unusualmusic_lj_archive | Entries tagged with liberalism

Via: Hullabaloo

A Liberal Shock Doctrine

Progressive political change in American history is rarely incremental. With important exceptions, most of the reforms that have advanced our nation's status as a modern, liberalizing social democracy were pushed through during narrow windows of progressive opportunity -- which subsequently slammed shut with the work not yet complete. The post–Civil War reconstruction of the apartheid South, the Progressive Era remaking of the institutions of democratic deliberation, the New Deal, the Great Society: They were all blunt shocks. Then, before reformers knew what had happened, the seemingly sturdy reform mandate faded and Washington returned to its habits of stasis and reaction.

The Oval Office's most effective inhabitants have always understood this. Franklin D. Roosevelt hurled down executive orders and legislative proposals like thunderbolts during his First Hundred Days, hardly slowing down for another four years before his window slammed shut; Lyndon Johnson, aided by John F. Kennedy's martyrdom and the landslide of 1964, legislated at such a breakneck pace his aides were in awe. Both presidents understood that there are too many choke points -- our minority-enabling constitutional system, our national tendency toward individualism, and our concentration of vested interests -- to make change possible any other way.

That is a fact. A fact too many Democrats have trained themselves to ignore. And it sometimes feels like Barack Obama, whose first instinct when faced with ideological resistance seems to be to extend the right hand of fellowship, understands it least of all. Does he grasp that unless all the monuments of lasting, structural change in the American state -- banking regulation, public-power generation, Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to join a union, federal funding of education, Medicare, desegregation, Southern voting rights -- had happened fast, they wouldn't have happened at all?

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The 1930s Washington culture in which LBJ thrived was not merely a function of the New Dealers' scramble to redeem a national emergency. It was a function of the fact that they understood the reality of America as "the frozen republic," as Daniel Lazare has called it. By the time Johnson got his accidental opportunity to occupy his hero FDR's chair, progressives understood implicitly that the unique constitutional system, conceived to protect the minority interests of slaveholders, gives the upper hand to obstructers. This, and not the supposed necessity of trimming ideological sails to placate some notional conservative majority, guided their strategizing. James MacGregor Burns' book on the subject, The Deadlock of Democracy, was not merely what every progressive in Washington was reading during the Kennedy years, it was what every progressive was living. The House Rules Committee, dominated by reactionary Southerners, kept Kennedy from passing even an increase in the minimum wage, let alone his campaign promise -- the cornerstone of his legislative agenda -- to extend Social Security to cover medical care for the elderly. It was, as historians G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot write in their fine recent study, The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s, "a lesson fully understood by the Southerners in Congress. They didn't need to have majorities on their side, they didn't need to have public opinion on their side, they didn't need the president on their side. They only needed to have the rules on their side."

Three accidents of history followed in quick succession to break the deadlock. First, in the most important turning point in history you've never heard of, Kennedy narrowly won a vote to dynamite the House Rules Committee's role as a tar pit for liberal legislation by expanding its membership. Second, the Supreme Court's first "one man, one vote" decision, Baker v. Carr (1962), outlawed Southern electoral systems, which, for instance, gave the three smallest counties in Georgia, with a total population of 69,800, as much voting strength as the largest county in the state, with a population of 556,326. And finally, Kennedy was shot. The national trauma was a blunt political opportunity from whose import Johnson did not flinch. "Let us continue," he intoned in his first address to a joint session of Congress. Then, before this tragic but miraculous once-in-a-lifetime store of political capital drained away, he started passing the liberal legislative agenda that had been little more than a shadow during Kennedy's lifetime.

Less than a month into his presidency, Johnson wrangled from a recalcitrant Congress a loan guarantee to help our mortal enemies, the Soviets, buy grain before he had been in office a month, convincing 38 legislators to return to Washington during their Christmas vacations to approve the loan. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 -- the "war on poverty" -- passed by a nearly two-to-one margin. Johnson advocated for a tax cut that conservatives called a budget-buster, bringing Dwight D. Eisenhower out of retirement to campaign against it. But Johnson passed that, too. Then came Medicare. Then the Civil Rights Act. "I'm not going to cavil, and I'm not going to compromise," Johnson told Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia as the landmark bill Kennedy introduced to no avail in the summer of 1963 was steamrolling its way to completion.

