Agre

Ken MacLeod reminds us of the wit and wisdom of Phil Agre. I myself have plugged his amazing comments from right after 9/11 in this blog.

Three days after 9/11, Phil Agre circulated this chilling essay about the consequences for democracy in the US. A few months later, I recall rereading it and finding it scary and prescient. Rereading it again now, “scary and prescient” is an understatement.

Even more so now. Definitely worth a read.

The conditions of war are almost identical with the social vision of conservatism, and it is no surprise that conservatives are so eloquent when the possibility of war arises.

And what is that social vision of conservatism? That's one of the Agre essays MacLeod links for us. Agre takes the long view to answer the question “what is conservatism?”

Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

That’s a very strong statement, so Agre lays out his argument a length. It’s worth your time. And for extra credit, you may want to read what Agre has to say about the current devolution of our political rhetoric.

Archive

Those original pages are linkrotted, so I am republishing them here in the name of a robust internet.

Imagining the Next War:
Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy

Philip E. Agre
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California 90095-1520
USA
pagre@ucla.edu
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/

Version of 15 September 2001.
4300 words

When political leaders refer to the September 11^th attacks in New York and Washington as “war”, what do they mean? It used to be that our concept of war was defined by a set of boundaries. Nation-states fought wars to defend their borders. They fielded armies, and those armies fought along front lines. Soldiers were separate from civilians, and the military domain was separate from the civilian domain. Soldiers ran the war from day to day; the civilian leadership gave the big orders and sat back.

Those boundaries no longer apply, as much evidence shows:

1. If you want to destroy someone nowadays, you get into their infrastructure. You don’t have to be a nation state to do it, and if your enemy retains any capacity for retaliation then it’s probably better if you’re not.
2. Because the fighting is all on television, the fine details of the fighting become political matters. Soldiers complain bitterly about politicians’ interference, not understanding that technology has eliminated their zone of professional autonomy. The politicians are right to be interfering.
3. The US military thought that the Republicans would save them from the Democrats’ boundary-breaching conceptions of the 21^st century world, but Donald Rumsfeld’s abortive reform efforts — which are really attempts to transpose the traditionally narrow view of military affairs into a science-fiction key — have only clarified how archaic the traditional conception of warfare really is.
4. During the campaign, George W. Bush harshly criticizied the “nation-building” activities to which military personnel have been assigned in Kosovo and elsewhere. The truth was that nation-building is a geopolitical necessity in a totally wired world, and that the soldiers themselves like serving in Kosovo — they know that they are doing something useful for once. The nation-building goes on.
5. In the old days, the industry that produced military equipment was almost entirely separate from the industry that produced civilian equipment. But economies of scale in the production of technology, especially information and communications technologies, have grown so great that the military must buy much of its equipment from the civilian market, even though the civilian equipment is not hardened for military purposes (or even, in the case of computer security, for civilian purposes).
6. Even airplane hijackings have lost their old boundaries. It is becoming clear that the people in the plane that crashed in rural Pennsylvania had extensive communications to the ground, and knew about the first attack on the World Trade Center. Boundarylessness in that sense actually defeated the hijackers, at least to that small degree. We have become so accustomed to boundarylessness that we didn’t find it even faintly odd that people in hijacked airplanes were have complicated telephone conversations with people on the ground, saying goodbyes to their families, and so on. The whole institution of airplane hijackings now has a new script, replacing the one from the 1970s.

Thus far, however, we have not been compelled as a society to define what we mean by “war” in this weirdly pervious world. Of course, defense intellectuals have not been short on definitions. Many of them claim to rue the loss of these boundaries, even as they embrace a conception of military matters that includes absolutely everything. War, on these expanded conceptions, no longer needs to be conducted between states. Privately funded groups can wage war, “asymmetric” to be sure but destructive all the same. Even lone individuals can engage in acts of “war”, and the swarm of worms that have attacked the Internet over the last year may have inflicted economic damage (at least according to reported estimates, and not including of course the damage in human terms) comparable to the cost of rebuilding the World Trade Center. The defense intellectuals have also expanded the definition of “war” to include many domains besides the mutual killing of soldiers and blowing up of ships and factories. One speaks, for example, of “cultural war”. Some military experts even lecture on political opposition as a form of “war”, explicitly treating nonviolence within the same doctrinal framework in which they talk about invasion and bombing.

War, in this broadened sense, is everywhere and everything. It is large and small. It is boundless in space or time. Life itself is war. The soldier’s zone of autonomy returns, but nothing else remains. Notice, however, that the defense intellectuals’ conception of boundaryless war is not the only one possible. It holds no place, for example, for “nation-building” activities, or for the integration of political and military concerns that military officers complain about. Far from replacing the traditional conception of the military, the new conception generalizes it.

Referring to the attacks on the east coast as “war” gives expression to our emotions about them, and feels proportional to the magnitude of the atrocity. But if the definition of “war” has shifted beneath us, then a declaration of war is an even graver matter than it used to be. Let us take a moment, then, to ask what we are getting ourselves into. The Bush administration started using the language of “war” well before they were willing to say who they thought was responsible for the attacks. That in itself is probably not unprecedented; the idea of something mysteriously blowing up is hardly new. What is less precedented is the lack of any clear suspect who was either a foreign nation state or a domestic organization. Suspicion from the beginning has fallen on a man named Osama bin Laden, and reasonably enough given his involvement in earlier attacks. But even to assign responsibility to this one man is entirely misleading, since bin Laden, at best, operates at the center of a far-flung and loosely-knit network of individuals who are united more by philosophy than by organization. They are certainly not a hierarchical military along the traditional lines — lines that Western militaries have themselves long abandoned for many purposes.

The problem posed by this nontraditional terrorist “enemy” has often been understood in purely military terms: how do you destroy something that has so little connective tissue? If you blow it up, it just grows right back. The United States has plenty of experience fighting loosely organized opponents, for example in Vietnam, and that experience is not good. Nor was the Russian experience in Afghanistan any better. But the new situation is even worse, and in several ways. We are not going to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to Afghanistan. I’d be surprised if we send hundreds. And whatever we do, every step will be on television. Everyone involved will have cellular telephones. We will be doing the messiest thing in the world, and we will be doing it in the most visible possible way.

But we should also understand the problem in political terms. What does it mean as a political matter to declare war on a network? This, it seems to me, is the greatest danger of all. The only moral justification for war is to preserve the conditions of democracy. Revenge is not a sufficient motive, except insofar as it preserves the conditions of democracy by serving as a deterrent. Otherwise the matter should be treated as a crime and handled by the institutions of the police and criminal courts. Are the conditions of democracy in fact under threat? It is possible that they are, and I would expect the government to present enough evidence of such a threat before placing the country in a condition of war. The question of justification is particularly important in the present case given the dubious conditions under which George W. Bush assumed the office of the president. His continued rule is also a significant threat to the conditions of democracy, even though his methods in gaining power were largely nonviolent.

Let us say, then, that George W. Bush commences a war against Osama bin Laden, or even against the greater abstraction of “terrorism”. What happens then? A state of war is a serious thing. States of war have routinely been used to justify censorship, the curtailing of civil liberties, and the repression of dissidents. States of war are also understood to require the opposition in the legislature to moderate its otherwise essential functions of criticism. Calls are issued to stand behind the political leadership and to display unity, with the implication that the enemy is watching and that failure to unite is tantamount to treason. These are not healthy conditions for a democracy; indeed, they are the opposite of democracy.

War in the old conception was temporary: the idea was explicitly that the state of war would end, and that the normal rules of democracy would resume once their conditions had been reestablished. Civil liberties and the institutions of democratic government are not entirely eliminated during wartime; rather, they are reduced in their scope while retaining their same overall form. Even in conditions of total war mobilization, clear boundaries between the military and civilian sides of society are maintained. But war, we are told, no longer works that way. No such boundaries are possible. It follows, therefore, that “war” in the new sense — war with no beginning or end, no front and rear, and no distinction between military and civilian — is incompatible with democracy, and not just in practice, not just temporarily, but permanently and conceptually. If we conceptualize war the way the defense intellectuals suggest, then to declare war is to destroy the conditions of democracy. War, in this new sense, can never be justified.

In reality, the problem here does not originate with technology and the military doctrines that respond to it. It is in the nature of democracy that its conditions are contested. The conditions of democracy are institutional, first of all, and institutions are human things. They live nowhere but in people’s minds, and in the language, artifacts, and practices by which people deal with one another. Democracy, like every institution, is something that people collectively learn to do. It is a skill. Its central conditions are intellectual: people continually reproduce the skills of democracy if they continue to believe in it. Democracy rests on beliefs. Yet the beliefs at the foundation of democracy are themselves controversial. They are reargued most visibly when prominent legal controversies come before constitutional courts. But they are also reargued every time that the institutions themselves are used. Democracy is an institutional framework for the conduct of disputes among organized interests, and the groundrules that this framework provides must be interpreted and applied in the case of each dispute that comes along.

The ideal of formal democracy as dispute within an agreed framework of rules is taught in school, but in the real world of democracy the combatants have fundamentally different visions of what that framework should be. Democrats believe that the people can and should govern themselves, and that all institutions should be reformed to provide a high degree of access and participation to the people whose lives they affect. Conservatives, by contrast, believe that society should be organized hierarchically and directed by a narrow elite, and that institutions should be invested with a high degree of authority to which the people reflexively defer. Conservatives differ on the question of whether the formal institutions of democracy are valuable and should be retained, but their main emphasis is on circumscribing those institutions in both their processes and their powers.

Conservatism has come in recent centuries to be overlaid with a liberal philosophy whose keyword is “freedom”, and the conservative movement must continually renegotiate the borderlines between authority and freedom as organizing principles of society. But because conservativism as a political movement is a fluid alliance between traditional social authorities and business interests, the actual boundary lines of conservatism’s commitment to freedom shift with the continual renegotiations of that alliance. Historically, the freedom that conservatism dictates is first and foremost the freedom of the market. And conservatism in actual practice rarely conforms to idealized pictures of the free market, given that large business interests tend to be central to any conservative political coalition. The longstanding tradition of business rent-seeking under conservative rule reasserted itself from the opening days of the Bush government, in the guise for example of subsidies to the oil industry to promote energy development that the market was already providing for, and we can expect rent-seeking to intensify in the conditions of intimate government-industry relationship that characterize war. Business managers, after all, have a fiduciary responsibility to return profits to their stockholders by whatever means, whether legitimate commerce or lobbying, represents the best return on investment, and undermining the conditions of democracy has proven a solid investment over many years. Libertarians who join conservative coalitions are simply trading one form of government interference in the market for another.

The almost inherent crisis of democracy, and the actual nature of conservatism, become clearest in conditions of war. The conditions of war are almost identical with the social vision of conservatism, and it is no surprise that conservatives are so eloquent when the possibility of war arises. Conservatism has always been profoundly opposed to the popular exercise of reason, supposing it to lead inevitably to tyranny, and wartime is ideally suited for the absolute, polarized, us-and-them forms of thinking that are the opposite of rational thought. In this sense, democracy as such is profoundly threatened by an absolute evil such as Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union or the attack on the World Trade Center — not because of the military danger it poses, real as that may be, but because of the danger that it poses to the collective reason of a democratic polity. Indeed, the depth of the danger was already clear before the attack, for example in Rush Limbaugh’s astonishing argument that the leader of the democratic opposition, Tom Daschle, resembled Satan simply because he opposed George W. Bush’s policies. And it has become clearer since the attack in the argument by many prominent conservatives that the coming wartime condition will require a diminution of civil liberties.

The new military doctrine of war as a total phenomenon — war without boundaries — is nothing except conservatism. It is conservatism expressed in different language, rediscovered starting from different concerns, but it is the antithesis of democracy in the same way that conservatism is. Yet military officers in democratic countries are often ambivalent about the new doctrine. They understand that the legitimacy of the military as an institution rests on its claim to preserve the conditions of democracy, and they understand more clearly than most civilians the potential for institutional catastrophe that can never be far from the surface in a society with a standing army. That is why it is especially unnerving that the United States military in recent years has developed a culture that sees itself as separate from, and morally superior to, the supposedly decadent society that it supposedly defends. Conservatives have energetically reinforced this tendency, portraying democratically minded governments as hostile toward the military and encouraging the military in its tendency to become a rent-seeking interest group like any other, to the point that the officer corps now skews very strongly Republican compared to even twenty years ago.

The danger of “total war” against the spectre named Osama bin Laden, then, is that it will reinforce the worst tendencies in our society, and that far from preserving the conditions of democracy it will undermine the cultural and institutional foundations upon which democracy rests. It will be war without end, without boundaries, without even a coherent conception of itself save as the expression of an impulse to vengeance. Far from the Gulf War image of televised war as a morbid video game, it will be what the defense intellectuals call infrastructural war, and in the most general possible sense: war that reaches into the finest details of daily life, reengineering the most basic arrangements of travel and communications in a time when everyday life in a mobile and interconnected society is increasingly organized around those very arrangements.

