By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, February 10, 2019
‘This is going to be the New Deal, the Great Society, the
moon shot, the civil-rights movement of our generation,” Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) says about her so-called Green New Deal.
The marketing material published in support of the concept — and that’s all the
Green New Deal is: an advertising campaign without a product — offers what
passes for soaring rhetoric anno Domini
2019, calling for a “new national, social, industrial, and economic
mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II.”
This is Sandy’s War.
In my forthcoming book, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics,
I consider an observation from Erich Fromm, the Marxist-Freudian social critic
whose Escape from Freedom was
required reading only a generation ago. (It remains worth reading.) Fromm
believed that the disruption of the medieval social order by the early
stirrings of what we would come to call “capitalism” left Europeans of all
classes uncertain and anxious about their status: social, political, economic,
and religious. He connected this to the rise of Protestantism and also to the
genesis of something much more relevant to our own disruption-convulsed culture
of social-media obsession:
This underlying insecurity
resulting from the position of an isolated individual in a hostile world tends
to explain the genesis of a character trait which was . . . characteristic of
the individual of the Renaissance and not present, at least in the same
intensity, in the member of the medieval social structure: his passionate
craving for fame. If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one’s
relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one
means to silence one’s doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of
the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one’s
individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructibility;
if one’s name is known to one’s contemporaries and if one can hope that it will
last for centuries, then one’s life has meaning and significance by this very
reflection of it in the judgments of others.
One of the more amusing psychotic delusions of our time
is that reputation is quantifiable,
and that this quantum represents a mathematical identity with one’s human value
in toto. Talk-radio hosts boast about
their audience size or their podcast downloads as a stand-in for credibility;
Donald Trump brags (and, often enough, lies)
about the size of the crowds he draws or the ratings of broadcasts with which
he is associated in a way that very much calls to mind simpler male boasts
involving ordinary rulers, and at the same time he mocks the “failing New York Times” — which is not actually
failing at all — as though the truth or falsehood of its reports were reflected
in its circulation numbers. Similar jibes were pointed at the much-missed Weekly Standard, even as people of no
particular account believe themselves to be figures of some consequence because
they have as many Twitter followers as a B-list film actor. Representative
Ocasio-Cortez’s admirers — and more than a few of her critics — note
approvingly that she is a capable user of Twitter, as though this somehow
liberated her from such quotidian congressional concerns as knowing how a bill
becomes a law or what it is the House of Representatives in fact does. Max
Boot, whiling noting her deficiencies, admiringly describes her as a “social-media
blackbelt.”
These people are unknowing followers of Bishop Berkeley,
who insisted: “To be is to be seen.” The vice associated with that appears in
exaggerated form in the manners of Millennials who cannot drink a cocktail or
eat a dessert without photographing it, publishing the photograph, and
anxiously minding the tally of how many people — and people of what status — engage with it. Appropriate
word, engage — it is one part
business and one part romance: a “prior engagement” can mean two very different
things. (That is true of many words in these weird times: Architectural Digest used to write about such-and-such an architect
or designer and “the space he shares with his partner, Bill” and it was never
clear whether they were in business together or in bed together. Thank goodness
for gay marriage.) The disastrously unsuccessful social experiment of the early
21st century has been attempting to substitute hundreds or thousands of
superficial and transitory instant relationships for genuine community and
family, which require time and a different kind of effort to cultivate. Like
Fromm’s medieval burghers, they live in a time of uncertainty and status
anxiety, and so they seek big, important things to which to attach themselves:
big crowds on social media, big crises in politics. Which is to say, the
passionate and fanatical denunciation of “climate deniers” or billionaires or
Mike Pence’s wife is only the Instagram photo of the braised beef cheeks at
Hunky Dory in political disguise: consumption that literally could not be more
conspicuous.
Eric Hoffer, author of The True Believer, offered observations similar to those of Fromm,
linking what would become the two most powerful forces in our community life
today: glory and hatred:
Passionate hatred can give meaning
and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of
their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a
holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers
them unlimited opportunities for both.
Related — and, again, the application to the contemporary
mode of social intercourse associated with social media is obvious — Hoffer
writes:
Glory is largely a theatrical
concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an
audience. . . . The desire to escape or camouflage their unsatisfactory selves
develops in the frustrated a facility for pretending — for making a show — and
also a readiness to identify themselves wholly with an imposing spectacle.
“Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” is, at 16
syllables, a mouthful. The day before yesterday, she was “Sandy,” a
pleasant-seeming young woman who liked to dance, worked in a bar, worried about
her family, and chafed that her advantages and elite education (Boston
University shares Case Western’s academic ranking and is significantly more
expensive than Princeton: Is there a more appropriate
preparation for life in Washington?) left her struggling, obscure, and
unsatisfied. And so she set after glory and personal significance in politics,
to which she is relatively new — the hatreds and grievances she dotes on are
obvious enough and familiar enough that one assumes she has been in possession
of those for some time. They are not newly acquired.
If you spend enough time around politics and/or media,
you have seen this figure before. Years ago, a young woman beginning what would
turn out to be a successful turn on the Washington cursus honorum asked me, earnestly: “Is it wrong to want to be
famous?” I asked her what she intended to do
with the celebrity she sought — for what purpose
did she want it? “Why?” The question obviously had never occurred to her. I
might as well have asked her why she wanted two eyes rather than one. She has a
lot of Twitter followers now.
