The Grey Ghost Rides Again.
My fiction class thought it odd today that I wanted to read _The Dead_ in terms of last night’s election. Stanley Fish, surely, would have fired me on the spot. I didn’t press the issue too hard or for more than a few minutes, but Joyce’s story concerns a rural vs. urban divide within which the intellectual protagonist becomes hopelessly tangled as he tries to fake a kind of cultural authenticity, to win the approval of his bourgeois family and his “country-cute” wife. Ultimately, it’s Ireland’s old folk-traditions and memories — to which he has no real access — that re-emerge on the sudden, to foil Gabriel, and render him absurd at the moment of his anticipated triumph, when he had hoped to win final acceptance and recognition. Gabriel had no answer to the Dead.
It was hard for me not to see the grey ghost of the Confederacy on the march last night. Like the flesh-and-blood Tyrannosaurus that demolishes the dinosaur museum in Jurassic Park, last night seemed like a moment of uncanny triumph for the evangelical right — a twentieth century Birth of a Nation. That the Republican win was driven by God, an anti-Muslim crusade, homophobia, and a desire to a abolish the church-state relationship made this North/South battle far different from contests like Bush Sr. vs. Dukakis. Really Paleolithic.
I don’t have the energy to write much about this. I’m finishing off a chapter, and I’ve been followed all day by a muscle tension headache. But I do think that a lot of what I said about Allan Bloom and Liberal Education is worth noting here. A really good essay could be written to show how Neo-conservative “Liberals” cut from the cloth of Allan Bloom’s “Illiberal Education’ have quietly gone on to define not just the Bush Presidency, but to frame the entire national public discourse, while “Liberals” in the Political sense of the word have virtually vanished.
But are liberalism and radicalism really so easily separable? Or does the example of the Straussian “Liberals” demonstrate the viability of liberalism as a *method* rather than a ideology that merely points to a finally moderate political outcome?
In the face of the last night’s display, it seems that a widespread defense of and retrenchment around critical and rational “Liberal” thought itself is required. H.G. Wells described history as a race between education and catastrophe — last night it was depressingly clear which is in the lead.
November 3rd, 2004 at 11:39 pm
Nice post, I like the connection to “The Dead.” I’m teaching a story on Vietnam tomorrow…I think I also might be able to make some pedagogical connections to the election and its international aftermath. I must admit, as I was watching election coverage last night and saw NC go to the red column early in the evening, I kept thinking “why, oh why didn’t Kerry pick Gephardt???” Those 11 Missouri electoral votes would have really helped the cause. I hope the Dems have learned to pick a running mate for their candidates who will carry a state, or at least who have a chance of doing so.
November 4th, 2004 at 9:49 am
Err. Erg. Must…stop….self…from going into Gephardt-based rant…
Well, ok, too late. With Gephardt Kerry would almost certainly have won not just Missouri, but also Iowa and Ohio. But sadly Gephardt was too boring and midwestern for the blogging hipster-types who managed to steer the Kerry campaign right into the ground on the basis of sheer cultural prejudice.
Spilt milk now, I guess.
November 4th, 2004 at 12:06 pm
I hate to disagree, but I don’t think Gephardt would have made a difference in Missouri. While Kerry did really well in the major urban areas of the state, it was the support for Bush everywhere else outside those areas that made all the difference. Conservative voters were galvanized, earlier in the year, by an election that put an anti-gay marriage amendment into the state constitution and, in the general election, by races for governor, the senate, and the house that framed themselves in terms of similar moral choices thereby keeping the momentum from the run up to the earlier election from dissipating. I don’t see how Gephardt would have made any difference in the face of that. And I point to the rather large majority by which Bush won the state, but also the rather clean sweep that republicans made of the major races (in many cases by similarly large majorities) as evidence. As I understand Ohio, it was the support Bush had outside the cities that won the state for him, support I think once again galvanized by the moral questions in which Bush framed this election rather than the appeal to self-interest Kerry was always harping on in talking about job losses.
And while sheer cultural prejudice had more than a little role in Kerry’s defeat (look at how solidly the south and mountain states went for Bush, to say nothing of rural areas) I really blame Kerry himself. He changed campaign management at least three times and thus muddied the waters, so to speak. Look at the breadth of issues that he tried to address. He simply never found a focus as concentrated as Bush did and so was never able to play to an attention deprived audience as Bush did. The genius/horror of Bush’s campaign is that the way he framed the issues in terms of simple moral binaries removed all need for critical thought from the process. The gay marriage question on the state ballots really helped to drive this home and helped mobilize that conservative christian base that wasn’t there for him in 2000. Ultimately, I think it was this crossing of the social and political, the synergy that was set up between issues like gay marriage and the war in Iraq (reduced down to a simple moral binary), that made the difference. Democrats like Kerry collapse the two because they have too strong a belief in reality and so put themselves at a tactical and strategic disadvantage. By which I mean there is something to be said for making the world up wholecloth, as Bush did. I think the Democrats success in 2006 and 2008 will depend on how well they come to recognize this. In retrospect, the monomaniacal politics of Howard Dean (sorry AI) would have played much better this election. That’s the cynical take.
But then again, the above assertion about the democrats is premised on accepting Bush’s election as the status quo, something I think we absolutely need not do. Remember Kerry got 56,000,000 votes! There is a population out there that was mobilized to try and make a change. The organization to connect with them is already in place. How effectively the Democrats make use of what this election has given them will probably be the bigger factor next time around. And that effectivity is going to depend, in large part, on keeping the level of discourse up. Obviously, it impacted people regardless of “cultural bias,” which I think I am increasingly coming to see as a red herring precisely because it means buying into the Bush status quo.
In any event, a very eloquent post Washburn. See ya on Saturday.
November 4th, 2004 at 4:00 pm
Check out the editorial at http://gadflyer.com/articles/print.php?ArticleID=256 A good take, I think, on where we go from here.
November 4th, 2004 at 5:08 pm
I’m glad I saw that editorial. That’s certainly a more practical place to go from here than Canada, which was the best idea I had come up with.
I still find it impossible to believe that half the country is opposed to gay marriage and really thinks Bush would be the better president. Call me naive, but I’m thankful I’m not around that ignorance on a daily basis.
November 4th, 2004 at 9:03 pm
Yeah Tom. Still, Gephardt understands exactly what you’re talking about (and I think he clearly knew this before the election, too). But in any case you are exactly right about the dangers of accepting the status quo. Note the insanity of an essay such as this (if you have a Salon subscription or are willing to watch an ad). There’s a lot of this kind of stuff around now, and I think it needs to be resisted. But the article does note accurately that progressives face a choice: to either promote or abandon reason as a way of making their arguments. The fact that the author chooses the latter of these choice point to a despair that obviously must be rejected.