The main precedent for this looming war is the boundaryless pseudo-war against communism, and yet the precedent is misleading. The Cold War was a war of the mind at home and a war of the jungles in the distant locales where conflicts were conducted by proxy. Its foundation was the intellectual control that, for a time and to a remarkable degree still, prevented those proxy wars from registering in the minds of a populace that otherwise was fairly free. Infrastructural war is something quite different. The Cold War promoted a paranoia of a quite abstract sort: the hidden traitors that supposedly lay behind the social ideals of reformers. Infrastructural war promotes a paranoia of a different kind: the ramifying maze of blind spots in the security arrangements of a technological society which a highly skilled enemy might exploit. Thus the uncanny sense of violation that compounds the sheer violence of the attacks on the east coast, and thus on a less dramatic level the myth-making around security vulnerabilities in “cyberspace”.

The Cold War’s most misleading legacy is an ideology that totally misconstrues these dangers. The great drama of the Cold War was a supposed conflict between two organizing principles: centralization and decentralization. Never mind that the Cold War societies of the First World were in fact highly centralized both in their industrial structure and in the central role of their permanent-war governments; despite this, the end of the Cold War is supposed to have vindicated a system of self-organizing decentralization that is robust against dangers of many types. In reality, the infrastructure of our highly technological society is centralized in many ways. There are three economic reasons for this: economies of scale, which tend to promote monopolies; economies of scope, which tend to reorganize products and institutions in terms of successively more generalized layers; and network effects, which tend to create uniformity through the need for everyone in an interconnected society to be compatible with everyone else. In reality, the decentralization that truly is one component of technological society rests upon an institutional and infrastructural framework that is necessarily uniform in many ways, and that is poorly suited to the kinds of decentralized administration that the ideology of the Cold War would promote. The more sophisticated our society becomes, the more complex and all-encompassing this framework gets.

So what to do? First we need a new concept of war. This is not easy, partly because the world has changed, but also because our concept of war is intimately tied to our concept of democracy. It follows that we can’t get a new concept of war without getting a new concept of democracy, and the process of getting a new concept of democracy is dangerous in itself. The military intellectuals’ new concept of war is flawed because it starts from the military and simply follows the logic of interconnection until the military domain encloses everything else. Instead, we need a broader conception of security that has a number of dimensions, and that incorporates the dialectical relation between the military and political domains that is inherent in a world without clear boundaries. Instead of permanent, total war, conducted under rules that subordinate democracy to an authority that draws its legitimacy from the absolute evil of its foe, we need a conception of permanent, total security, conducted under rules that keep the ends squarely in view. Those ends are the preservation, indeed expansion, of the conditions of democracy.

Total security, however, does not mean total control of society by “security forces”. In an infrastructural world, security cannot be a force, something exerted from the outside, a lid kept down or a shield put up. Instead, security is a matter of design. Infrastructure is something designed, in the sense that it is a human artefact, but the infrastructure that our society possesses right now has not been designed with anything approaching a full conception of its relation to a democratic order. When infrastructure is designed to serve a narrowly technical set of requirements, or, worse, when it accretes haphazardly in layers like the software code that we suddenly had to decompile en masse with the approach of Y2K, it becomes riven with blind spots, with vulnerabilities that, in the long run, only multiply the chaos that technology had always been thought to solve. The fact is, our current infrastructures are profoundly insecure. This has been documented over and over, and it is entirely absurd that we have learned to tolerate the worms that swarm continuously over the world’s networked computers, trashing information and randomly broadcasting sensitive files. These worms have not killed anybody yet, but the shoddy security systems in the country’s airports are another matter. The catastrophe at the World Trade Center provides an opening for a period of real design — design that adopts as its requirements both of the conditions of democracy: the closing of security holes and the protection of civil liberties. The necessary designs are partly technical and partly institutional. The current arrangement of having the airlines pay for the security personnel at airports, for example, has been comprehensively discredited, and even the strictest of opponents of centralized government appear to appreciate the need to federalize a system whose incentives have heretofore been set up exactly backward.

But secondly, the conception of security that our democratic society needs must take seriously the all-encompassing nature of modern industrial society. A technological society must be democratically legitimate, above all, because it cannot afford to have an outside. The people who conduct terrorist actions against the United States are fundamentally driven by a need to make us feel their pain. Along with natural human sympathy and outrage, the people in many countries have responded to the attacks in New York and Washington by observing that, at last, the United States knows what it’s like. Media commentators in the United States have often asserted, no doubt without thinking, that the magnitude of the recent attacks has been without precedent in history. This could not be more false, as the people of Nanking, London, Dresden, or Hiroshima could explain, or those of Hanoi, Baghdad, or Dili. The United States’ consciousness has been shaped by its geographic isolation, but now infrastructural warfare has provided an attacker of a way of piercing that isolation, and thus of piercing that consciousness, forcing upon the people of the United States the consciousness of a people who must fear, at one level or another, that they will be invaded and killed.

Americans’ imaginative distance from the rest of the world has been one reason why it has been so easy to keep from American public consciousness the nature and magnitude of the atrocities in which the American government and its close allies have unquestionably been culpable. A large portion of the population of East Timor, for example, was slaughtered by the genocidal regime that ruled until recently in Indonesia with the active approval and support of the United States. Counterinsurgency against a small and primitive peasant rebellion in Guatemala in the 1980s was conducted through a deliberate policy of simply killing large percentages of the population, with the active support of an American government that ridiculously claimed to have little knowledge of what was happening and no power to stop it, even as prominent religious conservative organizations in the United States praised the Guatemalan leadership for its claims to be acting in the name of God. Israel constantly takes people’s land away from them and treats them as second-class citizens in their own land, and no amount of bad behavior by them or their coreligionists in other countries can justify many of the Israeli policies, nearly all of which the United States supports both financially and diplomatically.

None of this mitigates the attacks on innocent people in the World Trade Center, or even the attacks on military personnel in the Pentagon. The people who conducted those terrorist attacks are entirely responsible for what they did. They are evil, and they made themselves evil by choice. Nearly as evil are the religious authorities who provided the ideological basis of this terrible self-making with their spurious justifications for suicide bombings. Yet the call to war is precisely a call for us, formerly citizens of a democracy, to remake ourselves in the image of that evil — to ignore all evil deeds of our own, and instead to project all of our own failings into an enemy who grows ever bigger, ever more inhuman, with every exaggeration of the extent of the danger and the need for revenge. The call to war is not legitimate: it is not capable of delivering what it claims to deliver.

Should we go out and get the people who blew up our buildings? Of course we should. If we can’t get them nonviolently, should we start dropping bombs on impoverished countries? Maybe we should, if it will actually achieve the stated goal. A world that has graduated beyond the traditional conceptions of war may not be able to avoid military action, regrettable as it always is. Evil is real, whatever excuse it might present. The important thing is to draw a distinction between military action, as the exercise within a framework of international law of the power of a legitimate democratic state, and war, as the imposition of a total social order that is the antithesis of democracy, and that, in the current technological conditions of war, has no end in sight. We can reorganize our infrastructure along more intelligent lines, and we urgently should. But more fundamentally, war will end only when the rest of the world enjoys the same institutional conditions of justice and freedom that we do. We can hasten that day by supporting civil society, education, reconciliation, institutional reform, Internet connectivity, and nonproliferation throughout the world. Or we can retreat into a conservative conception of war as a way to live our lives. That is our choice now, in our policies and in our hearts, as we decide how to act on the pain that we feel.

end

What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

Philip E. Agre
August 2004

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:

Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves “conservatives” have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.

//1 The Main Arguments of Conservatism

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.

The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use “social issues” as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.

The defenders of aristocracy represent aristocracy as a natural phenomenon, but in reality it is the most artificial thing on earth. Although one of the goals of every aristocracy is to make its preferred social order seem permanent and timeless, in reality conservatism must be reinvented in every generation. This is true for many reasons, including internal conflicts among the aristocrats; institutional shifts due to climate, markets, or warfare; and ideological gains and losses in the perpetual struggle against democracy. In some societies the aristocracy is rigid, closed, and stratified, while in others it is more of an aspiration among various fluid and factionalized groups. The situation in the United States right now is toward the latter end of the spectrum. A main goal in life of all aristocrats, however, is to pass on their positions of privilege to their children, and many of the aspiring aristocrats of the United States are appointing their children to positions in government and in the archipelago of think tanks that promote conservative theories.

Conservatism in every place and time is founded on deception. The deceptions of conservatism today are especially sophisticated, simply because culture today is sufficiently democratic that the myths of earlier times will no longer suffice.

Before analyzing current-day conservatism’s machinery of deception, let us outline the main arguments of conservatism. Although these arguments have changed little through history, they might seem unfamiliar to many people today, indeed even to people who claim to be conservatives. That unfamiliarity is a very recent phenomenon. Yet it is only through the classical arguments and their fallacies that we can begin to analyze how conservatism operates now.

1. Institutions

According to the first type of argument, found for example in Burke, social institutions are a kind of capital. A properly ordered society will be blessed with large quantities of this capital. This capital has very particular properties. It is a sprawling tangle of social arrangements and patterns of thought, passed down through generations as part of the culture. It is generally tacit in nature and cannot be rationally analyzed. It is fragile and must be conserved, because a society that lacks it will collapse into anarchy and tyranny. Innovation is bad, therefore, and prejudice is good. Although the institutions can tolerate incremental reforms around the edges, systematic questioning is a threat to social order. In particular, rational thought is evil. Nothing can be worse for the conservative than rational thought, because people who think rationally might decide to try replacing inherited institutions with new ones, something that a conservative regards as impossible. This is where the word “conservative” comes from: the supposed importance of conserving established institutions.

This argument is not wholly false. Institutions are in fact sprawling tangles of social arrangements and patterns of thought, passed down through generations as part of the culture. And people who think they can reengineer the whole of human society overnight are generally mistaken. The people of ancien regime France were oppressed by the conservative order of their time, but indeed their revolution did not work, and would probably not have worked even if conservatives from elsewhere were not militarily attacking them. After all, the conservative order had gone to insane lengths to deprive them of the education, practical experience, and patterns of thought that would be required to operate a democracy. They could not invent those things overnight.

Even so, the argument about conserving institutions is mostly untrue. Most institutions are less fragile and more dynamic than conservatives claim. Large amounts of institutional innovation happen in every generation. If people lack a rational analysis of institutions, that is mostly a product of conservatism rather than an argument for it. And although conservatism has historically claimed to conserve institutions, history makes clear that conservatism is only interested in conserving particular kinds of institutions: the institutions that reinforce conservative power. Conservatism rarely tries to conserve institutions such as Social Security and welfare that decrease the common people’s dependency on the aristocracy and the social authorities that serve it. To the contrary, they represent those institutions in various twisted ways as dangerous to to the social order generally or to their beneficiaries in particular.

2. Hierarchy

The opposite of conservatism is democracy, and contempt for democracy is a constant thread in the history of conservative argument. Instead, conservatism has argued that society ought to be organized in a hierarchy of orders and classes and controlled by its uppermost hierarchical stratum, the aristocracy. Many of these arguments against egalitarianism are ancient, and most of them are routinely heard on the radio. One tends to hear the arguments in bits and pieces, for example the emphatic if vague claim that people are different. Of course, most of these arguments, if considered rationally, actually argue for meritocracy rather than for aristocracy. Meritocracy is a democratic principle. George Bush, however, was apparently scarred for life by having been one of the last students admitted to Yale under its old aristocratic admissions system, and having to attend classes with students admitted under the meritocratic system who considered themselves to be smarter than him. Although he has lately claimed to oppose the system of legacy admissions from which he benefitted, that is a tactic, part of a package deal to eliminate affirmative action, thereby allowing conservative social hierarchies to be reaffirmed in other ways.

American culture still being comparatively healthy, overt arguments for aristocracy (for example, that the children of aristocrats learn by osmosis the profound arts of government and thereby acquire a wisdom that mere experts cannot match) are still relatively unusual. Instead, conservatism must proceed through complicated indirection, and the next few sections of this article will explain in some detail how this works. The issue is not that rich people are bad, or that hierarchical types of organization have no place in a democracy. Nor are the descendents of aristocrats necessarily bad people if they do not try to perpetuate conservative types of domination over society. The issue is both narrow and enormous: no aristocracy should be allowed to trick the rest of society into deferring to it.

3. Freedom

But isn’t conservatism about freedom? Of course everyone wants freedom, and so conservatism has no choice but to promise freedom to its subjects. In reality conservatism has meant complicated things by “freedom”, and the reality of conservatism in practice has scarcely corresponded even to the contorted definitions in conservative texts.

To start with, conservatism constantly shifts in its degree of authoritarianism. Conservative rhetors, in the Wall Street Journal for example, have no difficulty claiming to be the party of freedom in one breath and attacking civil liberties in the next.

The real situation with conservatism and freedom is best understood in historical context. Conservatism constantly changes, always adapting itself to provide the minimum amount of freedom that is required to hold together a dominant coalition in the society. In Burke’s day, for example, this meant an alliance between traditional social authorities and the rising business class. Although the business class has always defined its agenda in terms of something it calls “freedom”, in reality conservatism from the 18th century onward has simply implied a shift from one kind of government intervention in the economy to another, quite different kind, together with a continuation of medieval models of cultural domination.

This is a central conservative argument: freedom is impossible unless the common people internalize aristocratic domination. Indeed, many conservative theorists to the present day have argued that freedom is not possible at all. Without the internalized domination of conservatism, it is argued, social order would require the external domination of state terror. In a sense this argument is correct: historically conservatives have routinely resorted to terror when internalized domination has not worked. What is unthinkable by design here is the possibility that people might organize their lives in a democratic fashion.

