I’ve had a steady stream of great emails lately, but in this week’s edition of Correspondents’ Corner, there are two I’d like to share.
First up is an email from a Carpetbagger regular I’ll call “Progressive Junkie.” PJ’s email did a fine job identifying philosophical problems with recent political discourse, but also explains why there may be reason for optimism.
[O]ver the last four or five years, I have pondered why it is that the right — particularly the viscerally reactionary right (a la Tom DeLay and Dubya) — has been (slowly) able to win the “war of ideas” in the last twenty or twenty-five years. (Yes, Clinton was elected POTUS twice, but the Dems lost control of Congress). We’ve seen ideas that were clearly and for good reason discarded — such as that government owes no duty to protect those who can’t fend for themselves (it’s their own fault for being poor or disenfranchised), that the Constitution is not a living document, or that regressive tax schemes are fair — resurge in the last two decades or so. Why?
I lay the blame in large part on postmodernism, as an intellectual theory, and on our universities for allowing postmodernism to pervade all the humanities and social sciences. I empathize with why postmodernism became such a dominant approach, as a product of much frustration and angst. In my view, though, postmodernism’s nihilistic, it’s-all-relative approach is utterly disabling. Students who studied English, history, philosophy, sociology, and the other social sciences and humanities were taught how to deconstruct ideas and principles — to show how particular books, modes of thought, and theoretical approaches serve only to reify and subjugate women and minorities (racial, ethnic, religious, socio-economic, political, you name it…).
But that’s where it ended. Our universities failed to teach students how to distill the gem of value from a vat of the otherwise dated, and synthesize that gem into a useful, current concept, how to construct, how to develop solutions to the problems identified, and how to respond to outmoded theories (such as Constitutional originalism). Thus, while students with left-leaning predilections were inundated with “woe is me, the world sucks, and let me show you why,” the students on the right were taught how to develop arguments that not only had a certain degree of intellectual cogency (even if they ultimately were flawed) but also how to sell those arguments to the masses.
PJ added:
The point to all of this is that the intellectual backbone of the left is back (or, at least, starting to reemerge). The wheels have started to come out of the rut. Spades are starting to be called spades. Sure, there is disagreement within the left, but it is forward-looking, and the ideas which are emerging (both theoretical approaches and hard policy proposals), are of substance and pose a real threat to the right.
This is a tremendously exciting time. The havoc that Dubya & Co. have foisted upon this country and the world is the culmination of many, many years of careful planning and manipulation. It is starting to be exposed. The left has been awakened and is only starting to fight back. Regardless of what happens in November, the fight has just begun.
In addition, another long-time reader, Dave DeFreese had some compelling thoughts about Iraq’s “hearts and minds” problem.
Every time an American gets killed or ambushed, the Bush people say that it’s “anti-democracy” people committing these crimes or attacks. That’s turning out to be patently false — the attacks are almost explicitly “anti-American.” As such, this fundamentally alters the nature of the debate and our occupation.
In Vietnam, we were winning the military battles with the NVA and even Viet Cong forces which fought in open battles. What we lost was the ability to rally the South Vietnamese completely to the anti-Communist rallying cry from our hawks, in part because the North Vietnamese were pushing a nationalist campaign and painting Americans as intruding/meddling Yanquis. Better scholars can describe that part of history more effectively. Regardless of my historical shortcomings, if our people aren’t seen as beacons of democracy and instead are viewed merely as (infidel) occupiers, that will likely mean a different debate than what the Bush people want to have.
Indeed, the debate the White House has been dreading is now unavoidable and they clearly don’t know what to do about it.