GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Maybe discussions about how the Republicans can climb back into power as soon as possible are the worng ones to be having.  Maybe some kind of more or less left-wing rule, antipathetic towards initative and success, sympathetic to those with even mildly plausible victimary claims, aversive to the use of force or risk taking in politics and economics, is the normal state in advanced market societies.  Of course, government and public opinion can never be too antipathetic, sympathetic and aversive to these respective features of civilized life–it is enough that we know, when scapegoats are to be chosen, where the pool of possible victims is to be found and what the offenses for which they are to be punished are.    One of the more interesting statistics I saw following the election was that the proportion of Democrats and Republicans in Congress is pretty much the same now as it was upon Clinton’s election in 1992; even more, if we factor in the further left-wing tilt of this Congress, it looks a lot like pre-Reagan proportions.  It’s almost as if things “snapped” back into place, after being “stretched” into some anomalous form for the last quarter century.

We could use the originary scene as a model for this situation (as, indeed, for all things):  the putting forth of the originary gesture constitutes the scene, but if we were to segment the scene into all of its constituent elements–the beginnings of attention paid to the appetitive object; the acceleration of mimetic energy directed toward that object; the approaching crisis and the preliminary apprehension of imminent destruction; the gesture itself; the spread of and obedience to the gesture throughout the group; and, finally, the devouring of the object in unison–how much time would be taken up by the critical juncture of the gesture itself?  In a sense, it’s silly to try and quantify it, but maybe 1%? 

A genuinely responsible political party wants to be the party that supplies the gesture when needed.  Now, this doesn’t mean that conservatives should be content to rule 1% of the time–a party that rules as much of the scene as possible would be better positioned to emit the gesture when required.  It does mean, though, that however we position ourselves throughout the rest of the scene, our attention is always directed to what would count as the next gesture, in the next crisis.  Norms are established in exceptional circumstances, when they present some renunciation to the consideration of the community that the most powerful forces in that community can see as the only way out of some crisis; and they become normal as the memory of that circumstance becomes ritualized and largely absent from daily life.  Those who preserve and clarify the “materials” of such norms are likely to either be unpopular or to be vulnerable to the charge of supporting what is merely normal, i.e., the majority against some more victimized or romantically charged margin.

It is interesting that while the left offers a wide range of “benefits,” an all inclusive sparagmos–we will make sure you never experience poverty, never go without health care, get all the education you need, always have a job or are able to live without one, free sex, etc.–conservatives have really only offered one over the past few decades:  tax cuts.  It’s not surprising that, all recriminations aside, the bottom fell out of the conservative movement when we got to the point where there are really no more taxes to cut–well, we could cut capital gains taxes, I suppose, but there are few if any at this point with a strongly felt need to have their taxes cut, at least at the level of national politics. 

What this may mean is that the conservative path back to power will be the same one pursued by Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1980, Guiliani in 1993 and Gingrich in 1994 (to take just some major landmarks):  restoring the norms that have been trampled on by leftist experimentation and dogmatism–law and order, national security and a privileging of the “middle” or “center” (those who work, save, pay their bills, etc.) over those who flout the normal conventions that make such stability possible.  If the Democrats now raise taxes significantly, tax cutting can again become a “benefit” offfered by Republicans; but it might be more productive to consider that what we will mostly have to offer are deferral and renunciations.  The only “benefit” that comes along with that is an honoring of those who have made such deferrals and renunciations in their own lives, a feeling that the mores of the country reflect their own personal code. 

After all, even though we know that the free market is the surest way of creating prosperity and more goods for all, in the first instance the free market is experienced by just about everyone (with the exception of the risk-taking entrepeneur) as renunciation:  one needs to find a job on one’s own, pay for one’s own health care and education, compete against the rest of the world, accept that there are no  guarantees that the stock market won’t dip or worse right when I am ready to cash in my IRA, etc.  Arguing, in practice, for the free market is first of all telling people what they can’t have for free, or supplied by the government.  Even arguing against someone else’s protectionism on the grounds that it hurts you is far more indirect than the fear of having the protections you depend upon lifted.  And even the benefits brought by the remarkable innovations made possible by the free market are ultimately highly abstract:  everyone thinks in terms of holding on to what they have and making incremental additions to same:  no one was clamoring for the benefits of the internet or cell phones in 1985, and no one is now clamoring for some invention 20 years down the road that will transform our lives.

