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As an off-shoot of my 3-part series on Michael Lind's screed, "Are liberals seceding from sanity? The left is crazy to insult white Southerners as a group", I want to focus attention on a seemingly obscure point that Lind gets almost completely wrong. To do this, I'll begin quoting from him at some length, but the purpose is only to introduce the real subject of this post--the role of what's known as "Centrist/Extremist Theory" in marginalizing the left today (read "Medicare for All" in the health care debate) and thus inadvertantly opening the way for the extremist right, in the form of Birthers, Deathers and crazies of all kinds.
Here's Lind laying out his thesis in the first two paragraphs of his piece:
Back in the 1960s, Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter and other liberal sociologists, historians and political scientists, puzzled that anyone could support Barry Goldwater rather than Lyndon Johnson, concluded that Goldwater supporters were deranged. They didn't say so directly, of course. They said that members of the radical right were emotionally disturbed victims of "status anxiety." The evidence? They didn't vote the way that Lipset and other academics thought that they should vote. Therefore they had to be crazy.
In the decades since, far better scholars than Hofstadter and Lipset, for whom history and sociology are not exercises in partisan Democratic mythmaking, have established that Goldwater and Reagan Republicans often were highly educated, socially secure individuals who happened not to share the values of liberal professors and journalists. This scholarship has been wasted, to judge by the glee with which the liberal blogosphere, in the aftermath of the ephemeral "Birther" flap, has dusted off the old conservatives-are-crazy meme, and revised it to suggest that all white Southerners are crazy.
There are countless misrepresentations and falsehoods, in these two paragraphs, but here I will focus on just one:
It was McCarthy that first got these intellectuals going, and the intellectual history here is far more complicated than Lind lets on. These "liberal social scientists" were, in fact, establishment intellectuals constructing a narrative to marginalize critics on the left. Their intent was to characterize both left and right "extremes" as irrational. And doing this was a way of removing political substance, and power relationships (class struggle, White supremacy, etc.) from any consideration.
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| This began around the time of McCarthy, and a new wave of progressive critics would emerge to criticize this practice--most notably Michael Paul Rogin, author of The Intellectuals and McCarthy and Ronald Reagan, The Movie (And Other Episodes In Political Demonology), among other works.
As Rogin argued quite effectively, this intellectual project allowed a bunch of Jewish immigrants intellectual kids to recast nativist bigots as un-American extremists and recast themselves as the embodiment of mainstream America--nice work, if you can get it! If I had to choose between the nativist narrative, and the hijacking of it, I'd certainly prefer the hijacked version, beause the good guys in it are not only a lot more like me, they're also a good deal less violent. But both narratives are equally mistaken in drawing arbitrary lines between mainstream and margins, and in virtually disappearing the real substantive issues of politics and realities of political power that the mainstream/extremist narrative serves to hide.
In their essay, "Repression and Ideology: How Police Justify Labelling Demonstrators as 'Terrorists'", Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons of Political Research Associates, identify "Two Flawed Theories" that lie behind the ideology of state repression of political dissent. The first is "Countersubversion Theory", which they introduce thus:
Countersubversion theory was influenced by nativism and took shape as a form of government repression during nineteenth century industrial struggles and early twentieth century scapegoating of immigrants.2 Faced with a rising tide of militant labor activism, corporate elites and state agencies blamed the unrest on a few ringleaders conspiring to foment criminal subversive activity and eventually armed revolution. Following WW1 and the Bolshevik revolution there was a backlash against immigrants to the US from Italy, Russia, and other countries. These immigrants-seen as diluting the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant essence of the culture and nation-were scapegoated for purportedly bringing subversive "alien" ideas such as socialism and anarchism into the country and thus threatening law and order and even national security.3
Countersubversion theory emerged as the analytical model favored by corporate elites and private security firms to enlist state agencies in an effort to repress strikes and civil unrest aimed at industrial worksites and mines. Countersubversion theory later expanded beyond its early focus on alleged labor agitation and organizing by communists and anarchists to see all dissident social movements arising not from any real social or economic conditions, but as the creation of outside agitators who comprise a cadre at the epicenter of the movement. These leaders use the movement as a front to hide their plans for criminal subversive activity and eventual violent armed revolution.4
The second theory, however, that is directly germane to our discussion here:
Theory Two: Centrist/Extremist Theory
Many discussions of right-wing and left-wing popular movements routinely portray such movements as bizarre fringe phenomena fundamentally at odds with the political "mainstream." Generally the premise is that the US political system has an essence of democracy and freedom, but that this essence is threatened by "extremists" of one variety or another.