This alliance between traditional social authorities and the business class is artificial. The market continually undermines the institutions of cultural domination. It does this partly through its constant revolutionizing of institutions generally and partly by encouraging a culture of entrepreneurial initiative. As a result, the alliance must be continually reinvented, all the while pretending that its reinventions simply reinstate an eternal order.

Conservatism promotes (and so does liberalism, misguidedly) the idea that liberalism is about activist government where conservatism is not. This is absurd. It is unrelated to the history of conservative government. Conservatism promotes activist government that acts in the interests of the aristocracy. This has been true for thousands of years. What is distinctive about liberalism is not that it promotes activist government but that it promotes government that acts in the interests of the majority. Democratic government, however, is not simply majoritarian. It is, rather, one institutional expression of a democratic type of culture that is still very much in the process of being invented.

//2 How Conservatism Works

Conservative social orders have often described themselves as civilized, and so one reads in the Wall Street Journal that “the enemies of civilization hate bow ties”. But what conservatism calls civilization is little but the domination of an aristocracy. Every aspect of social life is subordinated to this goal. That is not civilization.

The reality is quite the opposite. To impose its order on society, conservatism must destroy civilization. In particular conservatism must destroy conscience, democracy, reason, and language.

The Destruction of Conscience

Liberalism is a movement of conscience. Liberals speak endlessly of conscience. Yet conservative rhetors have taken to acting as if they owned the language of conscience. They even routinely assert that liberals disparage conscience. The magnitude of the falsehood here is so great that decent people have been set back on their heels.

Conservatism continually twists the language of conscience into its opposite. It has no choice: conservatism is unjust, and cannot survive except by pretending to be the opposite of what it is.

Conservative arguments are often arbitrary in nature. Consider, for example, the controversy over Elian Gonzalez. Conservatism claims that the universe is ordered by absolutes. This would certainly make life easier if it was true. The difficulty is that the absolutes constantly conflict with one another. When the absolutes do not conflict, there is rarely any controversy. But when absolutes do conflict, conservatism is forced into sophistry. In the case of Elian Gonzalez, two absolutes conflicted: keeping families together and not making people return to tyrannies. In a democratic society, the decision would be made through rational debate. Conservatism, however, required picking one of the two absolutes arbitrarily (based perhaps on tactical politics in Florida) and simply accusing anyone who disagreed of flouting absolutes and thereby nihilistically denying the fundamental order of the universe. This happens every day. Arbitrariness replaces reason with authority. When arbitrariness becomes established in the culture, democracy decays and it becomes possible for aristocracies to dominate people’s minds.

Another example of conservative twisting of the language of conscience is the argument, in the context of the attacks of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, that holding our side to things like the Geneva Convention implies an equivalence between ourselves and our enemies. This is a logical fallacy. The fallacy is something like: they kill so they are bad, but we are good so it is okay for us to kill. The argument that everything we do is okay so long as it is not as bad as the most extreme evil in the world is a rejection of nearly all of civilization. It is precisely the destruction of conscience.

Or take the notion of “political correctness”. It is true that movements of conscience have piled demands onto people faster than the culture can absorb them. That is an unfortunate side-effect of social progress. Conservatism, however, twists language to make the inconvenience of conscience sound like a kind of oppression. The campaign against political correctness is thus a search-and-destroy campaign against all vestiges of conscience in society. The flamboyant nastiness of rhetors such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter represents the destruction of conscience as a type of liberation. They are like cultists, continually egging on their audiences to destroy their own minds by punching through one layer after another of their consciences.

Once I wrote on the Internet that bears in zoos are miserable and should be let go. In response to this, I received an e-mail viciously mocking me as an animal rights wacko. This is an example of the destruction of conscience. Any human being with a halfways functioning conscience will be capable of rationally debating the notion that unhappy bears in zoos should be let go. Of course, rational people might have other opinions. They might claim that the bears are not actually miserable, or that they would be just as miserable in the forest. Conservatism, though, has stereotyped concern for animals by associating it with its most extreme fringe. This sort of mockery of conscience has become systematic and commonplace.

The Destruction of Democracy

For thousands of years, conservatism was universally understood as being in opposition to democracy. Having lost much of its ability to attack democracy openly, conservatism has tried in recent years to redefine the word “democracy” while engaging in deception to make the substance of democracy unthinkable.

Conservative rhetors, for example, have been using the word “government” in a way that does not distinguish between legitimate democracy and totalitarianism.

Then there is the notion that politicians who offer health care reforms, for example, are claiming to be better people than the rest of us. This is a particularly toxic distortion. Offering reforms is a basic part of democracy, something that every citizen can do.

Even more toxic is the notion that those who criticize the president are claiming to be better people than he is. This is authoritarianism.

Some conservative rhetors have taken to literally demonizing the very notion of a democratic opposition. Rush Limbaugh has argued at length that Tom Daschle resembles Satan simply because he opposes George Bush’s policies. Ever since then, Limbaugh has regularly identified Daschle as “el diablo”. This is the emotional heart of conservatism: the notion that the conservative order is ordained by God and that anyone and anything that opposes the conservative order is infinitely evil.

The Destruction of Reason

Conservatism has opposed rational thought for thousands of years. What most people know nowadays as conservatism is basically a public relations campaign aimed at persuading them to lay down their capacity for rational thought.

Conservatism frequently attempts to destroy rational thought, for example, by using language in ways that stand just out of reach of rational debate or rebuttal.

Conservatism has used a wide variety of methods to destroy reason throughout history. Fortunately, many of these methods, such as the suppression of popular literacy, are incompatible with a modern economy. Once the common people started becoming educated, more sophisticated methods of domination were required. Thus the invention of public relations, which is a kind of rationalized irrationality. The great innovation of conservatism in recent decades has been the systematic reinvention of politics using the technology of public relations.

The main idea of public relations is the distinction between “messages” and “facts”. Messages are the things you want people to believe. A message should be vague enough that it is difficult to refute by rational means. (People in politics refer to messages as “strategies” and people who devise strategies as “strategists”. The Democrats have strategists too, and it is not at all clear that they should, but they scarcely compare with the vast public relations machinery of the right.) It is useful to think of each message as a kind of pipeline: a steady stream of facts is selected (or twisted, or fabricated) to fit the message. Contrary facts are of course ignored. The goal is what the professionals call “message repetition”. This provides activists with something to do: come up with new facts to fit the conservative authorities’ chosen messages. Having become established in this way, messages must also be continually intertwined with one another. This is one job of pundits.

To the public relations mind, the public sphere is a game in which the opposition tries to knock you off your message. Take the example of one successful message, “Gore’s lies”. The purpose of the game was to return any interaction to the message, namely that Gore lies. So if it is noted that the supposed examples of Gore lying (e.g., his perfectly true claim to have done onerous farm chores) were themselves untrue, common responses would include, “that doesn’t matter, what matters is Gore’s lies”, or “the reasons people believe them is because of Gore’s lies”, or “yes perhaps, but there are so many other examples of Gore’s lies”, or “you’re just trying to change the subject away from Gore’s lies”, and so on.

Many of these messages have become institutions. Whole organizations exist to provide a pipeline of “facts” that underwrite the message of “liberal media bias”. These “facts” fall into numerous categories and exemplify a wide range of fallacies. Some are just factually untrue, e.g., claims that the New York Times has failed to cover an event that it actually covered in detail. Other claimed examples of bias are non sequiturs, e.g., quotations from liberal columns that appear on the opinion pages, or quotations from liberals in news articles that also provided balancing quotes from conservatives. Others are illogical, e.g., media that report news events that represent bad news for the president. The methods of identifying “bias” are thus highly elastic. In practice, everything in the media on political topics that diverges from conservative public relations messages is contended to be an example of “liberal bias”. The goal, clearly, is to purge the media of everything except conservatism.

The word “inaccurate” has become something of a technical term in the political use of public relations. It means “differs from our message”.

Public relations aims to break down reason and replace it with mental associations. One tries to associate “us” with good things and “them” with bad things. Thus, for example, the famous memo from Newt Gingrich’s (then) organization GOPAC entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”. It advised Republican candidates to associate themselves with words like “building”, “dream”, “freedom”, “learn”, “light”, “preserve”, “success”, and “truth” while associating opponents with words like “bizarre”, “decay”, “ideological”, “lie”, “machine”, “pathetic”, and “traitors”. The issue here is not whether these words are used at all; of course there do exist individual liberals that could be described using any of these words. The issue, rather, is a kind of cognitive surgery: systematically creating and destroying mental associations with little regard for truth. Note, in fact, that “truth” is one of the words that Gingrich advised appropriating in this fashion. Someone who thinks this way cannot even conceptualize truth.

Conservative strategists construct their messages in a variety of more or less stereotyped ways. One of the most important patterns of conservative message-making is projection. Projection is a psychological notion; it roughly means attacking someone by falsely claiming that they are attacking you. Conservative strategists engage in projection constantly. A commonplace example would be taking something from someone by claiming that they are in fact taking it from you. Or, having heard a careful and detailed refutation of something he has said, the projector might snap, “you should not dismiss what I have said so quickly!”. It is a false claim — what he said was not dismissed — that is an example of itself — he is dismissing what his opponent has said.

Projection was an important part of the Florida election controversy, for example when Republicans tried to get illegal ballots counted and prevent legal ballots from being counted, while claiming that Democrats were trying to steal the election.

The Destruction of Language

Reason occurs mostly through the medium of language, and so the destruction of reason requires the destruction of language. An underlying notion of conservative politics is that words and phrases of language are like territory in warfare: owned and controlled by one side or the other. One of the central goals of conservatism, as for example with Newt Gingrich’s lists of words, is to take control of every word and phrase in the English language.

George Bush, likewise, owes his election in great measure to a new language that his people engineered for him. His favorite word, for example, is “heart”. This type of linguistic engineering is highly evolved in the business milieu from which conservative public relations derives, and it is the day-to-day work of countless conservative think tanks. Bush’s people, and the concentric circles of punditry around them, are worlds away from John Kerry deciding on a moment’s notice that he is going to start the word “values”. They do not use a word unless they have an integrated communications strategy for taking control of that word throughout the whole of society.

Bush’s personal vocabulary is only a small part of conservative language warfare as a whole. Since around 1990, conservative rhetors have been systematically turning language into a weapon against liberals. Words are used in twisted and exaggerated ways, or with the opposite of their customary meanings. This affects the whole of the language. The goal of this distorted language is not simply to defeat an enemy but to destroy the minds of the people who believe themselves to be conservatives and who constantly challenge themselves to ever greater extremity in using it.

A simple example of turning language into a weapon might be the word “predictable”, which has become a synonym for “liberal”. There is no rational argument in this usage. Every such use of “predictable” can be refuted simply by substituting the word “consistent”. It is simply invective.

More importantly, conservative rhetors have been systematically mapping the language that has historically been used to describe the aristocracy and the traditional authorities that serve it, and have twisted those words into terms for liberals. This tactic has the dual advantage of both attacking the aristocracies’ opponents and depriving them of the words that they have used to attack aristocracy.

A simple example is the term “race-baiting”. In the Nexis database, uses of “race-baiting” undergo a sudden switch in the early 1990’s. Before then, “race-baiting” referred to racists. Afterward, it referred in twisted way to people who oppose racism. What happened is simple: conservative rhetors, tired of the political advantage that liberals had been getting from their use of that word, took it away from them.

A more complicated example is the word “racist”. Conservative rhetors have tried to take this word away as well by constantly coming up with new ways to stick the word onto liberals and their policies. For example they have referred to affirmative action as “racist”. This is false; it is an attempt to destroy language. Racism is the notion that one race is intrinsically better than another. Affirmative action is arguably discriminatory, as a means of partially offsetting discrimination in other places and times, but it is not racist. Many conservative rhetors have even stuck the word “racist” on people just because they oppose racism. The notion seems to be that these people addressed themselves to the topic of race, and the word “racist” is sort of an adjective relating somehow to race. In any event this too is an attack on language.

A recent example is the word “hate”. The civil rights movement had used the word “hate” to refer to terrorism and stereotyping against black people, and during the 1990’s some in the press had identified as “Clinton-haters” people who had made vast numbers of bizarre claims that the Clintons had participated in murder and drug-dealing. Beginning around 2003, conservative rhetors took control of this word as well by labeling a variety of perfectly ordinary types of democratic opposition to George Bush as “hate”. In addition, they have constructed a large number of messages of the form “liberals hate X” (e.g., X = America) and established within their media apparatus a sophistical pipeline of “facts” to support each one. This is also an example of the systematic breaking of associations.

The word “partisan” entered into its current political circulation in the early 1990’s when some liberals identified people like Newt Gingrich as “partisan” for doing things like the memo on language that I mentioned earlier. To the conservative way of politics, there is nothing either true or false about the liberal claim. It is simply that liberals had taken control of some rhetorical territory: the word “partisan”. Conservative rhetors then set about taking control of the word themselves. They did this in a way that has become mechanical. They first claimed, falsely, that liberals were identifying as “partisan” any views other than their own. They thus inflated the word while projecting this inflation onto the liberals and disconnecting the word from the particular facts that the liberals had associated with it. Next, they started using the word “partisan” in the inflated, dishonest way that they had ascribed to their opponents. This is, very importantly, a way of attacking people simply for having a different opinion. In twisting language this way, conservatives tell themselves that they are simply turning liberal unfairness back against the liberals. This too is projection.

