Vision Circle

Warring in the USA

I wrote the following piece over two years ago. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to ponder its application to current events.

PSYCHO-CULTURAL BACKGROUND
11.11.2000

INTRODUCTION

I am baffled by the 2000 Presidential election. I don’t understand what has happened, nor do I understand my own actions in this election. I do not understand how politics works in this millennial and chaotic world and so I do not know how to be politically active.

I should also say, however, that after voting this time I felt more civic pride than I ever have. I attribute that to the fact that I participated in this election more than I have in previous elections. I participated in demonstrations and argued in online forums. I intend to do that again. But I want to have a better idea of what I’m doing.

WHAT HAPPENED?

When I say “I am baffled by the 2000 Presidential election” I don’t mean that:

Of the many accounts being advanced, I can’t find one I like.

Rather, I mean:

I don’t like the terms in which any of these accounts are being constructed.

I want an account constructed in terms of a self-organizing system psycho-cultural system of individuals whose thoughts and decisions are subject to multiple interacting forces, some rational, some not.

That sentence, admittedly, uses more than a little jargon. But it is a starting point.

THE CENTRAL PHENOMENON

The central phenomenon of this election seems to be this: when the country went to the polls the voters divided themselves into two big piles and a handful of considerably smaller piles. The astonishing fact is that the two big piles are the almost the same size. My intuition is that, in some sense, this deadlock was intended by the system. The explanatory problem is is to produce such an accounting without invoking some mysterious social organism. I don’t know how to do that.

All the activity that’s now taking place in an effort to pull a decision from the election is secondary to that central phenomenon. But that I do not necessarily mean that this activity has no significant consequence. It does. But that doesn’t change the fact that, for all practical purpose, the Bush/Republican forces and the Gore/Democrat forces came out even. That’s what I want to understand.

[As intuition is not knowledge, I do not actually know that deadlock was intended. But I believe that, by exploring that intuition, I will learn something. Whether or not this particular idea survives the exploration is beside the point.]

THE NATIONAL PSYCHE & THE FALL OF THE EVIL EMPIRE

Everything is connected to everything else and the causal forces meeting in the historical present stretch back into the past without end. Figuring out where to start is not easy. My sense is that we need to focus our attention on the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in the late 1980s. That left the nation without a national scapegoat, thus radically altering the nation’s psycho-cultural landscape. We no longer had Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire to kick around.

As some of you may know, my thinking on these matters has been strongly influenced by an essay Talcott Parsons published in 1947 on “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.

For the most part I have used Parsons, and others as well, in arguing about the nature of racism in the USA. While Africans were brought to this country for economic reasons it seems to me that during, say, the 19th century African Americans increasingly assumed a dual psychological role in the white psyche. On the one hand, they were a source of entertainment. On the other, they were convenient scapegoats, as became evident with the lynchings that emerged during Reconstruction and continued well into the last century. That is to say, African America served as a geographically internal target for the ethnic and nationalist antipathy Parsons discussed.

Thus we have the thesis in Klinker and Smith, The Unsteady March (U. Chicago, 1999). They argue that African Americans have been able to move forward on civil rights only during periods where the nation faced an external threat - the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the major wars of the first half of the 20th century. When the external danger had subsided, gains were lost. From my point of view, they’re arguing that, when external danger looms large and demands attention, the citizenry can focus aggression there and so ease up on the internal colony. Beyond this, of course, it becomes necessary to recruit from the colony to fight the external enemy, both physically and propagandistically - be kind to your black citizens when you fight the Nazis, etc.

Vietnam was the last major war of the Cold War period. As it receded into the past, a political backlash set in and affirmative action came under attack. That’s the situation we faced when the Soviet Empire collapsed. With the major external threat suddenly collapsed, there was a crisis of aggression - I’m reminded of the phrase “conservation of aggression” coined by Robert Wright. The fall of the Evil Empire deprived a great many people of an object for aggressive impulses. What then, happened to that aggression?

It got directed elsewhere. My sense is that the political rhetoric on a number of issues heated up in the wake of the fall: gun control, abortion, the arts, gays, affirmative action, violence in the media. A number of these issues come under the rubric of the so-called “culture wars”. Each of these issues was already on the political agenda, and had been there for some time.

