The Long View 2008-10-26: It's 1989 in America
I have no idea whether the alternative cover of The Village Voice that John Reilly mentions in this blog exists. It is probably one of those things that if it doesn’t exist, it should.
This is another one of John’s attempts to synthesize his own work. There was a long period in the mid-2000s where the sui generis event of 9/11 got him wrapped up in partisan politics, but by 2008 he had returned to his project of analyzing the American experiment in terms of the various historical models that he played with.
Here, John Reilly articulates something with a family resemblance to Christopher Caldwell’s Age of Entitlement, except that John is also arguing that the decline from the post-WW2 social solidarity was overdetermined, and politics since has been two factions jockeying for a chance to implement their vision of how to step back from the massive social effort to bend the nation’s thoughts and efforts to defined goals.
There are many reasons to deplore America’s prolonged involvement in Vietnam. One of them is that the Leftist tinge that the antiwar movement gave to the whole of politics masked the essential equivalence of the Left and Right that came out of that decade. It is no accident that Hillary Clinton began as a Goldwater Girl before taking up with the followers of Sol Alinsky. For want of a better term, let us call the common episteme of that era by Charles Reich’s term, Consciousness III. The Rightist version of Consciousness III became “libertarianism”: its chief effect has been on economic policy and public services. Its Leftist complement might be called “autonomy”: that found a home in cultural issues where, perhaps paradoxically, it played a major role in the development of equal-protection theory and group rights.
It’s 1989 in America
Did I imagine that Village Voice cover illustration 19 years ago? The Voice is a Manhattan-based, alternative-media newspaper that was founded in the 1950s and has trundled on, after a fashion into the 21st century. My recollection is that, around the time of the events now recalled as “the fall of Communism,” The Voice ran an alternative-history special issue to console its Leftist-leaning readership. The issue was about the Cold War turning out the other way; the cover featured a cartoon of a Soviet television news-crew interviewing early-middle-aged hippies and other progressive-looking types outside the White House gates as the American government was dissolving. If I bought a copy of that issue, I did not keep it. That’s a shame, because now I cannot find it online.
In any case, I suspect the United States is now about to experience the other bookend to the fall of Communism, with the 20 or so years of what Walter Russell Mead called “Millennialism” as the volumes in between. This by no means implies that the United States is about to suffer some such eclipse as Russia suffered after it sloughed off the Soviet Union. At the risk of repeating myself, let me just point out these two factors: First, the global financial situation actually improves the position of the United States relative to the other would-be poles in a multipolar world, all of which owed their prosperity to the Millennialist low-regulation system. Second, and this point cannot be too strongly emphasized, a President Obama would be globally very popular. The Russian-Marxist analogy, however, does apply in another way, in the sense of disillusion for many Americans about what they thought their country was for and what its history is about.
There are many reasons to deplore America’s prolonged involvement in Vietnam. One of them is that the Leftist tinge that the antiwar movement gave to the whole of politics masked the essential equivalence of the Left and Right that came out of that decade. It is no accident that Hillary Clinton began as a Goldwater Girl before taking up with the followers of Sol Alinsky. For want of a better term, let us call the common episteme of that era by Charles Reich’s term, Consciousness III. The Rightist version of Consciousness III became “libertarianism”: its chief effect has been on economic policy and public services. Its Leftist complement might be called “autonomy”: that found a home in cultural issues where, perhaps paradoxically, it played a major role in the development of equal-protection theory and group rights.
Consciousness III should be understood as a relaxation from the condition of social solidarity and national mobilization that increasingly characterized the whole Western world from the 1860s, reaching a climax just after the world wars. The solidarity of that decisive lifetime obviously involved a great deal of economic dirigisme for vital public purposes: that dirigisme, especially in support of military endeavor, is what the once free-floating term “socialism” came to mean; and yes, the New Deal was its final American incarnation. What is less widely appreciated is that the Left of Consciousness III, the Left of rights and grievance, is equally a rejection of socialism. The New Deal was concerned to promote social order; the Great Society of the 1960s came to represent the project of articulating claims against the social order.
The application of either pole of Consciousness III tends to weaken social cohesion and the legitimacy of public authority. Because of a variety of historical accidents that I lived through but which, for the life of me, I still don’t understand, the Right got its chance first. What a merry hash it made of its opportunity. Quite early on in the 1990s, the brighter lights realized that Movement Conservatism needed a theory of government once it was in power. The issue was seriously addressed, and maybe even solved on a theoretical level, but never in a way that affected how the national Republican Party governed when it had chance. Now that half of Consciousness III is going down, drooling over the Laffer Curve to gratify its tax fetish and calling on the nation’s millionaire plumbers to save it, all the while promising the people yet more lady-or-the-tiger choices about vital issues of personal and family welfare. As we know from his campaign for the Republican nomination in 2000, and also from his repeated displays of good sense during the early Bush years, John McCain knows better than this, but this sort of issue has become the only kind of campaign that the Republican Party can mount. As a coherent political force, Movement Conservatism is dead. That particle from the 1960s need no longer trouble us.
And as for the impending Obamarama, the complementary particle from that era, I think perhaps that we are about to get a demonstration of the fact that you can’t get away with doing to America as a whole what you can get away with doing to a liberal arts campus. The other half of Consciousness III has completed the Long March through the Institutions. In such a case, the wiser course is not to expect too much of the eschaton.
Having said all this, let me reassure my readers that I have every intention of voting for Senator McCain; I urge my readers to do likewise, or at least those of them who can vote legally in an American election. (Those who can’t I urge to evangelize their American friends in McCain’s favor.) McCain’s election would be more interesting because the course of a McCain Administration would, frankly, be much less predictable than that of an Obama Administration. I imagine McCain soon trying to govern through a non-party coalition in Congress, something that otherwise will not happen until the Democratic Party is discredited in 2012 or 2016.
"All will be worse confounded soon," as Robinson Jeffers put it. Nonetheless, everything is perfectly on track.
Copyright © 2008 by John J. Reilly
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