The Cult of Bushism...
Greenwald's post had two main points. The first was this:
It used to be the case that in order to be considered a "liberal" or someone "of the Left," one had to actually ascribe to liberal views on the important policy issues of the day – social spending, abortion, the death penalty, affirmative action, immigration, "judicial activism," hate speech laws, gay rights, utopian foreign policies, etc. etc. These days, to be a "liberal," such views are no longer necessary.
Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a "liberal," regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based.
This he admirably demonstrates and further defends in a follow-up post, aptly titled,
"Follow-up to the Bush post yesterday". But it's the second point that is problematic--the claim that's summarized here:
A movement which has as its shining lights a woman who advocates the death of her political opponents, another woman who is a proponent of concentration camps, a magazine which advocates the imprisonment of journalists who expose government actions of dubious legality, all topped off by a President who believes he has the power to secretly engage in activities which the American people, through their Congress, have made it a crime to engage in, is a movement motivated by lots of different things. Political ideology isn't one of them.
Of course, there
are political ideologies that match what Greenwald so neatly describes: the Divine Right of Kings, the Führerprinzip, fascism, etc. They are not ideologies we commonly think of in the American context, but they are ideologies, and the American context is clearly changing in ways that most people still cannot seem to grasp.
In short, Greenwald is, quite simply, relying on too narrow a conception of what ideology can be. But he also has a too-narrow idea of the phenomena. It's not just about Bush.
And Beyond
In this second post, Greenwald writes:
There are conservatives who criticize Bush on a whole host of issues, either on the ground of ineptitude or because what Bush is doing is the very antithesis of conservatism. And they are treated as outcasts and traitors, and considered no longer to be real conservatives. That is one of the principal points of the post.
Here is an example of a kind of intellectually honest conservative I was describing, Matthew Regent, who explains his perspective in a comment here:
I'm a Republican and a conservative. I voted for Bush twice. I didn't want to the second time, but it was a two-horse race, and the other horse was Carter redux. I disapprove of Bush's job performance and have more than once been called a liberal or equivalent on conservative blogs as a consequence, despite my beliefs, which put me solidly in the moderate-conservative portion of the political spectrum.
I disapprove of Bush's presidency for a number of reasons, including fiscal recklessness, the misprosecution of the GWOT, the nationalization of issues like education and marriage, and general incompetence on the issues, from Katrina to Miers. Frankly, I don't think Bush is much of a conservative himself. I think he's a low-tax liberal who gets along with religious people at home and a Wilsonian abroad.
And yet when I say as much to many Bush supporters, I'm the one who is branded the liberal, the troll, etc. Bushism IS a personality cult.
Now, I think that Regent is certainly right in his main point. But there's a little problem with his criticism of Bush: they apply to Reagan and other conservatives as well. Fiscal recklessness? Reagan
invented it. Nationalization of isuess like education and marriage? How about crime and pornography? Wasn't the nationalization of such previously local issues a key element in the conservative backlash that brought Reagan to power?
As for incompetence--even corruption--Reagan surely had his share of it, too. More top officials indicted--and convicted--than you can shake a stick at. Iran-Contra, the S&L Scandal, James Watt, etc. Not a pretty picture if you look at the record, rather than the biopic.
In fact, conservatism as a whole leaves a lot to be desired as an ideology--not just in terms of whether I agree with it (I don't), but in terms of plain old-fashioned coherence.
A Brief Sprint Through History
Once upon a time--in the 30s, 40s and 50s--conservatism used to be significantly more coherent. It was also wildly unpopular--despite all the people who called themselves "conservatives". LBJ beat Goldwater 60-40 in 1964, for example. And so a mighty effort was begun to overhaul conservatism, and remake it into a more palatable brand.
A good foundation came from plain old racism. Harnessing the white backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, and the legislation and court rulings that came from it, Nixon rode to power with his "Southern Strategy." But, at the same time, Nixon--one of the rawest bigots to ever sit in the Oval Office--knew that old fashioned racism was a thing of the past. "Law and order" was a frame that allowed Nixon to lump together all the demonized elements as threats to America that he and Spiro would protect against. Inner city blacks, anti-war protesters, dope-smoking hippies--"law and order" was the answer to them all. And if that meant the nationalization of formerly local issues, so be it. And if Nixon and Agnew were the biggest crook team to ever occupy the White House, well, that was part of the package, too.
Reagan's contribution was what George HW Bush called "voodoo economics." Before voodoo economics (a slur against Vodun, to be sure) conservative economics had been gloomy. It was all about how we couldn't afford things. But with the supply-side myth of tax cuts paying for themselves, suddenly conservatives became the free lunch crowd, while liberals--concerned about skyrocketing deficits--were turned into Grinch-like figures.