Conservatives, then, should work to reform the Republican party as the party of deferral, renunciation and normalcy and prepare itself for the exceptional situations in which an argument for these qualities can be heard.  I think it is a fantasy to think that returning to the Reaganite values (some of them honored more in the breach even then)  of small government, reduced spending, modesty and reticence in things associated with family and sex, increased national defense, etc. will activate some majority already out there and waiting for these principles to be presented in their pristine form by uncorrupted representatives.  It’s impossible to compete with the promises of Democrats, whether it be for universal health coverage or that a nicer President will make the rest of the world very happy with us.  These promises tap into fantasies that can only meet their match in a more powerful reality, a reality that the majority of Americans now feel safe enough to banish from their everyday considerations.  The whole era of Bush scapegoating was an attempt to impose a cartoonish representation on a reality that was becoming a little too real:  as opposed to a risky world, with dangerous enemies, increasing but unsteady prosperity and cultural conflicts that aren’t going away any time soon–a reality that requires decisions made by imperfect people with limited knowledge–the Left created a fantasy world in which everything Bush touched was falling to pieces (immiseration increasing, skyrocking hatred throughout the “world,” the Constitution in “tatters,” etc.) while simultaneously living in a real world where they went to work, grew their IRAs, spoke their minds and generally went about their business unmolested.  Now the fantasy world has grafted itself onto the real one as the anti-Bush promises to make everything right. 

Those who protect us from harm also remind us of the existence of such harm and we want no such reminders when the harm appears distant; those who enforce the norms that make civilized life possible remind us of all our thwarted desires, and once civilization appears secured why shouldn’t our desires find an open field of fulfillment–the exceptionally normal then become bad fathers and convenient scapegoats.  But as generative anthropologists and originary thinkers we know that the center cannot go undefended long without being cannabilized; as marginalists in politics we can likewise know that the hardest and least rewarded task is to immunize the imperative orders that provide the last line of defense for the center by making it clear when we will disobey them in specific cases.  We should have faith in reality, that majorities will come to reocgnize the wisdom in deferral (and then will go again) and we should take honor in standing where reality is sure to present itself and standing with anyone who happens to find him or herself there when it does.

I thought I’d give this post-election commentary game another spin.  Two things occurred to me:  first, that Barack Obama, for a while at least, will be able to do pretty much whatever he wants (and if what he does is well received, that “while” will become quite a while) and we have no idea what he wants to do (that’s all one thing); second, do we really have comprehensive knowledge of the laws of scapegoating?  Maybe sometimes scapegoating really works–it must have, after all, to become such a longstanding human practice.  Maybe sometimes the mimetic tensions are genuinely “discharged,” leading to a period of significantly reduced tensions.  This wouldn’t make scapegoating any more just or reasonable–the fact that it works sometimes does not mean we could know in advance when it will work, or what the collateral damage will be.  But it would be a fact that we would have to acknowledge as theorists seeking the truth. 

Obama, then, in this new discharged environment, in which he has made a wide range of inconsistent, likely insincere, but never too insistently put forward promises, is pretty much free to ignore his most fervent supporters–until someone undermines his transcendence, what we might call his victimary halo, he is fairly invulnerable.  And those who paved the way for his transcendence through their relentless scapegoating of Bush are not well positioned to trip him up–they have already gotten their hands dirty, both as unscrupulous partisan hitmen and as slavish supporters.  Obama will have to wager his transcendence on something, and the odds are he will do so on a leftist “surge” in both doemstic and foreign policy–a new New Deal at home, and transnational pacificsm abroad.  But what if he is independent enough from any particular commitments or interest group to actually observe the effects of his first steps in the direction of advancing such policies?  How will this proud man, whose resentments are not that easy to read, respond to a rebuff from Ahmadinejad, Chavez–or, for that matter, Gordon Brown or Nicolas Sarkozy?  How will he deal with leftist activists who try to drag him down to their level by trying to cash in on his promises, interfering with his basking in the historical moment?  Obama’s sleazy crack at his first post-election press conference about Nancy Reagan’s “seances” reminded anyone who was paying attention of what was already clear–that Obama’s entire political idiom is a hybrid of the leftist activist group and faculty lounge.  It is not unreasonable to imagine that he might realize fairly quickly how exhausted and inadequate that idiom is to his purposes.