In 1965 Johnson passed new legislation for preschool for poor children, college prep for poor teenagers, legal services for indigent defendants, redevelopment funds for lagging economic regions, landmark immigration reform, a new Department of Housing and Urban Development, and national endowments for the humanities and art. He even added a whole new category to the liberal agenda with the passage of the Highway Beautification Act, the Water Quality Act, and the Clean Air Act. He insisted to his congressional leadership that the House's bill for federal aid to education pass the Senate "literally without a comma changed," aide Eric Goldman recalled. It did indeed, two weeks later, with only 18 votes in opposition.

His insistence on ramming through bills "without a comma changed" wasn't a function of Johnson's natural aggressiveness or ego (or at least not only that). It was, in the American legislative context, a necessary sort of pragmatism. The 36th president saw that his opportunity to move the country forward could end any day and that he must act before America lurched back into a state of fearful reaction. He was right. During the span of just a few weeks in the summer of 1965, Johnson flew to Independence, Missouri, to sign Medicare -- the reform JFK had run on in 1960 -- and to Washington to sign the Voting Rights Act. Five days later, on Aug. 11, the Watts Riots brought down the curtain on the liberal hour. After that, he couldn't even get Congress to approve $60 million for rodent control in the slums.

The right and Democratic centrists have taught us to think of the Great Society in terms of its failures, like the War on Poverty's Community Action Program, which drove a wedge between Washington and local Democratic municipal administrations and supposedly empowered all manner of swindlers and "poverty pimps." We should focus instead on Johnson's remarkable number of broad-based accomplishments in those first 22 months. We now take for granted the notion that the elderly have a right to medical care, that the government should provide aid for education, that immigration policy should not discriminate on the basis of race, and that the government should concern itself with clean air. It would be unimaginable to see them reversed -- in part because of the constitutional inertia that made them so difficult to achieve in the first place. They are the kind of things Republicans now pretend they were in favor of all along. This is the way social change works. It is the responsibility of the next progressive president to crash through a similar set of reforms for the next generation to take for grantedMORE

Repress U-A Gramscian Case Study In A War of Position: The "Homeland Security" Attack On Academia by: Paul Rosenberg

Higher education has been highly contested terrain in culture wars as far back as ancient Greece, if not farther. But a recently-published article in The Nation magazine gives a fascinating snapshot of the efforts undertaken since 9/11 to bring academia into line with George Bush's highly-partisan "homeland security" agenda.

As such, it illustrates a particularly broad front in the struggle for hegemony-subsuming the entirety of an inherently troublesome institutional sector to the most rigorous forms of hierarchical control-those associated not simply with the military, but with military intelligence. The article, "Repress U", by Michael Gould-Wartofsky, is organized perfectly for illustrating how a well-coordinated war of position can be carried out. Discussion begins on the flip.

The article begins:
Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus.
From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.
Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:

1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations.

From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.
No doubt many of you read something about these incidents. Or about campus "free speech zones," which Gould-Wartofsky also mentions in this section. But few probably thought about it in terms of what it might it portend operationally. What was the purpose being served? Obviously, chilling dissent is one purpose. But chilling dissent is not the end of it, this article shows. It's just one piece of the puzzle.

2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry, from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of the "war on crime" only escalated with the President's "war on terror." Each school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--adds fuel to the armament flames. Two-thirds of universities arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams: for instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are in the arsenals of the University of Texas campus police. Last April City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Some states, like Nevada, are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special reserve officer corps."
And so, slowly but surely, people become acclimatized to living in a garrison state. It makes them feel "secure," by simultaneously making them feel insecure. It changes their everyday experience, expectations, and assumptions about what is normal, taken-for-granted.

Want to get even MORE scared?

A Gramscian Take on The Times And McCain
by: Paul Rosenberg Sat Feb 23, 2008

The proper perspective for viewing the NYT McCain story, the unfolding food fight, and the continuing fallout, is Gramsci's twin concepts of the war of position and the war of movement. I've written about this several times before, but here's a quick refresher. (A) Gramsci's motivation was that the predicted worker's revolution did not occur in the mot advanced capitalist countries, as Marxist theory predicted. He therefore sought to explain why this was so, and what to do about it. The answers he came up with, described briefly below, have been adapted by people whose viewpoints are far removed from his--Rush Limbaugh, for one--so there is no need to accept his initial premises, if--like I do--one finds his descriptions of processes compelling.

