December 4th, 2016

12-04-2016

Establishment Blues

[caption id="attachment_18513" align="alignleft" width="300"] Gerald Herbert/AP[/caption] Ian Buruma looks at the special relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. in the wake of Donald Trump's election and the Brexit vote. He argues that both votes are in important ways responding to a similar distaste for certain kinds of citizens.

"So Farage and Trump were speaking about the same thing. But they have more in common than distaste for international or supranational institutions. When Farage, in his speech in Jackson, fulminated against the banks, the liberal media and the political establishment, he was not talking about foreign bodies but about the aliens in our midst, as it were, our own elites who are, by implication, not “real, “ordinary” or “decent.” And not only Farage. The British prime minister, Theresa May, not a Brexiteer before the referendum, called members of international-minded elites “citizens of nowhere.” When three High Court judges in Britain ruled that Parliament, and not just the prime minister’s cabinet, should decide when to trigger the legal mechanism for Brexit, they were denounced in a major British tabloid newspaper as “enemies of the people.” Trump deliberately tapped into the same animus against citizens who are not “real people.” He made offensive remarks about Muslims, immigrants, refugees and Mexicans. But the deepest hostility was directed against those elitist traitors within America who supposedly coddle minorities and despise the “real people.” The last ad of the Trump campaign attacked what Joseph Stalin used to call “rootless cosmopolitans” in a particularly insidious manner. Incendiary references to a “global power structure” that was robbing honest working people of their wealth were illustrated by pictures of George Soros, Janet Yellen and Lloyd Blankfein. Perhaps not every Trump supporter realized that all three are Jewish. But those who did cannot have missed the implications. When Trump and Farage stood on that stage together in Mississippi, they spoke as though they were patriots reclaiming their great countries from foreign interests. No doubt they regard Britain and the United States as exceptional nations. But their success is dismaying precisely because it goes against a particular idea of Anglo-American exceptionalism. Not the traditional self-image of certain American and British jingoists who like to think of the United States as the City on the Hill or Britain as the sceptered isle splendidly aloof from the wicked Continent, but another kind of Anglo-American exception: the one shaped by World War II. The defeat of Germany and Japan resulted in a grand alliance, led by the United States, in the West and Asia. Pax Americana, along with a unified Europe, would keep the democratic world safe. If Trump and Farage get their way, much of that dream will be in tatters."

The demonization of any group of law-abiding citizens is a dangerous form of identity-based populism. The populist may speak for the people, but who and what is the people? Identity-based populism imagines a fictional conception of a homogenous people. That fantasy of a defined "people" is powerful and deeply appealing. So when others appear who don't belong to the fantasy, the easiest response for populists is not to revise and expand their conception of the people, but to eliminate or isolate those "enemies" of the people. Because populist movements are always tempted to prove the reality of their claims by achieving the purity they imagine, populism is dangerous and carries huge risks; under the wrong conditions (for example a major terrorist attack), populism can slide into authoritarianism. Vigilance is called for. But not all populism leads to authoritarianism. The recent outburst of populism in Europe and the United States is, at least in part, an illiberal democratic rebellion against an undemocratic technocratic liberalism. —RB

Form more information visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/magazine/the-end-of-the-anglo-american-order.html

Reading Yeats in the Time of Trump

The last year has seen a renewed interest in W.B. Yeats' famous metaphor of the falcon "turning and turning in the widening gyre," the falcon who cannot hear the falconer, the falcon who signifies the poetic-political-metaphysical truth, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Stephen Burt also finds solace and hope in reading Yeats. In an essay on what Yeats can teach us in the age of Trump, Burt finds in Yeats "the art of anger at the destruction of institutions, the art of a patriot whose country was not what he thought it was or could be, the art of an idealist let down, an art (not least) that speaks to America from outside America: the thoughtful, angry, frustrated, and painfully memorable art of W. B. Yeats." ?RB Burt writes:

"So instead I have been rereading W. B. Yeats—for example, “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing” (1913):

Now all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat From any brazen throat, For how can you compete, Being honor bred, with one Who were it proved he lies Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbours’ eyes. . . .