In a sense, some of the immediate decisions confronting Obama are very favorable towards any attempt to distance himself from the Left, should he wish to do so.  Reversing his position on Iraq, for example, should be relatively cost-free:  casualties are way down and stability and security immeasurably improved and likely to stay that way contingent only upon a continuance of present policies.  The financial crisis gives him cover to reverse himself on tax increases for the “rich.”  Taking a more skeptical stance on the constantly expanding bailout of what is coming to look like the entire American economy would allow him to pivot against both the Bush Adminstration’s haste to help rich Wall Street investors and the Democratic Congress’s lust to nationalize and distribute pork.  Everyone knows he has inherited the crisis, so the public will be patient, and the inevitable return to economic growth will redound to his credit.  The media is already preparing the narrative of Obama the rescuer, “like” Lincoln and FDR.

In the end, of course, Obama will have to prove himself by making difficult and unpopular positions–only when he does this will these favorable conditions become favorable conditions.  He will have to block some domestic policy proposal with overwhelming Democratic support; and, more important, he will have to initiate and see through to the end some application of American military power for some unequivocal end, against some enemy.  The latter imperative is, of course, both more difficult and more important.  But if Obama, offended by (say) an Iranian insult, shocked by some display of European cynicism in that same instance, and angered by his erstwhile domestic allies’ willingness to tie his hands in the midst of a decision he is coming to realize is more complex than he had realized–if, in such a situation, his sense of his own “destiny” overrides the Leftist commonplaces upon which he has been suckled, and as a consequence he finds himself a new set of allies willing, in the name of national security, to forget previous affiliations and advise and support him unconditionally in some action that will irrevocably narrow his future options and redefine his political identity; well, we might then have the makings of a remarkable Presidency.

Wouldn’t the criterion for actions taken by a new Adminstration, bolstered by a solid Congressional majority, which wants to effect fundamental transformation of the American order without tarnishing the transcendence which has been its real program, be that such changes be as subtle and irreversible as possible?  Perhaps (to refer back to my previous posts) large scale scapegoating operations can be suspended, and used for more targeted ends when needed–first of all, you would want to sustain the good feelings (treating opponents more with pity than anger) and make the most minimal changes with the most maximal effects. 

Now that the adminstrative, regulatory and welfare state has become large enough, and judicial understandings of the Constitution malleable enough, it is possible to make substantial changes simply through staffing decisions.  If the “Fairness Doctrine” is resurrected, a couple of appointments to the FCC determine what counts as “fair”; a couple of years of judicial appointments and “gay marriage” will be the law of the land; add to such appointments new “hate speech” laws and anyone who criticizes “gay marriage” (or puts quotation marks around it?) will be criminalized; appointments to the Federal Exchange Commission and of Federal Attorneys can ensure that, probably without even changing the law (as Eliot Spitzer showed, there is already plenty on the books with which to bully and bamkrupt less compliant corporations), corporations on board with the new regime will get along splendidly and those who aren’t–not.  The same goes for the Food and Drug Adminstration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Labor Department and so on–a government that scruples not to blow with the “righteous wind” at its back can make very thoroughgoing “change” without anyone really noticing until it is much too late–and, then, when resistance is mounted, you scapegoat that resistance as opposed to the implementation of the law, opposed to solid legal precedent, in favor of dirty air and water, in favor of unsafe working conditions, etc., etc.  This is how a smart and determined transnational progressive regime would proceed and Obama, much more so than the Pelosi-Reid clown Congress, seems to be smart and determined–and well-liked as well.

