should take note that it is adding up. Here is some evidence taken from reading the news of the past couple of days.

It is becoming clear that Obama’s tough stance in the fiscal cliff negotiations is yielding results.  The Republicans now are accepting tax increases. Signs are good that this includes tax rates. A headline in the Times Friday afternoon: “Boehner Doesn’t Rule Out Raising Tax Rates.” A striking shift in economic policy is apparent: tax the rich before benefit cuts for the poor, government support for economic growth. The Republicans are giving ground. The grand bargain to avoid the fiscal cliff will represent a major change in policy, with broad public support.

Boehner is talking tough but is gathering support of his party to enable a deal on President Obama’s terms, the Times reports in another story. The Republicans will support now what Boehner negotiates.

Even Rand Paul is supporting Harry Reid’s proposal in the Senate to increase taxes on the rich, albeit with a professed assurance that this will hurt the economy and in the long run hurt Democrats. Rand’s ideological conviction enables him to politically act. He pretends to know that taxing the rich will ruin the economy and be good in the end for libertarian Republicans such as himself. But note: he is accommodating to the new commonsense as he expresses a conviction that in the long run it will end.

Shockingly, following the same pattern, Ann Coulter, the extreme right wing Fox commentator, scandalized her host Sean Hannity by maintaining that Republicans support Obama’s tax proposals. Rightists are recognizing that the winds are pushing left.

And the far right is moving to the margins. Witness Boehner’s demotion of four Tea Party Republicans from choice committee assignments in the House of Representatives , and Jim DeMint, the Tea Party Senator, choosing exile at the Heritage Foundation, as its president, over completing his term in office, a luxurious exile worth one million dollars a year.

There are also more creative Republican responses. Rising stars in the Republican Party, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, gave speeches to a Jack Kemp tribute dinner, which emphasized the need to address the concerns and needs of the less advantage. I think that David Brooks reading of the significance of this is on the mark. There is a new “Republican Glasnost,” an openness to ideas, beyond trickle-down, ideas that could positively affect the life chances of the vast majority of the American citizenry, ideas that recognize positive government roles, that address the concerns of the less privileged.

The age of the attacks on big government is over. The times are truly changing. The New York Times today, under the headline “Obama Trusted on Economy,” reports on a Heartland Monitor Poll, finding broad support for Obama’s economic policies, with little support for  the Reaganesque Republican approach. The age of debate about good government has begun in an America that is becoming more comfortable with and confident of its pluralist identity, with more citizen involvement, and in which eloquence and intelligence matters. The election mattered.

On a more sober note: I don’t think that all is well in the Republic, that we are entering a new era of good feelings, that the President has the answer to all challenging problems. On many issues, the environment, national security, privacy and citizen rights, education and poverty, I think his policies and programs are wanting. I agree with the many leftist criticisms of Obama found on the left. But I think now is the time to push for corrections, with a chance to achieve them. As Obama himself said once, he has to be pushed to do the right thing.

I also think that the ideological polarization of the American public and its leadership is still a very serious problem. I wish the Tea Party were a thing of the past, but I fear it isn’t, and I hope the Occupy Movement will more practically engage in our pressing social problems, but I worry that it may not. It needs to work on speaking American, as Tom Hayden once put it in the 60s, stop dreaming about utopian visions, anarchism and the like, that make no sense to the broad American public, and address the incompleteness of the Obama transformation in ways that the public can understand and support. The emerging commonsense makes this possible. Obama has moved the center left, which has long been his project. The task for leftists is to move it further, engaging their fellow citizens.

I believe that the victory of truth over truthiness is the most important result of the elections last week. The victory is beautifully documented in Frank Rich’s latest piece in New York Magazine. In my judgment, the defeat of truthiness is even more important than the victory of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney and the victory of the Democratic Party over the Republicans, important though these are. A sound relationship between truth and politics will provide for the possibility of American governability and progress, informed by both progressive and conservative insights.

To be sure, on the issues, foreign and domestic, and on various public policies, the differences between the two presidential candidates and their two parties were stark, clearly apparent now as the parties position themselves for the fiscal cliff. Yet, these differences pail in comparison to the importance of basing our political life on factual truths, (as I analyzed here) instead of convenient fictions (fictoids), and on careful principled (of the left and the right) judgments and not the magical ideological thinking offered by market and religious fundamentalists (as I also previously examined) and by various xenophobes and racists (who promise to take their country back).

Stephen Colbert, the great political philosopher and public intellectual, the leading expert on truthiness, disguised as a late night comic, has most clearly illuminated the truth challenge in his regular reports. His tour de force, in this regard, was his address to the White House press corps in George W. Bush’s presence. But now it no longer takes a brave comic genius to highlight the problem. Republican and conservative responses to election polling and results provide the evidence, both negative and positive.

Though the polls clearly predicted an Obama victory, it is noteworthy that the Republican leaders and their advisers really didn’t see the defeat coming. They operated in an ideological bubble, which facts did not penetrate. Now they must (more on their alternative courses in our next post by Aron Hsiao on Monday).

After all objective reports on election night indicated a decisive Obama victory, Romney wouldn’t concede. Karl Rove on Fox News comically refused to acknowledge what Fox News (Fox News!) projected. Before the election, Republican pollsters systematically distorted their election predictions to confirm their desired results. A fact denying normality had become the order of things. The right-wing politicians, and their media enablers, were not simply lying to the public. They were blinded by their own fabrications. There were the fortunate (from my point of view) miscalculations of the campaign, but when it came to science, to climate change, to biology and much more, fact denying had become deadly. Thankfully, there is now sensible resistance, by the population at large and also by conservatives themselves.

As reported by Jonathan Martin at Politico notable young conservatives are now presenting important criticism. Ross Douthat: “What Republicans did so successfully, starting with critiquing the media and then creating our own outlets, became a bubble onto itself.” Ben Domenech: “The right is suffering from an era of on-demand reality.” Such self-criticism is heartening. Perhaps, it will be possible for serious conservative intellectuals and public figures to present positions without the craziness.

Severely conservative Romney continued his ideologically driven, fact-denying, forty-seven percent ways, blaming his defeat on “free gifts” to Obama’s core constituencies, free birth control to single women in college, health care to African-Americans and Latinos, and a special gift to Latinos — the promise of amnesty to children of illegal aliens, “the so-called Dream Act kids.” In the conservative cocoon at Fox, Bill O’Reilly strongly agreed, but it is very interesting to observe many Republicans running away from the remark. Surely political calculation is involved, but it is also a healthy matter that key conservative figures, such as Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie, are distancing themselves from the ideological fiction of the society made up of takers and makers, as Paul Ryan has put it.