Another common theme of conservative strategy is that liberals are themselves an aristocracy. (For those who are really keeping score, the sophisticated version of this is called the “new class strategy”, the message being that liberals are the American version of the Soviet nomenklatura.) Thus, for example, the constant pelting of liberals as “elites”, sticking this word and a mass of others semantically related to it onto liberals on every possible occasion. A pipeline of “facts” has been established to underwrite this message as well. Thus, for example, constant false conservative claims that the rich vote Democratic. When Al Franken recently referred to his new radio network as “the media elite and proud of it”, he demonstrated his oblivion to the workings of the conservative discourse that he claims to contest.

Further examples of this are endless. When a Republican senator referred to “the few liberals”, hardly any liberals gave any sign of getting what he meant: as all conservatives got just fine, he was appropriating the phrase “the few”, referring to the aristocracy as opposed to “the many”, and sticking this phrase in a false and mechanical way onto liberals. Rush Limbaugh asserts that “they [liberals] think they are better than you”, this of course being a phrase that had historically been applied (and applied correctly) to the aristocracy. Conservative rhetors constantly make false or exaggerated claims that liberals are engaged in stereotyping — the criticism of stereotyping having been one of history’s most important rhetorical devices of democrats. And so on. The goal here is to make it impossible to criticize aristocracy.

For an especially sorry example of this pattern, consider the word “hierarchy”. Conservatism is a hierarchical social system: a system of ranked orders and classes. Yet in recent years conservatives have managed to stick this word onto liberals, the notion being that “government” (which liberals supposedly endorse and conservatives supposedly oppose) is hierarchical (whereas corporations, the military, and the church are somehow vaguely not). Liberals are losing because it does not even occur to them to refute this kind of mechanical antireason.

It is often claimed in the media that snooty elitists on the coasts refer to states in the middle of the country as “flyover country”. Yet I, who have lived in liberal areas of the coasts for most of my life, have never once heard this usage. In fact, as far as I can tell, the Nexis database does not contain a single example of anyone using the phrase “flyover country” to disparage the non-coastal areas of the United States. Instead, it contains hundreds of examples of people disparaging residents of the coasts by claiming that they use the phrase to describe the interior. The phrase is a special favorite of newspapers in Minneapolis and Denver. This is projection. Likewise, I have never heard the phrase “political correctness” used except to disparage the people who supposedly use it.

Conservative remapping of the language of aristocracy and democracy has been incredibly thorough. Consider, for example, the terms “entitlement” and “dependency”. The term “entitlement” originally referred to aristocrats. Aristocrats had titles, and they thought that they were thereby entitled to various things, particularly the deference of the common people. Everyone else, by contrast, was dependent on the aristocrats. This is conservatism. Yet in the 1990’s, conservative rhetors decided that the people who actually claim entitlement are people on welfare. They furthermore created an empirically false association between welfare and dependency. But, as I have mentioned, welfare is precisely a way of eliminating dependency on the aristocracy and the cultural authorities that serve it. I do not recall anyone ever noting this inversion of meaning.

Conservative strategists have also been remapping the language that has historically been applied to conservative religious authorities, sticking words such as “orthodoxy”, “pious”, “dogma”, and “sanctimonious” to liberals at every turn.

//3 Conservatism in American History

Almost all of the early immigrants to America left behind societies that had been oppressed by conservatism. The democratic culture that Americans have built is truly one of the monuments of civilization. And American culture remains vibrant to this day despite centuries of conservative attack. Yet the history of American democracy has generally been taught in confused ways. This history might be sketched in terms of the great turning points that happened to occur around 1800 and 1900, followed by the great reaction that gathered steam in the decades leading up to 2000.

1800

America before the revolution was a conservative society. It lacked an entitled aristocracy, but it was dominated in very much the same way by its gentry. Americans today have little way of knowing what this meant — the hierarchical ties of personal dependency that organized people’s psychology. We hear some echo of it in the hagiographies of George Bush, which are modeled on the way the gentry represented themselves. The Founding Fathers, men like Madison, Adams, and Washington, were, in this sense, products of aristocratic society. They did not make a revolution in order to establish democracy. Quite the contrary, they wanted to be aristocrats. They did not succeed. The revolution that they helped set in motion did not simply sweep away the church and crown of England. As scholars such as Gordon Wood have noted, it also swept away the entire social system of the gentry, and it did so with a suddenness and thoroughness that surprised and amazed everyone who lived through it. So completely did Americans repudiate the conservative social system of the gentry, in fact, that they felt free to mythologize the Founding Fathers, forgetting the Founding Fathers’ aristocratic ambitions and pretending that they, too, were revolutionary democrats. This ahistorical practice of projecting all good things onto the Founding Fathers continues to the present day, and it is unfortunate because (as Michael Schudson has argued) it makes us forget all of the work that Americans have subsequently done to build the democratic institutions of today. In reality, Madison, Adams, and Washington were much like Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. Like Gorbachev, they tried to reform an oppressive system without fundamentally changing it. And like Gorbachev, they were swept away by the very forces they helped set into motion.

The revolution, though, proceeded quite differently in the North and South, and led to a kind of controlled experiment. The North repudiated conservatism altogether. Indeed it was the only society in modern history without an aristocracy, and as scholars such as the late Robert Wiebe have noted, its dynamic democratic culture was most extraordinary. It is unfortunate that we discuss this culture largely through the analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville, an aristocrat who wanted to graft medieval notions of social order onto a democratic culture that he found alien. In the South, by contrast, the conservative order of the gentry was modified to something more resembling the oppressive latifundist systems of Latin America, relieved mainly by comparatively democratic religious institutions. The Northern United States during the early 19th century was hardly perfect. Left-over conservative hierarchies and patterns of psychology continued to damage people’s minds and lives in numerous ways. But compared to the South, the North was, and has always been, a more dynamic and successful society. Southern conservatism has had to modify its strategies in recent decades, but its grip on the culture is tragically as strong as ever.

1900

Something more complicated happened around 1900. Railroads, the telegraph, and mass production made for massive new economies of scale, whereupon the invention of the corporation gave a new generation of would-be aristocrats new ways to reinvent themselves.

The complicated institutional and ideological events of this era can be understood in microcosm through the subsequent history of the word “liberal”, which forked into two quite different meanings. The word “liberal” had originally been part of an intramural dispute within the conservative alliance between the aristocracy and the rising business class. Their compromise, as I have noted, is that the aristocracy would maintain its social control for the benefit of both groups mainly through psychological means rather than through terror, and that economic regulation would henceforth be designed to benefit the business class. And both of these conditions would perversely be called “freedom”. The word “liberal” thus took its modern meaning in a struggle against the aristocracy’s control of the state. Around 1900, however, the corporation emerged in a society in which democracy was relatively strong and the aristocracy was relatively weak. Antitrust and many other types of state regulation were not part of traditional aristocratic control, but were part of democracy. And this is why the word “liberal” forked. Democrats continued using the word in its original sense, to signify the struggle against aristocracy, in this case the new aristocracy of corporate power. Business interests, however, reinvented the word to signify a struggle against something conceptualized very abstractly as “government”. In reality the new business meaning of the word, as worked out in detail by people like Hayek, went in an opposite direction from its original meaning: a struggle against the people, rather than against the aristocracy.

At the same time as the corporation provided the occasion for the founding of a new aristocracy, however, a new middle class founded a large number of professions. The relationship between the professional middle class and the aristocracy has been complicated throughout the 20th century. But whereas the goal of conservatism throughout history has primarily been to suppress the mob of common people, the conservatism of the late 20th century was especially vituperative in its campaigns against the relatively autonomous democratic cultures of the professions.

One of the professions founded around 1900 was public relations. Early public relations texts were quite openly conservative, and public relations practitioners openly affirmed that their profession existed to manipulate the common people psychologically in order to ensure the domination of society by a narrow elite. Squeamishness on this matter is a recent phenomenon indeed.

the 1970’s

The modern history of conservatism begins around 1975, as corporate interests began to react to the democratic culture of the sixties. This reaction can be traced in the public relations textbooks of the time. Elaborate new methods of public relations tried to prevent, coopt, and defeat democratic initiatives throughout the society. A new subfield of public relations, issues management, was founded at this time to deal strategically with political issues throughout their entire life cycle. One of the few political theories that has made note of the large-scale institutionalization of public relations is the early work of Jurgen Habermas.

Even more important was the invention of the think tank, and especially the systematic application of public relations to politics by the most important of the conservative think tanks, the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation’s methods of issues management have had a fantastically corrosive effect on democracy.

the 1980’s

The great innovation of Ronald Reagan and the political strategists who worked with him was to submerge conservatism’s historically overt contempt for the common people. The contrast between Reagan’s language and that of conservatives even a decade or two earlier is most striking. Jacques Barzun’s “The House of Intellect” (1959), for example, fairly bristles with contempt for demotic culture, the notion being that modern history is the inexorable erosion of aristocratic civilization by democracy. On a political level, Reagan’s strategy was to place wedges into the many divides in that era’s popular democracy, including both the avoidable divides that the counterculture had opened up and the divides that had long been inherent in conservatism’s hierarchical order. Reagan created a mythical working class whose values he conflated with those of the conservative order, and he opposed this to an equally mythical professional class of liberal wreckers. Democratic culture in the sixties had something of a workable theory of conservatism — one that has largely been lost. But it was not enough of a theory to explain to working people why they are on the same side as hippies and gays. Although crude by comparison with conservative discourse only twenty years later, Reagan’s strategy identified this difficulty with some precision. People like Ella Baker had explained the psychology of conservatism — the internalized deference that makes a conservative order possible. But the new psychology of democracy does not happen overnight, and it did not become general in the culture.

the 1990’s

In the 1990’s, American conservatism institutionalized public relations methods of politics on a large scale, and it used these methods in a savage campaign of delegitimizing democratic institutions. In particular, a new generation of highly trained conservative strategists evolved, on the foundation of classical public relations methods, a sophisticated practice of real-time politics that integrated ideology and tactics on a year-to-year, news-cycle-to-news-cycle, and often hour-to-hour basis. This practice employs advanced models of the dynamics of political issues so as to launch waves of precisely designed communications in countless well-analyzed loci throughout the society. For contemporary conservatism, a political issue — a war, for example — is a consumer product to be researched and rolled out in a planned way with continuous empirical feedback from polling. So far as citizens can tell, such issues seem to materialize everywhere at once, swarming the culture with so many interrelated formulations that it becomes impossible to think, much less launch an effective rebuttal. Such a campaign is successful if it occupies precisely the ideological ground that can be occupied at a given moment, and it includes quite overt plans for holding that ground through the construction of a pipeline of facts and intertwining with other, subsequent issues. Although in one sense this machinery has a profound kinship with the priesthoods of ancient Egypt, in another sense its radicalism — its inhuman thoroughness — has no precedent in history. Liberals have nothing remotely comparable.

//4 The Discovery of Democracy

Humanity has struggled for thousands of years to emerge from the darkness of conservatism. At every step of the way, conservatism has always had the advantage of a long historical learning curve. There have always been experts in the running of conservative society. Most of the stupid mistakes have been made and forgotten centuries ago. Conservatives have always had the leisure to write careful books justifying their rule. Democracy, by contrast, is still very much in an experimental phase. And so, for example, the 1960’s were one of the great episodes of civilization in human history, and they were also a time when people did a lot of stupid things like take drugs.

The history of democracy has scarcely been written. Of what has been written, the great majority of “democratic theory” is based on the ancient Greek model of deliberative democracy. Much has been written about the Greeks’ limitation of citizenship to perhaps 10% of the population. But this is not the reason why the Greek model is inapplicable to the modern world. The real reason is that Greek democracy was emphatically predicated on a small city-state of a few thousand people, whereas modern societies have populations in the tens and hundreds of millions.

The obvious adaptation to the difficulties of scale has been representation. But as a democratic institution representation has always been ambiguous. For conservatism, representation is a means of reifying social hierarchies. The Founding Fathers thought of themselves as innovators and modernizers, and the myth-making tradition has thoughtlessly agreed with them. But in reality the US Constitution, as much as the British system it supposedly replaced, is little more than the Aristotelian tripartite model of king, aristocracy, and gentry (supposedly representing the commons), reformed to some degree as President, Senate, and House. Many people have noted that George Bush is consolidating executive power in a kind of elective kingship, but they have done little to place the various elements of Bush’s authoritarian institution-molding into historical context. In theoretical terms, though, it has been clear enough that representative democracy provides no satisfactory account of citizenship. Surely a genuine democracy would replace the Aristotelian model? Fortunately, there is little need to replace the Constitution beyond adding a right to privacy. After all, as historians have noted, Americans almost immediately started using the Constitution in a considerably different way than the Founders intended — in a democratic fashion, simply put, and not an aristocratic one. The president who claims to be “a uniter not a divider” is hearkening back to the myth-making of a would-be aristocracy that claims to be impartial and to stand above controversy while systematically using the machinery of government to crush its opponents. But his is not the winning side.

Not that democracy is a done deal. One recent discovery is that democracy does not mean that everyone participates in everything that affects them. Every citizen of a modern society participates in hundreds of institutions, and it is impossible to be fully informed about all of them, much less sit through endless meetings relating to all of them. There are too many issues for everyone to be an expert on everything.