These are just a few of the broad brush strokes involved. The end result is nothing like your grandfather's conservatism. It reached that state before George W even entered Texas politics, and Reagan was its cult-like figure who could do no wrong.
In short, the remaking of conservatism to enhance its appeal has a long history, and a tendency towards cultishness. The syndrome that Greenwald is pointing to is not just "Bushism." That is just its current focus.
To place this all in a larger perspective, I suggest two helpful frameworks. First, an historical framework provided by erstwhile GOP guru Kevin Phillips. Second, a political psychology framework derived from several different lines of research.
The Kevin Phillips Diagnosis
Kevin Phillips wrote two books that shed light on the above. The first is Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. One aspect of the book is the parallels it draws with 3 previous world powers--Spain, Holland and Britain. A significant portion of this material is available here. The super-brief version of this survey is a repeated pattern of broadly-shared prosperity, leading to a peak of power, at which point a rude shock is delivered, which turns each great power into a reactionary political direction for roughly two generations. During this time, political elites realize even higher levels of prosperity as speculation and finance become the driving engines of the economy, while the great mass of the people see their incomes and prospects decline. In the end, the corruption and betrayal of the people becomes too much, and a more egalitarian regime is established... but only after the height of power has been spent--or rather, mis-spent.
This certainly tracks well with the American experience, and "reactionary" rather than "conservative" is a good way to describe Reagan's politics.
The second book is American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. In this book, Phillips combines an historical account of the rise of the Bush dynasty over four generations with an astute read of the nature of America today. What we are witnessing, he argues, is the politics of restoration, akin to the Bourbons and the Stuarts. It is underpinned by a broad fascination with wealth, especially dynastic wealth, which began with a vengeance during the Reagan years, as witnessed, for example, by the popularity of shows like Dynasty.
The cultishness and nepotism of restoration is evident in passages such this:
Family credentials and a powerful financial donor network had been the basis of the new president's nomination, and family connections quickly became a fount of federal appointments, including two for children of the five pro-Bush Supreme Court justices: Janet Rehnquist, daughter of the chief justice, became inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, while Eugene Scalia, son of Justice Antonin Scalia, became solicitor of the Department of Labor.
The resurgence of the divine right of kings doctrine is also noted:
Part of Scalia's objection to democracy, amplified a year later, was that it got in the way of a return to an eighteenth-century interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Speaking at the January 2002 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, he opined that as written in 1787 the Constitution reflected natural or divinely inspired law that the state was an instrument of "God. "That consensus has been upset," he said, "by the emergence of democracy." He added that "the reactions of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it but resolution to combat it as effectively as possible "
(Of course, America was
actually founded by liberals who based their theory of government on Locke's social contract--the secular humanist antithesis of the divine right of kings ideology. But that's Scalia for you.)
The upshot of all this is that what we're seeing is not "traditional conservatism" (whatever that may be), but a very particular, very strained sort of politics that recurs across history when elites beat back the tide of democracy, at least for a time. Under this sort of strain, they do not have the broad confidence that the world is with them, and that their rule represents the natural order of things. They are God's warriors in the world, if not against the world, and this high-strung, high-stakes vision quite naturally invests extraordinary faith and trust in those it deems annointed by God.
The WOT greatly reinforces this tendency, as Georgia10 notes over at DKos:
Like many of you, it's hard for me to understand how a core percentage of the American people are so quick to sacrifice their constitutional rights in the name of fighting terrorism. Reflecting on the question of why it is so, it's clear it's due in large part to Bush's framing of the war on terror as a fight between good vs. evil. Such a characterization has served to cast both sides in absolute terms. The terrorists are pure evil, soulless creatures with no affect who seek only to wreak death and havoc upon this earth. On the flip side, those who wage war against the terrorists are not only "good," but so righteous and pure in their crusade that they can do no wrong. That is the brilliance of Bush's strategy from the beginning--casting himself as the bearer of all things good in this fight, he has convinced his followers that there is not a shred of evil in his actions. Every act, no matter how repulsive it may to our innate sense of decency, becomes "good" because it is performed by those who fight evil.
This leads us directly to our next frame of reference--that of political psychology.
Political Pychology, Pt1: Melanie Klein
The division of the world into absolute good and evil is rooted in the most primative of psychological processes, present from infancy and first elucidated by Melanie Klein--splitting and projective identification:
Splitting (DSM-IV, pg. 757). The individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by compartmentalizing opposite affect states and failing to integrate the positive and negative qualities of the self or others into cohesive images. Because ambivalent affects cannot be experienced simultaneously, more balanced views and expectations of self or others are excluded from emotional awareness. Self and object images tend to alternate between polar opposites: exclusively loving, powerful, worthy, nurturant, and kind--or exclusively bad, hateful, angry, destructive, rejecting, or worthless.