I wonder, thinking ahead to 2014 and 2016, perhaps there will be a Republican civil war, between the ideologues and the conservatives. I have my hopes, but also my concerns. But at least in this election, those who used facts to mobilize their campaign won over the prisoners of fictoids.

I identify with Barack Obama’s political position, as a centrist wanting to move the center left. I identify with the democratic left because of its long and developing progressive tradition, addressing the problems of inequalities based on class, race, religion, gender, nation and sexual orientation, and because of its critique of the injustices of untrammeled capitalism and its conviction that the present order of things can and should be subjected to critique, its conviction that the way things are is not necessarily the way they must be. For these and other substantive reasons, I am very happy with the election results.

But further and in a less partisan way, I understand that alternative political traditions, broadly understood as conservative, are worthy of respect, especially as they illuminate the importance of learning from experience and highlight the limits of reason. I respect this tradition and have learned from it. I think a healthy modern republic should be informed by it. And, for these reasons, I even have sought to find conservative intellectuals worthy of respect at Deliberately Considered, see here and here. It is a terrible loss that fact-denying, right-wing ideology has prevailed in the Republican Party in recent years, amplified by racist currents during the Obama presidency. But perhaps the tide will now change among conservatives.

Conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, and radical icon, Karl Marx, are important thinkers for me as I try to make sense of the political world, but it is the ambiguous and ambivalent commitments and insights of Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt that make them my primary political teachers. Tocqueville, the ambivalent democrat, highlighted the dangers of mass society as the underside of democracy. (I should post my thoughts on this one of these days.) Arendt more crucially observed the dangers of ideology and emphasized that a common factual base is the ground upon which democracy is built. I sense that the most significant result of this election is that we are moving back to this ground. I hope Fox News craziness, the right-wing entertainment industry, as David Frum is now describing it, is “so yesterday,” or at least no more intimately connected to the Republicans than the Democrats are tied to MSNBC. I can’t tolerate either as a source of news. It worries me that some think of them as such.

This is how I understand my centrist orientation. My primary political commitment is to a free public life, where people with different identities and principles meet between left and right, i.e. in the center. I don’t’ believe in watered down progressive and conservative positions, but a position where there is informed debate. For me, this is the meaning of “the vital center.” I think this election, as truth prevailed over truthiness, and as a principled leader prevailed over one that pretended to be a true-believer, who had a very problematic relationship with factual truth, provides hope for a centrist with leftist commitments.

As I was composing my thoughts about the Biden–Ryan debate, I returned to my initial response to Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his Vice President.

“Ryan’s nomination, I believe, assures the re-election of President Obama. The basis of my belief is a judgment that Americans generally are guided by a conservative insight, an American suspicion of ideological thought. Conservative insight defeats the conservative ticket.”

I reported this on my Facebook page and a very interesting debate developed, the sort of “serious discussion about the events of the day,” beyond “partisan gated communities,” which I hoped Deliberately Considered would stimulate. Thomas Cushman, the Deffenbaugh de Hoyos Carlson Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College, was the critical voice, reflecting on my post and on James Jasper’s on anti-intellectualism, which focused on Paul Ryan. The discussion than took off when I responded and then Aron Hsiao joined us.

Thomas Cushman: Honestly, is it possible that anyone could not look at Biden and see the incarnation of the anti-intellectual? It would seem more sociologically accurate and fair-minded to see that ideologue anti-intellectuals abound in both parties.

Jeffrey Goldfarb: Historically for sure, there have been anti-intellectuals in both parties. I really don’t understand on what grounds you label Biden as such, though. And I think ideological temptations, in the form of magical modern thinking about complex problems, exist among Republicans these days, not among Democrats. I wish this wasn’t so as someone who admires conservative thought.

Thomas Cushman: Really, from my point of view, it seems like Obama is almost completely a magical thinker, who inflects most of reality with a utopian narrative, and therein lies the problem. You can’t govern with a narrative, not a complex modern society in any case. I think Ryan comes across as a kind of intellectual technocrat, icy facts, some basic principles. Romney as well. I was here in MA for the Romney governorship, he was very pragmatic and not an ideologue. I think Obama is, at base, an ideologue, and it is his own words that give that sense to me. This is why Clinton, deep down, thinks he’s an amateur politician. Because he is a utopian and that doesn’t work. As for Biden, well, where to start on making the case against him. If you can look at the behavior and thinking of the two men in relation to each other, and come away thinking that Ryan is the anti-intellectual, I’m not sure what to say.

I would add that loud guffaws, eye rolling, bullying, laughing, etc. are not exactly the hallmarks of what I would consider to be an intellectual habitus. Ryan comes off as studious, serious, even professor-like. One could make that observation despite any political preference. There is nothing intellectual in Biden, no literacy, no depth, nothing but bluff and bluster. Obama at least can claim the mantle of intellectual, but of course for the Americans that is something of a liability in politics. Thanks for listening.

Aron Hsiao: Thomas, it seems to me as if you’re confusing an affect associated with certain social statuses with logical and empirical soundness. The socially constructed quantity of “the intellectual” encompasses both, but as a social construction, it is inflected in the process of reception as a matter of the audience demographic at issue and their culture and values.

Certainly both Obama and Biden are more logically and empirically sound than Romney and Ryan in the substance of the platform, policy specifics, and accounts of our present policy universe. In fact, Romney and Ryan have worked hard, to my eye, to ensure that there is relatively little content in this dimension of their “intellectualism” inasmuch as it is claimed to exist and obtain.

What is often described as Obama’s “utopianism” is in fact an acknowledgment that the social dimension of the world (both practice and ideology) are deeply implicated in and constitutive of policy outcomes, a view that is somewhat unpopular in American circles (note the constant dismissal of sociology and, to a lesser extent, other social sciences as “just politics” or “just utopianism” or “soft and wishful”) despite what history has to tell us about the incredible power, both for good and for bad, that inheres in publics and their quotidian lives and interactions.

Thomas Cushman: Fair enough, but one can be a sociologist — like myself – and feel as if some people read the social dimensions of the world differently than, say, contemporary welfare state liberals. My own sociological awareness is deeply suspicious of state power, as Jeffrey Goldfarb’s ought to be, given our common experiences in looking at state socialism. I think hard sociology is actually the best empirical proof of the dangers of utopianism, as evidenced by the now forgotten classical liberal sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, who was the best sociological critic of utopianism, with the possible exception of Raymond Aron. Somehow, liberals forgot that the real enemy of freedom was the state and then came to believe that anyone who actually believed that was somehow retrograde or anti-intellectual.

