The Guardian Does Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School seems to give conservatives the willies.  Founded as the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1920s, its mission has always been to deal with "Problems in Marxism," in other words to rescue Marxism from the failure of its prophesies.

Now Peter Thompson in The Guardian has written an 8 part review of the Frankfurt School. Links here.  Is it any good?  Well, I found it useful in guiding my own study of the Frankfurt School.

My take is roughly that the Frankfurt School was basically honest.  It was trying to create real knowledge from the debacle of the Marxist prophesies that became evident in the 1920s.  Thus Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment argued that the problems of the world weren't just due to capitalism and its exploitation.  Domination was encoded in the very idea of Enlightenment.  Men use knowledge to dominate nature and other men.

But this makes a nonsense of the progressive view of history, including the Hegelian dialectic, taken up by Marx, that sees a progression, through the dialectic, from thesis to antithesis to synthesis.  Obviously, this is not true.  History does not always progress forward. Thus, in Negative Dialectics, Thompson writes, Theodor Adorno argued that

history is not the simple unfolding of some preordained noumenal realm and that existence is therefore "ontologically incomplete".

In other words, Marxian prophecy is out.  This obviously complicates the Marxian narrative, because now it admits that things aren't as simple as Marx prophesied.  Well, I'll have to read Negative Dialectics to find out.

With Marcuse, of course, we get to "repressive tolerance." Thompson:

This is the theory that in order to control people more effectively it is necessary to give them what they need in material terms as well as to let them have what they think they need in cultural, political and social terms.
Parliamentary democracy, he maintains for example, is merely a sham, a game played out in order to give the impression that people have a say in the way that society works. Behind this facade however, he maintained that the same old powers were still at work and, indeed, that through their tolerance of dissent, debate, apparent cultural and political freedom had managed to refine and increase their exploitation of human labour power without anyone really noticing.

Agreed.  But nothing that the Marxists have proposed have done a thing to fix this.  Conservatives have, in our notion of "civil society" and "mediating structures."

Then we get to Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.  Thompson says that they argue that Marxism is the spark of liberation contained within the authoritarian corpus of religion.

To those who criticise communism and Marxism as "merely" a new form of religious belief, Benjamin's position – as with Ernst Bloch, whom I shall look at next week – was that religion was actually a vessel that contained within its authoritarian history and structures the spark of liberation which could only be fully realised through historical materialist transformation. In that sense religion is "merely" an old form of a future and as yet unrealisable dream.

Conservatives would say that unless the religious power and the political power are separated then all you are going to get is authoritarianism rendered down into totalitariansim.  As all regimes pretending to Marxism have shown, from Lenin to Chávez.

With Jürgen Habermas and Alex Honneth Thompson turns to "reification."  Although it simply means "thingification" I always worry that I don't understand "reification" in the way that Marxists do.

Strictly speaking, as I understand it, reification refers to the fact that, under capitalism, it seems that people do not relate person to person, but instead as object to object.  The exchange economy depersonalizes people into objects.  In traditional Marxism there is no way to remove reification and alienation except through the destruction of capitalism.  But Habermas has another way, Thompson writes:

Rather than maintaining that nothing could be done to improve conditions until capital had been dislodged and replaced by a socialist system he was much more interested in finding ways in which the public sphere could be gradually transformed into a space where domination by the media and the big ideological apparatuses of the system could be replaced by interactive and intersubjective dialogue from below.

Yep.  As I read Habermas, he is saying that the intersubjective public sphere is a balance to the reification of instrumental reason as implemented in the exchange economy and the administrative state.

Now here is Thompson on Honneth.

Honneth goes back beyond Lukács and Marx to early Hegel and locates the basis of reification not in social, economic or structural terms but in the problem of "recognition" or what Plato called Thymos which, alongside reason and eros form the three basic parts of our psyche. Of course this platonic triad could be said to be equal to the Freudian division into id (eros), ego (reason) and superego (thymos) and in that sense, reification continues the psychoanalytical tradition within the Frankfurt school. But Honneth also de-ideologises it by removing structural economic factors and foregrounding individual psychology.

