Sunday, July 03, 2005

the last post on this subject, I hope

LI finds the whole festuche of the upcoming Supreme Court hearings to be so much depressing filler. We expect the D.C. Dems to charge out of their trenches once again into withering fire, having, like the English officer corps on the Sommes in 1915, understood nothing and remembered everything.

It is quite simple. Progressive politics on the national level are dead. D.C. is now the heart of big government conservatism. The party can’t adapt to this because it has concentrated its throw weight and vanity in D.C., producing the pompous puffer culture that is the snide voice which replies to Bush’s weekly radio speeches.

So – one needs a strong states rights justice or two. That should be the biggest criteria for liberals – and please, no Roe! if Roe goes down on the national level, it will just be catching up with reality, since in large stretches of Snopes country, abortion went back to the coathanger era in the nineties.

Advice that is futile, of course. The Dem consultants and media hangers-on and all the pathetic political hive continue to hum along as if they are about to retake D.C. any day now. In 1932, the shift to the national level was tactically brilliant. And up until the seventies, it was still a historic necessity. Breaking apartheid in the South, and, to a certain extent, in the North was a great moral victory. But the center didn’t feed the periphery. Snopes states were generally able to retain their anti-labor laws and their legally enshrined feudal customs, partly because it was to the advantage of those Northeastern investors who started putting serious money in the Sunbelt in the sixties. The Sunbelt, in turn, has interiorized the dependent mindset to the degree that the monstrous hybrid of big government and Bama-thought was inevitable: Bush is simply the freerider king, which is why it is popular in households in Mobile and Albany,Georgia and other of the bright lights of civilization to think that he talks directly to Jesus. Faith, after all, is just freeloading gone cosmic.

Adapting to this situation requires waking up. The medical marijuana case was the latest in a long line of examples. Those forms created by the progressives to enforce civility on a restless and depraved rural population have been seized by that civilization, and they are in payback mode. What does that mean? This is the part of the Widescreen space drama where the invaders are seizing the ship’s working mechanisms, and the captain has to press the autodestruct button, while the crew looks on anxiously. The carefully crafted national system has to be taken down. Otherwise, it is easy to predict the passage of a law outlawing abortion nationally in coordination with the redneck court, and a series of other eviscerating judgments -- for instance, the spread of anti-labor legislation on a national level. Etc., etc. The 2000 court decision that gave Bush the presidency (making the recent election of the president of Iran a model of democracy, by comparison – just think, the person with the most votes won!) indicates how far that court will go to enable the crushing power of reaction.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Happy Fourth of July, Sire. For some reason I feel Russell is a bit closer to Fourth Day values and to Jefferson's bosom than is Santayana. Perhaps that is sufficiently philistinish to cause you to delete this post, but Santayana, like Pound, seems very much in favor of that view that the western heritage since the greeks has been marvelous and so forth, and I think many (like Russell) would question that. Referring to Russell's politics as enthusiasm also seems a bit unwarranted: a rebel yes but Russell also voices his affection for various virtues, including aristocratic and democratic ones, throughout his essays.

Nonetheless Dr. Santayana surely wielded some sparkling rhetoric. Mussolini himself--who I assume you do not approve of--was himself not a horrible writer. Or are you aligning yourself with Santayana and Pound and proclaiming the claims of secular democracy (or leftist-whiggish logocracy ala Russell) to be bankrupt if not corrupt? For some reason I did not picture Roger with a
blackshirt but I guess we could get used to it .

Anonymous said...

Apologies--this was meant to be attached to the above thread. Should I repost? Or do you care to discuss it.

Roger Gathmann said...

Thanks for the holiday greetings. Hey, I never erase posts. Except the ones that offer splendiferous links to various hot hot hot xxx xxx xxx sites -- and that is because I figure that the ability to google "sex" or "Hot xxx" is native to my dear readership. I, at least, find it easy enough.

I've never read Mussolini. I know he was a newspaperman. Somehow, though, I suspect his prose would be full of boilerplate and swelling imperial periods, like Macaulay without the clubman's wit. And though it is true that my favorite shirts are black, it isn't to express sympathy with fascism, but to look artsy.

Anonymous said...

Cool. Really I think fascism ala milano is never far from many: any time I venture near some tony LA Mall (Rodeo) I often feel the women, in their black skirts and their shades or their tight-ass jeans all are having massive Sophia Loren fantasies if not Clara Petaci ones.

Anyways I don't think Santayana's little attempt at some universalizing of scientific theories is correct, or at least it's going to take some more explainin': natural selection is merely the name given to the natural process but does that imply that the theory itself has some sort of abstract existence apart from the things being described? I think not. Marx's Critique of Political Economy in Capital does not possesses some sort of transcendent quality above the economy and life itself--to think so would be beyond strange.

Santayana sounds rather scholastic; he would seemingly suggest that people can do geometry and logic implies the soul exists and partakes in the world of these transcedent functions and so forth.

I dont think so. Math and logic and scientific theories have a necesssary relation to the physical world: Newton derived his laws and constants from observation. The theories--based on sense impressions as Hume would claim--would not exist had men not begun to make inferences from the world. Natural selection is thus really a name for human mental events and symbols--a truth process really--not for some self-subsisting platonic entity.

Anonymous said...

Amen, roger.

I honestly think most libertariansim as it exists today (the pro-war, pro-big business wing so dominant today) is nothing but a stooge for the corporate fascism evolving before our eyes. So, I increasingly believe in the small scale, radical, mutualist project: fight the large concentrations of power, public or PRIVATE. The small scale, the local, are the only ways of fighting the terrifying Handmaiden's Tale reality we are hurtling towards.

Roger Gathmann said...

Brian, pretty eloquent language there! Thanks.

From the Holodomor to Gaza: NYT softfocuses on famine - the spirit of Walter Duranty lives!

  When Gareth Jones, a former secretary of David Lloyd George, made a walking tour in Ukrainian agricultural districts in 1933, he wrote a s...