(B) Gramsci attributed the failure to make an anti-capitalist revolution to the capture of worker's ideology, and organizations by the hegemonic (ruling or dominant) culture, transmitted by institutions such as the church, compulsory education, popular culture, etc. as well as appeals to bourgoise ideologies, such as nationalism, consumerism, careerism, etc. which also enjoy their own forms of instutional support.
Such institutions and ideologies have both their own independent rationale and function in their own spheres, as well as their function in the largr social system. Gramsci's conception allows us to view both institutions and narratives at varying different levels of abstraction operating according the same over-all logic, without denying or distorting the fact that they also follow their own particular logic as well.

(C) To overcome the power of hegemony, and create a workers revolution, Gramsci argued for a two-fold strategy, First, a "war of position" to build working-class counter-institutions, and take over bourgoise ones while promulgating working-class ideology. Second, once this stage was successful, then a "war of movement" to the actual insurrection against capitalism, with mass support that Marxist theory originally predicted.
Consciously or not, the American right has adopted Gramsci's fundamental insight, but adapted it to their somewhat different position in society. On the one hand, as Gramsci advised, they have dilligently built up their own institutional infrastructure, and attacked existing instriutional structures that they do not control, seeking either to take over or cripple or destroy them. On the other hand, they have combined the war of position and war of movement into a more integrated whole, frequently taking advantage of a constellation of positions to launch a "war of movement" attack on an insitution they wish to cripple, destroy or take over, or an idea, principle, value, or narrative they wish to discredit, or subvert.

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So, again, Straight Talk? Not so much....
Which leads me into one of my recurrent topics--the politics of cognitive developmental levels--and how it helps illuminate the strange workings of the "Straight Talk" meme, a meme that's been prominently applied to Ross Perot, George W. Bush and Ron Paul, as well as John McCain. The implications of "straight talk" are quite clear--in ordinary parlance, a straight talker is someone who tells the truth, without all manner of qualifications and embellishments.
But the "Straight Talk" meme is something quite different--it takes the superficial lack of qualifications and embellishments as proof that what is said is true, even if what is being talked about happens to be rather complicated, and very much in need of qualifications and embellishments. One could understand the "Straight Talk" meme simply in terms of American anti-intellectualism, ala vintage Richard Hofstadter. But I prefer Robert Kegan. In the table below, "Straight Talk" is an example of the underlying structure of Level 2--a "durable category":

Click through and scroll down for chart

The first thing to understand is that we are talking about mere appearances here. While the real deal is an "Enduring Disposition"--the psychological manifestation of a durable category--the "Straight Talk" meme refers simply to the appearance described above.

The second thing to understand is that normal conservatism operates on Level 3. It corresponds to adult consciousness in a traditional society. The self is defined in terms of the matrix of social roles and relationships of the surrounding society.
At that level, we are those roles and relationships, and any criticism of them is a criticism of ourselves. "America, love it or leave it," indeed.
Except that--Third Thing--America was founded as a Level 4 institution. Our very Constitution is the very embodiment of a "Relationship-Regulating Form." And it is the conservative, Level 3 mind's complete incapacity to deal with Level 4 that leads to falling back on Level 2 pseudo-certainties.

You see, each level is more complicated than the one before. Each level involves taking what was subject, the foundation of thought and being, and making it object, turning taken-for-granted context into clearly manipulable content. For those who remain embedded in the taken-for-granted context, this is not merely a frightening possibility, it is, quite literally, inconceivable, because they lack the context needed to conceive it.

Traditional, Level 3 societies change only very slowly over time. This is where the "narrative of 'personal virtue' as the foundational concern of politics" described at the beginning of this post fits in. So long as society is basically unchanging, the person who exemplifies living by the rules has a very strong claim to encompass the very essence of what politics is all about.

But modernism developed out of the quickening pace of change that first hit Europe a good seven centuries ago, in the fast-paced trade-oriented city-states of Northern Italy. They called it "The Renaissance," but it was actually much, much more than the rebirth of ancient knowledge, because that ancient knowledge feed into a newly dynamic form of life, from which a wholly new future would spring--the future in which we now live. This future requires, among other things, the active engagement in reshaping the rules by which we live. Change is simply too rapid, and too all-pervasive for us to remain unchanged and still fit with the world around us.

