[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Shine, Perishing Republicans

[Bill Totten]

by Garret Keizer

Harper's Magazine Notebook (April 2009)


For man it is certainly more grave, or at least much more dangerous, to
deny original sin than to deny God. -- Georges Bernanos


Perhaps the self-proclaimed party of family values and Judeo-Christian
morality might appreciate - in lieu of the more prosaic soul-searching
in which it is now engaged - an analysis of its resounding electoral
defeat and resultant marginalization rendered in the form of an
old-fashioned parable. He that hath an ear, let him hear.

The Republican Party is like unto an indulgent father who would not
discipline his only son. Though his own father, even Ike, who had
begotten him, prophesied against this slackness while the grandson was
yet a suckling babe, bestowing upon the child the name of
Military-Industrial Complex, the heart of the child's father would not
repent. And though the father spake many curses against "permissive
society", yet in the rearing up of his son he was the very marrow of
permissiveness. When his servants came unto him and said, "This thy son
is ruining thine house", he replied, "What is mine house if not a place
for my son to play? And is it not written that the spilled wine of a
prosperous son doth trickle down to sweeten the tongues of his bondsmen?
Be patient then, and the trickled-down wine of my drunkard son may yet
be fragrant upon thy beards".

It continued in this wise for many years, until the son said to himself,
"It is not enough for me that I have my father's heart and my father's
servants at my command, that they beat mine enemies and enlarge my
purse, and that I am free to enrich myself and hide my treasure across
the sea. For I have found me a friend, a youth after mine own heart, who
is like my very frat brother, and my love for this W exceedeth my love
for womankind. And between us we shall enjoy all that pleaseth our
hearts, yea though it breaketh the heart of my dotard father like a
potsherd."

Saying this, the son and his friend seized the mother of the boy, even
Nasdaq the delight of his father's eyes, and stripped her of her raiment
and ravished her upon the ground and spoiled the riches of her chamber
and greatly shamed her in the eyes of the people. And when he saw this,
the father rent his garments and said, "How is it that this crisis has
come upon me, and why hast the Lord of hosts visited this calamity upon
mine house so that I shall pay the price of it unto my children's
children?"

But his neighbors and all those in the surrounding countryside said,
"How now, but what shall prevent these motherfuckers from doing the same
and worse to us, and indeed already we are made like paupers and
captives in our own houses". For the son and his friend W had been
abroad like a plague on the land. And seizing the father by the hairs of
his head, the people of that place cast him out to wander the country
like a leper, and with W they did likewise. But the son, the
Military-Industrial Complex, they could not seize because of his great
strength. And the son continued to oppress them and to commit robbery
and abomination wherever he could. And this was about the time when
Obama was anointed King.

The biblical language comes naturally, not only because of my background
- I was raised on the King James Bible by people who were both Calvinist
and Republican, not necessarily in that order - but also because the
irony of the Republican Party's fall strikes me as essentially
theological. That the party seems unable to grasp this may be a measure
of just how far it has fallen.

Ask someone on the street or in the blogosphere to describe what makes
the party's current predicament so ironic, and you might hear something
like this: The Republican Party was supposed to stand for small
government and fiscal restraint, and instead it has given us big
government and the virtual socialization of large segments of our
economy. Ask David Brooks of the New York Times and you will hear that
such a development was more inevitable than ironic, and not necessarily
a bad thing. Ask Ron Paul and he'll say nuts to David Brooks. But all of
this is to miss the most basic question, which is why the Republican
Party - or, more precisely, its dominant conservative wing - came to
stand for smaller government in the first place.