I haven’t spoken about the Palin phenomenon, but would like to now, because it is linked to a broader point:  the absolute need, if we are to extricate ourselves from what seems to me to be a death spiral (the success of the 9/11 attacks), to demolish the Washington “establishment”:  there is almost nothing actually existing in Washington, with the exception of Constitutionally mandated institutions, that I wouldn’t include in this imperative.  The CIA should be abolished and replaced by human intelligence gathering groups directly accountable to the President; the State Department should be eviscerated; we should bring back the “spoils system,” so that a new Adminstration can be genuinely responsible for the actions it undertakes–I would like to set the major political parties on the road to extinction, first of all by removing any legal forms which elevate them above any other private association; the same for the big media.  And that’s just for starters.  All this is in the realm of fantasy (and, perhaps, liberating thought experiments) at this point, of course–I raise the issue here not because I necessarily think Sarah Palin would do any of these things, but because there is no doubt that official Washington and its media praetorian guard saw her as a deadly threat to business as usual.  The frame-up of Palin revolved around her unfamiliarity with Washingtonese and media-speak–I would agree that she probably doesn’t know much about some foreign policy issues, but neither did Clinton or Bush before being elected, neither does Obama, and Biden knows a lot more that isn’t true than is.  They have no more brains than she does:  the difference, to paraphrase the Wizard of Oz’s speech to the strawman at the end of the movie, is that they have been “certified” by the establishment and she hasn’t.  The most remarkable and prescient events of the campaign might turn out to be those disastrous interviews:  what a careful and sympathetic viewer saw in Palin’s encounters with the “mainstream” media was someone torn between her lack of familiarity with the terms of a very hostile environment, her loyalty to her running mate which led, in turn, to her exaggerated deference to the standardized “official” discourse with which the campaign advisors tried to inculcate her, and her own, rather precise but largely unwelcome convictions and political instincts.  Torn to the point of incoherence:  when, in that cring-producing moment, Katie Couric asked her which newspapers and magazines she reads, and Palin answered “all of them,” as a writing instructor I saw the terror of the student desperate not to be “wrong” and rummaging through her store of commonplaces for a serviceable answer that won’t draw upon itself the dreaded red ink (“what is this essay about?”–“He is making a point about universal human nature”…)–I imagine that, running through her mind at that moment was something like “Oh my God, they didn’t tell me which newspapers and magazines I read!”

It was very good for us to see it and, I hope, in the long run, for Palin to have experienced it–because it is only those who are untutored in Washington’s ways, but skeptical enough to burst the bubbles of conventional wisdom (and there Palin certainly has some work to do) who can save us at this point.  Margins of the political system must be sought where “unregulated” associations and agendas can be formed–there’s no need to ignore the pseudo-center, but no serious political activity at this point can allow itself to be dependent upon it either.  My own favorite is a movement organized around constitutional amendments:  let’s sit down a formulate the language knocking the media, the judiciary, the universities, and the political parties off of the pedestal they have erected for themselves; let’s see if we can revise the terms of accountability of elected officials for the programs they establish by forcing Congress, not unelected bureaucrats, to set the rules according to which laws will be implemented–I am confident that language in all of these cases, and many more, can be found that would gain the support of the 2/3-3/4 of Americans needed to pass new amendments, and such a campaign would be an unprecedented experience in trans-partisan political self-education.   We could then hold politicians accountable to their stand on the amendments.  Let’s see if we can be subtle and irreversible ourselves:  all ideas conforming to our constitutional order should be welcomed into the discussion.

One conclusion from the election results that conservatives seem to find comforting is that it still appears as if the U.S. is a “center-right” country.  The proof of this lies in polling revealing significantly higher numbers of self-identified “conservatives” over self-identified “liberals,” as well as polling revealing majority support for traditionally “conservative” issues like lower taxes, fiscal responsibility, traditional marriage, a judiciary that applies the law rather than creating it, and so on; and, in the need for a leftist like Obama to present himself as a centrist, changing his position on government wiretapping, the death penalty, and other issues. Isn’t there another way of explaining these polling results and candidates behavior, one which doesn’t require us to ignore the fact that voeters  have just elected the most lefist President, two years after electing the most leftist Congress, ever?  Couldn’t it be that people like describing themselves in those traditional conservative categories, but also don’t want to be targeted and categorized as racist/sexit/homphobic/anti-environment by the all pervasive victimary disocurse–even by themselves?  More generally, that people want to be part of the euphoria promised by the transcendence that follows a successful scapegoating campaign,” and the vagueness of the “ideas” behind the campiagn allows them to deposit whatever content they want into it?  One result of election exit polling was, apparently, that McCain’s “negative campaigning,” which mostly involved reminding people of what a basic media vetting would have made common knowledge, turned off a substantial majority of voters–what could that mean other than that those voters knew that there was a truth concealed by the cult of deification surrounding Obama and simply did not want their attention drawn in that direction? 