Aron Hsiao: I think that Obama’s position on the state is a nuanced one; one of the underlying issues at debate is whether he is a statist at heart (the Right position) or seeks a realization and understanding of the state as a responsive expression of the nature and values of its public (the Left position). The problem, of course, is that the public of the state in question is a deeply divided one in terms of value orientations and everyday life practices, which means that in the wild the argument devolves into a debate as to whether the prerogative belongs to the slim majorities or, in the opposed view, the state is to be effectively abolished as an expression of the irreconcilable differences of the public.

My view is that it is in the interest of the best estimable practical and ethical outcomes, given the history of the 20th century and the modernities that we have already observed, that Obama’s nuanced Left understanding of the state ultimately obtain. But obviously, this is precisely the terrain of the value difference in the first place, so on both sides the argument has tended toward the subtly tautological.

Jeffrey Goldfarb: I go to sleep and an interesting discussion happens, too complicated for me to adequately address here. Just a few quick notes, and then perhaps we can reproduce this as a sustained exchange on Deliberately Considered [and here it is]. Tom, I am looking for intelligent criticism of my position on Deliberately Considered, not just agreement. It would be great to get one from you. I agree that Romney is no right wing ideologue, but he sometimes has tried to appear as such. It is difficult to know where he actually stands, what he would actually do. Obama on the other hand is very clear, at least to me. He doesn’t celebrate the magical powers of the state, as you suggest. He is a principled, pro market, centrist, who thinks the market should function in a setting that is developed with state support and control, including controls that facilitate greater social justice and decency. He is quite pragmatic about this, it seems to me. I don’t see this as having much to do with the previously existing socialism, which we both knew and developed our critical skills studying. Ryan as anti-intellectual? As James M. Jasper analyzed, there is pseudo intellectual quality to anti-intellectuals, which I think is present in Ryan. Further, his true believing anti-statist position is ideological (though he controls this) and especially dangerous. And on Obama again, all politics is formulated through narratives, the telling of stories as Arendt would put it. He is a powerful storyteller who in the last debate lost his voice. I hope he finds it soon.

Thomas Cushman: All very good. I’d be interested perhaps in an interchange on DC [It is starting here]. I am not sure why an anti-statist position is dangerous. It could be of course, but not necessarily. It was the wellspring of the anti-communist intellectuals whom your books taught me to appreciate and model my own politics after. I am searching for a liberalism which is more cautious of the state and have been led to something that is being called neoclassical liberalism, which tries to appreciate egalitarian high liberalism a la Rawls but also stresses greater economic individual liberties over and against the state as one of the best means for achieving self realization and more general societal happiness.

I do agree that there is a pseudo intellectual quality to all these politicians these days. I don’t consider Obama to be an intellectual in the strong sense of that term. As a legal scholar, presumably, he never left us any work by which we could judge his legal acumen. His autobiographies are written somewhat more for the Oprah crowd, and as we know now are creations of narrative rather than deep analysis. The smart people who have worked with him have generally left in frustration by his inability to listen (Larry Summers, for instance). Romney is certainly no intellectual either, but he makes no pretensions to being so. And it is difficult to find a person who worked for him who does not have deep respect for his abilities and successes. I wonder if really the US is actually better governed by intellectuals or managers. Seems to me that modernity demands managers of complexity, and that intellectuals are ill suited to govern in this context.

The discussion continued, packed with intriguing insights and competing judgments. I will post them later. For now, note the key questions that arise out of this discussion: Who are and are not intellectuals and what are their proper roles? Is there a distinction between storytelling based on principle and ideology? What is the role of the state and how suspicious of the state should we be? What are the promise and perils of utopianism? And much more specifically: what have Tom and I learned from our experience studying previously existing socialism and our appreciation of what he calls the classical liberal sociology of Ralf Dahrendorf and Raymond Aron?

I find the last question personally interesting. Thomas and I agree in many of our critical observations and judgments. He even maintains that his are informed by my writings (I indeed also appreciate his). Yet, we draw different political conclusions. He asserts that he is surprised by my conclusions, as I am surprised by his. I think such surprise is the stuff that makes for a sound democratic culture. More soon.

As a supporter of Obama – Biden, I found the debate last night soothing. Biden performed well, better than Ryan. From my partisan point of view, it was a good night. After the first Obama – Romney debate, I had a hard time sleeping. Last night, I slept like a baby.

In form and substance, I think Biden was convincing, presenting passionately and clearly the case for re-election, providing Obama a proper introduction for a debate comeback. The contrasting approaches to the practical challenges of our times were on clear view and, I believe, Biden made the Democrats approach more cogent, while Ryan was not able to overcome the contradictions of the conservative Romney-Ryan approach.

First form: Republicans are in convinced. Biden was boorish, Gore – like, patronizing rude. Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard summarizes their judgment: “You don’t win a nationally televised debate by being rude and obnoxious. You don’t win by interrupting your opponent time after time after time or by being a blowhard. You don’t win with facial expressions, especially smirks or fake laughs, or by pretending to be utterly exasperated with what your opponent is saying.”

Indeed Biden was highly expressive. He interrupted Ryan. He smiled, laughed and non-verbally belittled his opponent. I knew as I watched Biden’s performance that the Republican partisans would draw the Gore analogy. I worried, but was also enthused. Now that I have had a bit of time to deliberately consider the evening, I think that there was good reason for my enthusiasm.

Biden non-verbally framed the debate, deflecting Ryan’s criticisms, highlighting the thinness of the Romney-Ryan critique of the administrations foreign policy, and the contradictions of the Romney Ryan economic plans. Take a look at the embedded video. Notice that Biden’s expressive behavior was responsive to what Ryan was saying and that it is consistent with what we know about Biden, the man, how he presented himself last night and how he has presented himself in our experience.

Biden is an honest Joe, sitting at the bar, infuriated by the nonsense he is hearing, unable to control himself, wanting desperately to set the record straight. Herein lies Biden’s victory (I am thinking about the great sociologist Erving Goffman and his master essay “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor”). Far from being a weakness Biden’s expressions are at the root of his decisive victory.

Through his demeanor and his lack of deference, Biden managed to define the situation. He turned the evening in his favor. The debate started with Obama – Biden on the run. Romney had won the last debate and has been on a roll. His stock was up, Obama’s down. Romney seemed to be turning the election into a referendum over the Obama record, as he presented himself as a competent moderate Republican technocrat: no right-wing extremist he. Biden last night in his body language reversed the trend. Who are Romney and Ryan? And why are the saying what they have been saying about American foreign policy? With a puzzled frown, Biden underscored this question. And what are they saying about taxes, Medicare and Social Security? With a flash of a smile, Biden raised serious doubts about the veracity of what they have been saying.

Apart from this win, the debate was a success because each man presented his party’s position: on foreign policy, taxes and deficits, economic growth, social justice, and on the proper relationship between religious belief and public policy, including the issues of women’s rights and abortion.