But according to Wikipedia, Platonic Thymos is passion, spiritedness.  I don't get it.   And when I look at commentaries on Honneth, I get it even less.

The problem with the Frankfurt School, for conservatives, is that they are still looking for liberation here on Earth, as their lefty pals have been doing for two centuries.  They dream of a world without work and suffering, without injustice and inequality.

Conservatives are different.  We believe that a world of work and suffering is inevitable.  What we can do, in our social, economic, and political institutions, is mitigate the sorrows of life.  That's why I like Habermas.  He is not proposing heaven on earth.  He is proposing that the answer to the domination of instrumental reason in totalizing systems is to cultivate the lifeworld of intersubjective communicative action and negotiation.  It is telling, of course, that he steps outside of the Marxian bubble and invokes non-Marxist Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, Emile Durkheim, and Talcott Parsons.   Here is how he presents his program at the start of Volume Two of The Theory of Communicative Action.

In the Marxist reception of Weber's theory of rationalization, from Lukacs to Adorno, the rationalization of society was always thought of as a reification of consciousness... [But] rationalization cannot be dealt with adequately within the conceptual frame of the philosophy of consciousness.

So Habermas uses the "communication-theoretic" approach of Mead and Durkheim to develop his notion of a lifeworld of communicative action and negotiation of truth value.  This is based upon what he calls a philosophy of language that is opposed to what we might call the consciousness-theoretic approach of the Germans from Kant down to Adorno.  It would seem to me that this is no longer Marxism.

Now back to the Obama scandals.

Dinner with Liberals

Suppose you were going out to dinner with a couple of liberal friends this evening.  How would you approach the delicate problem of the Obama scandals?



I've been thinking about this, as it's likely that I'll be dining with some liberal friends in the near future.  These friends are good, honorable people, but seldom stray far from the latest liberal talking points.  They are, of course, New York Times readers.



The first thing, obviously, is to forget the idea of scoring points.  That would just make them defensive.  But what should my line be?



I've decided that rather than get embarrassing confessions, I really want to know what they know.



Do they know about the Case of the Divorce Records?  How the the sealed divorce records of his primary and general election opponents in his 2004 US Senate race somehow got publicized?



Do they know about the Case of the Disappearing Opponents?  How the Obama campaign got all of his primary opponents for his first state senate race removed from the ballot?



What do they think of the Case of the Rogue IRS Agents?  Do they think the conservative Tea Party groups had it coming?  That the whole thing is a storm in a teacup over a couple of rogue agents in Cincinnati?  Do they go so far as to embrace the loyal courtier argument, "who will rid my of this troublesome priest?"



And then there are the First Amendment issues, the bugging of the AP and the NSA data-mining.  I'm just interested to see where a couple of good loyal liberals come down on this.



Then there is the whole delicious question of trust in government, from the president's speech where he worries where it will all end if people stop trusting the government.  Where do they come down on trust?  Should we trust government in general?  The EPA?  The Pentagon?  Democratic administrations?  Republican administrations?  Inquiring minds would like to know.



Peter Berkowitz has a good piece that argues that we are getting what we paid for.  Nice middle class kids have been going off to college for a couple of generations and learning the straight liberal line.  The education has had measurable effects that we can see in the Obama scandals.

• Benghazi is explainable by the postmodern notion that "Knowledge is socially constructed, and therefore the narrative is all."


• In the IRS harassment scandal "the president was aided by the pervasive teaching on campuses that conservatism is wicked."  You know the deal: racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-choice fascist.  We can't let those people loose in the public square.


• The AP leak investigation is explained by the hate speech culture.  "On campus, students learn that liberty of thought and discussion is a norm to which lip service must be paid but which must not be taken to heart because of the importance of stamping out disagreeable and dangerous speech."

So it makes complete sense that young educated Americans are putting their education into practice as they go into government and politics.

