A couple of weeks ago, The Nation’s Chris Hayes noted, “I was just on a conservative talk radio show where the host accused the Obamas of being Marxists. Really! I told him I spend my whole time on the left and I literally know one Marxist. One! It’s a fascinating trope of conservatism that despite the fact Marxism is more or less dead as a political movement they feel the need to keep red-baiting all these years later. What’s up with that?”
I’ve long wondered the same thing. The right seems to take inordinate pleasure in red-baiting, whether it makes sense or not. Bill Kristol, in his increasingly mind-numbing New York Times column, joins the parade today.
I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s, when I taught political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, it didn’t take me long this weekend to find my copy of “The Marx-Engels Reader,” edited by Robert C. Tucker — a book that was assigned in thousands of college courses in the 1970s and 80s, and that now must lie, unopened and un-remarked upon, on an awful lot of rec-room bookshelves.
My occasion for spending a little time once again with the old Communist was Barack Obama’s now-famous comment at an April 6 San Francisco fund-raiser. Obama was explaining his trouble winning over small-town, working-class voters: “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
This sent me to Marx’s famous statement about religion in the introduction to his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”:
“Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.”
I don’t expect much in the way of intellectual seriousness from Kristol, but if he wants to understand how wrong he is, he might want to pick up his un-dog-eared copy of “The Marx-Engels Reader” again.
Like any good poli-sci student, I (way back in the ’90s) actually had to read that book for a couple of different classes. I was prepared to go into some detail explaining why Kristol doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but I noticed that Sullivan beat me to it.
Is this indistinguishable from saying, along with Marx, that all religion is an obviously false consciousness caused by the alienation of the world-historical class struggle? No, it obviously isn’t. It’s saying that economic distress does often in human history express itself in more rigid forms of religion, more reactionary cultural identification, less tolerance of “the other.” Since large swathes of human history have shown this to be true — and perfectly arguable without any materialist understanding of religion — Kristol is deliberately distorting to paint Obama as a cynical manipulator of religious faith for political ends, rather than as a genuine Christian. He’s calling him a lying, Godless communist.
You could argue, as Kristol and others hilariously will, that Lou Dobbs has no base, that fundamentalist Christianism has no problem with “the other” in a globalized world, that dozens of state constitutional amendments banning civil marriages that had never and would never have taken place were just spirited forms of civic engagement, rather than scapegoating or politicking on resentment. You could also argue, as others legitimately will, that spasms of economic distress and social discontent are unconnected. Hey: Weimar had nothing to do with Hitler. But Kristol is doing something much more pernicious: he is saying that Obama is faking faith, that his very profession of faith is a “mask” that is slipping, and that Kristol is the person to determine whose faith is genuine and who is a fraud.
A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his own faith. That’s where they’ve gone to already. And it’s only the middle of April.
The irony, of course, is that Kristol accusing Obama of elitism — the NYT columnist said the senator is “disdainful of small-town America” — is rather extraordinary in its own right.
Kristol helps define elitism. He makes a considerable amount of money arguing in support of tax cuts for millionaires and military adventures that burden low-income families disproportionately. He’s had every advantage in life, and now gets paid ridiculous sums to write obnoxious drivel for the nation’s most prestigious news outlet. Kristol probably visits small towns, only to tell his very wealthy friends about how “quaint” they are once he returns to the DC cocktail-party circuit and Fox News green-room.
Kristol’s most notable contribution to public policy in his professional life was a 1993 memo he wrote to congressional Republicans, explaining that they had to destroy any effort to pass a national healthcare bill, not because the policy was flawed, but because it would “give the Democrats a lock on the crucial middle-class vote and revive the reputation of the party.” If tens of millions of Americans were left uninsured, so be it — the goal, Kristol said, was to help the Republican Party, not those without insurance.
Barack Obama, meanwhile, used some clumsy language to describe a real phenomenon in struggling communities, where working-class families have fallen behind thanks to the policies embraced by Bill Kristol. Obama, whose faith is genuine, has, like Hillary Clinton, presented a policy agenda that might actually help these communities for a change.
Kristol concluded, “[W]hat has Barack Obama accomplished that entitles him to look down on his fellow Americans?” Oddly enough, I’m tempted to ask Kristol the same question.