As a partisan, I am very pleased that Biden made the positions of Obama and his party clear, with a full command of the facts. Ryan also presented his party’s positions effectively. As a theater critic, though, I am struck by the fact that Biden’s performance was more sincere, fluid and engaging. But I know that other theater critics, such as Peggy Noonan at that great theater review, the Wall Street Journal, with different politics, review the debate drama differently.

But theatrical performance, of course, is not really the issue. How the performance is defined by and helps define a script is. And this is why I think that not only did Biden win last night, but that Ryan and Romney lost. Their script is flawed, filled with contradictions about which they can’t, in the end, give persuasive account.

Their response to Obama’s foreign policy successes is to tell a story of weakness, of apology for America. They present a neo-conservative position, while not clearly identifying with the position as brought to us by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. They want to criticize Obama’s policies in North African and the Middle East, asserting the need for toughness. They criticize Obama for working through the United Nations, consulting with allies, dealing with Russia and China as they are, not as imagined Cold War enemies, but they have not presented alternative policies, which very well might not be popular. As Biden suggested: ground troops in Syria and a regional conflict, an international conflict in Iran with a global economic crisis, and continued American troops in Afghanistan.

On tax policy, Ryan claimed they had a plan but wouldn’t explain any details. Cut tax rates for the rich and middle class alike by twenty per cent, pay for it by closing loopholes and reducing deductions, with only the faintest hint of what would be closed and reduced. There’s a problem. Now Romney-Ryan want to claim that this will not affect the taxes of the middle class, but if it is born by the rich (oopps, I mean job creators), how would this lead to their supply side fantasies of an economic boom created by cutting taxes.

The Ryan plan of old was more about reducing the size of government and unleashing private entrepreneurship, unshackling individual creativity, advocating minimal government, his strong Randian inspired ideological streak, also the rallying cry of the Tea Party. Romney, the severe conservative, supported this during the Republican primaries and his choice of Ryan confirmed this support. Now the running mates are running away from this position, as is confirmed by both debates. Romney somehow pulled this off last week, a commanding performance. Ryan couldn’t.

Biden did his job. He has helped Obama by leveling the playing field for the next debate. Biden wins, and the campaign proceeds. I think with the advantage now turning in Obama’s favor.

When I lived in Boston in the late 1970s, I came across a small news article about the energetic Ayn Rand Club at MIT. I had read three of her novels in high school, the appropriate time for sophomoric works. Along with Catcher in the Rye, Winesburg, Ohio, and many other books, I had already – at the age of twenty – begun to think of her novels as part of a wasted youth (too much reading, not enough sex). No one over twenty should – or could – take them seriously.

Apparently Rand was different, and appealed to a kind of person plentiful at MIT. She presented a logical social philosophy for people who knew little about social life. They were immature, yes, but there was no sign they would ever grown up. They were smart, not wise. Today we might suspect them of Asperger syndrome.

Paul Ryan is smart, too, in the style of an autodidact who has read widely without putting what he knows together into the big picture. Or perhaps putting it into a too simple a big picture. There is no mystery why a partially educated fellow like Ryan might cling to an adolescent worldview. The mystery is why he has accumulated followers who seem to find him some kind of profound guru. Even most Republicans, who as Rick Santorum reminded us do not even hope to attract smart people any more, must see through Ryan.

Or maybe not. Ryan reminds me of another would-be politician who used a similar kind of pseudo-intellectual style to attract a small but viciously devoted following, Lyndon LaRouche. There was one thing constant in LaRouche’s bizarre move from the authoritarian Left to the authoritarian Right: his use of impenetrable prose and technical jargon to “prove” his worldview. His main publications were couched as “executive reviews” and a magazine on the technical details of the fusion energy that would save the world. The very idea that a worldview can be “proven” is a telling mistake.

At the risk that I’ll sound like a crowd theorist of the 1950s, LaRouche’s followers seemed like social misfits. When they lurked around airports, their opening gambits for engaging passersby in conversation tended to be insults. “Even guys with beards can be for nuclear energy,” I remember one saying to me. Perhaps so, but not in my case. It took only a minute of conversation for him to turn contemptuous and end the conversation. An interesting way to win friends and influence people.

But the LaRouchies did not expect to win many friends (and they did not). It was more important to be right, to show off a few technical terms, and to feel superior to the rush of humanity. This is almost the definition of a cult: a group isolated from its surroundings by its own self-righteousness.

This pseudo-intellectual political style is linked to two other styles in American politics, famously analyzed by Richard Hofstadter a generation ago: anti-intellectualism and paranoia. Of the former, the great historian commented in 1962,

“Just as the most effective enemy of the educated man may be the half-educated man, so the leading anti-intellectuals are usually men deeply engaged with ideas, often obsessively engaged with this or that outworn or rejected idea.”

Ten years earlier he had written of the paranoid style’s pedantic concern with demonstration and facts:

“The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with such defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least of what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming ‘proof’ of the particular conspiracy that is to be established.”

The implausible conclusions are hidden in the forest of details.

In their local social circles, individuals often gain reputations for being profound thinker by deploying arguments like these, now easily available on the Internet, ready to send along or to cite at dinner parties. In addition, I suspect that there are certain professions, or semi-professions, where there are lots of people who appreciate the pseudo-intellectual style. Lower-level engineers, perhaps, or math and science teachers in middle schools: people whose sense of their own status depends on scientific facts, not social skills. More men, no doubt, than women, for that very reason. The laws of nature exist independently of what we think of them, and only a few understand those laws. That works fine if you are a scientist trying to discover a new neurotransmitter. But the laws of the social world – even economic markets – are not so simple.

Unfortunately the pseudo-intellectual style does get applied to social life, and that is when it turns dangerous. People with this worldview are rarely professional social scientists. In fact, the pseudo-intellectual aura of hard facts does not appeal to social OR natural scientists. The latter take a more pragmatic approach, seeing all findings as tentative and open to eventual refinement and revisions. There are no easy, complacent truths. But that does not stop quasi–intellectual occupations like math teachers or journalists from trying. Take a look at some of Glenn Beck’s elaborate diagrams of historical influence, linking Barack Obama to Angela Davis to Woodrow Wilson, and so on. It looks complicated, so it must be right.

The notorious hero of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, John Galt (tellingly, a double major in physics and philosophy, two fields revered but rarely understood by outsiders) proclaimed a contemptuous, anti-social philosophy “that I will never live for the sake of another man” because “you are your own highest value.” Surely Paul Ryan and his quasi-intellectual fans are a bit old for this sophomoric ranting?

As I anxiously await the debate tonight, I am struck by an Facebook exchange on a friend’s Facebook page, which addressed one of the major issues that lies in the shadows, but is nonetheless very much present: poverty and public policy.

