here <\/a>but that few care to hear anymore, much less ponder.)<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt\u2019s hardly necessary to name current exemplars of the Greedhead\/opportunist strain \u2014 the Goldman-Sachsers and Citi-Groupers and hedge-fund hustlers who are in and out of government management posts \u2014 or to identify the cash-and-carry lawmakers who take these people\u2019s instructions even when they\u2019re giving them or forging grand bargains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fountainheads.<\/strong>\u00a0This group is named for\u00a0The Fountainhead<\/em>, the perennial best-selling novel by the libertarian zealot, Ayn Rand. They aren\u2019t in it just for the money. From Margaret Thatcher and Alan Greenspan to Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, and Eric Cantor, they\u2019ve been true believers in Rand’s doctrine that human dignity is a lonely, Lockean-in-the-wilderness achievement and that \u201csociety\u201d must constantly be pared back to liberate it. <\/p>\n\n\n\nAristotle considered humans the noblest of animals with politics and the most depraved of beasts without it, but Fountainheads think that government, with its rational social engineering, is the beast. They think that society\u2019s foundations are pre-political \u2014 divine or ordained in Natural Law \u2014 and that much of what passes for democratic and republican politics violates those foundations and is depraved. Their vociferous populism disguises their conviction that most people are barely fit to govern themselves as individuals, let alone one another: Only Nietzschean, or at least Randian, generators and facilitators of wealth are fit to govern them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Godheads. <\/strong>Close to Randians in some ways, but not as assuredly libertarian, are religious conservatives who emphasize the divine inspiration behind individual materialism. Listen to James Lucier, an assistant to conservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms in 1980, talking to Elizabeth Drew just after Ronald Regan\u2019s election:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cThe liberal leadership groups that run the country \u2014 not just the media but also the politicians, corporate executives \u2026 have been trained in an intellectual tradition that is \u2026 highly rationalistic. That training excludes most of the things that are important to the people who are selling cars and digging ditches. The principles that we\u2019re espousing, have been around for thousands of years: The family \u2026, faith that \u2026 there is a higher meaning than materialism. Property as a fundamental human right \u2026 and that a government should not be based on deficit financing and economic redistribution \u2026 . It\u2019s not the \u2018new right\u2019 \u2013 people are groping for a new term. It\u2019s pre-political.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To keep on believing this, you really need to have God at your elbow, or you’ll need beliefs in ethno-racial destiny on sacred soil that were potent and wildly popular in the deranged Europe of the 1930s, when Woodrow Wilson\u2019s liberal-nationalist imaginings had collapsed into capitalist exploitation and when godless Communism was baring the ugly underside of a universalism that hadn\u2019t reckoned deeply enough with nationalist and religious yearnings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Americans curb such fantasies of ethno-racial or dialectical materialist destiny, it\u2019s quite often by turning to God; even Martin Luther King did that, as Glenn Beck reminded everyone at his big rally at the Lincoln Memorial. But this religious turn can become idolatry, as too many Republican candidates demonstrate every day. Who\u2019s to decide? The only way out is to diffuse and displace such currents. But how? And with what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Liberal Conundrum.<\/strong>\u00a0FDR\u2019s answer was that a healthy society, like a healthy person, walks on two feet: The left one is the foot of social provision (public education, health care, retirement insurance), without which the values that conservatives say they cherish couldn\u2019t flourish: It does take a village to raise a child. The right one is the foot of irreducibly personal responsibility without which even the most assiduous social engineering (and, indeed, especially that) would turn persons in to cogs, clients, or worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe problem with this dichotomy is that each side emphasizes its favored foot until it swells, hobbling the other foot’s and, with it, the society\u2019s stride. Fountainhead Paul Ryan thought that our safety net had become a hammock, lulling people into complacency and dependency. Yet he and other true believers, and the Greedheads and opportunists who back them, can\u2019t reconcile their calls for individual and family virtue with their obeisance to every whim and riptide of capitalism that\u2019s dissolving everything they mean to defend. (\u201cAll that is solid melts into air, everything holy is profaned,\u201d as an observer of capital put many years ago, but never mind\u2026.