But the Level 3 mind sees such change as its very destruction. To note things that need changing in America is to be anti-American in this view. Ironically, this view is quintessentially un-American. People come here to reinvent themselves. That is the whole point of America. If reinvention is not your thing, then you just don't belong here. Of course, no Level 3 mind can grasp such a basic Level 4 fact, which constitutes an existential threat to its very existence. And a common response to such overwhelming threats is one form or another of ego defense mechanism, such as regression, which is defined as :returning to a previous stage of development."

Much more

What am I doing here? by Paul Rosenberg

Obama Is Absolutely Right Obama is absolutely right that we stand at a time of historic possibility for fundamental change-if anything, he under-estimates how much this is so.

He is also absolutely right that he is the perfect figure to lead us in a new direction. He doesn't have a lot baggage, he is someone that young people can identify with, he is not deeply embedded in a Washington culture that is far removed from the real pulse of the country. But...

Obama Is Absolutely Wrong
Obama is absolutely wrong in his fundamental political analysis. The problem in America today is not a polarized political system in which Democrats and liberals are as equally to blame as Republicans and conservatives. The problem is a political system that's dominated by this sort of brain-dead political narrative. And the longer that Obama promulgates such brain-dead political narratives, the more he squanders his enormous potential.

This sort of brain-dead political narrative dominates our political system because it's highly beneficial to the right wing, which has positioned itself to have veto power over such things. It's not the ideal narrative for them. "Democrats are the source of all evil, and should be hunted down like dogs" is the ideal narrative for them.

But they will happily settle for a dominant narrative that says it is equally reasonable-and equally divisive-to say "Democrats are the source of all evil, and should be hunted down like dogs" or to say "no, we're not, we're just sorta stupid, is all."

More

Will The Real Culture War Please Stand Up???
by: Paul Rosenberg

It's the grand premise of the Obama campaign that he can bring us together, slay the dragon of partisan divisiveness and end the culture wars which he lays at the feet of the Baby Boom generation. It's a nice, appealing narrative, in a way, it all turns on the question of what you mean by "culture war." The commonsense meaning of "culture war" over the past few decades is a war over social mores between hierarchical "traditional values" and the post-1950s emergence of egalitarian values, especially with respect to race and gender, more closely aligned with the traditional values at the core of our Constitution.

But there's a deeper meaning, which is clearly understood by rightwing culture warriors, and virtually unknown to everyone else. This meaning comes, ironically, from a leading Marxist theorist, the highly independent Italian leader, Antonio Gramsci, who described culture war as a struggle for ideological control of the broad range of institutions in society. And in this deeper sense, Obama's analysis is completely upside-down--the problem is not that both sides are equally to blame, but that only the right is actually fighting a coordinated culture war as Gramsci defined it. It's not a case of bringing a knife to a gunfight, it's a case of brining a plastic yogurt spoon to a nuclear war.

Gramsci was grappling with the question of why Marxist predictions had not come to pass, why the rise of working class power had not lead to a communist revolution, or even the dominance of socialist political parties. The reason, he believed, was that workers aspired to become their class enemy--they wanted to join the bourgeoisie, not destroy it, and the reason for that was the hegemony of bourgeois ideology, expressed through a whole range of political institutions.

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I intend to follow it up with some diaries that look at how the right has moved in on various different cultural institutions-possible examples include think tanks, the media, K-12 and higher education, churches, state governments, the courts and civil society institutions such as the Boy Scouts. I have one about the intrusion of "homeland security" on academia that's ready to go. I plan to do one or two others this weekend or next. Two other forms of follow-up are planned-first, more scrutiny of Barack Obama in light of this analysis and his failure to grasp what's going on, and second, a step back to discuss what the two sides are all about. Broadly conceived, I will characterize them as hierarchy, authority and coercion on the right, versus equality, autonomy, and voluntary cooperation on the left. These encompass a wide range of specific forms and culture expressions on both sides that have their differences with one another, but that all express similar fundamentals.

So what the hell is ACTUALLY going on?

