Conservatism & Liberalism Continued

Excursis Continued:  How did we get to this impasse?  That, of course, is an historical question, but it is questionable whether one can have a view of history without a mythology of history that gives it a narrative arch.  I have said elsewhere that the principle American myth is the Eden story -- or perhaps more precisely, the faith that Eden could be recovered, if not at the "fresh green breast of the new world," if not in the settlements just a bit further to west, then through a continuous refinement of the state.  It is the faith that innocence could be recovered, not only the innocence that derives from obedience to law, in the Edenic case the revealed law of divinity, but also the innocence that derives from ignorance, in the Edenic case not-knowing what we have, unfortunately, come to know now.  The myth demands an answer to the question, "when did we go wrong?" and "what then should we do?"  American's it seems, more than others, obsess over the answer to that question, and the answers are, inevitably, and oddly, both deeply reactionary and deeply progressive.  Lilla writes that there are basically two types of reactionaries "with different attitudes toward historical change."  On the one hand, the prevailing American type, there are those who dream "of a return to some real or imaginary state of perfection that existed before a revolution."  On the other hand, something Lilla feels to be new to the American political landscape, there are those who "take for granted that the revolution is a fait accompli and that there is no going back," but they also believe that the only sane response to an apocalypse is to provoke another, in hopes of starting over" from scratch.   On the one hand, there is the faith that the way forward is to "get back to where you once belonged," and on the other hand, "to destroy what history has given us and wait for a new order to emerge out of the chaos."

The answer to the question, "when did we go wrong," seems to be the so-called sixties,  the period of time that spanned the Vietnam war.   I don't want to dwell on the obvious, but the war itself marked the death knell of American moral exceptionalism.  If we could believe before then that government entered into conflict, not (or at least not only) to serve our self-interest, but to serve the moral and ethical imperatives of the American way, but as the war extended, as the conduct of the war seemed less and less congruent with the American way, less and less congruent with the conduct of the so-called "greatest generation," as the outcome of the war seemed less and less likely of success, there was the corresponding loss of secular faith in government.  Then too, with the growing recognition that even the constitutional protections of "freedom for all" did nothing to eradicate the Jim Crow laws of the south or the other instrumental forms of institutional racism, the civil rights movement served to dispel any illusion that American political liberties guaranteed anything resembling "justice for all," and this too came with its corresponding loss of secular faith in government.  The anti war movement and the civil rights movement, both brought revolutionary politics, if not exactly to the mainstream, at least well within the purview of the mainstream, and if civil society is an "inheritance we receive and are responsible for," then both made it easy to repudiate the inheritance and deny any responsibility for the past.  The collapse of the Soviet Union, not with the apocalyptic bang of nuclear Armageddon, befitting the great ideological struggle between secular good and evil, but with a whimpering collapse into an all too familiar oligarchy.  The cold war was won, and along with it, not only the great ideological struggle against totalitarianism, but also the enlightenment faith that people could -- whether with the "slow changes in custom and tradition," as favored by the conservatives, or with "explicit political action," as favored by the liberals -- actually fix things.   We had reached the end of history, and the only answer to the question, "now what?" seemed to be the shoulder shrug, "more of the same."

It is not surprising that people would look back to the happy days of the so-called fifties and see, if not a "state of perfection," then a loss of innocence.   The enlightenment faith in the perfectibility of our social contingencies, and with that the perfectibility of human-kind, is a secular faith, conceived outside of and in response to the excesses of religious faith, but the two are not wholly incompatible.  The fall and expulsion from Eden was a set back, and it came with consequence, but mankind could redeem themselves through labor of both sorts, for men with the sweat of one's brow and for women with the birth of children, both activities sanctioned within and valued by civil society.  It is not difficult to credit the reactionary response, the desire to restore a time before the social revolution that resulted not in a new Eden, but in a penurious attitude -- "money for nothing and your chicks for free."  The 60s were paradigm busting, and the paradigm they most successfully busted was the largely agrarian paradigm of redemptive labor, the marriage of the socially pragmatic and the spiritually redemptive that had been the hallmark of the American dream.  One could argue, of course, that the American dream had always been more fantasy than reality, but the radical fringes of the 60s brought us another sort of pipe dream, the more immediate transcendence brought about by psychedelic drugs and a newly liberated female sexuality, a sexuality freed from the biological consequences of reproduction.  The idea of redemption divorced from labor has proved a virus of sorts, sticking with us even as the instrumental means to redemption have morphed.  It is now the digital transcendence, the alternative realities of psychedelic drugs displaced by virtual gaming worlds, the sexual revolution displaced by undreamed of cornucopia of pornography, a communal utopianism displaced by the varieties of social media.  The conservative desire to hit the reset button, restore the 50s, and start over is not terribly surprising.