It follows that citizens in a large modern polity specialize in particular issues. In fact this kind of issue entrepreneurship is not restricted to politics. It is central to the making of careers in nearly every institution of society. Conservatism claims to own the theme of entrepreneurship, but then conservatism claims to own every theme. In reality, entrepreneurship on the part of the common people is antithetical to conservatism, and conservatism has learned and taught little about the skills of entrepreneurship, most particularly the entrepreneurial cognition that identifies opportunities for various sorts of useful careers, whether civic, intellectual, professional, or economic. Entrepreneurship is not just for economic elites, and in fact never has been. One part of democracy, contrary to much socialist teaching, is the democratization of goods and skills, entrepreneurial skills for example, that had formerly been associated with the elite. American society has diverged dramatically from that of Europe largely because of the democratization of entrepreneurship, and that trend should continue with the writing down and teaching of generalized entrepreneurial skills.

The real discovery is that democracy is a particular kind of social organization of knowledge — a sprawling landscape of overlapping knowledge spheres and a creative tension on any given issue between the experts and the laity. It is not a hierarchical divide between the knowledge-authorities in the professions and a deferential citizenry; instead it democratizes the skills of knowledge-making among a citizenry that is plugged together in ways that increasingly resemble the institutional and cognitive structures of the professions. This generalized application of entrepreneurial skills in the context of a knowledge-intensive society — and not simply the multiplication of associations that so impressed Tocqueville — is civil society. The tremendous fashion for civil society as a necessary complement and counterbalance to the state in a democracy, as launched in the 1980’s by people like John Keane, has been one of the most hopeful aspects of recent democratic culture. Indeed, one measure of the success of the discourse of civil society has been that conservatism has felt the need to destroy it by means of distorted theories of “civil society” that place the populace under the tutelage of the aristocracy and the cultural authorities that serve it.

Economics, unfortunately, is still dominated by the ancien regime. This consists of three schools. Neoclassical economics is founded (as Philip Mirowski has argued) on superficial, indeed incoherent analogies to the mathematics of classical mechanics whose main notion is equilibrium. Economies, it is held, are dynamic systems that are constantly moving to an optimal equilibrium, and government intervention will only move the economy to the wrong equilibrium. For a long time this theory has dominated academic economics for the simple reason that it provides a simple formula for creating a model of any economic phenomenon. Its great difficulty is that it ignores essentially all issues of information and institutions — important topics in the context of any modern economy. Austrian economics (associated with Hayek and Mises) began in the context of debates about the practicability of central planning in socialism; as such, it is organized around an opposition between centralized economies (bad) and decentralized economies (good). Although preferable in some ways to neoclassicism in its emphasis on information and institutions, as well as its rhetorical emphasis on entrepreneurship, it is nonetheless hopelessly simplistic. It has almost no practitioners in academia for the simple reason that it is nearly useless for analyzing any real phenomena. A third school, a particular kind of game theory based on the work of John Nash, does have elaborate notions about information and at least a sketchy way of modeling institutions, and as a result has established itself as the major academic alternative to neoclassicism. Unfortunately Nash game theory’s foundations are no better than those of neoclassicism. Whereas neoclassicism, though ultimately incoherent, is actually a powerful and useful way of thinking about the economy, Nash game theory is based, as Mirowski again has argued, on a disordered model of relationships between people. Fortunately it has no particular politics.

The state of economics is unfortunate for democracy. Conservatism runs on ideologies that bear only a tangential relationship to reality, but democracy requires universal access to accurate theories about a large number of nontrivial institutions. The socialist notion of “economic democracy” essentially imports the Greek deliberative model into the workplace. As such it is probably useful as a counter to conservative psychologies of internalized deference that crush people’s minds and prevent useful work from being done. It is, however, not remotely adequate to the reality of an interconnected modern economy, in which the workplace is hardly a natural unit. A better starting place is with analysis of the practical work of producing goods in social systems of actual finite human beings — that is, with analysis of information and institutions, as for example in the singular work of Thorstein Veblen, John Commons, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, John von Neumann, Mark Casson, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul David, Bruno Latour, and Michel Callon.

This work emphasizes knowledge and the very general social conditions that are required to produce and use it. Simply put, knowledge is best produced in a liberal culture. This is why the most prosperous and innovative regions of the United States are also the most politically liberal, and why the most conservative regions of the country are also the greatest beneficiaries of transfer payments. Liberals create wealth and government redistributes it to conservatives. This is, of course, the opposite of the received conservative opinion in the media, and indeed in most of academia. But it is true.

Another connection between democracy and a modern economy is the democratic nature of entrepreneurialism. People who reflexively defer to their social betters will never learn the social skills that are needed to found new types of social relationships. This was clear enough in the interregnum in the 19th century between the fall of the American gentry and the rise of the modern corporation. An economy of generalized entrepreneurialism, moreover, requires an elaborate institutional matrix that is part public and part private. As scholars such as Linda Weiss have argued, the conservative spectre of a conflict between government and entrepreneurial activity is unrelated to the reality of entrepreneurship. To be sure, much has been learned about the kinds of government policies that do and do not lay the foundation for economic dynamism. It is quite correct, for example, that direct price controls in competitive commodity markets rarely accomplish anything. (Labor markets are a much more complicated case, in very much the ways that neoclassical economics exists to ignore.) Free trade would also be a good thing if it existed; in practice trade is distorted by subsidies and by uneven regulation of externalities such as pollution, and “free trade” negotiations are a kind of power politics that differs little from the gunboat diplomacy that opened markets in a one-sided way in former times. The point is scarcely that markets are inherently democratic. The economic properties of infrastructure and knowledge create economies of scale that both produce cheap goods (a democratic effect) and concentrate power (an anti-democratic effect). Conservatives employ the democratic rhetoric of entrepreneurialism to promote the opposite values of corporate centralization. But the 19th century’s opinions about the political and economic necessity of antitrust are still true. More importantly, a wide range of public policies is required to facilitate a democratic economy and the more general democratic values on which it depends.

Lastly, an important innovation of democracy during the sixties was the rights revolution. Rights are democratic because they are limits to arbitrary authority, and people who believe they have rights cannot be subjected to conservatism. Conservative rhetors have attacked the rights revolution in numerous ways as a kind of demotic chatter that contradicts the eternal wisdom of the conservative order. For conservatism, not accepting one’s settled place in the traditional hierarchy of orders and classes is a kind of arrogance, and conservative vocabulary is full of phrases such as “self-important”. Institutions, for conservatism, are more important than people. For democracy, by contrast, things are more complicated. The rights revolution is hardly perfect. But the main difficulty with it is just that it is not enough. A society is not founded on rights alone. Democracy requires that people learn and practice a range of nontrivial social skills. But then people are not likely to learn or practice those skills so long as they have internalized a conservative psychology of deference. The rights revolution breaks this cycle. For the civil rights movement, for example, learning to read was not simply a means of registering to vote, but was also a means of liberation from the psychology of conservatism. Democratic institutions, as opposed to the inherited mysteries of conservative institutions, are made of the everyday exercise of advanced social skills by people who are liberated in this sense.

//5 How to Defeat Conservatism

Conservatism is almost gone. People no longer worship the pharaohs. If the gentry were among us today we would have no notion of what they were talking about. For thousands of years, countless people have worked for the values of democracy in ways large and small. The industrialized vituperations of conservative propaganda measure their success. To defeat conservatism today, the main thing we have to do is to explain what it is and what is wrong with it. This is easy enough.

Rebut conservative arguments

This is my most important prescription. Liberals win political victories through rational debate. But after a victory is won, liberals tend to drop the issue and move along. As a result, whole generations have grown up without ever hearing the arguments in favor of, for example, Social Security. Instead they have heard massive numbers of conservative arguments against liberalism, and these arguments have generally gone unrebutted. In order to save civilization, liberals need a new language, one in which it is easy to express rebuttals to the particular crop of conservative arguments of the last few decades. And the way to invent that language is just to start rebutting the arguments, all of them. This means literally dozens of new arguments each day.

Do not assume that rebutting conservative arguments is easy, or that a few phrases will suffice. Do not even assume that you know what is wrong with the conservative arguments that you hear, or even indeed what those arguments are, since they are often complicated and confusing in their internal structure. Do not just repeat a stock response that worked for some previous generation of liberals, because your audience has already heard that response and already knows what the counterargument is. Conservative rhetors have invested tremendous effort in working around liberals’ existing language. In the old days, racists were racists and polluters were polluters. But those old labels do not win arguments any more. Liberals must now provide new answers in plain language to the questions that ordinary citizens, having heard the arguments of conservatism, now have. Do environmental regulations work? Why do we protect the civil liberties of terrorists? Are liberals anti-American? What do we need government for anyway?

Benchmark the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page is the most important conservative publication, and it is often described as a bulletin board for the conservatism. A better metaphor, however, would be a war room. Day by day, the Wall Street Journal’s editors detect liberal arguments coming over the horizon, and immediately they gather up and distribute the arguments that conservatives will need to rebut them. Since the retirement of its late editor Robert Bartley, the Journal’s opinion page has become more sophisticated. The crude lies and belligerent irrationality of the Bartley era have not disappeared, but they have certainly been attenuated. Daniel Henninger in particular does something interesting with clouds of associations that are subrational but not quite fallacious.

Liberals should not imitate the antireason of the Journal or other distribution channels of conservative opinion. Instead, as part of the hard work of inventing democracy, it will be necessary to tell the difference between methods that liberals ought to be applying in their own work, such as the day-to-day rebuttal of arguments, and methods that liberals need to analyze and place in the same category as the priesthood of Egypt.

Build a better pundit

Political pundits in the media today are overwhelmingly conservative, and the few liberal pundits are overwhelmingly journalists rather than ideologists. It is difficult to identify a single pundit in the media who consistently explicates liberal ideology. It is time to build a democratic punditry.

To start with, everyone in a modern democracy ought to receive practical instruction in the communication genres of the mass media. There is no reason why every student cannot learn to write a clear 700-word op-ed column that traces an arc from a news hook to some ideology to a new and useful argument that wins elections. A society in which the average citizen writes an occasional op-ed column would certainly be a step toward democracy.

But even if the skills of punditry are widespread, there is no substitute for professional pundits who can make “brand names” of themselves in the media, and talented people will not make careers out of democratic punditry until they are reasonably assured of being able to make money at it. This is where think tanks and their philanthropic funders come in. Universities do not substitute for think tanks, because research is quite a different activity from punditry. Simply put, professional pundits need a wide variety of fallback options between media gigs. Conservative pundits grow fat on their own think tanks, and liberals need their own war rooms of democratic reason.

Say something new

Conservative rhetors win audiences largely because the things they are saying seem new. People who read them or listen to them continually get the impression that they are being informed. If news and opinion editors seem biased against liberals, one reason is simply that liberals are not delivering the goods. Whenever you get ready to express a political opinion in the media, first ask whether you have ever heard that opinion in the media before (as opposed, for example, to scholarly works). If so, figure out what the counterarguments are — because there will be counterarguments — and then proceed to base your column on the counterarguments to that. Get ahead of the curve.

Teach logic

Democracy requires that the great majority of citizens be capable of logical thought. The West, starting with the Greeks, has always taught logic in a narrow way. Logic does include the syllogism, but it also includes a great deal of savoir faire about what constitutes a good argument, a good counterargument, and a good counterargument to that. In particular, the citizen must have a kind of map of the arguments. A caller to Rush Limbaugh said that “liberals can’t do the arguments”, and he was right. Existing curricula on “critical thinking” are unfortunately very weak. They should be founded on close analysis of actual irrationality.

Many on the left unfortunately abandon reason because they believe that the actual basis of politics is something they call “power”. People like this have no notion of what power is. For example, they will argue that reason is useless because the powers that be will not listen to reason. This is confusion. The purpose of reason is not to petition the authorities but to help other citizens to cut through the darkness of conservative deception.

Others on the left believe that reason is the property of the elite. This is true historically, but that is simply because the essence of conservatism is to deprive the common people of the capacity to engage in democracy. Many bad theories of democracy actually reinforce conservatism, and this is one of them.

Similarly, others on the left argue that requiring politics to be based on reason tilts the playing field in favor of the elite. This is historically true as well, and politics based on money does the same thing. But that is reality. The fact, again, is that democracy needs the citizenry to be educated, and the skills of reason are the foundation of democratic education. Democracy cannot be established in any other way. Aristocratic rule is not reinforced by the use of reason. The situation is quite the reverse: in order to fight off democratic values, conservatism must simulate reason, and pretend that conservative deception is itself reason when it is not. Many conservative pundits, George Will and Thomas Sowell for example, make their living saying illogical things in a reasonable tone of voice. Democracy will be impossible until the great majority of citizens can identify in reasonable detail just how this trick works.

Conservatism is the problem

Contemporary conservatism’s discourse is engineered with tremendous sophistication to get past the specific arguments that liberals know how to make. Conservative strategists, moreover, are willing to achieve their goals incrementally, depending on the arguments that liberals are capable of making at a given moment. Of course it is important for liberals to make the arguments against each increment. But it is more important to explain what conservatism is in general, and then to explain what is wrong with it.

For example, I once heard Rush Limbaugh discussing with a listener how school vouchers were just a conservative tactic, and how conservatives’ real goal was to eliminate public funding for education altogether. This is the sort of thing that loses elections, and yet I have never heard a liberal pundit discuss it.