Projective identification (DSM-IV, pg. 756). The individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by falsely attributing to another his or her own unacceptable feelings, impulses, or thoughts. Unlike simple projecion, the individual does not fully disavow what is projected. Instead, the individual remains aware of his or her own affects or impulses but misattributes them as justifiable reactions to the other person. Not infrequently, the individual induces the very feelings in others that were first mistakenly believed to be there, making it difficult to clarify who did what to whom first.
In Kleinian psychology, there are two fundamental "positions"--the Paranoid Schizoid Position and the Depressive Position. Splitting and projective identification are dominant in the Paranoid Schizoid Position, while an integration of opposites characterizes the Depressive Position.
This somewhat dense text contains a relatively lucid description of how these concepts fit together:
Klein argues that the young infant possesses a rudimentary ego which "largely lacks cohesion" and "has a tendency towards integration alternating with a tendency towards disintegration, a falling into bits" (Klein, 1946/1994, p. 140). This early ego's primary function, like the later, more fully developed ego, is to manage anxiety. However, in this primitive mode of experience, Klein imagines the infant as suffering severe destructive impulses which are directed at the breast, as mentioned earlier, which fragments the breast into "bits." This hated breast is split-off from the loved breast, which Klein associated with wholeness (Klein, 1946, p. 142). In this sense, Klein's notion of "splitting" is largely understood as a spatial phenomenon, in which the breast is spatially fragmented. However, she later acknowledged that this phenomenon may also involve breaks in temporal continuity (Klein, 1946, p. 142, footnote). This defense of "splitting" enables the infant to ward off anxiety by experiencing the loving breast as wholly other than the hated, persecutory breast. Further, Klein argues that such a split in the external object is impossible without a subsequent split in the infant's ego, which also becomes defensively severed into "good" and "bad" aspects. While the "bad" breasts give rise to persecutory fear, the "good" breasts are idealized and introjected to protect the infant from persecution.
Eventually, says Klein, the infant's oral-sadistic attacks on the mother's breast become generalized to other part-objects of the mother's body, before the mother comes to be perceived as a whole person. Further, these attacks take on both an oral and anal/urethral character. The oral impulse attacks the mother in phantasies of sucking dry, biting up, scooping out, and robbing the mother's body of its good content, while the anal and urethral impulses aim to expel "dangerous substances (excrements) out of the self and into the mother." (Klein, 1946/1994, p. 144) It is from out of this conception of anal and urethral impulses that Klein first developed the concept of "projective identification"
Now, of course it won't do to just ignore people's arguments and instead describe their behavior in terms of infantile psychology. But when rational argument repeatedly fails, when clearly established facts are routinely ignored or denied, when discredited lies are resurrected, when contradictions spew forth with a density appoaching that of a neutron star, then it
can help to
supplement a rational analysis of the content with a psychological analysis of what in blazes is going on inside those very addled heads. Klein offers one form of understanding. But it's a good deal more general than we would like to describe whatever it is that Greenwald is pointing to.
Political Psychology, Pt2: Developmental Psych
And so we move on to a completely different tradition in psychology--the developmental approach pioneered by Jean Piaget. Piaget was the father of "genetic epistemology," meaning the study of the development of knowledge, which Piaget found to be organized in a series of stages.
Piaget was focused on how children learned to function in the world. His work was expanded by Lawerence Kohlberg, who developed a related model of moral development. At the same time, other psychologists, such as Erickson and Maslow, also developed stage-based theories of psychological development. Robert Kegan, a student of Kohlberg's, developed his own, more general developmental model, which sought to integrate the major outstanding models into a single framework that also applied to pyschotherapy and education.
Kegan achieves this integration by taking a step back, and realizing that there is a constant subject/object schema describing the self at all stages. Subject is what one is; object is what one has. What is subject at one stage becomes object at the next. Thus, Kegan's developmental model can be neatly summarized thus:
0. Incorporative stage (Ends ~ 2yrs)
* Subject: reflexes
* Object: nothing
1. Impulsive stage (Ends ~ 5-7 yrs)
* Subject: impulses, perceptions
* Object: reflexes
2. Imperial stage (Ends ~ 12-16 yrs)
* Subject: needs, interests, desires
* Object: impulses, perceptions
3. Interpersonal stage
* Subject: interpersonal relationships, mutuality
* Object: needs, interests, desires
4. Institutional stage
* Subject: authorship, identity, ideology
* Object: interpersonal relationships, mutuality
5. Inter-individual stage
* Subject: "the interpenetrability of self-systems"
* Object: authorship, identity, ideology
Notice what appears at level four? Ideology! This is crucial, as we'll see in a moment. But first let's lay some groundwork.