The delicious thing about the Obama scandals is that, while partisan liberals like my aforementioned liberal friends won't be mutinying any time soon, the fabled moderates and independents are very likely going to be up for grabs in the next two election cycles.

Put it in liberal-speak.  Those people that were open to the Bush-is-to-blame narrative are just as likely to believe an Obama-is-a-crook narrative.  Particularly if they have $100,000 in student debt and no real prospects of a decent career.

All in all, the Obama administration is proving to be everything that conservatives could want.

Cut Any Program Ever?

Columnist Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Herald thought he'd have a bit of fun with the two candidates running for John Kerry's seat in the US Senate, Democrat Ed Markey and Republican Gabriel Gomez.  He asked them if there was anything that the government shouldn't do: "Can you name a troubling social concern that does not require government action?"



You can guess the answer.  Both candidates ducked. "[N]either candidate identified a single issue that it is not government's place to solve."



I know, it's the First Commandment of Politics.  Don't say anything to make anyone mad.  Ever.



But it explains the difficulty of ever cutting any government program, ever.  Right now in Britland the Labour Party, the party of big government, is trying to do a dance over spending.  They are trying to sell the idea that they would be prudent with the people's money, while accusing the Tories of being mean spirited.


They are, of course, right to be careful.  The Canadian Liberal Party got scared in the mid 1990s and cut spending.  Look what happened to them.  The Conservatives got into power and the second biggest party is now the social-democratic NDP.



Really, a center-left political party cannot afford to do spending cuts.  Not now, not ever.  Because any big-government party that cuts spending is in danger of encouraging its replacement with another party that is more true to its social-democratic principles.



So if I were a Democrat I would refuse to cut spending.  Let the Republicans do the heavy lifting on that.  Let them cut spending, scoot grandma over a cliff, end Medicare as we know it.



You can say, if you like, that Democrats betray their "little people" by driving the government finances into the ditch.  But I don't agree.  From a political point of view, all Democrats ever have to do is "fight for the people against the powerful."  Anything that goes wrong, they can blame it on the Republicans, and their partisans will believe them, from the haut-liberal elite reading The New York Times to the union public schoolteacher to the homeboys in the 'hood.



But what about Republicans?  Should they cut?  Well, Ronald Reagan cut domestic spending in 2001 and lived to tell the tale.  And the Gingrich Congress, after being bested by President Clinton in the government shutdown of 1995, successfully implemented a stealth program of holding down increases in spending.



But, of course, we are coming to a moment when all the biggies are going to break: health care, Social Security, K-12 education, welfare.   In that bonfire, all kinds of things will get vaporized, including perhaps the "fifth party system" that has endured since the the 1932 presidential election.



As I like to say, it will be the "little people" served by the Democratic Party that will get hurt, with women and minorities hardest hit.



But they will still keep voting for those benefits.

Finally Good News on Jobs

The headline number on unemployment went up last month to 7.6 percent.  But it went up for a good reason.



Let's take a look at the BLS numbers.  The unemployment rate went up because the Civilian Labor Force went up faster than Employment.  That means that more people are entering the labor force.  That is very good news.



The Civilian Labor Force went up by 420,000.  The Employment level went up by 319,000.  That will make the overall unemployment rate go up.



However, all is not copacetic.  If you look at the Labor Force numbers, you see that it has merely recovered from a three month dip.  What we need to see is continued growth in the Labor Force.



The question for us gamblers and speculators is what this does to the Fed.  Does it mean that the Fed will now slow its money printing operations and return to normal interest rates?  Does that mean that the bull run in gold is over?   Gold was down a couple percent this morning.



My guess is that the Fed will start gradually returning to normal operations, but that as in the past it will be too little too late.  By the time that the Fed gets to a genuinely balanced monetary policy it will find that inflation is roaring, real assets are booming, and a credit crunch will be needed.  Then it will have to really put on the brakes.