Anna Hsiao read Ayla Ryan’s wrenching autobiographical story, “What Being Poor Really Means,” and remarked:

I guess it’s easy to take money away from starving children when they aren’t yours. Right, Mr. Romney?

Eli Gashi, a mutual friend from Kosovo and a former student at The New School wondered:

How can people vote for Romney – I dont get it

Anna Hsiao responded:

It’s pure ideology… They’re voting for his money, because that’s somehow gonna make them rich, too.

Muma Honeychild, a friend of Anna’s from Poland, whom I don’t know, insisted:

but how, really?

Anna:

Like it requires rational cause-effect thinking! We are masters of voting against our own interest – Bush’s two terms, hello….

While, Aron Hsiao, Anna’s husband and a student of mine, offered a different theory:

People mistake the absence of misfortune and a hindsight of fortuity for moral and ethical superiority. It’s a monotheist and specifically Protestant tendency, to my eye. “You’re suffering? Well, I haven’t suffered. God and the universe have punished you and rewarded me. Clearly, you have done something wrong and I have done something right.” That’s the morality of Mitt, and the morality of half of America. They will only develop “empathy” once they, too, find themselves shocked and crying out about the injustice of what has just happened to them. “Why do you failures not take responsibility for your own suffering!?” will become “Why has God forsaken me?!” and only then will they–at length–understand (and only some of them). It will only take another Great Depression to cause America to once again to loathe the idea of a Great Depression. The consciousness colonized by monotheism in most of its present guises cannot learn from mistakes, because the universe is an ordered space not of causality and physics, but of governance by fiat carried out by a moralistic, judging God. The rocks fall only on the heads of the sinners; those skulls that remain intact are the saved. They do not think to don a helmet or to place a “Beware the falling rocks!” sign; no mere helmet or sign can forestall God’s judgment.

To which I responded:

I find this exchange really interesting. I wonder. Would all of you mind if I reproduced it on Deliberately Considered? The question, repeated. The reference to a materialist and then a cultural explanation. I would add my wonder: the materialist explanation is inadequate because Romney is proposing an irrational response to the economic crisis, or at least is pretending to. On the idea of monotheism being the explanation: I would suggest my specification. Monotheism yields belief in one’s own truth, yes. A certain kind of Protestantism may be related to a lack of empathy for the unfortunate, but there are many other kinds. A good sociologist of religion might help us with this. Where is Weber when you need him?

Anna Hsiao:

Mine was merely a frustrated rant in response to what you call Romney’s inadequate and irrational response. I’d love to see a larger discussion on the subject on DC!

I replied:

“The rant” opened up an interesting discussion. I will try to turn it into something for DC.

So here it is. Thinking about inequality and abject poverty, and the kinds of albeit inadequate assistance we now provide, how could anyone support Romney – Ryan, who propose radical cuts in government support for the poor? Is it possible to think about the poor, including the working poor, and understand their situation and propose an increase in their taxes and cutting food stamps? If you pay close attention, it is clear that they do, after all, have much more “skin in the game” than the super rich, who have no moral qualms about hiding their money in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Can charity do the trick for Ayla Ryan and her family and the millions of others who have suffered disproportionately during the Great Recession, but also the bubbled booms of the preceding years? And I wonder how does all the talk about the middle class relate to this?

I hope Jim Lehrer raises the issue of  poverty and real human suffering in American tonight, but I fear he won’t.

I couldn’t sleep last night, haunted by a world gone crazy.

I dreamt that a purported Israeli, with the support of one hundred rich American Jews, pretended to make a feature length film aggressively mocking the Prophet Mohammed and Muslims in general – Islamophobia and anti-Semitism combined!

The faux film producer uploaded a mock trailer to YouTube. Along with thousands of other clips, it was ignored. But then when the film was dubbed into Arabic, the demagogues of the world all played their roles – the clash of civilizations as mediated performance art.

Radical Islamic clerics worked as film distributors (monstrous monstrators as my Daniel Dayan might put it), bringing the clip to the attention of the mass media and the masses. Islamist and anti-Islamist ideologues worked up their followers, happily supporting each other in their parts. Feckless diplomats in embassies tried to assure the public that hate-speech isn’t official American policy. Analysts identified root causes.

The clash of civilizations was confirmed. All the players needed each other, supported each other, depended on each other. A marvelous demonstration of social construction: W.I. Thomas would be proud of the power of his insight. Social actors defined the clash of civilizations as real, and it is real in its consequences.

A reality confirmed with a jolt when I awoke, knowing full well about the global attacks on American embassies and symbols, and the tragic death of a man who was determined to go beyond clashing clichés, the heroic American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens. The American right, including the marvelous Mitt Romney and Fox News talking heads, denounced President Obama’s purported support of the attacks and failure to stand up for American values, including the freedom of speech — this from people who worry about the war on Christmas. It’s a surreal reality this morning.

And this morning, wide-awake, I am savoring Marvelous Mitt’s recent video performance: right-wing newspeak de-constructed. At last, class warfare in America has been given a full public airing. In pitching his candidacy with his fellow fat-cats, Romney revealed his definition of job producers, the nature of dependency and the work ethic. He also showed himself to be a true student of Ayn Rand. Really, all who depend on government vote for Obama and the Democrats? No wonder he selected Paul Ryan. Identifying those who don’t pay federal income taxes with votes for Democrats is amazingly poor sociology, bordering on comedy, a point made beautifully in a letter to the editor in today’s New York Times.

To the Editor:

I woke up early this morning and drove my daughter several miles on a government-built road, all the way to a government-operated school.

I came back to my home — for which I receive a government-sanctioned mortgage-interest deduction — and called my parents, who both receive Social Security and Medicare from the government. Then I signed on to the Internet, which was developed by government-sponsored researchers.

So Mitt Romney is right, on two counts. I am “dependent upon government.” And I’m not voting for him.

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN
New York, Sept. 18, 2012

There was an interesting exchange on my Facebook page following my last post. I am re-posting it this afternoon because I think it opens some important points and may serve as a guide to understand more deliberately this week’s Republican National Convention. The dialogue reveals alternative positions on conservative politics and the way progressives engage with conservative thought and practice. I think it is an interesting beginning of a discussion beyond partisan intellectual gated communities, as Gary Alan Fine has called for in these pages. I welcome the continuation of the discussion here, hope it illuminates theoretical and pressing practical questions . -Jeff

I opened on Facebook by quoting a central summary of the post. The irony: “Ryan’s nomination, I believe, assures the re-election of President Obama. The basis of my belief is a judgment that Americans generally are guided by a conservative insight, an American suspicion of ideological thought. Conservative insight defeats the conservative ticket.” And then a debate followed.

