Wednesday, March 09, 2005
(11:14 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Liberals react to the hard left
Sometimes it strikes me that liberals overreact to leftist critique. For instance, many liberal critics attribute to Chomsky an almost ontological anti-Americanism, such that America can do no right, ever, in history. When I read Chomsky, I don't see that. Maybe I'm just naive. And I also think that Tim Burke's response to the Wealth Bondage post I linked a while ago is somewhat exaggerated in parts:So if you take it as a given that Coulter, Horowitz and so on are indecent, destructive, and malevolently instrumental, that they have no interest in genuine communication or democratic discourse, that they intend to use the public sphere as a tool to destroy democratic practice and all their enemies in the process, that nevertheless doesn’t mean that you have to accept an account of their effectiveness that removes them from history and turns them into superhuman demons gifted with inexplicable powers. If they connect, however imperfectly, with some audiences, that is not merely a consequence of having web pages or access to Fox News. It is also because some of what they say is heard by some mass audiences as having some truth value.The Happy Tutor did not render the radical right-wing an ahistorical force of pure evil, any more than Chomsky deploys an ontology that grants "good" status to anyone opposing the US. (Now I'm struggling for a way to describe the position I'm opposing without exaggerating.... Okay:) There is an idea here that people are basically trustworthy or rational on a certain level. That is, people can't be fooled forever, and as such, any set of views that meets with popular success for a long period (like the increasingly radical right) has a prima facie claim to be considered rational and as representing people's real interests. That might be partly behind the Democratic party's "wimpiness" -- the idea that it somehow betrays the idea of Democracy to unduly obstruct an agenda that has widespread popular support. Democrats simply become conservative in the best sense of the word here, trying to prevent the Republicans from undoing the basic structure of society -- Social Security, but more especially the basic democratic structure that will allow the people to come to their senses if they have in fact taken leave of their senses. I tend to think that Al Gore's acceptance of the fraudulent election results stems from a conservative impulse like I've just described: better to let Bush take office in somewhat shady circumstances than to undermine people's trust in the system altogether.
More radical voices are prima facie illegitimate because they have limited popular support and basically no electoral support. The burden of proof on such voices is to show sufficient gratitude for the gracious willingness of American civilization to allow such voices to be heard; lack of sufficient gratitude leads directly to accusations of America-hating, with the following logic -- you are apparently ungrateful for the protections America grants to your speech; you oppose the actions of the duly elected and legitimate rulers of America as though they were somehow illegitimate; you must hate America. If no such America-hating is evident, then it must be simply invented, as in the case of Chomsky's anti-American ontology (an incoherent ontology in that it ostensibly fails to take his own existence into account). And since the radical right has taken power through legitimate, historical, electoral means, the person who believes that they should not have been allowed to take power is showing an alarming lack of faith in the electoral system and must be attributing super-evil powers to the radical right -- that is, failing to take into account the obvious, liberal explanation for how people come to power in what is, after all, a democracy.
The problem I see here is that calling the status quo a democracy -- in the face of an inadequately educated electorate, a lazy and corrupt mainstream press corps, massive lack of participation in the political process, as well as concrete instances of voter intimidation and outright fraud -- as though we have already arrived at the ideal of popular sovereignty, is dishonest. I don't doubt that Bush is the legitimate president, that he came to power through legal means (even in the first election -- since the Supreme Court decides what is legal in the final instance). But I just think that the fact that Bush came to power through the legal means of the electoral system speaks poorly of that system. We can do better.
Perhaps the only thing that is possible right now is attempting to hold onto the formal processes of democracy and the basic structures of our society and hope that people wise up in the next few years -- I don't have many other concrete ideas for what else to do in the current situation, but it still seems somehow inadequate for one's adherence to democracy to be finally conservative. And it also seems somehow inadequate for one's strategy to be finally all about giving the people what they want -- because in this case, what the people want is the wrong thing to want. People should not want George W. Bush to be president right now. Those who voted for him were wrong to do so, no matter what portions of his message or the right's message is understandably plausible or convincing to certain people. There has to be some way to react to people wanting the wrong thing other than to just say, "Well, I guess we'd better give them what they want."