Why does it always go like this?  It's because the Fed is a creature of the government, and it will almost always do what the government needs to keep paying its bills.  The Fed does not conduct monetary policy for the benefit of the American people.  It conducts it for the benefit of the US government.  Then there is the dual mandate, for the Fed to target prices and employment.  And then there is Keynesianism, which encourages inflationary money printing in a recession, well after the credit crisis has passed.



We aren't going to get a sensible monetary policy until the prestige of the current ruling class is utterly destroyed.



But meanwhile, we see a healthy uptick in the employment indicators, despite the headwinds of big government spending, big government regulation and the looming threat of Obamacare.  This is good.

The Real Foreign Policy Reset

Conservatives seem to be in a tiff today about Benghazi Babe Susan Rice's appointment as National Security Advisor.  Meanwhile Charles Krauthammer opines that Republicans would have had a better chance of getting to the bottom of Benghazi if they'd let Rice's nomination as Secretary of State go forward.



But I don't think we should get too worked up about minor tactical issues.  President Obama wants an "America is the real problem" strategic retreat on foreign policy, and he ought to get it.  If he is wrong, deadly wrong, then Republicans will get to fix it, and the Democrats will get to be mistrusted on defense for another generation.



In truth the world is at a hinge point.  The strategic importance of the Middle East is about to decline as the fracking revolution comes on line, and the whole Arab culture is going to go through a gigantic revolution.  What about China?  Who knows?  Iran?



So the Obama policy of retreating from the world and contracting the defense establishment is really a status-quo policy.  We really don't know what else to do.  And if he retreats too far and contracts defense too much then it merely creates maneuver room for the next Republican administration.



The thing to remember is that government is always a complete mess, a record of failure after failure.  The heroic story of the British Empire was in fact a long series of blunders that usually got patched up and repaired just in time.



Our Democratic friends made a big deal about the mistakes and the blunders of the Bush administration.  But in the context of the time, it made sense.  We wanted to contain Iran and we did.



But what about the jihadi threat?  What about the surging Muslim immigrants to Europe?  Aren't they threatening to take over the world?



Well maybe, or maybe not.  The Islamic surge is a strongly divisive movement.  It is tribal in its structure and therefore probably self-limiting, just like fascism in its day.



If we accept the judgement of people like Max Weber the vital spark that powered the West to world hegemony was not its guns and its science but its transcending of mere tribalism.  Christianity, he wrote, taught city dwellers extend the boundaries of trust beyond blood kin.  It taught them personal responsibility.  It taught them to trust the stranger, or at least give him a fair chance to demonstrate trustworthiness.



Liberalism is going down because it contracts the boundaries of trust.  It urges us to trust foreigners and people barely off the farm.  And it tells us to mistrust businessmen and the ordinary middle class.  Instead it should be teaching women and minorities to emulate and admire the culture of business and the middle class.



Years ago the rulers of China and India decided to build their post-colonial regimes on the model they had learned at western universities, the socialist model.  They thought they were buying the latest, hottest thing.  It took them half a century to discover their mistake and switch their economies away from the dead hand of the administrative state.



Perhaps the Islamists are making a similar mistake.  They are practicing the white-hot politics of identity, just like their western liberal professors taught them.  It may take them half a century of bloody mistakes before they discover they have been had.



The only opportunity for a real reset on foreign policy -- and on domestic policy -- is after the liberal way gets exposed as a hopeless failure and a pathetic conceit of the present ruling class.



Then and only then will conservatives get a mandate to resume the western project of freedom, trust, responsibility, and prosperity.



But in the collapse of liberalism it will be minorities and women hardest hit.  As usual.

McDermott: Tea Parties Asked For It

Dear Congressman McDermott:



I am writing to deplore your conduct at a hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee on Monday, June 3, 2013.



As a US citizen and voter in Washington State's 7th District, I am ashamed of what I saw you do in your official capacity as my representative in the US House of Representives.



Look, I'm a conservative and you are a liberal institution here in liberal North Seattle.  But what you did on Monday shamed every First Amendment believing liberal in the nation.  Or it should have done, for any liberal that had, at last, any sense of decency.