The extreme nature of conservatism — not just the extremity of its rhetoric but the oppressiveness of its prescriptions for society — is clear enough in the conservatives’ own literature, but American culture no longer has the categories to identify what it is. Indeed, one can hear fascism, never mind conservatism, on the radio any day of the week. But Americans have mostly forgotten what fascism even is, so that they can listen to fascist rhetoric and it will actually sound kind of fresh.

Critically analyze leftover conservative theories

Liberal ideology is in disarray. After all, conservative ideology has dominated human thought for thousands of years, and it takes concentrated effort to liberate oneself from it. Such intellectual liberation will never happen without a detailed history of conservative theories — which is to say, the ways in which these theories have been designed to subordinate people’s minds to a hierarchical social order dominated by an aristocracy. Lacking such a history, liberal ideology draws in random and confused ways on conservatism, giving it a sentimental update without particularly changing it. Or else liberalism spins out into something wishfully called radicalism, which at best inverts conservatism into something that does not work as well and does not liberate anyone either. A genuine tradition of liberatory social thought does indeed exist, but it must be disentangled from its opposite.

As an example, let us consider the notion of social capital, which has been fashionable among both conservatives and liberals for some time now. The conservative version of the social capital is a medieval ideology that justifies the hierarchical conservative order in terms of the values of community. This medieval notion of community is particularistic in nature: everyone in a community is knitted to everyone else through a system of roles and relationships into which they are born, and which they supposedly accept and love. This network of relationships is made to sound harmonious, and objections to it are made to sound divisive, by neglecting to mention the oppression of the life-long hierarchical bonds that make it up. This is the kind of society whose passing Tocqueville lamented, and that is at the core of modern conservatism in authors such as Robert Nisbet. For Nisbet, modernity could only be understood in a negative way as an erosion of the particular types of community and order that traditional institutions provided. This is what many conservatives mean when they value social capital, regret its decline, and urge its revival.

This notion of social capital should be contrasted, for example, with Ernest Gellner’s notion of the modern democratic citizen as “modular”, that is, as capable of moving about within the society, building and rebuilding relationships and associations of diverse sorts, because of a set of social skills and social institutions that facilitate a generalized, dynamic mobility. The modular citizen gets a place in society not through birth or the bonds of an inherited order but through a gregarious kind of entrepreneurial innovation.

The difficulty with too many liberal notions of social capital is that they are oblivious to the tension between conservatism and democracy. As a result, they are vague and ambiguous as to the nature of social capital, how it might be measured, and what kinds of institutions might erode or encourage it. For example, a theory of social capital that locates it in plain numbers of social network connections is insufficient because it undervalues social skills and overvalues particularistic forms of community that are not adaptive in a dynamic modern economy. This is how liberals end up quoting Tocqueville and sounding indistinguishable from conservative theorists of “intermediary institutions”.

Social capital is just one example of a general crisis of liberal ideology. The first step in resolving this crisis to get clear about what conservatism is and what is wrong with it.

Ditch Marx

Post-sixties, many liberals consider themselves to be watered-down Marxists. They subscribe to a left-to-right spectrum model of politics in which they, as democrats, are located in some hard-to-identify place sort-of-somewhat-to-the-left-of-center, whereas the Marxists have the high ground of a clear and definite location at the end of the spectrum. These liberals would be further out on the left if they could find a politically viable way to do it. Conservative rhetors concur with this model, and indiscriminately calling liberals communists is back in style. This is all nonsense. Marxism is not located anywhere on a spectrum. It is just mistaken. It fails to describe the real world. Attempts to implement it simply created an ugly and shallow imitation of conservatism at its worst. Democracy is the right way to live, and conservatism is the wrong way.

Marx was a brilliant analyst for his time. His analysis of technology’s role in the economy was wholly original. He was the first to analyze the structural dynamism of a capitalist economy. But his theory of modern society was superficial. It overgeneralized from the situation of its time: the recent discovery of economies of scale, crude market institutions, no modern separation of ownership and control, and a small middle class. Marx followed the political economy of his day in analyzing markets as essentially independent of the state. But this is not remotely the case.

One difficulty with Marx, which is the topic of a vast literature, is that his theory requires a periodization of history that does not correspond to historical reality. Capitalism, for example, is supposed to be a discrete totality, but claimed starting dates for this totality range across a good four hundred years. His economistic analysis of society, though indisputably productive in the way that many powerfully wrong ideas are, makes history seem more discontinuous than it is. In fact, the relationship between conservatism and democracy is more or less constant throughout thousands of years of history. One evidence of this, for example, is Orlando Patterson’s stunning discovery that Western notions of freedom were invented by former slaves in the ancient world and have remained more or less constant ever since.

In economic terms, Marx’s theory is mistaken because he did not analyze the role the capitalist plays as entrepreneur. The entrepreneur does an important and distinctive type of work in inventing new ways to bring together diverse factors of production. Now in fact the nature of this work has remained largely hidden throughout history for a wide variety of reasons. Because Marx had no notion of it, the capitalist’s profit seemed to him simple theft. It does not follow, though, that entrepreneurs earn all of their money. The theories of mainstream economics notwithstanding, serious how-to manuals for entrepreneurs are quite clear that the entrepreneur is trying to identify a market failure, because market failures are how you make money. The relationship between entrepreneurship and the state is much more complicated than economics has even tried to theorize. Capitalists, moreover, are not a class. Particular networks of capitalists and other well-off or otherwise connected personages may well try to constitute themselves as an aristocracy, but this is a phenomenon with several more dimensions than just economics.

Nor is Marxism of any use as politics. All that Marx offered to people who worked in deadening factory jobs was that they could take over the factory. While unions and collective bargaining exist in many contexts for good economic reasons, they are an essentially medieval system of negotiations among orders and classes. They presuppose a generally static economy and society. They are irrelevant to knowledge-intensive forms of work. Nor do they provide any kind of foundation for democratic politics. People want their kids to be professionals, not factory workers, and democracy helps people to knit themselves into the complicated set of institutions that enable people to build unique and productive lives.

Talk American

Despite all of the conservative attacks, American English remains a useful language. So use it, and learn to say democratic things in it. There is a style of academic “theory”-talk that claims to be advanced and sophisticated but actually lacks any precision. “Privilege”, for example, is not a verb. If new words are needed and are actually good for analyzing the deception of conservatism or the invention of democracy, go ahead and teach them. Integrate them into the vernacular language.

While you are at it, forget the whole strategy of the counterculture. Be the culture instead.

Stop surrendering powerful words

Many liberals abandon any word that conservatives start using. That means, since conservatives systematically lay claim to every word of the English language, that liberals have been systematically surrendering powerful words such as family, nation, truth, science, tradition, and religion. This has made it increasingly difficult for liberals to explain what they believe. There is no alternative: if conseratives have been twisting a powerful word, then you have to explain in concise American English what the word really means and how the conservatives have distorted it. Contest the signifiers. Use the words.

Tipper Gore is right

Snoop Dogg’s music really is garbage. Some liberals, however, argue that racists hate rap and so therefore any disapproval of rap abets racism. This is bad logic and stupid politics. If racists hate rap then the logical, rational, politically efficacious thing to do is to say that some rap is good and some rap is bad, and that good rap is an art form like any other, and that the bad rap exists because the people who rap it are bad people.

Do not be afraid of losing contact with young people. If all you know about youth culture is Snoop Dogg, then I suppose it is time for some focus groups. Use the focus groups to identify language that Martin Luther King would approve of. Besides, there is plenty of good politics in mass culture, as cultural studies professors have explained at length.

Nor should you be afraid of losing campaign contributions from the entertainment industry. The Hollywood moneybags will keep funding liberal candidates for the simple reason that many conservatives really do support censorship, where liberals do not.

That said, there is certainly a disconnect between some liberal entertainers and the liberals who win elections. Some entertainers are willing to get up on stage and embarrass John Kerry. Scorn them.

Assess the sixties

Make a list of the positive and lasting contributions of the sixties. Americans would benefit from such a list.

Teach nonviolence

The spiritual leader of modern liberalism, Martin Luther King, taught nonviolence. This has been narrowly construed in terms of not killing people. But, as King made clear, it has other meanings as well. You have to love your enemies. This is difficult: the reality of conservatism is so extreme that it is difficult even to discuss without sounding hateful. There is also an intellectual dimension to nonviolence. Nonviolence means, among other things, not cooperating in the destruction of conscience and language. Nonviolence implies reason. Analyze the various would-be aristocracies, therefore, and explain them in plain language, but do not stereotype them. Nonviolence also has an epistemological dimension. Few of us have the skill to hate with a clear mind. Conservatism is very complicated, and you cannot defeat it by shouting slogans. This is the difficulty with Michael Moore. He talks American, which is good. But he is not intellectually nonviolent. He is not remotely as bad as Ann Coulter, and liberals have criticized him much more thoroughly than conservatives have criticized Ann Coulter. But he is not a model for liberal politics. There is no doubt that Martin Luther King would be in George Bush’s face. But how? That is why liberals need a language.

Tell the taxpayers what they are getting for their money

Civilization requires a substantial number and variety of public services, which in turn require moderate and reasonable amounts of taxes. Despite decades of conservative rhetoric, a majority of Americans are perfectly happy to pay their taxes. And yet liberals keep letting conservatives clobber them with rhetoric that makes taxes sound like a bad thing. It is time for liberals to stop losing this argument. To start with, do not talk about amounts of money (“we should spend $15 billion on health care”). Instead, talk about what the money buys (“we should provide medical care to 15 million children”). And stop letting Bush call his tax policies “tax cuts”: he is not cutting those taxes; he is just postponing them.

Make government work better for small business

The market continually undermines both conservatism and democracy. Both systems must continually improvise to accommodate it. The difference is that conservatism pretends to be a timeless order whereas democracy is all about experiment, innovation, and entrepreneurial culture. Conservatives have historically tried to include entrepreneurs in their coalition, even though conservatism is almost the opposite of the cultural conditions of a modern economy. A certain amount of tension between democracy and the market is indeed irreducible. But a great deal has been learned about markets and their relationship to government, and the democratic culture of innovation can reduce the unnecessary tensions between small business and government while providing for social values such as urban design, consumer information, and the environment.

An excellent example of this is duplicative paperwork. Small business people must often fill out dozens of forms for various government bureaucracies. This is a significant expense. These forms should be combined and given a clean and unified interface. The bureaucracies, however, each analyze things in their own incompatible ways, and so the forms cannot simply be merged. Like much of democracy, this is an interesting design matter.

Clone George Soros

George Soros is an excellent citizen. Conservatism has gotten so out of sync with the conditions of a modern economy that significant numbers of wealthy people, especially young entrepreneurs who live and breathe the liberal culture that makes successes like theirs possible, would be happy to help build the institutions that a democratic society needs. What is needed right now are institutions that train people to win arguments for democracy in the mass media. Antireason has become thoroughly established in the media, and it will take real work to invent languages of reason that are fresh and cool. And this work just costs money.

Build the Democratic Party

Your model should be Pat Robertson. He is as extreme on the right as anybody in the United States is on the left. Yet his people took over large parts of the Republican Party. They did this in three ways: laboriously designing a mainstream-sounding language, identifying large numbers of talented activists and training them in the day-to-day work of issue and party politics, and building their own communications systems. Liberals should do the same.

Now, many liberals argue that the Democratic Party would magically start winning again if it would only move to the left. This is lazy nonsense. The Democratic Party has moved to the right for the simple reason that liberals do not have a language that wins elections. To take over the Democratic Party, liberals need to replace the left-wing policies that do not work and, for the policies that do work, get a language that moves 51% of likely voters to vote Democratic.

Other liberals argue that the Democratic Party, and the “system” in general, are irretrievably broken, and that they must build a third party, such as the Green Party with its endorsement of Ralph Nader. The difficulties with this notion are hard to count. For one, splitting the left is a certain recipe for centuries of aristocratic domination. For another, building a party with only people who share your opinions to the nth degree is a certain recipe for factionalism and isolation. For another, the Green Party is a chaotic mess that has no serious chance of becoming a mass-based political party.

Life under aristocratic domination is horrible. The United States is blessed to have little notion of what this horror is like. Europe, for example, staggered under the weight of its aristocracies for thousands of years. European aristocracies are in decline, and Europe certainly has its democratic heroes and its own dawning varieties of civilized life, and yet the psychology and institutions that the aristocracies left behind continue to make European societies rigid and blunt Europeans’ minds with layers of internalized oppression. People come to America to get away from all of that. Conservatism is as alien here as it could possibly be. Only through the most comprehensive campaign of deception in human history has it managed to establish its very tentative control of the country’s major political institutions. Conservatism until very recently was quite open about the fact that it is incompatible with the modern world. That is right. The modern world is a good place, and it will win.

The New Jargon

Phil Agre
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
December 2000
You are welcome to forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose.

You can learn a lot on the Internet. Just yesterday, for example, I learned that Gore voters associate with criminals, that Gore himself is gay, and that if Bush becomes president then a group of liberal financiers is planning to crash the stock market. There it was, in one place: The Conservatives’ Greatest Hits.