War is the most ancient avenue of glory, but it isn’t for
everyone: Many of our progressive friends believe that American military might
is a force for evil in the world, and that the military itself is malevolent,
backward, and hateful. But there are war substitutes and war analogues to be
had. My friend and colleague Jonah Goldberg is the poet laureate of “meow” —
the Moral Equivalent of War — and its baleful effects on our political thinking
and discourse. The concept, he writes,
has been the central idea of
American liberalism for over 100 years: from John Dewey’s “social benefits of
war,” to Woodrow Wilson’s “war socialism,” to FDR’s explicit embrace of martial
organization to fight the Great Depression, to the New Frontier and the War on
Poverty, straight up to Barack Obama’s call for America to be more like Seal
Team Six. Instead, I just asserted it in a single sentence. The idea can simply
be understood as the progressive version of nationalism, minus the word “nationalism.”
When you say, “We’re all in it together” or, “Ask not what your country can do
for you but what you can do for your country,” you’re making a nationalist
argument, even if you think, as so many liberals do, that the word itself is
icky.
While many causes associated with
the moral equivalent of war are well-intentioned and honorable in spirit
(fighting poverty, conservation, etc.), the problem with the idea itself is
that it is totalitarian — in a psychological, if not always in a political,
sense.
Meow has many cynical political uses: If every political
opponent is the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler, if every political initiative
tantamount to D-Day, then there is much that can be excused in the way of
underhandedness, rhetorical excess, demagoguery, and the like. As Goldberg
reminds us, war and war alone has been the great champion of socialism, because
it provides an emergency pretext for the authoritarian project of reorganizing
an organic society in accordance with the necessarily synthetic model decocted
from ideology, bias, bigotry, eccentricity, and the self-interest, always
unavoidable, of the planners empowered with drawing up the blueprints of this
or that brave new world or utopia.
And, hence, the Green New Deal: Our war, requiring a “new
national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen
since World War II.” Under whose
command? That of Field Marshal Sandy, of course.
About the details of the Green New Deal, such as they
are, there is not really much to say. On Friday, I spoke with one of the
world’s leading authorities on North American building practices and asked him
about the plan to “retrofit” these structures in the service of a “net-zero
energy” agenda. Neither “scathing” nor “derisive” quite captures his response.
He has been involved in a number of net-zero retrofits and understands how
complex and expensive they are — and how they can destroy a building when done
poorly. Ask a farmer, an aerospace engineer, the manager of an electric
utility, or a truck-driver about these highfalutin’ schemes and sentiments and
you will get another superfluous proof of Robert Conquest’s maxim — “Everyone is conservative about what he knows
best” — and Williamson’s First Law: “Everything is simple if you don’t know
a f*****g thing about it.”
But the call for a World War II–level national deployment
in the service of an old, tired, hackneyed, shopworn Democrat-socialist
wish-list is not about reversing the trend of climate change (China and India
operate independent of American policy) or even about redistributing wealth or
aggrandizing the power of petty politicians, as attractive as those things are
to the low-minded and meretricious class of people who can hypnotize others —
and very often themselves — with
shiny objects found in any gutter. Field Marshal Sandy needs a great cause to
which to attach herself, lest she return to being only Sandy, obscure and unhappy
and of no consequence — or at least no consequence obvious enough for someone
with her crippled understanding of what life is for.
In times of war and crisis, or other instances of high
drama, life is dominated by public
affairs, and it is in public life that one seeks glory and meaning. But ours
are not times of that kind, however much we insist on trying to convince
ourselves that they are. These are times of relative peace and plenty. In times
such as these, the ordinary thing would be for Cincinnatus to return to his
plow, and domestic affairs would take
their rightful place at the center of life, including at the center of a community
life of which politics is only a minor part. But private life has been much
diminished by the decline of marriage and family, and by the abandonment of
institutions ranging from churches to social clubs. Private life also has been colonized: partly by the social-media
culture that treats every afternoon latte or trip to the beach as subject
matter for a running documentary of limited interest, and also by an expansive
and metastatic form of politics that insists that the personal really is the
political, to the extent that there is no sphere of genuinely private life at
all: If you happen to be the parent of a kid who was standing near another kid who had an expression on his face that
somebody didn’t like, then there very well may be an organized political
campaign to ruin you economically, as in the matter of the children from
Covington Catholic visiting Washington a few weeks ago. Domestic life is not
happy, satisfactory, or even safe.
And so we have the grand game of make-believe and moral
dress-up, in which Field Marshal Sandy rallies her troops on Twitter in the
service of a half-organized bouquet of slogans and prejudices that no mentally
normal adult — and there are still a few of those around — takes quite
seriously. The purported goal of the great national deployment isn’t the point
— the deployment itself is. It is an excuse for a great deal of noise and
running in circles and excitation and displays of Very High Moral Seriousness
that is its own reason for being. Sandy’s war is not a struggle over the future
of Earth — it is only a struggle over the future of Sandy, and all the other
Sandys out there in the great vast wilds of America, waiting tables at TGI
Friday’s or grinding away in the obscurity of some master’s program in women’s
studies, sure that however things were supposed to turn out, they weren’t
supposed to turn out like this, a
mess of loneliness and pointlessness, all dressed up for battle with nowhere to
go and no comfort but Netflix and Facebook and Twitter, little fixes of dopamine
just strong enough and frequent enough to keep the addicts upright and sedated
enough that they do not begin asking the really difficult questions and
demanding answers.
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