What this would mean is that voters want to believe utterly irreconciliable things.  Or that, like Freud’s pleasure principle, there are no contradictions in the contemporary shared consciousness of the American public:  there are simply affirmations.  There is probably not anything too new about this.  Who is a fiscal conservative when it comes to seeing their own prescription drug benefit cut?  But there may be a difference between maintaining such fantasies on the margin along with a core relationship to reality and severing all reliable ties to (at least political) reality.  To use the old definition of a neo-conservative, a “liberal who as been mugged by reality,” the criterion for such a “core” relationship to reality might be that there is something you could be mugged by.  What if the typical Obama supporter (voter?) is unmuggable?  If my previous post is right, and the Obama cultic phenomenon is simply the converse of the unprecedented scapegoating directed towards Bush, then it would make sense to expect a basic detachment from reality to be part of the phenomenon. 

I suppose it’s common enough for political losers to levy such insults at the winners as being “detached from reality.”  Still, you, reading this, can let me know:  if you listen to what leftists say they want to do these days in foreign policy, or the economy, or health care, or anything else–well, there will be the conventional gesture toward some think-tank derived “plan,” but the core rationale behind what they want to do and why, is it ever anything that couldn’t be mapped out in terms of “unlike Bush, I want…”?  The whole argument for more “multilateralism” in foreign policy, or for “repairing our alliances,” not to mention Obama’s signature promise to meet with all our enemies without preconditions are all pure negations of the attitudes polemically attributed to Bush.  No one can tell you what they mean by any of these things:  what would come of meeting our enemies, what, exactly, we would like and could reasonable expect our allies to do that they aren’t doing now… I am sure that such queries will be met with blank stares, followed by a relapse into the scripted diatribe.

My previous post suggested that a sustained confrontation with reality, now that the Left has no choice but to govern, is sure to burst this bubble, and such bursting will take the form of the disintegration of the Left into infighting, making a coherent simulated reality impossible.  There is, of course, a more pessimistic possibility–that forces within the Left will succeed in punishing and expelling its “dissidents” and imposing such a reality, now within the world’s superpower.  In this case we will see efforts to, first modify, but then perhaps assault, important elements of the Constitutional order.  This would force a large minority of Americans into open rebellion–roughly speaking, the 30% or so who still give Bush favorable approval ratings, thereby producing a new class of enemies/scapegoats.  Where, then, would the rest of Americans stand?  How much of this process would be “processed” as a reality one is being mugged by and how much, if jobs are supplied, massive government intervention stabilizes for a short while the financial system and Obama’s stock as savior increases, would be processed according to the script frantically being produced? 

The only point of adducing such speculations would be to lay down markers which might identify one or another tendency in advance; or to construct practices and arguments that could intervene effectively before it is too late.  I believe that if we have to rely upon the sense of limits, restraint, morality or respect for the American constitutional order on the part of the left, we are finished.  If the American “middle” is not essentially intact, there will be no countervailing cultural and political forces.  What we need to look for is signs of resistance to extreme policies, and the response on the part of the ruling Left to that resistance; and then the response to that response.  Last year, Congress and the President tried to force through an extremely unpopular immigration reform bill–regardless of what one thinks of the bill, the fact that massive resistance forced an almost unanimous governing class to back down was a very healthy sign.  If that kind of thing happens in response to, say (everyone can make their own list here), massive new welfare spending, or the kind of disarmament policies Obama is on record as favoring, or the abandonment of an ally in crisis… then that will be a sign that everything should be alright.  If such massive resistance is ignored, with the leaders of the movement scapegoated and incumbent politicians paying no or little price (because of overwhelming advantages in funding and media coverage)–then things will not be alright.  That would be a sign of reality lost, of the rise of the unmuggables.