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Faith in God or Rand can\u2019t deliver anyone from the growing irreconcilability of spiritual and material values in our present dispensation. Nor can the targeting of scapegoats that always accompanies conservatives’ failures to deliver. Their course becomes so hard and confused that\u00a0Greedheads, Fountainheads, and Godheads become Airheads<\/strong>, or they’re supported by airheads — by the Sarah Palins and Michelle Bachmans (and an astonishingly large number of other women, such as Christine O\u2019Donnell, Sharron Angle, Linda McMahon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene), who’ve been standard-bearers for the Absurd in several elections.)<\/p>\n\n\n\nOne of the saddest truths of human history is that delusional escapes become stampedes, in ways that some conservative zealots who foment them anticipate more clearly and cynically than liberals who are caught by surprise and rendered speechless by surges of Greedheads, Fountainheads, Godheads, and Airheads, whether in Monkey trials, McCarthyism, \u201cBomb \u2019em Back Into the Stone Age\u201d war-mongering, or sanctimonious authoritarian, “pre-political” pronouncements. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A republic depends on citizens resisting such impositions and rising above the rats-in-a maze scramble for individual security and distinction into which they’ve been driven by a casino-finance, corporate welfare, consumer-marketing juggernaut that presses them to buy more guns and burglar alarms and to hire more private tutors, leaving them clueless about how to cultivate public safety and wisdom. A republic depends on citizens who know how to advance enlightened self-interest and achieve their highest and best selves by finding their personal advantage in pursuing a common good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not all citizens need to do this, and not even a majority need to. Some will always commit their energies to generating wealth or contributing to religion, art, entertainment, and recreation. But in a healthy republic, a critical mass of citizens will indeed advance a common good by setting standards, a tone, and an idiom of mutual obligation, respect, and reasoned deliberation that dampens the allure of empty rhetoric and brutal actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Republics need citizens who are committed to exercise public virtues, because, unlike monarchies, theocracies, or ethno-racial tribal societies, republics have \u201cno other adhesives, no bonds holding themselves together, except their citizens\u2019 voluntary patriotism and willingness to uphold some public authority,\u201d as the historian Gordon Wood put it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
American Quirks.\u00a0<\/strong>Conservatives are quite right to insist on the importance of that right foot of irreducibly personal autonomy responsibility: The voluntarism in republican self-sacrifice can\u2019t be coerced by the state or incentivized by markets. It’s what makes a republic free. An American republican ethos has embodied such voluntarism well enough at times to inspire and sustain it with a mix of pragmatism, faith, and fakery that\u2019s better exemplified by Jack Nicholson than by John Roberts. Some of its voluntarism came originally from Protestantism, common-sense moral reasoning, and Enlightenment affirmations of Natural Law. The American, wrote the early 20th Century philosopher George Santayana, is \u201can idealist working on matter\u2026. There is an enthusiasm in his sympathetic handling of material forces which goes far to cancel the illiberal character it might otherwise assume.\u201d Such an American was \u201csuccessful in invention, conservative in reform, and quick in emergencies.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\nSantayana added that because the American is an individualist, \u201chis goodwill is not officious. His instinct is to think well of everybody, and to wish everybody well, but in a spirit of rough comradeship, expecting every man to stand on his own legs and to be helpful in his turn. When he has given his neighbor a chance, he thinks he has done enough for him; but he feels it is an absolute duty to do that. It will take some hammering to drive a coddling socialism into America.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Santayana’s American — like many Americans I grew up with in an old, residually Puritan, western Massachusetts town — favored not much redistribution of the material but lots of inner renewal of the spiritual to temper self-aggrandizement with social obligation and to re-centering oneself in commitments to society. \u201cThis linkage of American material productivity with an outpouring of the spirit over the whole world, of material with spiritual blessings, is and remains the key to American self-justification,\u201d wrote Sacvan Bercovitch, a scholar of the Puritan mission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The very fragility of republican voluntarism\u2019s reliance on cooperative rather than coercive power is its strength, as Jonathan Schell shows in his book\u00a0The Unconquerable World<\/em>: Because cooperative power grows from give-and-take in everyday interactions that organize and reorganize themselves informally, it\u2019s too elusive for enemy armies to destroy, too independent of markets for their wealth to buy off.