Of course, the funny thing is that the gist of your remarks amounted to the idea that the Tea Party groups that applied for 401(c)4 status behaved like a woman that "asks" to be raped.



And we know what liberals think about that.  Blaming the victim is the least of the judgments that liberals make on people that suggest, even obliquely, that a woman asks for trouble when, e.g., she dresses "provocatively."  It shouldn't matter how a woman is dressed.  Rape is rape.  Right?



How provocative is it to put "Tea Party" in the name of your organization!  Talk about push-up bras!



By the way.  I see that in IRS Publication 557, 401(c)4 groups are titled "Civic Leagues, Social Welfare Organizations, and Local Associations of Employees."  What part of that is relevant to the notion that "if you didn’t come in and ask for this tax break, you never would have had a question asked of you"?



You see, Congressman, it matters a lot how an organization is registered with the government, and the Tea Partiers know it.  It's not just a question of tax-deductible contributions, or exemptions from income tax.  Tea Partiers know that you liberal chaps want to legislate lots of laws around the actions of corporations influencing elections, particularly corporations organized for the purpose of political education and persuasion.  In fact, I thought that you chaps want to overturn the Citizens United decision on corporate donations and electioneering.  Remember, Citizens United wasn't a grocery store that decided to get involved in changing the plastic bag law.  It was a corporation of concerned citizens that wanted to play in the public square on public issues.



So it is rather important for any "civic league" to make sure that it has ticked the right boxes with the government.  Otherwise the IRS or the FEC or the EPA or OSHA or ATF might come calling.  Golly, they did!  Especially since the folks at the Obama administration get really interested in the dotted "i"s and crossed "t"s of conservative organizations and conservative people when they get anywhere near public advocacy.  Hey, Lois!  How yer doin' babe?



Oh, I know what you were doing on Monday.  I understand completely.  You Dems are really worried about the air going out of the balloon of liberal enthusiasm.  With the IRS hearings droning on, day after day, and Jay Leno getting big applause on his IRS one-liners, you need to keep the liberal team pumped up.  You need to keep those liberal trolls going at full throttle down at Jen Rubin's blog.  And then there's the 2014 mid-terms.  So, who else do you ask to throw out the partisan red meat than good old Jim McDermott (D-WA-7), the guy representing the most liberal congressional district in the nation?  It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.



So I understand the political imperatives, Congressman, and the imperatives of political tactics.



But let's look at the bigger picture, Jim.  Let's peer beyond the parameters of daily talking points and partisan political tactics.  Let's start the good old post-mortem.  What went wrong?  How come that we find ourselves railing away at the IRS and the Obama scandals, day after day?  Is there something beyond mere Republican opposition and mean-spirited extremism?



Yes, there is.  In fact there's a big lesson to be learned from the current mess that you Dems are in.



It's simple really.  The "rules" and "rights" are not there just to protect the weak from the powerful, as we all endlessly declare.  They are not there just so that a Mom and Pop Tea Party organization can get a fair shake from the IRS.  The "rules" are also there to protect the powerful from themselves.  They are an insurance policy against hubris in the ruling class.



Here's the deal.  Anyone with political power is tempted to use it.  Even abuse it.  Sometimes liberals abuse their power.  Imagine that!  So we Americans limit the power of government to limit the power of the rulers.



It's all very well to decide what's needed to make America better and then legislate a program to change it.  Anyone can do that.  Anyone can then sit in a government bureaucracy and issue regulations to force people to conform to the new law.  But what if you are wrong?  Suppose that you pass a law on health care and predict that it will lower insurance premiums.  And then, four years later it becomes clear that you were wrong, and that health insurance premiums will go up?  What then?  Do you have to have an election and elect new legislators?  A new president?  Suppose that a significant minority is deeply hurt by the legislation but that a majority of the voters refuse to modify the law to accommodate them?  What does that minority do, if it is, say, composed of undocumented workers? Or, alternatively if it is composed of people working for small businesses that will lose their health insurance?  Or gays?