Harrison Tesoura Schultz: Would you say that the conservatives have become too extreme for most people to believe that they’re still actually ‘conservatives?’

Alvino-Mario Fantini ‎@Harrison: What I always want to know is: “too extreme” in reference to what? Public opinion? (It seems to shift.) In comparison to conventional wisdom? (It, too, seems to change over the centuries.) The problem, I would suggest, is not that conservatives have become too extreme for people but that basic conservative ideas and principles are no longer known or understood, and increasingly considered irrelevant.

Jeffrey Goldfarb: Extremism in defense of liberty is a vice and it is not conservative. So, I think you are both right. People who call themselves conservatives are often not, rather they are right wing ideologues. Too much for the general public, I think, hope. On the other hand, people who are interested in limited government and in the wisdom of custom and tradition, but recognize that things do change, should be able to have a conversation with people who think change is imperative and the government has an important role to play, but know that there are no magical solutions to all our problems in the form of one “ism” or another.

Harrison Tesoura Schultz: Akin’s comments certainly seemed to transgress the conventional wisdom of public opinion. Even Romney’s tax evasions and Ryan’s plan also appear to be striking some of the conservatives I talk to on FB as too extreme as well. It seems to me as if the Republicans themselves are the one’s who are increasingly misunderstanding basic conservative ideas and principles.

Aron Hsiao: My anecdotal and personal impression is rather than defending the abstract ideals of freedom and liberty in many cases, what they are defending (and mistake for these) are a narrow group of substantive individual freedoms that are indeed being lost in recent decades—those that inhered in white, male, and/or U.S. privilege/exceptionalism as individually or as a set of statuses. These statuses did in fact once grant very real social and economic power to those that enjoyed them and/or identified with them, a power that has not been replaced and is not easily replaceable in the case of middle and lower classes. The impulse to preserve these is the nature of the conservatism.

The rejection of enlightenment rationality and epistemology (surely that’s what’s at stake here) is not a critical response for at least some of the current U.S. far right rank-and-file, as was the case for the postmodernists, but an instrumental and reactionary one. The logic, values, and methods of the Enlightenment ultimately demand basic equality between, for example, men and women, or blacks and whites, or Americans and non-Americans, or at least forms of status adjudication that do not rest on skin tone, sex, nationality, or other characteristics that grant privilege by birthright.

To those that have had their status upset and have lost social power as a result (or that see themselves having been cheated of it by previous generations), there is only one answer: since it is clear to them (as a matter of socialization, culture, and values) that there is and (at the practical level of their own interests) *must be* a natural hierarchy of races, genders, nations, populations, etc., in which either they or those that they identify with are in the upper echelons, then any logic or epistemology that threatens these hierarchies (i.e. the Enlightenment and that which proceeds from it, including modern science), or the status and power that they are expected to provide, must by definition and practical exigency be rejected as improper and “radical” in nature.

Instead, a logic and epistemology must be found that appears to unconditionally support (or even provide a “restoration” narrative about) essentialist status and power hierarchies, and selective readings of certain strands of Christianity (which holds strong traditional authority for them, an additional affinity and congruence) fit the bill.

In other words, to my eye the Tea Party isn’t about defending Liberty (capital ‘L’) but rather a set of practical liberties that can no longer be taken with (for example) people of color, women, the colonial and postcolonial “other” places, etc.

The ideological substance in the equation conflates this narrow set of practical freedoms with Freedom (capital ‘F’), asserts that that the hierarchy that once granted them was Natural (capital ‘N’), and thus also asserts that the enlightenment worldview and all that proceeds from it (i.e. science, equality, the democratic impulse) are thus destructive of Freedom (again, capital ‘F’) and Nature (and another capital ‘N’).

Note that this opinion is neither scientific nor expert, but merely personal and with significant qualifications. It is not meant to characterize all of American conservatism today and proceeds primarily from my having many family members (both immediate and extended) that are Tea Partiers. It’s likely therefore to be highly regionally, economically, and culturally idiosyncratic.

But it is one reading of at least one current in the present political milieu.

Jeffrey Goldfarb: Interesting note Aron. I wish this discussion appeared on Deliberately Considered itself [which I am now acting upon]. All points have been interesting, it seems to me, Schultz’s and Fabino’s, as well as yours. As far as your note, in contrast to your primary concerns, I am interested in understanding the form of the commitments of present so called conservatives and try to explain why many “conservatives” are actually not conservative. They are ideological rightists instead. You are doing two things: illuminating the seamy side of conservative thought (its attachment to custom as it enables privilege) and understanding present day “conservative” motivations. I worry about your second move. Following it exclusively leads to the cynical dismissal of those one disagrees with. On the other hand, if one carefully analyzes your first move, this is avoided. Seems to me it is especially important to do so when the “conservatives” who you are thinking about are family. I must admit, that is very far from my experience. I know no Tea Party supporters personally, only rarely overhear them in public places. They exist for me mostly as characters in the media spectacle.

Aron Hsiao: … With regard to dismissal, I understand your concern but feel somewhat differently—I take each point to suggest the need to take the issue very seriously. Apart from its sins, one of the insights of postmodernism is that it is difficult to persuade or even engage others about points using one system of knowledge, lexicality and epistemology when they specifically reject it and employ another. The same holds true in the opposite direction.

Yet there are practical issues—dare I say, lives—at stake in politics. Ultimately, like you in some ways (but probably not in others), I think that common dismissal of the Tea Party and the far right is wrongheaded, not to mention undemocratic in nature (never mind that the Tea Party itself is undemocratic in nature, and that this is precisely one of its biggest values). To dismiss it out of hand and reject it without acknowledging and understanding its worldview is to (a) commit the same sin of which we accuse them, strengthening rather than weakening the prevalence of that worldview and (b) render ourselves powerless to influence or engage with that movement in a way that remains ethical or moral within our own worldview. And of course we ought also to take it seriously because of the outcomes that it seeks (and has had some success already in achieving), many of which are, to say the least, undesirable to the other half of the population.

______________

Here the discussion on my Facebook page ends. I did receive, though, a personal note from Fantini, which takes the discussion one step further and which I am posting here with his permission:

Jeff: Aron’s lengthy post screams for a response to be written in time I don’t have! Let me share with you what I’d like to say:

Point 1: Conservatism is not, as Aron says at the outset, simply an attempt to preserve white, male privilege. That is an old and tired argument. The most recent attempt to revive this trope is The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin. The book conflates the old, throne-and-altar conservatism of Old Europe with the Anglo-American variety rooted in Edmund Burke and elaborated by Russell Kirk—and, thus, Robin cannot avoid but concluding that conservatism is nothing but a defense of hierarchy.

In short, I think what has been provided is a post-modern caricature of conservatives and their world-view.