And those were the polite ones. We have a serious problem in this country, regardless of who becomes president — a cult that conducts its political life in an aggressive and antirational jargon. On many occasions here I have dissected the workings of this jargon, but now I want to focus on the cultivated use of jargon for purposes of emotionally abusing people. My long message about the hate mail that I’ve received since I started covering the election controversy brought quite a bit of testimony on the matter from people who are distressed at the name-calling, disregard for reality, and all-around dehumanizing scorn that they suffer from the members of this cult. Many of these folks reported feeling all alone with this abuse, and they spoke poignantly about being trapped in overwhelming conservative parts of the country where the cult and its jargon dominate public discussion to the exclusion of everything else.

Most of these people didn’t even think of themselves as liberals — at least not until they learned, for example, that Al Gore didn’t claim to have invented the Internet, wasn’t lying when he described his childhood farm chores, didn’t grow up in a luxury hotel, didn’t falsely claim to have been the model for Love Story, didn’t hold a fund-raiser at a Buddhist temple, didn’t propose abolishing the automobile, didn’t propose to outlaw guns, and so on. They had been genuinely shocked to discover that the cult members had been lying about these things, and they were even more shocked to discover that they and everyone around them had been living in a media bubble whose ranting and raving had shut off the oxygen from even these very simple truths. Some of them described the paralyzing despair that they experienced during the post- election controversy when they found themselves surrounded by angry and irrational people who display no respect for logic.

It is important to be clear about some things. Not all conservatives participate in this cult or speak its jargon, and not all speakers of the jargon engage in personal abuse. I have received many messages from rational people who treat me like a human being even as they express conservative disagreement with my views. I have also received many messages that labor to twist the facts of the election controversy, as if they were taking the opportunity to sharpen their sophistical skills on a real live college professor, without being especially rude about it. And I have received some messages of crude name-calling and insults that required no particular skill or cultivation and could simply be the product of a deranged mind or a bad day. Those are not the people that I am talking about, or that my correspondents were talking about. After all, I’ve expressed myself strongly on some controversial political issues, and it stands to reason that someone somewhere is going to get mad.

No — I am talking here about people who are emotionally abusive, and who have obviously invested effort in learning a whole technology of emotional abuse that they are deploying in a systematic way for (what they regard as) political purposes. I am talking about people who express themselves in snide, sarcastic, scornful tones, who express themselves in innuendoes, who invest incredible effort in provoking an intemperate response so that they can portray themselves as victims, and who engage in complicatedly indirect forms of rhetoric that deniably presuppose things that are false.

Let us consider a few examples of the phenomena I am talking about. This message was in response to my essay on the hate mail I’ve been getting:

so, let’s see. If we disagree with your spin and erroneous conclusions, we are sending “hate mail”? my god, what hypocracy, what insular thinking (and frnakly, I worry about using that last word)

My problem with a passage like this, I repeat, is not exactly that it is nasty, but that it is nasty in a stereotyped and cultivated way. It is part of a technology of nastiness. Let’s consider how it works. Start with the first sentence. In the jargon, expressions like “let me see if I’ve got this straight” are used to preface a distorted paraphrase of an opponent’s words. This is a matter of routine; it’s part of what a linguist would call the “phasal lexicon” of the new jargon. In fact, “so, let’s see” does two kinds of work: it prefaces a distortion of what I said, and it pretends that the distortion is what I said. It twists reason, and projects that twisting onto me. I, of course, never said that everyone who disagrees with me is sending hate mail. Never said it, never meant it, never implied it, never presupposed it, never thought it.

And this is not just any distortion. It’s a type that is also very common in the new jargon: someone sends me hate mail that expresses disagreement with my views, and so rather than acknowledge the hateful elements of that mail, my correspondent here pretends that I have associated all disagreement with hate. Underneath, in other words, it’s a matter of associationism. Associationism deletes all of logical connections among ideas, and instead works to create certain strategically chosen associations among concepts, and to break others. The first step, very often, is to project the very fact of engaging in associationism into one’s opponent: by writing about messages of disagreement that were hateful, it is said, “they” are the ones who associated disagreement with hate.

Notice, too, the rhetorical question (“If we disagree with your spin and erroneous conclusions, we are sending ‘hate mail’?”). This is also common. It’s a way of making an obviously false assertion — in this case, the assertion that I have said that everyone who disagrees with me has ispo facto sent hate mail — without admitting to it. Then the “my god”, etc, which assumes an answer to the rhetorical question, as if the rhetorical question’s proffered paraphrase were something that I said. Then, of course, the flood of nasty language.

The same writer continues as follows:

Yep, you must really enjoy democracy if you feel that Al’s team is absolutely with clean hands while W is totally wrong.

Having worked himself into a state of righteous indignation, he starts in with the sarcasm: “yep”. Then another characteristic pattern of the new jargon: reframing issues in terms of straw-man extremes. He ascribes to me a view that is framed in terms of absolutes. Notice how the straw man is amplified even further through imbalance: it’s Al’s team versus W (alone). Notice, too, how this view is not quite ascribed to me in a straightforward way; he doesn’t say “You believe that Al’s team is absolutely clean and W is totally wrong”. Rather, he puts this proposition, for which he has presented no evidence, into an “if”, thus sheltering it from the rational examination that it would invite if he had squarely asserted it. This is part of what I mean when I say that the jargon is subrational: it continually places its assertions out of the reach of rational inquiry, either as innuendoes, or rhetorical questions, or presuppositions, or beneath ambiguities that also admit trivial interpretations. I’m not saying that this is a conscious strategy; rather, it is a property of a way of speaking that one cultivates in the same way that one acquires any way of speaking — by listening to the radio, reading pundits, rehearsing lines with other members of the cult, and so on.

He continues as follows:

Phil, this diatribe can only be the result of lack of sleep, or some other medical condition. Why are you so logical, informative and interesting on non-political topics, but rant uncontrollably, name calling, ignoring facts, hypocracy and worse when your man is losing the election, despite Bill Daley’s best efforts to the contrary?

Lack of sleep is a medical condition? Blah blah blah — more broad accusations without evidence. Never mind that I have been offering pretty much the same analysis of the decline of public reason in the United States for a long time, regardless of who has been ahead in the polls.

Then note the reference to Bill Daley. It is a recurring theme of the current party line that Bill Daley’s father engaged in political corruption in Chicago, and that somehow Bill Daley is doing the same thing. What’s noteworthy here is that this slander has been repeated so often in the press that it is now a rhetorical commonplace — something that can be indexed, alluded to, simply by mentioning Bill Daley’s name in an appropriate context. This too is part of a broad pattern in the workings of the jargon. The jargon is not something static; it is very much a process, and through this process the cult members work hard at extending the underlying principles to every topic, every word, every remaining holdout of rational thought. One method by which they do this is, as analysts of propaganda have always said, repetition. But the word “repetition” does not fully capture it — it’s too static a concept. The point of repetition is not just to say the same thing over and over, but to say the same thing in fewer and fewer words, making it more and more of a commonplace, so that it can be alluded to in ever briefer and more indirect ways, so that the very mention of Bill Daley’s name can become a shorthand code for corruption, and deniably so, even though Bill Daley has never even been accused of doing anything wrong beyond choosing the wrong father.

Moving along:

This is NOT hate mail. I don’t know you from Adam. I don’t HATE your silly conclusions — the beauty of this country is that we are entitled to hav differences of opinion. But your willingness to ignore facts, well, that is scary.

Observe how my author, who is manifestly engaged in writing hate mail, sets about redefining the term “hate mail” so as to disassociate it from himself. In order to write hate mail, by his definition, he must know me as an individual well enough to have a particularized hatred of me. But this is not what “hate mail” means. A letter of anti- Semitic diatribes mailed at random to someone named “Blumenthal” who is picked from the phone book would be hate mail. (And this happens.) But now this guy has taken the phrase “hate mail” and twisted it. Note how this works: if I wanted to make claims about what the phrase “hate mail” really means, there is no authority to which I could turn — no dictionary, no official body of scholars. That’s part of how he can get away with it, and it’s also one of the ways in which this kind of rant induces feelings of helplessness in the people upon whom it is inflicted. It’s destructive: in twisting words, this guy is twisting something that is common property, degrading part of the collectively inherited culture. The element of language that he is wrecking lives nowhere else except in the shared culture.

Then, this thing about “ignoring facts”. You’ve read his whole message — he does not present a single fact that I have supposedly ignored. The phrase “ignoring facts” is part of the rhetoric of public relations. Facts (which in practice need not be factual, but never mind about that for now) are what you use to create an association between two concepts, or else to break an association that you do not like. Thus, for example, he attributes to me an association between Gore’s team and clean hands, and between Bush and total wrongness. The “ignored facts” that he has in mind surely take the form of unclean things that Gore or his team have done, or right things that Bush has said. The cult of jargon is not indifferent to facts; quite the contrary it invests tremendous effort in building and circulating them, exactly so that they will be ready when a mental association needs to be built or broken. To the associationistic way of thinking, one single fact is enough to prove an argument, exactly because all of the positions have been reframed in extreme ways. Thus, for example, if I demonstrate that the Bush campaign has been engaged in a campaign of fabrications against Gore, to the associationistic mind it suffices to refute my argument if one can produce a single example, just one, of Bush saying something that’s right or Gore saying something that’s wrong. Never mind that one could use the same logic to “prove” exactly the reverse set of associations.

Finally this, in response to my discussion of the Republican riot in the Miami government building:

By the way, I viewed all the video you cited, as well as other sources. Check out some of the FLA based news sources. Methinks you will agree that your initial description was inaccurate, shall we say?

More snideness, more lack of evidence. To be honest, despite his confident prediction, I haven’t the faintest idea what he is talking about. The video I cited, which is only a few seconds long and shows only a small portion of the events in question, shows running, screaming protesters knocking down a cameraman and pounding their fists against windows and furniture. The Florida based news sources that I cited in abundance on my list describe a great deal of other mayhem organized by the same parties. But I want particularly to remark on the word “inaccurate”. This is another term of art in the public-relations vocabulary of the jargon. In the jargon usage, “inaccurate” does not mean “false”. Rather, PR distinguishes between “messages” and “facts”. “Messages” are strategically vague, and someone else’s “message” is ispo facto “inaccurate” if it conflicts with your own. Of course, you can’t tell from this guy’s e-mail that he meant “inaccurate” in that sense; it is simply that he is consistently using a lexicon and a mode of reasoning that derives from public relations, and “inaccurate” is part of that. The lexicon is like a toolkit, and every word in the toolkit has a function in the rhetorical technology of the jargon.

Let us consider another message that I was fortunate to receive in the course of the current controversy:

Subject: Those 13 “myths”

You are REALLY desperate if you think the American public are stupid enough not to see through this deliberately misinformative “spin”. You are still feverishly campaigning for Gore and the Democratic Party at the expense of truth and justice. Get over it, the time for campaigning is done! Oh, and Leave the exaggerations to Gore himself please, he’s at least funnier with them. You assume too much when you assume we don’t know and understand the undoctored, unspun facts.

I’m sure you understand that to assume makes and ASS out of U and ME, to which I say make an ASS of Uself as much as you please, but leave ME out of it!

As the subject line indicates, this message was apparently sent in response to Rich Cowan’s “13 myths” article presenting the facts that conflict with both the Gore and Bush camps’ mythologies in the early days of the Florida election conflict. I have no idea who the writer is, or even his gender, but I’ll say “he” because almost all of my hate mail on political topics comes from men. I’m not even clear why this guy sent his message to me; I didn’t write the “13 myths” piece, which is clearly credited to Rich. I did forward that piece to my list, and a couple of URL’s to my Web site appear at the bottom of the piece. The point is, this guy sent a message filled with harsh and abusive verbiage out of a clear blue sky to a complete stranger who didn’t even write the article that he is ranting about. This kind of random abuse is not uncommon, and it is certainly part of the political strategy of the jargon, much of whose purpose is to make sane people feel so traumatized that they will keep their mouths shut.

Now, as to the substance of the message. Let’s start with the word “desperate”. This word derived from the party line of that particular week (I got the message on November 30th). Followers of Gore (which he imagines me to be, despite the criticism of Gore in the “13 myths” piece) were held during that week to exhibit “desperation” in pretty much everything they did, and this word was applied to me in at least two dozen messages. When the party line moved along to other words, so did the messages. Yet in that week, the word “desperate” had been repeated so many times, through so many of the literally hundreds of pundits who speak and write the jargon in the national and regional media, that everyone was familiar with it. It was a commonplace, a topos, but a bad sort of topos, one that achieved its effect not through its novelty, freshness, precision, or aptness but precisely through its bluntness, by bludgeoning. Everyone who was attacked with the word “desperate” during that week was made to feel the combined blows of a million abusive cultists, all simultaneously dehumanizing their opponents as if they were a single assailant.

The word “spin” is used in the same way — not as the flavor of the week in this case, but as a trope, that was floated during the impeachment controversy, and that the practitioners of the jargon have worked to attach to their opponents at every opportunity ever since. (Another example, less obvious, is the word “attack”, which some “journalists” associate with Al Gore’s name every chance they get, regardless of whether he has said anything that deserves such a strong word.)

The message goes on to attribute a mental state to me; I am held to have engaged in “deliberately misinformative ‘spin’”, and to regard the American public as stupid enough to believe my conscious lying. This, too, is very common. In order to dehumanize their opponents, it is not enough for cultists to refute their opponents’ arguments; rather, the liberals, like Satan himself, must be made out as liars. This is the deep meaning of the false accusations that Gore is a liar. If you persuade yourself that your opponent is a liar — that his whole being is in its very essence a lie — then you no longer feel any responsibility to take what he says seriously or accountability to the reason in his words. And so my assailant does not accuse me of being mistaken, or stupid, or a dupe, or careless. I am not even accused of deceiving myself. No, I am accused of deliberately and consciously lying. About what, you might ask? He never tells me — having crafted my lies deliberately, he imagines, I already know.