Reality Be Damned! Why Media Narratives Don't Change by: Paul Rosenberg

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Journalism Ethics As Problematic
But the workings of truth suppression revealed by Parry's account are only part of the picture. A deeper part goes to the very nature of how journalism as a whole defines its roles and purposes. This is the subject of a unique book of media criticism, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest. In it, Iggers argues that the core problem with journalism is not that journalists sometimes violate their code of ethics, the problem is the code of ethics itself.

Instead of being a disinterested code, divorced from the everyday pressures of realworld journalism, Iggers shows how codes of journalism ethics are deeply interested documents, reflecting the over-arching material concerns. Conflicts of interest, for example, are held to be a very serious concern for individual journalists. Yet, dependence on advertising creates much more powerful economic incentives at the corporate level, which are routinely ignored. At the same time, it's clear that journalists and their sources both benefit from dealing regularly with one another, and yet the journalist-source relationship is regarded as a pillar of journalism, not a source of ethical problems. This is but one aspect of his critique, which demonstrates a complete lack of level 4 reflection on the practice of journalism from outside the system of relationships that practical journalism is embedded in.

Iggers also provides a compact history of how journalims ethics has changed over the years, particularly around the notion of truth-telling, as various different proxies for quasi-scientific "truth" have been tried and found wanting. In the end, we have arrived at a state in which "balance" has come to substitute for any concern with "truth"-we're much too sophistatced to believe in that anymore. This helps to explain why the media can get things so thoroughly and deeply wrong-as they have done continuously with Iraq, and as Glenn shows, with the 2006 mid-terms-and yet not be bothered at all: they have done their jobs according to the book.

Journalism Ethos As Problematic
Finally, one can consider the matter of journalistic culture and ethos. There are ways of promoting or validating some stories, just as there are ways of dismissing others. The Downing Street Memo provides a classic example. Here was smoking gun evidence that the President of United States had lied about invading Iraq, had planned for it roughly a year in advance, and worked to construct a plausible rationale. It was, by any sensible measure, a blockbuster story. And yet, it has been regularly and routinely ignored by the Versailles media.

When I interviewed a USA Today reporter who had co-written an excellent, high-profile article on the first anniversay of 9/11 which told a similar story, but without the evidence of the Downing Street Memo, she showed no interest in following up on it, and did so using a coule tropes I've heard before-it was an "old story" that was "up to the historians now." Of course, it went directly to the issue of impeachable offenses and the needless deaths of thousands of Americans, and many more Iraqi civilians. What's more an even "older story"-the Whitewater land deal, in which no one died-was kept alive ad nauseum by the press, despite copious evidence that the Clintons had lost money on the deal and done nothing wrong whatsoever.

But this only goes to show that such explanations are not to be taken seriously at face value. They are semi-ritualized behavior, by which certain unwanted stories are gotten rid of, while others are embraced-nothing more, nothing less. They are part and parcel of how level 3 life is lived, and as such they cannot be seriously questioned by a level 3 consciousness. Only someone who stands outside, someone at level 4 or above who regards such rituals and the purposes they serve as objects can properly question or challenge them. And any attempt to do so will be severely attacked. Just look at how Versailles screams bloody murder about the blogosphere, almost every day now.

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The notion of an independent truth to be served--an 18th Century Enlightenment notion that fanned the flames of the press that helped win our freedom as a nation--is virtually nowhere to be found. Global warming, evolution, George Bush's numerous impeachable offenses, none of these are, or possibly could be matters of simple, straightforward truth, because such truth no longer exists in the lowly precincts of Versailles.

They owe their allegience to another 18th Century tradition, from which they take their name--an opulent, excessive, out-of-touch culture of gossip, terminal triviality and utter incompetence. That is their reality. It is all they know, and it has total dominance over mere facts, which are completely powerless to change the stories it tells.... just like it was in the old Versailles until the guillotine came.

More

Liberals And Conservatives Switch Places--Sort Of (The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem, Pt 3b) by: Paul Rosenberg

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Free Lunch Conservatism
All the above explains motivations-and, broadly stated, means as well. But it does not really explain how old-fashioned monopolistic capitalism made such a striking comeback, producing a rapid rise in economic polarization, which virtually halted a centuries-long history of each generation of Americans doing better economically than the generation before. These political developments were so transparently opposed to the common good, and yet were so readily normalized that they require special explanation in their own right-as well as being crucial to understand if we wish to reverse them, as it seems inarguable that a progressive politics must do.