I persist in believing that the founding event of our era is 9/11 and that the era is therefore defined by whether we reject, decisively and deliberately, victimary blackmail.  9/11 was a tocsin call for the intensification of what I consider a Global Intifada–an increasingly tight alliance between the transnational progressives on the one hand and the imperial victimary forces spearheaded by totalitarian Islam, on the other hand.  The transnational progressives work to create a reality solely defined by international laws and norms, while the terrorist victimary forces carve out a regime of lawlessness enabled by the transnational progressive neutralization of any terms available for thinking self-defense.  To put it another, transnational progressiveness insists upon a transactional approach to the victimary:  it promises, gives hope that, a sufficiently high ransom will eliminate the system of blackmail once and for all.  While the victimary/terrorist forces shrewdly realize that this provides a blank check to keep raising the ransom. 

The trope of blackmail is a very apt one, because isn’t the reality produced by extortion one of utter irreality, a situation in which one swings back and forth between hope and despair based upon intrinsically ambiguous and easily manipulated indicators; a situation in which one vacillates wildly between blaming and consoling one’s fellow victims; a situation in which someone much weaker than yourself holds your fate in his hands; a situation in which one is compelled constantly to make intricate calculations without having any reason to believe that the “data” they based upon are real?  A situation, in other words, in which one is reduced to the condition of a child, reduced to blathering “Yes we can!” and other inanities?  How in the world does one exit such a condition?

White Guilt has a staying power well beyond what I anticipated when I first started analyzing it, following Eric Gans’ seminal discussions in his Chronicles of Love & Resentment.  And I’m not sure I completely understand the source of that staying power, much less what would displace it.  As a religious cult for a highly advanced, secularizing age, White Guilt certainly testifies to the absolute need for some kind of sacred center.  So, the question is, now that White Guilt is implanted in our cultural DNA, what new revelation or series of revelations can compete?  Christianity is certainly a source of resistance, but could never conquer the “commanding heights” of the governing and cultural elites of the Western world (I still hold out hope that those elites can be decentered, since we really don’t need :commanding heights” any more, if we ever did–but asking how that might happen would throw us back into this same circle).  Perhaps we will simply have to wait and see what kinds of victims and what kind of visibility for those victims our new, essentially one-party state (encompassing all of government–excluding a sliver-sized majority in the Supreme Court–and the media, entertainment and educational systems) will produce.

First of all, we just received a very valuable lesson in the efficacy of scapegoating:  the singleminded hatred of Bush cultivated by the Left over the past 8 years has translated directly into the deification of Barack Obama.  That singlemindedness is to be wondered at:  there were no guarantees that the robotic effort to blame every single bad thing that happened in the world on Bush, and to separate him from every single good thing that happened, would work to discredit Bush rather than the purveyors of the myth.  On the other hand, it’s not clear what else they had to work with.  Bush, in the end, turned out to be vacillating, “compassionate” conservative who simply could not bring himself to believe that his opponents were willing to disable us in front of our enemies in order to defeat him; much less that they were so desperate to defeat him because they hoped to disable us in the face of our enemies.

 At any rate, what struck me in Obama’s victory speech was how one could see almost everything he says and, indeed, his entire persona, as a precise photgraphic negative of the stereotype that has been produced of Bush.  That is why, if Bush is the source of all evil, Obama can be the source of all good, of “healing” and transcendence.  The power of Obama’s otherwise vapid oratory might be explicable on these terms:  from a time of division to a time of unity, from antagonizing the world to inspiring it, from the old (white) guard to the new inclusive order.  As a non-threatening (in Shelby Steele’s formulation) “negotiator,” Obama takes upon himself our White Guilt, all of which had been deposited in the person of George W. Bush, and cleanses us of it. 