The idea that putative liberals regard the American public as stupid is itself a common conceit of the new jargon. It is something that Rush Limbaugh says constantly.

Next, I am told, I am “still feverishly campaigning for Gore and the Democratic Party at the expense of truth and justice”. Observe the use of the abstract words “truth” and “justice”. Here we have more associationism. The new jargon breaks all thought into atomic elements like these and then arranges them with vague associations and strong emotions. So I am not simply telling particular lies — I am engaged in a generalized war on truth and justice. By now you have probably long forgotten what I actually said that brought us to these primitive sentiments, but that doesn’t matter. The end-point of a rant in the new jargon is always the primal scene of the Satanic liberal engaged in an apocalyptic attack on the broadest, vaguest, most emotionally charged symbols in the world, in this case truth and justice. The logic that connects anything that I actually said to this primitive scene is completely beside the point. As a moral matter it is certainly relevant whether the accusation is true; there does exist such a thing as engaging in a way or truth and justice, and in fact I think that my assailant is doing just that. The point is that he has assailed me in such terms on no rational grounds, and to the extent that his argument has any defeasible sense it is not true.

We are truly staring in the face of madness here, and in a healthy world nobody would even read such things without having an appropriate mental health specialist on call. Note, too, that it is not just my own evil self who is set against truth and justice, but Gore and the Democrats: the situation is constructed such that advocacy for Gore and the Democrats (which, you will recall, is not what the “13 myths” piece was) is ipso facto the opposite of truth and justice. That is the emotional structure of the rant.

Next comes the phrase “Get over it”. This is part of the rhetoric by which one sneers at people for being “victims”. Of course, the jargon recognizes all sorts of legitimate victims: people who are victims of liberals. Victims of conservatives, however, are harshly instructed to quit crying and get over it. (I’ve been accused of “crying” many times in the last month. I feel sorry for these people; I can only imagine what their childhoods were like.) In this case, the theme is not elaborated. “Get over it” has itself been repeated often enough that it is a taken-for-granted element of the rhetorical background. Nobody needs to explain any more how disgusting it is to pose as a “victim”; an aggressor need only invoke a little phrase like this one, and all of the scornful lectures of the past will come flooding back.

Next I am instructed in sarcastic tones to “leave the exaggerations to Gore himself” — “Gore’s exaggerations” having been one of the central messages of the Bush campaign. I have already discussed in detail the disturbed nature of this campaign, in which Gore was falsely accused on many occasions of being a liar. This particular version of the story simply invokes Gore’s supposed exaggerations as a commonplace, and heaps on some extra ridicule. But I do think it’s worth a moment to focus on the last sentence:

You assume too much when you assume we don’t know and understand the undoctored, unspun facts.

The “13 myths” piece, as you may recall, listed various myths that had been put about by both campaigns, and responded to them each with abundantly documented facts. Now, some people responded to that piece by arguing at great and twisted length that these facts were partial or incomplete or did not establishe what Rich was supposely trying to establish by them. But this guy doesn’t go into any of that; that I am a liar is too obvious to need proof, in his view. Instead, he sneers at me that I falsely assume that “we” (who?) don’t know “the undoctored, unspun facts”. This is a fancy thing to say. The “Gore’s exaggerations” campaign was a tidal wave of non- facts, which is to say actual, real lies — Things That Were Not True. And the facts in the “13 myths” piece were, as I say, both abundantly documented and not even contested. The situation, in short, is precisely the reverse of what my assailant alleges them to be. Yet he is ranting at me about “the undoctored, unspun facts”. This phrase must be significant. What are “doctored” facts? What are “spun” facts? As so often in the jargon, each of these two phrases is ambiguous. They could mean that my “facts” are factually false, that is, that they are not facts. Or it could mean that the world contains two categories of facts: those that are doctored or spun, and those that are not. In other words, the possibility is held open here that the facts adduced in the “13 myths” piece really are facts, but that they are nonetheless, in some sense, not legitimate, not real, not part of the correct factual world. It is hard to know.

And to be honest it is not worth investigating. The reality is that this gentleman is doing what he is falsely accusing me of doing, and doing it at the top of his lungs, and is assisted in doing it by a rhetorical technology that makes it easy to lie and to falsely accuse others of lying, without ever saying anything that risks being subjected to rational investigation.

For the sake of completeness, my correspondent riffs on the “assume” theme using a commonplace of vulgar abuse. This last bit is noteworthy, if only slightly, by his instruction that I “leave [him] out of it!”. In what way have I included him in it? I have never sent him anything. Notice, once again, the projection: he is the one who sent unsolicited junk to me.

Let us consider one final message. This one was evidently in response to my discussion of the quotation-out-of-context of Paul Begala by a series of widely-published jargon-slingers. You will recall that a conservative pundit had asserted that the Bush-voting states in the south and middle of the country represented “family values” where the Gore-voting states in the northeast and west represented “entitlement”. Begala responded to this ugly regional stereotyping by explaining that the situation was more complicated, that every region had good and bad, and that various bad things had also occured in the southern and middle states. The point of Begala’s comments was plainly to explode stereotypes, and he was polite about it, praising the conservative pundit in question despite his calumny. A series of pundits then took Begala’s words out of context to suggest that he had stereotyped the Bush- supporting states, as opposed to offering a balanced view in response to stereotyping of the Gore-supporting states. This tactic was the purest projection, and especially so given that Begala’s mis-quoted words were widely put about as reasons why conservatives must act like the vicious animals that the Democrats had supposedly shown themselves to be. In response to this explanation, someone who I know nothing about (and who is not on my mailing list) responded as follows:

Are you serious? You suggest that characterizing one region of the county as believing in entitlements and another region being murders and racists as having equal weight. Get real. The only thing viscious about an entitlement, is that it takes away from producers without their consent and gives to non-producers.

Also, I think it hilarious that a Lib is crying about Republicans falsely acusing Democrats of wrong doing to cover their equal sin. Bill Clinton invented the tatic, (with apologies to Stalin).

By now you are familiar with this tone of scornful irrationality, which pervades American political culture like a 60-cycle hum. People can address their fellow citizens in this way with impunity, with no fear of criticism, but only so long as they are conservatives. Liberals do engage in their own trash-talk, of course, but it is conservatives who can carry on in this harshly abusive tone of voice without anyone calling them on it.

Now, it would be one thing if we had simply learned to screen out a bad attitude. “Oh, you know, they’re like that. Just ignore them.” But it’s worse than that. In ignoring the awful tone of voice, we also ignore the howling unreason that boils below it, and that gets insidiously into our minds through repeated pelting with it. So it’s important that we slow the rhetoric down so that the irrationality becomes visible for what it is.

He says this:

You suggest that characterizing one region of the county as believing in entitlements and another region being murders and racists as having equal weight. Get real. The only thing viscious about an entitlement, is that it takes away from producers without their consent and gives to non-producers.

Never mind the guy’s bad grammar, or the bad spelling in the other messages. That’s not the important thing; besides, my own messages to this list often have bits of bad grammar as a result of hurried editing. What’s important is the poor logic of the accusation.

Let’s start with the second part. To paraphrase the tone of the accusation that the pundits had issued against Begala, I had used the word “vicious” to describe the original stereotyping of liberal states in terms of “entitlement”. But this guy addresses a different question, whether an attitude of entitlement, or more precisely its implementation in government policy, is itself vicious — switching the issue, in other words, from the viciousness of the stereotypers to the putative viciousness of the people who were being stereotyped. That particular bit of bad logic, however, is probably just sloppy. Despite the slickness of the change of topic, I’m not sure that this particular bit of sophistry is characteristic of the new jargon in general. At least I’m not aware of it being a pattern.

The sophistry of the first part, however, is a different story. I am accused of having equated morally unequal stereotypes, that of Begala and that of the pundit to whom Begala was responding. The accusation only makes sense if did in fact Begala characterize an entire region of the country as being murderers and racists. But (1) Begala did not do that, and (2) my whole point was that Begala did not do that, so that logically I could not be suggesting anything that presupposes it.

The illogic here was so severe that I couldn’t help inquiring: but Begala did not say that, I said. That was something that was imposed on him through quotation out of context. He responded as follows:

Paul Begala (excuse the spelling) wasn’t trying to make a clever and cerebral comment. I truly believe that this is the way the man thinks. Furthermore, painting people in certain states or regions as racists and bigots is exactly what he wants to do, because he knows it is devisive. That’s the way his ilk work. Divide people, by lying and scaring them. Then use them.

The argument is no longer that Begala stereotyped people, but rather that he harbored a hidden intention of stereotyping them, that being the sort of person he is. The method here is obviously similar to the previous writer’s accusation that I was consciously lying, except that it goes a step further: this guy knows what Begala had in mind, even though it was the opposite of what he both said and did. Begala had explicitly denounced regional stereotypes; that was his whole point. But this guy just knows the opposite. He went on to claim that he had not encountered Begala’s words through the filtering of the pundits, but had seen their original complete context on MSNBC, and that he had come up with his interpretation independently. I don’t doubt this. Part of an apprenticeship in the jargon is learning how to interpret everything you hear and read in terms of projections about the evil intent of the people involved.

Although it’s probably too obvious to even deserve mention, I’ll mention anyway the projection involved in stereotyping “his ilk” in this ugly fashion, precisely by accusing them of stereotyping — but not just any stereotyping, but by accusing others of stereotyping. Are you following me? Paul Begala denounces stereotyping, but what he is actually doing (my assailant tells me) is stereotyping people as people who engage in stereotyping. The author is engaged in projection, which involves falsely accusing your opponent of doing what you’re doing, except in this case the projection is two-deep: he’s stereotyping Begala’s ilk as a people who stereotype people as engaging in stereotyping. That probably went by a little too fast, so I’ll slow it down: Begala did indeed accuse the pundit in question (Mike Barnicle) of having stereotyped whole regions of the country, but the accusation was a true one. Barnicle did in fact issue such a stereotype. Except now Begala is falsely accused of stereotyping people as stereotyping. By this double-reverse wrist action, my correspondent has been able to duck the whole question of whether Begala’s accusation was true, and instead to attribute to him a generalized practice of accusing people of being racists and bigots. He says that Begala’s method works “by lying and scaring [people]” — even though what Begala said was true! Pretty fancy, I have to say. Now, of course this guy didn’t invent any of what he’s doing. He probably doesn’t even understand it very well. The point is, there’s no way that he could have produced this incredibly sophisticated paragraph without having worked really hard to cultivate a jargon that would trash the reason of any sane person.

His final comment is a lower-grade version of the basic technique:

Also, I think it hilarious that a Lib is crying about Republicans it falsely acusing Democrats of wrong doing to cover their equal sin. Bill Clinton invented the tatic, (with apologies to Stalin).

Speakers of the jargon very often describe themselves as laughing at their opponents, or more twistedly they accuse their opponents of lacking the capacity to laugh at themselves. Here what he’s laughing about is another double- reverse version of the projection tactic: I, a supposed liberal, am “crying” (that word again) about Republican projection, Bill Clinton having really been the one who invented it. (Um, except that maybe Stalin did, or maybe he didn’t, or something — the point simply being to associate Clinton with Stalin somehow.)

Accusing Bill Clinton of having started it is of course a staple of the jargon; it’s a variety of projection that requires no real proof, such is the infinite evil of the Great Liar, that infinite sink for all possible projection. (For example, Clinton is often accused of having invented the “permanent campaign”, even though the guy who wrote the book of that title did so in 1980.) The fact is, of course, that neither Clinton nor the cult invented the general technique of projection, which is found anywhere and everywhere in human history that people engage in aggression despite a culture that claims to disapprove of it. So I’m not just talking about doubletalk, or unfairness, or false accusations, or bias, or lack of objectivity, or propaganda as general matters. What the modern cult of the American far right did invent was this specific jargon, this specific way of emotionally assaulting people with the aim of crushing their reason and one’s own. And it is this jargon that I am trying to flush out into the open.

Now, it may seem like absurd overkill to expend all of this time and intellectual precision analyzing the rantings of people that most of us probably have no respect for anyway. Aren’t I swatting flies with cannons here? I’m really not. I’m not writing this message simply because someone said something mean to me and made me feel bad. I’m writing this message, simply put, because the jargon I have been describing is everywhere. If I’m hallucinating, if other people have not been suffering from the assaults of this deranged cult, then my effort is wasted — nobody will have any idea what I am talking about. But if others have had the same experience, and I believe that millions upon millions of normal Americans have this sort of experience on a regular basis, then my goal is to provide names for things that have heretofore been largely nameless. I do not want this jargon to succeed, and it can only succeed by taking over people’s minds. Everyone’s mind has its breaking point, and there is no shame in succumbing to the waves of vitriolic nonsense. And there is hope for those who have succumbed, if any humanity remains in them. But hope grows dim with time, and as the madness takes over more and more of our public discourse. When I read the newspaper today, I see dead people. I see vampires feeding on my country. I have no power to make them stop. What I can do, however, is to shine a light on them, and that’s what I’m trying to do here.

end