There have been, of course, many other attempts during the 20^th century to dismiss the ‘conservative mind’ as nothing more than a genetic predisposition or a “mental defect”. (Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, famously tried to dismiss conservatism as an extension of a psychologically paranoid personality.) But these are all reductionist arguments and I don’t think one can say that they represent serious efforts to engage with—let alone understand—conservative thought.

2. Conservatism is not an outright ‘rejection’ of Enlightenment rationality but rather a criticism of it. That alone, however, does not a conservative make. Conservatives have such criticism in common with, well, almost any critic of the ‘Modern Project’—and that includes people on the Left.

3. The source of the ‘impulse’ toward natural hierarchies, as Aron argues, is not simply confined to conservatives reflexively trying to maintain a pecking order—any pecking order. May I suggest that order and hierarchy are simply extensions of the nature of man, of human societies and of political communities everywhere (regardless of political orientation, party affiliation or ideological stance)? A pecking order has emerged in all regimes, from early nomadic tribes, to principalities on small islands, to the brutal regimes that emerged [precisely to do away with one pecking order] in Russia, China and Cambodia.

4. Finally, I think Aron mischaracterizes what the Tea Party is about. I don’t know any conservatives—except perhaps a few old-school, unreconstructed reactionaries in the Old World, all of whom are probably in their 90s and are still raging against  the break-up of the Holy Roman Empire—who believe in rigid hierarchies, with little or no social mobility, or limited economic freedom. Nor do I know any conservatives who are against the scientific advances proceeding from the Enlightenment. Furthermore, the democratic impulse that he speaks of began to emerge as part of our ‘worldview’ centuries before, not from the Enlightenment.

In short, I think what has been provided is a post-modern caricature of conservatives and their world-view.

I think this is an important discussion and hope it continues, unsettling the certainties of left and right. Next a post from Hsiao on a political platform that moves further in this direction.

In the past week, I have published in Deliberately Considered and posted on my Facebook page a series of reflections on the implications of the nomination of Paul Ryan as Vice Presidential candidate of the Republican Party. And I have explained that the basis of my understanding of the present situation is a conservative insight concerning the dangers of ideological thought. The replies have been quite illuminating. The discussion starts with an interesting American irony: amusing, perhaps more.

Ryan’s nomination, I believe, assures the re-election of President Obama. The basis of my belief is a judgment that Americans generally are guided by a conservative insight, an American suspicion of ideological thought. Conservative insight defeats the conservative ticket.

Yet, on the intellectual front, there are few conservative thinkers who would illuminate this. Exceptions? Andrew Sullivan, perhaps also David Frum. (Anyone else?) But because these two are so guided, few, if any, conservatives recognize them as comrades in thought.

Aron Hsiao in a reply to one of my posts on conservative intellectuals explains the factors involved:

“The essence of the moment is that the mainstream demographic blocs of the Right have, as an ideological move, adopted anti-intellectualism as a central tenet of conservatism. Any marriage of democratic practice and political epistemology at the moment therefore precludes the conservative intellectual; if someone is intellectual in the slightest, the Right will disown him/her. They are the oft-maligned “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only). To make matters worse, any intellectual at the moment of any value is loathe to be associated with the totality of the present (i.e. recent form of the) conservative project in America and thus tends to gravitate toward the (D) party. My suspicion is that rationally informed self-selection (they have careers and statuses, after all) results in a state of affairs in which few serious intellectuals can be found in the (R) party…”

Aside from the way he uses the term ideology, I agree completely with Hsiao. The implications are indeed scary.  I explained my understanding in my last post. I think it can help us understand the unfolding electoral debate.

Ideologists are more enamored by the purity of the ideological position, than they are committed to factual reality. This week we observed the strange case of the Republican candidate in Missouri Senate race, Congressman Todd Akin. Akin knows about wondrous powers of female biology “from what doctors have told him.” In cases of “legitimate rape” the reproductive system shuts down, according to the Congressman. I wonder what he thinks about the rape war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and beyond? From such ideologues we also “know” that there is no human induced climate change and that evolution is just a theory, persuasively challenged by creationist “science.” With the incredible power of the ideology induced human mind: fiction becomes fact; fantasy (in the technical Freudian sense of wish fulfillment) becomes science. Human suffering is ignored. Faced with a serious anti-abortion ethical dilemma, a new science is born.

Alvino-Mario Fantini, a conservative intellectual who has contributed to Deliberately Considered, I believe understands the problems here, the need to distinguish conservative thought from right-wing ideology. He responded to a commenter on my Facebook page, which he took to be an unwarranted dismissal of a significant conservative thinker. He asked:

What do you mean when you say “these days, Russell Kirk would be considered an ‘intellectual’ ?” Was he not? His seminal work The Conservative Mind was the work of a deep thinker (not an activist): an elegantly-written overview of literary and political examples of the “conservative imagination.” If anything, Kirk rejected ideology and would likely have very little to do with many of today’s GOP leaders.

Fantini shares my judgment that a serious debate between the left and the right needs to happen and hasn’t. He agrees with Gary Alan Fine that we live in partisan gated communities and that our ideas and our politics are diminished as a consequence. Fantini testifies that an important American conservative would have been appalled. Perhaps the most tragic consequence is that one party is now mired in an ideological fog, seducing a significant part of the public through ideology empowered media, i.e. Fox and company.

It is with this in mind that George Finch, disagrees with my observations and conclusions concerning the nomination of Paul Ryan. Finch noted on Facebook:

With all due respects, this country is very ideological, one that is based in the sanity of private property, individualism, the wisdom of the market, and a god-like capitalism. All are related of course. To top it off government is now seen as incompetent and part of the problem, not part of a solution. Ryan can appeal to this better than Romney, and with the right pr (lies) they may not scare people. Obama like most of the Ds do not help as they are now deficit hawks and have shifted to the Right and their ideology over the years. Obama will cut the safety net , and Ryan and his folk can use this to counter the D’s attacks and confuse people. The issue is not whether there are any Conservative intellectuals, but how far close we are coming to a form of Friendly Fascism.

And I responded:

I am not so sure that the American population is quite as nutty as you think, or that the market is worshiped in the way right wing ideologues hope and you fear. I think, and hope, that these things are in play and that the Republicans have over played their hand. I fundamentally disagree with you on Obama. He is not a deficit hawk and I think he has long fought the shift to the right and it is most clear now. Friendly Fascism is an epithet. I think it warns of the dangers of the rise of the hard right in one party, not both. Here again is a strong reason to vote for Obama and the Democrats.

Finch concluded the exchange by conceding that he has been hard on Obama, hoping that I am right in my electoral prognostication (“I would vote for a stale, bug infested baloney sandwich rather than Romney”), but asserting that Obama may be the conservative I have been looking for, given his commitment to stability and support of existing institutions and realities.