No other poet has captured so well the feeling of noble failure—of having lost an unfair fight—along with the feeling of conflict between serving a very flawed nation and serving the ideals embodied in art. Yeats wrote in defense of institutions, historical memory, and gradual change. He also wrote in defense of ideals, against a pragmatism so total that it toppled into defeatism: “only amid spiritual terror,” says a character in The Hour-Glass (1903), “or only when all that laid hold on life is shaken can we see truth.” And he wrote some of those defenses while surrounded by more violence than most Americans will likely ever see. I am rereading him now not only for those laudable goals, but also for his own strenuous, chastened, even tormented ambivalence toward those goals, for his divided mind (“All Things Can Tempt Me,” 1916):

All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman’s face, or worse— The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil. When I was young I had not given a penny for a song Did not the poet sing it with such airs That one believed he had a sword upstairs; Yet would be now, could I but have my wish, Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.

Yeats once turned to politics, and to a clumsy courtship, out of frustration with the demands of art; now (so the hypermetrical final line implies) he has turned back to poetry because public life and erotic life have failed. This Yeats—from the early 1910s into the 1920s—is a poet of fierce disillusion, musing both on the necessity and on the frustration (veering toward futility) of his entry into the electoral fray. I do not take from these lines the lesson that resisting Trumpism is futile. “Give up forever” is not a Yeatsian sentiment, though “understand and learn from your opposite” is. Nor do I mean Yeats’s politics should be our own. Sometimes they led him close to endorsing fascists. (The Yeats scholar Jonathan Allison summarizes the most egregious episode: “in response to . . . the renewal of IRA activity and the apparent threat of communism, [Yeats] gave support for several months in 1933 to the Irish Blueshirts. . . . He wrote marching songs for them, but soon, realizing his mistake, he revised them so they could not be sung.”)"

Form more information visit: http://bostonreview.net/literature-culture-poetry/stephen-burt-reading-yeats-age-trump

The Lesser Evil

In the debate about whether civil servants should serve in the Trump administration, David Luban reminds us of Hannah Arendt's suspicion of all arguments about the "lesser evil."

"In a powerful essay written half a century ago, Hannah Arendt warned about lesser evils (pp. 35-36):

If you are confronted with two evils, thus the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Those who denounce the moral fallacy of this argument are usually accused of a germ-proof moralism which is alien to political circumstances, of being unwilling to dirty their hands. …

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. … Why do they forget? It isn’t hard to fathom. Once you are inside, your frame of reference changes. The work is challenging and invigorating and cutting-edge. You see that many of the people you’re working with are decent and likable. You tell yourself that decent people like these wouldn’t do anything indecent. Gradually your moral compass aligns with theirs (and you don’t notice that theirs are simultaneously aligning with yours); and gradually all your moral compasses align with The Program. You develop team spirit, and you don’t want to let your team down by shirking; you can’t be a nay-sayer on everything. You lose your sense of outrage, which is, after all, a feeling we experience when we see something abnormal. Once the abnormal becomes routine, outrage fades. And above all, you reassure yourself of your own decency because you can contrast yourself with the real radicals, the true believers. They’re right down the hall. In meetings, you try your best to mitigate the damage; you win a few of these fights and become heartened. But you lose more than you win, and your own sense of fair process – “I waged the good fight but lost fair and square” – leads you to acquiesce. You may even find yourself publicly defending the decision you opposed; at best, your duty of confidentiality seals your lips. Your degrees of freedom are radically constricted. Drawing on the experience of 1933 and 1934, Arendt warns that “we now know that moral standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something” (p. 45). That something will be the bureaucratic new normal that you see around you. Arendt adds a political argument against participating in Big Man government:

No man, however strong, can ever accomplish anything, good or bad, without the help of others. … Those who seem to obey him actually support him and his enterprise; without such “obedience” he would be helpless. …

In these terms, the nonparticipators in public life … are those who have refused their support by shunning those places of “responsibility” where such support, under the name of obedience, is required. And we have only for a moment to imagine what would happen … if enough people would act “irresponsibly” and refuse support.

Her key insight: when you stay in your job, and perform lesser evils, you are supporting the administration, even if in your own mind you abhor it. Your own mind is irrelevant: if you participate, you support."

Form more information visit: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/career_civil_servants_should_not_serve_in_the_trump_administration.html