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA Hunger for Myths.\u00a0<\/strong>A society enhances its capacity to sustain trust by generating strong, shared ideas and story lines that sift the deluge of infotainment and inspire citizens to find themselves in an ever-evolving common good. A gnawing hunger for spiritually deep myths has driven young Americans to\u00a0Harry Potter<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Lord of the Rings,<\/em>\u00a0which teach courage and loyalty to friends and to a higher, common good in adversity. But both of these were literary creations, first as novels whose creators drew some of their inspiration from English mythic wellsprings whose pre-market depths and expressions were still widely, intimately shared. Even as they became corporate investments in publishing and then in films, they held power for myth-starved young American moviegoers,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But \u201cSymbols control sentiment and thought, and the new age has no symbols consonant with its activities,\u201d as John Dewey warned in the roaring 1920s, a decade whose widespread frenzy, disorientation, and loss we\u2019re recapitulating. The story lines or myths of a shocked and stressed society may sour and metastasize into something alien and frightening to citizens who are still trying to keep the civic faith. If such a society loses its humane consensus, its words and deeds part company, as Hannah Arendt warned, leaving words empty and deeds to become unguided missiles, advancing no commitments a people can trust enough to trust anyone to be faithful to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Without a more wholesome consensus and trust, a polity is vulnerable to manipulation by the few who are filled with passionate, factional intensities. The left as well as the right flirt with the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt\u2019s expectation of decisive, sovereign actions that cut through liberal democratic dithering. Widening gyres of violent, directionless infotainment unleash more shouts and undercurrents, driving public deliberation into a vortex from which ever-starker mis-leadership springs, promising clarity and security and reaping millions of people’s swooning desperation to obey it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The more demagoguery, surveillance, police and prisons a society deploys, the less civic oxygen it has and the weaker it is, because it can\u2019t depend any longer on commitments that people feel motivated to keep even when no one\u2019s looking, motivated by irreducibly personal responsibility and by a love of society cultivated in a way of life that seeds and nourishes trust, thereby eliciting it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The faith, arts, and disciplines of such cooperative power are being undermined by conservatives and liberals alike who confuse today\u2019s casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-marketing juggernaut with the Lockean capitalism and free markets they imagine they\u2019re defending. The more often they get this wrong, the more they become Greedheads, Fountainheads, or Godheads, ending as Airheads in the public forum, which they destroy as their numbers grow. That\u2019s the real cost of the three-decade-long campaign that conservatives waged and that liberals accommodated and often abetted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The people who’ve seeded and deepened this crisis haven\u2019t the intention or the civic courage to resolve it through the \u201cbalanced approach\u201d which most Americans would support decisively if only they had a chance to see it in action and to think about it. But how can they think about it in any decisive way if the court of public opinion has been disbanded and is no longer capable of reaching consensus and decisions?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Capitalization of Communication is critical here.\u00a0<\/strong>The determined minority that I’ve mentioned has deprived Americans of chances to think by trading shrewdly on many people\u2019s disinclination to think much in the first place. The real scandal in Rupert Murdoch’s communications empire isn\u2019t its obvious political and moral corruption; it’s his news outlets\u2019 relentless drive to make citizens fear and mistrust one another, drip by drip, deploying excellent “production values,” that disassociate increasingly empty slogans about self-governance from increasingly brutal images of mob-like behavior. This willful, systematic degradation of public discourse, which turns a society from cultivating cooperative power to legitimizing and glorifying coercive power, hasn’t been seen on a scale like Murdoch\u2019s since the 1930s, except, perhaps, in the worst excesses of Cold War anti-Communism.