This is where it helps to employ a theological language, perhaps while
recalling that the rise of the modern conservative movement is sometimes
dated to the 1951 publication of William F Buckley's God and Man at
Yale. If conservatives have traditionally believed in limited government
it is because they also subscribe, contra many liberals and
progressives, to an anthropology based on some notion of original sin.
That is to say, the politically conserving impulse grows out of a
deep-seated pessimism in regard to the ability of human beings to
improve their lot merely by wishing to do so. A conservative tells us we
had better look at history - hell, we had better examine our own
thoughts and deeds since our last coffee break - and that in the light
of those all-too-sobering examinations we had better be cautious about
jettisoning old institutions and time-tested traditions, which, though
flawed as all things human must be flawed, may be our best bulwark
against evil itself. That a good law made in our best moments, and in
the light of public scrutiny, is our strongest defense against what each
of us is capable of doing in his worst moments and under the cover of
dark. (I am old enough to remember a time when the battle cry of
American conservatism, at least in my neighborhood, was "Law and
Order".) The role of a conservative, as I understand it, is to challenge
the yes-we-can progressivism of people like me, which is why I have
always valued a conservative when I could manage to find one.
Cheapskates and chauvinists I've found aplenty, but conservatives are a
rarer breed.

Take, for example, that "archconservative" Ronald Reagan, who from the
perspective of a hundred years will be seen as the last of the
California hippies, a man who told us that if we just let the markets
run wild and the Magic Bus of juggernaut capitalism go barrel-assing
down the road with its freak flag flying all would be groovy and out of
sight. What was his "Morning in America" bit but a cover of "Aquarius";
what was his presidency but the last act of Hair? - preferable, I admit,
to the helter-skelter criminality of Cheney and Bush. But to call either
administration "conservative" in its blithe overconfidence is to hold up
a picture of your brain on drugs.

Beyond all the prattle about big and small government, this is the
mega-irony of the Republican Party: that of all people conservatives
ought to have been the first to grasp the dangers of unregulated
markets. If big government is susceptible to the abuses of "sinful"
human beings, how much more susceptible is a corporate system that is
bigger than any government? The right wing of the party ought to have
seen this better than the center, and the religious right ought to have
seen it best of all. That they failed to see it bespeaks a spiritual
bankruptcy beside which the financial plight of an auto industry is as a
gnat unto a camel.

Given its inability to grasp that irony, we should not be surprised if
the Republican Party evinces a similar inability to grasp the primal
values of its base. There has been quite some groping about for those
values of late, and quite a lot of talk about "the base", but I'm not
sure the party would know its base if it fell down drunk and broke its
nose on the same, which in a manner of speaking I suppose that it has.

This came home to me several years ago when my state representative Cola
Hudson (as the story goes, his mother wanted to name him Kohler, but the
doctor had had a few nips before he signed the birth certificate)
dropped by my house for a visit. Cola was an old-school conservative
Republican of the kind that made Vermont notorious for being one of only
two states that didn't support Franklin Roosevelt in the election of
1936. (This was several decades before my tribe moved in.) A lifelong
bachelor, Cola lived in the farmhouse where he was born and worked as a
school janitor between legislative sessions. He died a little over a
year ago, and I miss him.

Touchingly, Cola arrived at my house with a few clips about his record
as an officeholder and with some photocopied pages from what he regarded
as the seminal text of his political philosophy: Emerson's essay
"Self-Reliance". If the essay was a formative influence for Cola, his
reverence for it was something of an epiphany for me. It was also a shot
of deja vu. There were none of Emerson's essays in the house where I
grew up, or very many other books for that matter, but in addition to
the Bible, we had shop manuals and parts lists for every car we ever
owned, these being supplemented in later years by a Physicians' Desk
Reference. (When my octogenarian father is prescribed some new medicine,
he informs the doctor of the side effects.)

At bottom, and I mean the demographic as well as the spiritual bottom,
the motivating ethos of the Republican Party base is not national
defense, or free markets, or "family values". At bottom it is what Cola
Hudson knew it was, what Joan Didion, a Goldwater Republican in her
youth, partly had in mind when she wrote about "wagon-train morality".
In his heart of hearts, the Republican conservative is still a pioneer
and a homesteader, someone who takes care of himself, practices thrift,
prizes industry, despises waste. I do wonder if the appeal of Sarah
Palin had less to do with her opposition to abortion than with her
ability to dress a moose. As far as that goes, I wonder if even
Republican strategists grasp that hatred of abortion, and the related
enthusiasms for guns and school choice, have less to do with opposition
to the Democratic Party or to some atavistic "Communist Party" than with
opposition to any well-credentialed, all-presuming third party: the
physician, the cop, the school superintendent, the politician - alas,
the union organizer - who intervenes, imposes, and later sends you the
bill. In this connection, I would cite Richard G Mitchell Jr's 2002
study, Dancing at Armageddon, in which he persuasively argues that the
driving force behind the survivalist movement is not so much right-wing
reaction as the desire to exercise individual creativity and competence
on some yet-to-be-subdued acre of "Planet Microsoft".