For this, we require an explanation that brings us back to the main thrust of this diary series. The mechanism I propose was two-fold: First, traditional conservatism had utterly failed, and try as it might to re-present itself, people might buy it in the abstract, but when it came down to brass tacks, they were down with the New Deal, and broad government spending. A conservative ideology that was halfway reality-based could not appeal to people whose everyday experience told them that government had an important role to play, even if they longed for the freedom of the Wild West and wished it were not so. Still worse was a conservatism of austerity that promised people lots of hard work, with nothing much to show for it. For conservatism to succeed, it had to totally cut its reality-based ties, and remake itself in the image of liberalism, promising good times for all, a better tomorrow, morning in America.

This was the beauty of supply-side economics, as sketched out in the earlier diary "The Big Lie And The Rightwing's Neo-Feudal Vision (A Supplement To The Political Duality Series)": it promised something for nothing: tax cuts would make tax revenues grow. Instead of the traditional conservative message of sacrifice and hard work, this free lunch conservatism leap-frogged over the most utopian promises that mainstream liberalism had ever made. Its promises were so excessive that they could only be compared to Communism.

It's worth noting some other aspects of reality-denial that surfaced at this time. Racism suddenly vanished overnight, along with any sense that the conservatives who had fiercely defended it were in any sense morally lacking. (Indeed, the fact that black people remained poor even after racism had vanished seemed to indicate that conservatives had been right all along-there was something morally wrong with the great mass of black people, and liberals were doing them no favors by pretending otherwise.)

Furthermore, by discovering the cause of fighting abortion, conservatives staked a claim to the new Civil Rights Movement. Vietnam was not tragic betrayal of ideals, a genocidal war of domination, marked by countless atrocities, fought for no good reason, and built on an elaborate foundation of lies. It was a noble crusade, one that we had actually won, in fact, before the treasonous liberals in the media and the Democratic Congress stole it from us. And as for the environment, trees were a leading cause of pollution.

In all these ways and more, by cutting its reality-based ties, rightwing movement conservatism positioned itself for a dynamic of magical thinking, much like the rightwing movements of early 20th Century Europe. Such a dynamic holds tremendous advantages over reality-based politics, simply because it is able to promise so much more-miracles both economic and spiritual. The arguments for such a magical politics cannot be made in the same mundane reality-based way that one argues for realist politics. One cannot discuss the Pentagon Papers, for example. One must talk about Rambo instead, with his poignant question, "This time, will they let us win?" One cannot study the sociology and economics of poverty. One must tell stories of non-existent "welfare queens." Nor can one realistically face the insanity of nuclear brinksmanship, and preparing to "win" a nuclear war. Instead, one must tell fairy tales about a Star Wars missile shield, like a giant Superdome protecting the entire country.

All these problems that conservatism could not face and solve were to some degree insoluble because the world is simply too complicated for its Level 3 solutions. It could neither grasp nor abide the Level 4 solutions of liberalism, but it could step in aggressively when liberalism faltered, either because a changing Level 4 world always throws up set-backs from time to time, or because the world was becoming even more complex-a post-modern Level 5 world. And when it stepped in because liberalism faltered, it stepped in with simplistic stories, about turning back to the good old days, and moving forward at the same time.

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Even More Good Analysis and History Combined

Lib/Dem Political Ineptitude--A Prelude (The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem, Pt 3a, by: Paul Rosenberg

In my Part Two of this series, Why Conservatives Can't Govern, I argued that (a) the world is simply too complex for the Level 3 conservative mind [in Kegan's typology] to handle and (b) movement conservative political discourse often doesn't even rise to Level 2. This raises the obvious question: if they're so stupid, and we're so smart, then how come they're running everything? The simple answer is: wealth and power. But a secondary answer is that they're not all stupid (besides which, cognitive complexity and intelligence are two different things).. In this diary, I'm going to lay some groundwork, and then begin discussing how the lens of cognitive complexity can illuminate why conservatives have been so much better at politicking, when they suck soooo bad at governing.

