{"id":13,"date":"2002-11-06T12:55:00","date_gmt":"2002-11-06T17:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=13"},"modified":"2002-11-06T12:55:00","modified_gmt":"2002-11-06T17:55:00","slug":"post-postmodern-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=13","title":{"rendered":"Post-postmodern politics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Democratic Party fell off a cliff last night.  Never mind their<br \/>\nshiny new governorships &mdash; the `smart&#8217; money pre-election was on<br \/>\nthem picking up an absolute majority of governor&#8217;s seats, and at the<br \/>\nCongressional level they took a shellacking nearly as bad as 1994&#8217;s.<br \/>\nThe races Terry McAuliffe targeted as most critical &mdash; notably<br \/>\nthe Florida governorship &mdash; were all lost.  And the big Democrat<br \/>\nlosses bucked historical trends &mdash; the mid-term election and the<br \/>\nweak economy should have helped them.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re going to hear a lot of gloating from Republicans and<br \/>\nsoul-searching from Democrats in the aftermath.  The easy explanation<br \/>\nis that 9\/11 did the Democrats in; that American elected to get behind<br \/>\na president who seems to be handling the terror war with decisiveness,<br \/>\nprudence, and strategic acumen.<\/p>\n<p>I think this conventional wisdom is wrong.  I think 9\/11 merely<br \/>\nexposed a longer-term weakness in the Democratic position, which is<br \/>\nthis: the Democrats have forgotten how to do politics that is about<br \/>\nanything but politics itself.  They&#8217;re a post-modern political party,<br \/>\nendlessly recycling texts that have little or no referent outside<br \/>\nthe discourse of politics itself.<\/p>\n<p>The disgusting spectacle they made of Paul Wellstone&#8217;s funeral<br \/>\nis diagnostic.  We were treated to trumpet calls about honoring<br \/>\nWellstone&#8217;s legacy without any discussion beyond the most superficial<br \/>\ncliches of what that legacy was.  All the ritual invocations of<br \/>\ntime-honored Democratic shibboleths had a tired, shopworn, unreal<br \/>\nand self-referential feel to them &mdash; politics as the literature<br \/>\nof exhaustion.<\/p>\n<p>The preconditions for paralysis had been building up for a long<br \/>\ntime; arguably, ever since the New Left beat out the Dixiecrats for<br \/>\ncontrol of the party apparat in 1968-1972.  Caught between the<br \/>\nblame-America-first, hard-left instincts of its most zealous cadres<br \/>\nand the bland dishwater centrism recently exemplified by the DLC, the<br \/>\nDemocrats found it more and more difficult to be about anything at<br \/>\nall.  The trend was self-reinforcing; as Democratic strategy drifted,<br \/>\nthe party became ever more dependent on cooperation between dozens of<br \/>\nfractious pressure groups (feminists, gays, race-baiters, the AARP,<br \/>\nthe teachers&#8217; and public-employee unions), which made the long-term<br \/>\ndrift worse.<\/p>\n<p>Bill Clinton was the perfect master of political postmodernism and<br \/>\nJames Carville his prophet.  For eight years they were able to<br \/>\ndisguise the paralysis and vacuum at the heart of Democratic thinking,<br \/>\ncentering party strategy on a cult of personality and an<br \/>\nanything-but-Republicanism that was cunning but merely reactive.  The<br \/>\nRepublicans cooperated with this strategy with all the naive eagerness<br \/>\nof Charlie Brown running up to kick Lucy&#8217;s football, perpetually<br \/>\nsurprised when it was snatched away at the last second, repeatedly<br \/>\ntaking pratfalls eagerly magnified by a Democratic-leaning national<br \/>\nmedia.<\/p>\n<p>But Bill Clinton was also a borderline sociopath and a liar, a man<br \/>\nwhose superficial charm, anything-to-get-elected energy, and utter<br \/>\nlack of principle perfectly mirrored the abyss at the heart of the<br \/>\nDemocratic party.  The greedy, glittery, soulless Wellstone-funeral<br \/>\nfiasco was the last hurrah of Clintonism, and it cost Walter Mondale<br \/>\nhis last election fight.<\/p>\n<p>Reality had to intrude sometime.  The destruction of the WTC<br \/>\nreduced all the politics-about-politics rhetoric of the Democrats to<br \/>\nirrelevance.  They stood mute in the face of the worst atrocity on<br \/>\nAmerican soil since Pearl Harbor, arguably the worst in U.S. history.<br \/>\nThe superficial reason was that their anti-terror policy was hostage<br \/>\nto the party&#8217;s left wing, but the deeper problem was that they long<br \/>\nago lost the ability to rise above petty interest-group jockying<br \/>\non any issue of principle at all. The most relevant adjective is not<br \/>\n`wrong&#8217;, or `evil&#8217;, it&#8217;s <em>`feckless&#8217;<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Republicans, by contrast, forged a workable consensus during<br \/>\nthe Reagan years and never quite lost it.  They&#8217;ve often been wrong,<br \/>\nfrequently been obnoxious as hell, and have their own loony fringe<br \/>\n(abortion-clinic bombers, neo-fascists like Pat Buchanan, and<br \/>\nthe Christian Coalition) to cope with.  But when Osama bin Laden<br \/>\ndemonstrated a clear and present danger to the United States of<br \/>\nAmerica <em>they were able to respond<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>They were able to respond not merely with reaction, but by taking<br \/>\na moral position against terrorism that could serve as the basis of<br \/>\nan effective national strategy.  Quarrel with &#8220;Homeland Security&#8221; all<br \/>\nyou like &mdash; but then imagine Al Gore in charge of defeating<br \/>\nAl-Qaeda and shudder.  He would actually have had to take the likes of<br \/>\nCynthia McKinney and Maxine Waters <em>seriously<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I think these 2002 elections are going to turn out to have been much<br \/>\nmore of a turning point than the aborted `Republican Revolution&#8217; of<br \/>\n1994.  Unless Bush&#8217;s war strategy completely screws the pooch, he is<br \/>\ngoing to completely walk over the Democratic candidate in 2004.  The<br \/>\nDemocrats show no sign of developing a foreign-policy doctrine that can<br \/>\ncope with the post-9\/11 world, and their domestic-policy agenda is<br \/>\ntired and retrogressive.  Their voter base is aging, and their national<br \/>\nleadership couldn&#8217;t rummage up a better Wellstone replacement than<br \/>\nWalter &#8220;What decade is this, anyway?&#8221; Mondale.  The Democratic<br \/>\nparty could end up disintegrating within the decade.<\/p>\n<p>This is not a prospect that fills me with uncomplicated glee.<br \/>\nRight-wing statism is not an improvement on left-wing statism; a smug<br \/>\nand dominant GOP could easily become captive to theocrats and<br \/>\nknow-nothings, a very bad thing for our nation and the world.  And,<br \/>\nunfortunately, the Libertarian Party has courted self-destruction by<br \/>\nchoosing to respond to 9\/11 with an isolationism every bit as vapid<br \/>\nand mindless as the left&#8217;s &#8220;No War for Oil!&#8221; chanting.<\/p>\n<p>Welcome to post-postmodern politics.  Meaning is back, but<br \/>\nthe uncertainties are greater than ever.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=84133776\">Blogspot comments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Democratic Party fell off a cliff last night. Never mind their shiny new governorships &mdash; the `smart&#8217; money pre-election was on them picking up an absolute majority of governor&#8217;s seats, and at the Congressional level they took a shellacking nearly as bad as 1994&#8217;s. The races Terry McAuliffe targeted as most critical &mdash; notably&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=13\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Post-postmodern politics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}