18 Aug Upside Down
Just over twenty-three years ago, in the runup to the 2000 presidential election, we wrote a piece noting how the two parties had, more or less, switched places in their approaches to government and “reform.” In that piece – titled “The New Progressives and the Reactionaries” we quoted from two Washington Post analyses, the first by Dan Balz, and the second by the inimitable George Will. Balz noted the following:
Many of the policy initiatives Bush has outlined this spring, from education and health care to Social Security and arms control, bear striking similarity to the world of the New Democrats. Bush’s advocacy of these policies has guided his shift back toward the center this spring, and the New Democrats movement’s leaders, who have close ties to Gore, don’t know whether to be flattered or alarmed . . . .
Bush’s initiatives have overlapped with New Democrat proposals in a number of areas. His emphasis on educational accountability echoes ideas advanced by the New Democrats. His call for partial privatization of Social Security and his embrace of Medicare reforms that emphasize more choices for senior citizens mirror ideas the DLC or the PPI [the think tank associated with the DLC] have advanced….
“George Bush is trying to steal the mantle of reform and innovation from the New Democrats, and we can’t let him get away with it,” said Will Marshall, who heads the Progressive Policy Institute.
As for Will, he described much the same process, only from the opposite angle:
What year will Al Gore inhabit today?
When discussing Social Security, he is a man of 1935: Nothing has happened, economically, or demographically, since that year of enactment to justify any significant recasting of the system, such as George W. Bush’s proposal for allowing Americans to invest a small portion of their payroll taxes in personal retirement accounts.
When discussing ballistic missile defense, Gore is a man of 1972: Nothing has happened, geopolitically or technologically, in the 28 years since the Anti-Ballistic Missile treat was signed with the Soviet Union (that has changed), to justify anything more than a minimal system. And such is the fetish Gore makes of the ABM treaty, not even the minimal system should be built unless Russia (more change: its economy is now the size of Iceland’s), by agreeing to amend the treaty, gives us permission to defend ourselves.
When promoting campaign finance reform, Gore is a man of 1974: In the quarter-century since the government embarked on the post-Watergate experiments with limits on permissible kinds and amounts of political communication, nothing has happened to dampen enthusiasm for more of the same.
But Gore is generally a man of the 1950s, the decade when liberalism became a species of condescension.
In my book, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, in a chapter titled “To Whom Does Wall Street Belong,” I explained how and when the two parties switched places with respect to finance – especially in terms of support from the big financial players and “Wall Street” more generally. Policy was the first of the civilizational trinity to be inverted, but finance was close behind:
By the time the 2008 election cycle rolled around, Wall Streeters had fully and firmly embraced the Democratic Party and actually dragged it leftward. Hillary Clinton, then the sitting senator from New York, was pushed aside by her adopted home state’s most affluent and influential residents in favor of Barack Obama, the young, charismatic, ideological tabula rasa from Illinois. Wall Street loved Obama and especially loved his social liberalism and his economic malleability.
During the 2006–2008 election cycle, Wall Street ponied up big for the Democrats and especially for Obama. Goldman Sachs (its PAC, its employees, and their immediate families) was the second-largest donor to Obama overall. J.P. Morgan was fifth, Citigroup seventh, and Morgan Stanley rounded out the Top 20. The Democratic takeover of Wall Street was complete.
In a long post-election piece for National Review, Kevin Williamson noted that the Republicans had “lost Gordon Gekko,” their erstwhile indefatigable caricature.8 Williamson also explained, in large part, how the loss had thoroughly changed the face of Wall Street. He quoted one bond trader who told him, “Of course these guys aren’t conservative. Why the [expletive deleted] would they be? We’re talking about guys who live in Manhattan, guys with manicures and eight-figure bank balances. And their wives—their wives aren’t showing up at parents’ day at Brearley with a Sarah Palin button. It’d be like showing up in flip-flops from Walmart. Like showing up in a [rather lengthier expletive deleted] tracksuit.”
The differences between Wall Street in 1988 and Wall Street in 2008 were shocking. The transformation was nothing less than total. In the 1980s, Republicans in pop culture looked like Randolph and Mortimer Duke, the wealthy commodity brokers in the movie Trading Places who toyed with people’s lives just for fun. By the 2010s, however, Republicans were much more likely to be compared to Bo and Luke Duke, the reckless, redneck country boys who drove gas-guzzling cars and clung bitterly to their God and their guns.
What we are witnessing today is the final part of this partisan/ideological inversion, the cultural switch. In the 1970s, David Bowie became a huge sensation (despite selling relatively few records) because he was “gender-bending.” He was tall and thin and had high cheekbones, and he freaked out “the establishment” by wearing makeup and dressing and acting effeminately. Bowie was “transgressive,” which, in the 1960s and ‘70s was the most important and powerful “trans” a person could be. When he died in 2016, PBS waxed nostalgically that “Bowie Made Androgyny Cool, And It Was About Time.” His transgressions against “the norm” inarguably constitute his most important and vaunted legacy.
Today, by contrast, the most “transgressive” and anti-establishment thing a young person can do is wear a t-shirt to school that says “There Are Only Two Genders.” Seriously. If your son wants to dress like a girl at school, not only will the school allow it, it’ll encourage it. In some jurisdictions, this government apparatus will even keep it a secret from you. But send a kid to school in a sweatshirt praising chastity, and all hell breaks loose.
The other day, we were involved in a brief but interesting discussion on Twitter X. Like many of our interesting discussions on that platform these days, it all started with a comment/post by our friend Russ Greene. In brief, we debated whether the philosopher Michel Foucault was an anti-statist out of principle or if he was an anti-statist specifically because he believed the state was inclined to repress people with out-of-the-mainstream sexual proclivities. (Foucault was gay and, more to the point, was publicly supportive of pedophilia and has been accused of being a practitioner as well.}
In thinking about this conversation after the fact, it occurred to us that much of what made Foucault anti-statist and, more importantly, much of what made the state anti-Foucault would be entirely upside down today.
When one considers the focus of Foucault’s work – his obsessions with power, his belief in sexuality as an expression of power, and his concomitant belief that various “sovereigns,” including the Church, maintained power by restricting sexuality – then it’s not all that surprising that he would support anything that restrained government/sovereign action. Even in his rich imagination, Foucault could never fathom a situation in which the sovereign/government didn’t exist explicitly to hoard power and thus to restrict the people’s access to it in all its forms. Therefore, the sovereign had to be restrained.
But Foucault was wrong. Likewise, Herbert Marcuse, with his obsession with sexual perversity as the means to undermine the false consciousness of the one-dimensional society, was also wrong. Indeed, the entire New Left was wrong. They never imagined that “The Man” could, someday, be on their side; that all the people over 30 who matter could believe what they believe; that the sovereign could be their sovereign and could wield its power as their cudgel against “the reactionaries.” They were all wrong.
Much of what the philosophers of the last century had to tell us about power and language and the rest was even less valuable and relevant than it first appeared. Again, they all got it wrong. Indeed, they got it perfectly backward. Changing the culture didn’t prime the world for revolution. It made revolution unnecessary, totally passe. Today, the bourgeoisie rule, the “Left” – such as it is – is thrilled, and working-class rednecks who write and sing country music songs are the “transgressive” rebels.
The partisan/ideological world is now totally upside down. This process, which began 30 years ago, with the election of a “liberal” who flew home during the campaign to oversee the execution of a man so mentally damaged that he wanted to save part of his last meal “for later,” is complete.
What this means in the grand scheme of the American experience remains to be seen. Rest assured, however, that there will be a great many opportunities and a great many risks for all who are willing to take them.