The Problem Restated It's a well-known fact that college tends to have a liberalizing effect on people. The exposure to different points of view does that to people. But it's equally well-known that a lot of college graduates are still Republicans, even conservatives. Furthermore, the impact of college on promoting cognitive development has also been widely noted-well, at least within the field of cognitive development. From all this comes an interesting question: What are these people thinking?

Equally puzzling-and quite related-is the question of why liberals and Democrats have been so consistently politically inept for so long, given that they're much more sophisticated, as a whole, when it comes to policy analysis. This diary offers my answer to these questions: Level Four Republicans focus their attention and higher level cognitive skills on getting what they want, rather than trying to understand the world in a broadly objective manner. This is a rather straightforward consequence of their interests and values, which are not substantially changed by growing more conscious.

The notion that conscious evolution inherently equates to a similar growth in moral and ethical responsibility is just one of those liberal myths that comes from hanging around with people whose parents raised them right. Not everyone is like that.

Development vs. Interest
One of the main points of Kegan's approach to cognitive development is that he stresses a common structure of consciousness that applies across the full range of cognition. There is clinical evidence for this, but it does not mean that people actually use the same level of cognition at all times. Indeed, there is strong empirical evidence that specialized knowledge does not translate into other contexts-and, indeed, does not necessarily get assimilated by those directly and repeatedly exposed to it.

For example, even college biology students, who learn in detail about evolution can retain the mistaken, but commonplace folk impression that evolution is essentially progressive, as if higher intelligence were the whole point of it, despite the fact that there are so staggeringly many more insects than there are higher mammals. Thus, an important part of education is not simply the inculcation of new knowledge, but the much more difficult elimination of old, false knowledge. In short, capacity to think at any level is no guarantee that one will think at that level, as opposed to simply relying on what one already thinks one knows. (emphasis mine}

Above all, one must be interested in something in order to pay attention to it, and think about it, and one must be very interested indeed to pay so much attention that one will willingly discard what one thinks one already knows. This is difficult enough on an individual basis, but when one is part of a social group, it is all the more difficult.

Someone at Level Five may be much more capable of sophisticated moral reasoning than someone at Level Three. But if the person at Level Five dislikes struggling with human problems (as, for example, many physical scientists do) while the person at Level Three has spent their life wrestling with moral dilemmas (counseling troubled youth, for example), then the Level Three person will have a much firmer grounding, a much surer instinct, and a much stronger motivation to address, understand and solve problems.

And this, then, is the fundamental key to all that follows: conservatives are much more interested in power, control and running things. Indeed, it is their most central concern. Liberals are much more interested in understanding things, making things work, sharing the fruits of these endeavors and furthering the unfolding of human potential-all of which amounts to an incredible dissipation of attention, since it leads to limitless different forms of endeavor, while power-seeking focuses on just one.

The Big Picture

This is my favourite part of this installment:

The classic conservative narrative is the narrative of The Fall from Grace in a past Golden Age. If only we can return to some past Golden Age, all will be well and good, conservatives tell us. The classic liberal/progressive narrative is the opposite-the narrative of progress. But conservatives in recent decades have excelled at co-opting liberal narratives, and casting past narratives of progress as proof that we have already achieved everything worthwhile-and somehow lost it again. Thus, the immigrant experience of past generations is not a lesson we can carry forward in our own lives, or a source of compassion for those living that experience today. Instead it is a source of entitlement-"My ancestors came here legally, and they struggled hard to give me a better life, and those people are just trying to steal what my family had to work hard for."

While liberals and progressives have by far the greater number of storytellers, conservatives have gained an incredible strategic advantage by harnessing the storytellers the do have, and widely disseminating their stories. They have also inculcated storytelling into the activities of activists at all levels, and in all manner of different roles. Above all, conservative media figures, such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, are predominantly story-tellers. They routinely tell outrageous lies precisely because that is the purpose and their function: they are mythmakers. And liberals have an incredibly hard time dealing with this, in part because they do not understand that myths are absolutely vital for us as human beings-and that some myths can be absolutely true.

This is one of the great disconnects in liberal politics today. We have the majority of storytellers. And the majority of real-life stories, too. And yet our political establishment disdains these strengths. Hollywood's money is fine. Their creative input is not simply not wanted-it is despised. We're going to take a closer look at this--and other disconnects--in our next installment.