Centrist/extremist theory was formulated in the 1950s by liberal and moderate intellectuals such as Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, Nathan Glazer, David Riesman, Seymour Martin Lipset, Earl Raab, Peter Viereck, and Alan Westin. They were members of the circle that would later evolve into the neoconservative intellectual movement. Many of them were former Marxists who had rejected the Popular Front and embraced a militant Cold War anticommunism, yet they defended the New Deal and criticized the "excesses" of Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting. In books such as Bell's anthology The New American Right (1955) and its expanded edition The Radical Right (1963) they glorified the political center against "extremists" at both ends of the spectrum.
Centrist/Extremist theory, especially as outlined by Lipset, Raab, Viereck, and Bell, sees dissident movements of the left and right as composed of outsiders-politically marginal people who have no connection to the mainstream electoral system or nodes of government or corporate power. Social and economic stress snaps these psychologically fragile people into a mode of political hysteria, and as they embrace an increasingly paranoid style they make militant and unreasonable demands. Because they are unstable they can become dangerous and violent. Their extremism places them far outside the legitimate political process, which is located in the center where pluralists conduct democratic debates. The solution prescribed by centrist/extremist theory is to marginalize the dissidents as radicals and dangerous extremists. Their demands need not be taken seriously. Law enforcement can then be relied upon to break up any criminal conspiracies by subversive radicals that threaten the social order.
Centrist/extremist theorists portrayed the political mainstream as an "open democratic market place"21 where a rich array of interest groups competed freely and fairly, and where "the sources of power" were "difficult to locate."22 The center was a realm of political civility, pragmatism, rationality, and tolerance. The extremes were the opposite of all this: absolutist, moralistic, unrestrained, irrational, and paranoid. "[T]he extreme right," wrote Hofstadter, "stands psychologically outside the frame of normal democratic politics, which is largely an affair of compromise."23 The difference could be expressed as one between "interest politics, the clash of material aims and needs among various groups and blocs; and status politics, the clash of various projective rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives."24
The point of quoting this at length is not just to portray Lind's narrative as simplistic--which it most certainly is--but to underscore that the theoretical tradition he's attacking is not that of the progressive left, but of the corporate center, and that it was deployed equally against both left and right.
In fact, the false equivalence of left and right is one of it's central and most pernicious features. This is why, in short, single-payer advocates were given such complete short-shrift in the health care legislative process, ironically opening up political space for the Birthers and Deathers to flood into once the corporate elite special interests had already gotten the lion's share of what they desired.
What happened between the 1950s and today was that the political establishment shifted dramatically to the right--something that happens routinely as an imperial power reaches its apogee and then heads into decline. The intense concentrations of wealth that were the subject of Dan's diary earlier today are but one symptom of this dramatic shift. By it's very nature, the political mainstream filters out virtually all narratives that would serve to critically reflect on this momentous shift. And, of course, the two political parties continue to operate at their topmost levels, almost as if nothing had happened. But the vast majority of the American people have no such luxury available to them.
This is why, for example, we have 47 million people without health care, and a proposed "solution" whose main thrust will be to force each and every one of them to begin paying mandatory taxes--which few, if any of them can afford--directly to the insurance cartel, without the government playing any middle-man role whatsoever.
But it's not just health care policy. The same is true of global warming policy, where even the "responsible" environmental groups are pushing for legislation that their own scientists know will not be sufficient to avoid catastrophe. Reality itself simply doesn't matter in our political process any more. Only "political reality" matters, and that political reality is entirely disconnected from the real world.
So it is that an apparent "minor detail" of historical scholarship leads us to a completely different picture of the large-scale political dynamic that's unfolding around us today. Ironically, some of Lind's deepest political instincts, oriented toward empowering and lifting up the economic everyman and everywoman, would be much better served if he were to recognize the true origins and ideological purposes of the psychological explanations he rails against. Instead, his unfocused diatribe attacking "liberals" is as far off the mark as anything he attempts to criticize.
It bears noting that much of the subsequent research into political psychology has no necessary relationship to Centrist/Extremist Theory. My own use of such research, for example, is pointedly not to justify mainstream political decision-making. Indeed, as just noted above, things have shifted so dramatically since the theory was first propounded that it's now the political mainstream--including Obama's refusal to investigate and prosecute the criminal and delusional activities of the Bush Administation--which systematically excludes rational/empirical fact-finding and political debates based thereon as the foundation for political action. |
