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Saturday, August 20, 2005
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UD has a theory… as to why the Democratic party’s in such bad shape (everybody in the blogosphere and beyond lately seems to be writing about what the Democrats can do to start winning elections again). Her theory doesn’t explain everything, but might have some modest value. Democrats today are both too happy and too sad. The happiness as well as the sadness tend to make them passive and apolitical, and as a result the party lacks the passionate involvement it needs from people in order to get somewhere. I Too Happy The Democrats are too happy because millions of them are rich winners. It doesn’t matter to their way of life whether Clinton or Bush is in the White House -- the salient thing is their dreamworld of affluence, ease, and fun. To be sure, they sign large checks and give them to Democrats, but money isn’t everything, as a writer in New Left Review recently pointed out in talking about what he calls the blue plutocracy: [T]he Democratic Party is a vehicle of reaction, not out of error or lack of wit, but because it is a machine largely controlled by the super-rich, who are perfectly capable of understanding their own interests. People aren’t just voting expressively for the party that seems to speak for their values; they’re also voting resentfully against the rich winners. As Frank writes, “people know that in everyday life they are being screwed in a hundred ways, and that the people who benefit from this screwing are the ones they see driving Volvos and drinking lattes and enjoying life in Bethesda [UD’s hometown] or Georgetown or wherever.” Just one example along these lines from the university world, bastion of blue. In a recent interview, Camille Paglia points out that [U]niversities have permitted in the last 40 years and all the media sat on its hands on this, the growth of a bureaucratic master class of administrators. More and more deans who are making fortunes and also the salaries at the Ivy League are astronomical. People are making $200,000 and families are bankrupting themselves to pay for these bills. There should be a national outrage... Another Democrat at TPM Café writes that “while liberals are steadfastly supportive of racial equality, all too many are outright contemptuous of working class white people. I think we all know that. I think we all hear ‘white trash’ bandied about by people with ‘Free Tibet’ on their car bumpers. My point here is that people are generally very sensitive to the fact that someone despises them…. Social attitudes bred by Harvard are not compatible with any broad-based social movement… When people look at the most prominent Democrats, they don’t see themselves. What they see are the Harvard-educated limo-libs of the entitlement class, who for God knows what reason are trotted out as party spokespersons.” Yet another writer says that Democrats “are prone to be elitist. They come from places such as California and Massachusetts who harbor class contempt for hayseeds living in fly-over country. Witness Michael Moore’s characterization of ‘Jesusland’ after the 2004 elections.” Again Paglia, who got at this a few years ago: “The Kennedys want it both ways. They want their exclusive life, and they want the pretense that they speak for the people. But of course that’s the hypocrisy of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that we’re now going to be examining with the potential senatorial candidacy of Hillary Clinton in New York. It’s long overdue -- a real shakedown that exposes the arrogance and insularity of the lifestyle not only of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party but of their media cohorts.” Millions of Democrats, in other words, look around themselves, look at their lives, and see nothing but glory. These are the people who’ve been sitting tight for a couple of years in the house they bought for $500,000 and are about to sell it for two million. When your life is that beautiful, you lose the fire in your belly. UD’s point is not to complain that many Democrats are successful people. It’s great to be successful. Her point is that success in the blue regions is so over the top that people have become complacent and self-involved, behavior alienating to the rest of the country, and behavior at odds with social commitment generally. II Too Sad One major sign of this self-involvement is the way in which psychotherapy, and a general struggle toward yet higher degrees of personal happiness, has replaced larger worldly struggles. Democratic elites tend to be inwardly rather than outwardly directed . They contemplate themselves, not the world. They believe it’s worth a lot of their time and money for them to be in therapy and talk about their unhappiness over having had a judgmental father and a neurotic mother. No matter how privileged and happy you are, you can always be more privileged and happy. Thus the literature that dominates this culture has, Paglia points out, “drifted into a compulsive telling of any trauma that you can find in your life. Prozac --‘I’m taking Prozac.’ - or divorce or diseases or whatever. Endless kvetching. It’s a style of telling of woes and the potential range of literature is being neglected…” To other Americans, the ideology of therapy and restless self-fashioning toward total happiness which dominates the belief system of Democratic elites is another expression of the elites’ sense of superiority, and their eagerness to indulge in their own comfort. Most non-blue Americans find their belief system not in psychology but in religion of one sort or another. Their religion is a collective belief system, not an individual one like psychotherapy. Democratic elites are not shy about expressing their contempt for the group-oriented religion of the majority of Americans, even as they fail to see the flimsiness of Freudian faith, whose simple-minded dogma has it that happy people are repressing something and that Christians and Jews are infantile. Frank Furedi points out the tendency on the part of blue Americans to reduce political discourse to psychoanalysis, as the current Democratic guru, George Lakoff, does when he “characterises Bush supporters as dominated by a ‘strict father morality’ which is hostile to ‘nurturance and care.’” Justin Frank performed the same reduction in his book, Bush on the Couch, a spectacularly vulgar psychoanalysis of the president which probably did as much for the Republican cause in the last election as any brilliant Roveian strategy. |