You'll notice ending ages for the first three levels, but not after. That's because the last three levels all correspond to adult levels of functioning. In most traditional societies, Kegan observes, Level 3 is normal adulthood. People are defined by their social roles and relationships. It is only as societies get more complex that challenges arise which demand a higher level of functioning. Level 4 corresponds to meeting the challenges of the modern world, and Level 5 to meeting thos of the post-modern world. Yet, even in today's world, only about half of all adults are at levels 4 or 5. Hence the title of his most comprehensive book, In Over Our Heads: the Mental Demands of Modern Life.
Level 3 is a good fit with traditional conservatism. The Level 3 self is defined by their social relations. In micro, this means their family and close friends. In macro, it means the social mores of their society. The Level 3 self lacks the capacity to stand outside these relationsips (on the micro level) or mores (on the macro) to critique or alter them. They can only be accepted or rejected. It is only by developing into Level 4 that these relationships become object, and thus subject to inspection and manipulation. Part of the means for doing this is ideology--an organized structure of thought that stands apart from the concrete social setting one was born and raised in.
Two points here need to be kept in mind. First, that a "good fit" doesn't mean direct causality. For example, a social system could be warlike and hierarchical, or peaceful and egalitarian. Either way, the Level 3 self would have no capacity to stand outside that system. They would be functional conservatives, regardless of whether the ideology inherent in their society was liberal or conservative. Another example Kegan gives is in pedagogic approaches. Whether one uses "traditional" or "progressive" teaching methods, Kegan demonstrates, is completely independent of the level at which one functions.
And yet--point two--a good fit does mean something. Liberalism is a political philosophy of personal autonomy, which corresponds quite directly to the capacity to choose that appears at Level 4. Conservatism is a political philosophy of social conformity, which corresponds to the very nature of the Level 3 self. Someone can grow up in a very liberal social setting, and think of themselves as a "liberal," even though they are functioning at Level 3. But someone functioning at Level 4, from the same background, will have much deeper, more integrated experience of what that means.
While Kegan speaks of Levels 3, 4 and 5 as being adult levels, other approaches raise the possibility that Level 2 can persist into adulthood. And, indeed, that's precisely what I think we see with Restoration Politics. Certainly, we have the sense with Bush himself that he never really grew up. The frat boy is still there. Not even hiding "in there," but right there on the surface.
Level 2 is a good fit with The Divine Right of Kings, with the Führerprinzip, with fascism, with narcissistic personality disorder.
The account Kevin Phillips gives us of the Bush family and the current political climate is quite consistent with this. The more hierarchical a society becomes, the more attenuated are the bonds and norms that constitute the Level 3 self. Those at the center--those most privileged--experience this breakdown most intensely. For them, it may be a source of psychological distress, but is definitely a source of liberation: there is quite literally, nothing to constrain them, as Bush's sorry history in Texas National Guard so vividly reminds us.
Level 3 allows for significant inconsistencies. It's commonplace for a social system to be rationalized with different rules for people in different social stations. And thus, the "logic" applied to one group of people is likely to be quite different from another. But at least Level 3 has rationalizations. Level 2 just has slogans and self-justifications.
This is because the Level 2 individual has no concept of the inner life of others, and cannot even imagine what a plausible rationalization would sound like.
The link to the Imperial Self above contains the following:
"Imperial" because there is an absence of a shared reality with others....
Can't imagine the feelings of other's interior responses (empathy)
* Only understand consequences of external behavior
* What will happen if someone finds out.
Bush/Rove anyone?
Of course, someone at Level 2 can parrot a rationalization if they find it useful. But this is a purely instrumental act. They don't actually believe the rationalization, which is why it really isn't a rationalization in the common sense of the word. And this is why we get second order contradictions from them. First order contradictions come from Level 3--applying different rules to different people, based on unexamined assumptions derived from one's social setting. Second order contradictions come from Level 3--mimicking first order contradictions, without awareness of how they will be perceived. So long as there is sufficient power on their side, it simply doesn't matter how their contradictory rationales are received. They are repeated, simply because this is what is done. This is the essence of the Führerprinzip.
Naturally, the vast majority of conservatives are not at Level 2, but Level 3. The advancement of Level 2 ideology causes considerable strain (if not existential panic) for them. And this is where the Kleinian processes of splitting and projective identification come in. This is where traditional conservatives either buckle, or get demonized. It is where "The individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by falsely attributing to another his or her own unacceptable feelings, impulses, or thoughts."
I could say much, much more about all this, but I've already said much, much more than I intended when I began. But here is the bottom line: what we are seeing is not "conservatism" in any traditional sense. But we have not seen tradtional conservatism in a very, very long time. What we are seeing is reactionary politics on steroids.
The original reactionaries were reacting against the Enlightenment. But with Bush's assertion of the unitary executive, he is pushing the point of reaction much further back--to 1215, and the Magna Carta. And when he plays guitar while New Orleans drowns, well, can fire and fiddle be far behind?
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