About self-reliance as a creed, several things come immediately to mind.
First, the obvious limitations of such a value, the degree to which
self-reliance is both precarious and bestial outside of a social
contract, the degree to which a patriarchal construction of
self-reliance can become a woman's lack of the same. Second, the ease
with which self-reliance, laced with a bit of original sin, becomes
self-indulgence. Indeed it doesn't take Emerson many paragraphs to go
from lauding self-reliance to praising the virtues of "whim", an
accolade I would expect to find heavily underlined in Dick Cheney's copy
of the text. On the positive side, though, it strikes one how attractive
an ethic like self-reliance might prove in a time of environmental
catastrophe and economic collapse. In any event, the survival of the
Republican Party may depend on its ability to reclaim the values that
appear in their most radical form among survivalists. Don't
misunderstand me. I want the Republican Party to drop dead. Inasmuch as
it differs too little from the competition, I want the Democratic Party
to drop dead with it. What interests me is the politics that might
emerge from their respective deaths and resurrections, what might happen
if each were to glance at the yawning sarcophagus of the other and spot
a naked body that it liked.

In that contentious stage of boyhood when I first began to shake off the
political and religious conservatism of my roots, my worried parents and
my much-harried Sunday-school teacher joined in referring me to the
Dutch-born minister of the family's Reformed church. Perhaps the learned
reverend could calm me down. The trouble of the moment was my discovery
of what I took for a glaring contradiction in the writings of Saint
Paul. This I could not abide. After hearing me out in his study, and
taking a few meditative puffs on his pipe, the minister said that he was
inclined to agree with me and that there were actually several other
contradictions I might have missed. "For example", he said, "Paul tells
the Galatians to bear one another's burdens, and then some verses on, he
says that every one shall bear his own burden. Still, I'd say that on
the whole it's a pretty good epistle." Then we talked about pipes, as I
had recently taken up smoking one myself.

The older I get the higher my regard for the old dominie's method of
treating with budding skeptics and the lesser my regard for his sense of
contradiction. Whatever the apostle's inconsistencies, the dual
admonition to bear one another's burdens and to bear one's own burden is
not among them. These two imperatives, that of self-reliance and social
responsibility, of the Republican heart and the Democratic heart in
their purest forms, are the crux of any sustainable community. Neither
value makes sense without the other, nor can it be fulfilled without the
other. The trick is to get them to kiss. The trick is to create a
society in which the privilege of disposable income is not contingent on
the existence of disposable people - to say nothing of disposable
tigers, ice caps, and arable land.

That is the primary task of any mature politics, and it cannot be
performed so long as both of our major political parties are held
captive by a rumpus-room economic system, with our congressional
representatives spending more time talking to CEOs than to philosophers
- or even to accountants - and hardly any time talking to the people
they supposedly represent. Such a politics must always be puerile.
Witness the recent hearings on the bailout; spend an hour lounging with
the business-class travelers in an airport bar. (I happen to enjoy that
crowd, but then I happen to enjoy the skateboard set as well.) Perhaps
the greatest conservative soul who ever lived, Dr Johnson, said, "There
are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in
getting money". He was right insofar as innocence belongs to childhood.
Innocents make money; adults make love. Adults hear more possibilities
in that last phrase than the reductive eroticism that advertisers use to
make money. A grown-up body politic will acknowledge its children, set
them strict rules, and let them play with their credit ratings and their
hedge funds, their light sabers and their cap pistols, in a
well-supervised back yard so that the adults can get down to what adults
are meant to get down to: the pleasurable socializing of their resources
and the passionate coupling of their best ideas.

_____

Garret Keizer is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. His essay
"Of Mohawks and Mavericks" appeared in the December 2008 issue.


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