From a historical and anthropological perspective, then, the question is whether the mimetic crisis has been deferred, or are its forces merely gathering?  On the one hand, the esthetic and sacrificial coherence of singling out Bush (and other Republicans, to the precise extent they could be shown to have been contaminated by Bush), and defeating him decisively in the figure of his assigned surrogate, McCain, might have the desired cathartic effect.  The symbolic scapegoating, mediated through the terms of the liberal democratic order’s procedures for succession, would make more bloody or destructive versions unnecessary.  Here, we might have an argument over whether the liberal democratic order does do anything other than provide simulations of scapegoating events so as to protect us from actual ones.  I think it has to do quite a bit more, because scapegoating has no epistemological value–it offers no help in providing accounts of reality and preparing for future events.  And if the terms of the mimetic crisis have remained unchanged, how can the symbolic scapegoating appease the victimary gods?

It will perhaps be up to Obama whether those terms remain unchanged.  He would have to do at the least the following two things in order to emerge as more than a kind of fertility god springing from the soil manured by the sacrificed Presidency of George W. Bush.  First, he would have to stand in between the Democratic majority and one or more of their interest groups as they grab for more than their “fair” share of the spoils of victory (the sparagmos); second, he would have to take actions aimed unequivocally and unapolegetically at one or another of America’s declared enemies–only such actions would position Obama as a genuine defender of the national constitutional order, rather than the idol of those resentfully parastic upon it. 

If Obama chooses to remain at the center of the cult that has brought him to power, what might we expect:  who would be the next victims?   There don’t seem to be any immediate threats (the Left, of course, will be the first to insist upon the ease with which threats can be fabricated), precisely because the victory seems so complete:  the most powerful Republican now in power will be Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, hardly a promising bogeyman.  The talk radio hosts?  They can be easily ignored, at least for a while, and anyway it would be almost too easy to simply cut them off (reinstating the “Fairness Doctrine” won’t easily produce the required sacrificial event).  More promising might be show trials for members of the Bush Administration, not excluding Bush and Cheney themselves:  that would be red meat for the base in a more than usually literal sense.   But one would run out of them fairly quickly as well.

The question won’t arise for real until Obama confronts genuine obstacles.  What might those be, and what would be the appropriate scapegoats?  One easy answer is the financial crisis, where Obama could follow the lead of both Roosevelts and seek the heads of various “malefactors of great wealth” (presumably those who don’t donate to Democrats), plus increasingly confiscatory taxes–this might be very bad economics, especially in a recession or depression, but very good politics.  Environmental extremism also points out quite a few possibilities, like producers of coal and the oil companies.  Obama need not take the lead in any of this, instead simply nodding to supporters in and out of government–by this point, quite a bit of law changing and regulation can be effected through well situated lawsuits in front of friendly judges (and many more of them will now be friendly). 

I doubt that there is anything anyone opposed to this agenda could do until it plays itself out.  I suppose a bout of scapegoating comes to an end when it has been ritualized and institutionalized:  in this case through ritual flagellations of racism, polluting technologies, expressions of “intolerance,” warmongering, and so in, in politics and throughout the culture.  Which means a lot more of what we have now, but without even the token resistance and possibility, every four years, of appealing over the heads of the elites to the populace available up until now.  (No, I don’t think the Democrats will try to cancel the 2012 elections–but they can arrange things so as to face a severely underfuned Republican will be thoroughly “profiled” and demonized from the beginning.) But when these institutions fail to successfully target all the resentment they generate, or generate new resentment through their intrinsically imprecise application, and fail to account for a wider reality unresponsive to them, we can expect the victims to turn on each other.  Undeniable failures will call for a reckoning, starting perhaps first of all with the Big Media, for whom continued idolization of Obama will become incompatible with actually reporting on what he says and does.  A whole system of taboos have been established protecting Obama from serious questions, and they are all taboos deeply rooted in both victimary politics and Bush hatred (which are really two sides of the same coin).  Someone will have to break those taboos, some “insider,” who will then be punished; more will come forward, leading to a new sub-system of victimage.  With the break-up of the cult, a renewal of a thinking of the center might be possible.  The only figures who will emerge with any credibility at that point will be those who managed to avoid all responsibility for what happens in the meantime.

Adam