We, Finch and I, apparently, will vote the same way in November, though our reasons will be different. He will vote for “not Romney – Ryan,” holding his nose as he votes for a conservative, while, I, as a centrist who wants to move the center left, will vote for Obama, a centrist who wants to move the center left. Finch as a left-wing ideologist (as he and Hsiao understand the term) will vote against right-wing ideologists and their policies. While I will vote against ideology and a set of political principles with which I don’t agree, and vote for a candidate who I think is principled but also against “isms,” a politician looking for meaningful dialogue with his opponents, but holding to his own positions and visions, as he beautifully describes the reinvention of the American Dream. Finch, I suppose, imagines that the Romney – Ryan ticket is likely to win, given the pervasiveness of right-wing ideology in the American population. I agree that there is a problem, but think and hope that an ideology aversion will prevent this from happening.

I found this discussion here and on Facebook illuminating. It gets me thinking about the tension within conservative thought between anti-intellectualism and opposition to ideology, i.e. as I put it previously, opposition to all “isms.” We suffer from the former, would greatly benefit from the latter, in my judgment. And I am not convinced with Pait, as he responded to my last post, that ideologists get things done, while those who oppose modern magical thinking don’t.  But I agree with him, it is a challenge. More soon.

I am having second thoughts about my last post in which I assert that the nomination of Paul Ryan, because he is a right-wing ideologist, assures the re-election of Barack Obama. I don’t wish to revise my observations or judgment, but think I need to explain a bit more. I realize that I should be clearer about what I mean by ideology and why I think, and hope, that it spells defeat for the Republicans. My thoughts in two parts: today, I will clarify what I mean by ideology and my general political prediction; in my next post, I will consider further implications of ideological developments in American politics, addressing some doubts and criticism raised by Deliberately Considered readers.

I also want to point out that my thoughts on Ryan and ideology are related to my search for conservative intellectuals worthy of respect. In that what I have to say is motivated bya conservative suspicion of the role of a certain kind of idea and reason in politics, I wonder what Paul Gottfried and Alvino-Mario Fantini (two conservative intellectuals who have contributed to Deliberately Considered) would think. As I understand it, my last post was a conservative critique of right-wing ideology, pointing to its progressive consequences. As a centrist who wants to move the center left, I am hopeful about this, but I imagine committed conservatives would be deeply concerned. I am still having trouble finding a deliberate dialogue with them.

A brief twenty-five year old encounter comes to mind as I think about ideology and its political toxicity, trying to explain my Ryan judgment.

We were in a taxi in Prague in 1987, Jonathan Fanton, the President of the New School for Social Research, Ira Katznelson, the Dean of The New School’s Graduate Faculty, Jan Urban, a leading dissident intellectual-journalist activist, and I: the preliminary meeting between The New School and the small but very vibrant, creative and ultimately successful Czechoslovak democratic opposition. In the end, we did some good in that part of the world, starting with a donation of a computer that enabled Urban and his colleagues to more easily publish their underground newspaper, Lidove Noviny. As we were exchanging pleasantries in the taxi, I became serious and asserted that I am against all “isms”: communism, socialism, fascism, but also liberalism and conservatism. Urban turned to me and happily declared that we were comrades in thoughts. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, based on our deep concern about the ideological politics of the sort that is now to be found in the Tea Party on the American radical right, and also played a unfortunate role in the politics of post–Communist Czech Republic under the stewardship of Vaclav Klaus.

Urban and I agreed that true-believing politics was extremely dangerous, whether or not the beliefs were attractive. We were suspicious of systematic overall positions. We understood together that the too intimate connection between ideas and assertions of power was extremely dangerous. Ideas then blind. The difference between fact and fiction become difficult to discern. Newspeak prevails.

There was, of course, exaggeration in our agreement, the danger of ideology is not neatly summarized by suffix “ism,” but we shared a common sense, the same sense that informs my judgment of Ryan and the likely Republican fate. Ideology for Urban and for me is a term that is best understood not as the confluence of interest and political ideas, enabling political action (ideology in the sense of Mannheim and Geertz, beautifully interpreted by Ricoeur). Rather, implicit in my exchange with Urban is an understanding of ideology that draws on the position of Hannah Arendt (and more conservative thinkers such as Eric Voegelin), as she and we try to make sense of a particularly pernicious form of political ideas.

Thus in the present situation, following the ideology of the free market true-belief, constitutional fundamentalism and a theological reading of the American tradition, rich people become “job creators” by definition. A moderate Democrat becomes a “dangerous socialist” who doesn’t understand what America is. Changing the fundamental principles of Medicare and Social Security becomes “saving” them, while controlling the cost escalation of Medicare means destroying it. We also have the “failed stimulus package,” the “racist” Attorney General Eric Holder, not to mention the Muslim president born in Kenya. All of this passes for the conservatism of Tea Party Republicans, and Ryan is said to be its great intellectual leader. This is ideological politics pure and simple.

I disagree with the substance of Romney – Ryan’s positions on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, something that Michael Corey identified and criticized in his response to my post. He believes that the Republican and the Democratic plans for “entitlements” should be dispassionately evaluated and seems to be disappointed that I didn’t do this in my post. But this wasn’t my point. There are indeed different ways to address the problems of medical care of the old and the younger that have their strengths and weaknesses. A debate about such things is a normal part of politics. What concerns me is the Manichean way this debate is presented and understood by the new right-wing ideologues, as a grand battle between good and evil, with the very future of America in the balance. Ryan reduces all political conflict in this way, as he put it in 2005: “the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.“

I think that this is the sort of thing that a great majority of Americans reject. There may have been a drift to the right in recent years. Belief in the possibility that government can address social problems may be down, but the certainty of free market true-believers makes little sense to people as they try to get by in tough times. It’s a matter of form, not substance, and again to paraphrase Barry Goldwater in order to criticize his position: extremism in defense of freedom doesn’t win elections in America, not for Goldwater in the early sixties and not for Romney – Ryan now.

As a consequence, the Republican ticket will prevaricate. They will back down. This has defined Romney’s career, and Ryan himself, to get re-elected, has also compromised his stated principles to deliver the “collectivist” government goods to his constituents. Yet, in the glare of the national campaign this sort of thing is less likely to work. Romney – Ryan will reveal to the electorate the worst of both worlds, the repellent dogmatism of true-belief, combined with the apparent cynicism of hack politicians who will say anything to be elected.

Thus, I think that Obama will be re-elected. I also have a hunch. This may allow Obama to be Obama. Perhaps just as the decisive defeat of Goldwater established the political opportunity for the reforms of “The Great Society,” the Romney – Ryan defeat may open up the opportunity for “change we can believe in.”