<\/p>\n\n\n\nEssential to this transformation has been deregulation of the massive invasion of the republican deliberative processes by the supposedly protected \u201cspeech\u201d of incorporeal (and, increasingly, un-American) \u201cspeakers\u201d in election campaigns, in legislative drafting sessions, and, of course, in every television commercial and virtually every highly visible debate forum, including those staged by media conglomerates themselves. News organizations break \u201cnews\u201d as bread-and-circus entertainment for audiences assembled and re-assembled on any pretext whatever \u2013 erotic, ethno-racial, ideological, nihilist \u2014 solely for the production of maximum profit. See this website’s section, “News Media, Chattering Classes, and the Phantom Public.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although the digital revolution has expanded everyone\u2019s ability to break news, as in the video of George Floyd’s murder, it has also deranged our capacity to break and sustain\u00a0ideas<\/em>\u00a0that are good enough and shared widely enough to make sense of the deluge of \u201cnews\u201d and entertainment that\u2019s separating us from one another and thereby plunging us into ourselves in troubling ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\nDuring the Iraq War, the columnist Paul Krugman noted that although 60 percent of Americans believed wrongly that Iraq and Al Qaeda were linked, that W.M. D. had actually been found, or that world public opinion favored the war with Iraq, only 23 percent of PBS and NPR audiences \u201cbelieved any of these untrue things, but the number was 80 percent among those relying primarily on Fox News\u2026. [T]wo-thirds of Fox devotees believed that the U.S. had \u2018found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.’\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When deliberative democracy is sidelined like this, it won\u2019t be long before the determined, powerful few can administer more shocks and palliatives to an atomized body politic that\u2019s too frightened to challenge them and that, indeed, becomes disposed to embrace them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a moment of pique, Obama called the debt-crisis mongers of 2011 \u201chostage takers\u201d for refusing to approve even six months of unemployment benefits in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts. But Obama himself exhibited a hostage\u2019s Stockholm syndrome by praising his captors\u2019 patriotism even though, in their own mystical confusion, they are actually serving powers and patrons foreign to any republican polity or moral code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A civic republican alternative?\u00a0<\/strong>For decades after Roosevelt\u2019s 1944 speech about what is required for \u201cnecessitous men\u201d to achieve freedom, the non-rational, \u201cpre-political\u201d currents in American political life that James Lucier characterized were sublimated, and even elevated, by liberal education and assiduous civic-republican pedagogy. Against the darker currents of McCarthyism and Cold-War anti-Communist hysteria, they became something worth cherishing but seldom understood or appreciated by Marxist or post-modernist leftists any more than it is by Paleolithic, religious, and proto-fascist conservatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCan the small-\u201cr\u201d republican center hold? The conservative strategy to direct the capitalization of irrational undercurrents that too many liberals have dismissed has become the context or straight-jacket within which Obama has been trying to renew FDR\u2019s reasonable, evolving balance between a left foot of social provision and a right foot of irreducibly personal responsibility and dignity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If liberals don\u2019t acknowledge the right foot, they\u2019ll never regain power or deserve to regain it. And if conservatives can\u2019t sideline their Greedheads, Fountainheads, Godheads, and Airheads enough to give the left foot its turn, they\u2019ll keep turning the right foot into a staggering, suppurating limb that drags the republic to its doom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
___________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
. By Jim Sleeper \u2013 July 21, 2011, 12:51PM Ronald Reagan\u2019s inauguration in 1981 marked the debut of a strategy to \u201cstarve the beast\u201d of big government by ballooning its deficits and the national debt. That would generate a crisis severe enough to force drastic rollbacks of Social Security, Medicaid, and other programs that most Americans had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2681"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3675,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2681\/revisions\/3675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}