The fatal flaw in liberal politics is that it assumes that liberals will always be the first to see and respond to social injustice.  But suppose liberals were blind on some issue?  Suppose they just didn't get it?  What do we do then?  Given the power that liberals have, how will the people get the government to listen to their grievances?



Well, it's obviously going to be more difficult for the people to get their voices heard when you Dems sicc the Lois Lerners of the IRS on them.  And in the bigger context, that's going to hurt liberals.  Because, in a word, you chaps have put the Lois Lerners in there to suppress dissent from your liberal agenda.  How do we know who is right?



That is what came over so clearly in your remarks on Monday, Congressman.  You told us all that you do not understand the possibility that you liberals might, just once, be wrong on something.



The Greeks had a god that took care of people like you, Congressman McDermott.  The name of the god was Nemesis.

Judging Obama with Burke

I was looking at the latest Edmund Burke biography at the Corner Bookstore in Manhattan yesterday.  Well I was attending an author event for my daughter Beatriz Williams' blockbuster new book, A Hundred Summers.  It's about the big 1938 hurricane that hit New England in the fall of 1938.  It's going to be big, very big.



Listening to a flock of liberals at the party, and in particular to one enthusiast that averred that President Obama would go down as a great president, it got me to thinking.



How does Obama stack up against Edmund Burke?



The first great effort of Edmund Burke was his twelve year effort to impeach Warren Hastings, the Governor of Bengal.  I remember learning about the affair in school, but not really getting it.



But in the Obama era, you can get it, completely.  The point of impeaching Warren Hastings was to open a new era in governance.  No longer was it OK for a ruler to plunder his subjects as the mood took him.  The ruler, in this case Britain's proconsul in its new Indian empire, could not simply farm his subjects, he had to obey the law, its letter and its spirit.  He could no longer act like a Spanish conquistador or a pirate and loot and plunder.  He had to be responsible and obey the law.  The Begums of Oudh.  You could look it up.



Compare with Obama and the IRS and Fast and Furious and Obamacare and the bureaucracy run amok and the recess appointments made when Congress isn't in recess.  It is clear that President Obama recognizes no limits to his authority except those of countervailing power.



The second great effort of Edmund Burke was his support for Catholic emancipation, to stop Britain ragging on the Catholics, particularly the Catholics in Ireland.  Nominally, Burke was Protestant, but there is reason to believe that he was a crypto-Catholic; his wife remained Catholic all her life.  Burke lost his seat in Parliament in Bristol over his support for Catholic emancipation and free trade with Ireland.  Thereafter he represented a pocket borough belonging to Lord Rockingham.



Compare with Obama and his use of the IRS to harass his conservative opponents.



Then we come to Burke and his opposition to the French Revolution.  His opposition is generally framed with his denunciation of "sophisters, economists, and calculators." This was an attack on the worship of Reason, then at the height of its prestige before the attacks of Romanticism began in earnest.  Burke argued that society could not be founded on reason, nor yet on the social contract theories of the 18th century.  Society was not an arbitrary or supposed contract between the living, but a much bigger contract.  It was a contract between the generations, between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.



Compare with Obama who is spending the country into bankruptcy.  Not to overdo it, we were already heading there, but President Obama certainly seems to be insistent that we should get there in a hurry.



The problem is, of course, that government is force, politics is division.  Liberals don't recognize this, don't understand it.  They are transfixed by the notion that they are transforming society from bad to good.  They do not get that it matters, profoundly, how society gets transformed.  The fatal flaw in the Obama method is that his vision is a vision of power.  The thing is to get to the progressive millennium, any way you can.



The whole point of Burke's philosophy is that reform or revolution by itself means nothing.  What matter is how you implement change.  Humans are social animals, not mechanical slaves.



We will soon learn to appreciate the sublime wisdom of Edmund Burke better.  Thanks to President Obama, the great.