The Curse of Moral Purity
The Curse of Moral Purity
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The continued inability of America's liberal democratic establishment to
address the ills besetting the country-climate change, unregulated global
capitalism, mounting social inequality, a bloated military, endless foreign
wars, out-of-control deficits and gun violence-means the inevitable snuffing
out of our anemic democracy. Overwhelmed by the multiple crises, the liberal
elites have jettisoned genuine political life and retreated into
self-defeating moral crusades in a vain and futile attempt to deflect
attention away from the looming social, political, economic and
environmental catastrophes.
These faux moral crusades, now the language of the left and the right, have
bifurcated the country into warring factions. Opponents are demonized as
evil. Adherents to the cause are on the side of the angels. Nuance and
ambiguity are banished. Facts are manipulated or discarded. Truth is
replaced by slogans. Conspiracy theories, however bizarre, are incredulously
embraced to expose the perfidiousness of the enemy. Politics is defined by
antagonistic political personalities spewing vitriol. The intellectual and
moral sterility, along with the inability to halt the forces of societal
destruction, provides fertile soil for extremists, neofascists and
demagogues who thrive in periods of paralysis and cultural degeneracy.
Liberals and the left have wasted the last two years attacking Donald Trump
as a Russian asset and look set to waste the next two years attacking him as
a racist. They desperately seek scapegoats to explain the election of Trump
as president, no different from a right wing that tars its Democratic Party
enemies as America-hating socialists and that blames Muslims, immigrants and
poor people of color for our national debacle. These are competing cartoon
visions of the world. They foster a self-created universe of villains and
superheroes that exacerbates the mounting polarization and rage.
"Bourgeois society seems everywhere to have used up its store of
constructive ideas," Christopher Lasch wrote in 1979 in "The Culture of
Narcissism." "It has lost both the capacity and the will to confront the
difficulties that threaten to overwhelm it. The political crisis of
capitalism reflects a general crisis of western culture, which reveals
itself in a pervasive despair of understanding the course of modern history
or of subjecting it to rational direction. Liberalism, the political theory
of the ascendant bourgeoisie, long ago lost the capacity to explain events
in the world of the welfare state and the multinational corporation; nothing
has taken its place. Politically bankrupt, liberalism is intellectually
bankrupt as well."
The online magazine Slate recently published a transcript of a town hall
meeting between Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, and
the Times staff. It was a fascinating window into the hubris and
cluelessness of the paper, the ruling elites' primary news organ, which has
spent the last two years shredding its credibility by hyping the
investigation by Robert Mueller and the conspiracy theory that Trump was a
Russian asset. Here is Baquet on the newspaper's reporting on Trump:
"
Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but,
frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships
with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice? That was a really
hard story, by the way, let's not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover
that story. I'm going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that
story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.
The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our
readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, "Holy shit, Bob
Mueller is not going to do it." And Donald Trump got a little emboldened
politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think
that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we're talking about started to
emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We're a little tiny bit flat-footed. I
mean, that's what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years.
Right?
I think that we've got to change. I mean, the vision for coverage for the
next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who
makes these kinds of remarks? How do we cover the world's reaction to him?
How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover
America, that's become so divided by Donald Trump? How do we grapple with
all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a
thoughtful way, something we haven't done in a large way in a long time?
That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help
us shape that vision. But I think that's what we're going to have to do for
the rest of the next two years.
Baquet asserts that the journalistic campaign to incriminate Trump as a
Russian agent sputtered out and a new campaign-read moral crusade-arose six
or seven weeks ago to focus on Trump's racism. Trump's racism, of course,
did not begin six or seven weeks ago. It is the paper that switched
narratives six or seven weeks ago, from one moral crusade to another.
This is not journalism. It is moral purity masquerading as journalism. And
it will, like the "Russiagate" conspiracy, be useless to blunt Trump's
support, explain and cope with our innumerable crises or heal the growing
divide.
The problem that the paper, along with the Democratic Party and its liberal
allies, faces is that it is captive to its corporate sponsors who
orchestrated our grotesque income inequality, deindustrialization,
out-of-control military machine, neutered media and muzzled scholarship. The
paper, therefore, rather than turn on its corporate advertisers and elitist
readers, first blamed Russia and now blames white supremacists. The longer
such demagoguery continues on the left and the right, the more the country
will be torn asunder.
Hannah Arendt in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" pointed out that
ideologies are attractive in times of crisis because they reduce and
simplify reality to a single idea. While the right wing blames the decline
on darker races, the liberal elites blame the decline on Russia or racists.
It is the ideology, not experience or fact, that is used "to explain all
historical happenings, [to provide] the total explanation of the past, the
total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future,"
she wrote.
All ideologies demand an impossible consistency. This is achieved by a
constant mutation and distortion of reality until it becomes, as the Mueller
investigation did, absurdist theater. The result for believers, Arendt
wrote, is disorientation, heightened fear and paranoia.
These types of collective self-delusions have always existed in American
society, as the historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out. Such
self-delusions, he wrote, are "made up of certain preoccupations and
fantasies: the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good,
abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of
gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary."
But these self-delusions have usually been confined to the fringes of
society, such as, for example, a left wing that made political pilgrimages
to the Soviet Union, blissfully ignoring its government's slaughter of
millions of its own citizens, the gulags and the famines, and a right wing
that celebrated fascist dictatorships in Spain and later Latin America,
overlooking the mass executions, state terror and death squads there.
Collective self-delusions, however, have now been mainstreamed. They are
trumpeted by media platforms across the political spectrum and by the
political establishment. They are the fodder of Fox News and Breitbart as
well as MSNBC and CNN. Jake Tapper and Rachel Maddow, as Matt Taibbi has
pointed out, are "liberal" versions of Sean Hannity.
Richard Rorty, with uncanny prescience, wrote in his 1998 book "Achieving
Our Country":
"
Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized
democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist
movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak,
for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The
point of his book "The Endangered American Dream" is that members of labor
unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that
their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to
prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize
that suburban white-collar workers-themselves desperately afraid of being
downsized-are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social
benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide
that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote
for-someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug
bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodern
professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of
Sinclair Lewis' novel "It Can't Happen Here" may then be played out. For
once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In
1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg
named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past
forty years by black and brown Americans, by homosexuals, will be wiped out.
Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words "nigger"
and "kike" will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which
the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come
flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about
having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an
outlet.
The rupture of social bonds, caused by the breakdown of society, income
inequality, social stagnation and the disempowerment of the working class,
is expressed in innumerable dark pathologies. A fractured public carries out
self-destructive behaviors-out-of-control gun violence, opioid addiction and
sexual sadism-in an attempt to cope with dislocation, impotence and pain.
Moral crusades are an expression of this cultural sickness. They are
emblematic of a society in deep distress, unable to cope rationally with the
problems besetting it. These crusades always make things worse, for once
they are exposed as ineffectual they invariably breed a frightening
fanaticism.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers.
Chris Hedges