Sexy music had been inspiring pulpit denunciations and legislative action since the early decades of the 20th century. Movies have been problematic since the beginning and the NAACP put itself on the political map by organizing protests against “Birth of a Nation.” But, it seems to me, that the scope of politicized cultural contest broadened.

Perhaps the most interesting redirection, however, was into the so-called War on Drugs. Political concern about drug use is not, of course, new. It goes back to Prohibition - which, was, of course, intimately linked with that objectionably sexy music - and got redirected by and in reaction to the counter-cultural 60s and 70s. However, it is my impression that the current effort ramped up in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

This war on drugs has had substantial material consequences: increased law enforcement and court activity, a considerable increase in the prison population and, of course, in the prison industry. Our prisons now have a relatively large population of non-violent offenders who are disproportionately black, taken off the voting rolls as felons, and available for labor in various prison-based enterprises. I do not know whether or not the increase in the economic “weight” of the prison sector is roughly equal to the losses suffered by the defense sector. I would, of course, like to know.

Regardless of how those numbers work out, my basic point is simply that the end of the Cold War changed the psycho-cultural system in a major way. Psycho-cultural aggression had to be redirected and much of it was redirected at targets within the country, rather than externally. That redirection is the central political phenomenon of the 90s and is responsible for much of the ugliness and programmatic futility of current politics.

CLINTON AS SCAPEGOAT

By the end of the decade much of that aggression became directed at President William Jefferson Clinton. In psycho-cultural terms, he was the first draft-dodging, pot-smoking, funky-butt saxophonist, and baby boomer to have been elected to the Presidency. He was also intelligent, personable, charismatic, a superb politician, and a centrist.

And he quickly became deadlocked. I have no desire to recount the Clinton Presidency, but I cannot avoid the final act, the Lewinsky scandal. That consumed a considerable portion of the national political energy during his second term and resulted in an impeachment process in the course of which Toni Morrison and others suggested that he was, at least symbolically, a black President - this, of course, links back to the cultural psychodynamics we looked at above. In this impeachment process the people’s representatives seemed to be acting against the will of the people they represented, at least as that will was revealed in opinion polls. That, in itself, requires some analysis. But not here and now.

The impeachment effort failed and Clinton has ended his term with a prosperous economy and considerable popular approval for his presidency, if not for his person. It seems that the people were able to make a distinction their representatives were not. They ended up separating Clinton's private life, of which they disapproved, from his public, of which they seemed to approve. In any event, they could see no purpose in punishing the public man for the private sin. That I count as a significant, though as yet untested, outcome. That also requires some analysis. But not here and now.

It seems to me, however, that--to paraphrase von Clauswitz--the current election is a continuation of the Clinton scandal by other means. That is to say, the Clinton scandal brought about a certain configuration of political forces. These forces are not quickly mobilized and/or redirected -- which is one reason why the post-Cold War era has been so politically unproductive. That configuration is the one that cradled this election.

And with that, I will leave things for now and return to the Big Picture.

PSYCHO-CULTURAL POLITICS

The psycho-cultural problem engendered by the end of the Cold War has had a major effect on politics by “releasing” a great deal of anxiety from Cold War targets. Dealing with this “free-floating” anxiety is a major social task, one currently stressing our political mechanisms. However, as far as I know, such forces are invisible to mainstream political thinking. If you can’t see the forces, you can’t analyze them, and you certainly can’t base political strategy and action on an analysis you don’t even know you need.

So, we have a political system driven to deadlock by forces that are not acknowledged. How can we change that? What kind of political actions follow from this kind of analysis? To the extent that I am correct, this badly directed collective aggression will distort all attempts at substantive political action.

It seems to me that the political problem we face is not at all politics as usual. For a decade or two people have been talking about a realignment of positions in which the old distinctions between the political left and right become less and less useful. And, while one can certainly see the centrist urge as an example of this, I think that something deeper is going on. Realignment is a matter of positions in the rational realm. What’s going on is a revision in the boundary between the rational and the....what?

At the same time we’re in a technological explosion, with communications and information technology being one of the major foci of activity. The biological sciences are the other focus. These are inspiring high-tech visions of the future, both utopian and distopian. Libertarian thought seems to be on the rise, seeking to free individuals and industry from government forces. This thinking seems blind to the fact that the high-tech boom is grounded on research sponsored by Big Government decades ago, when it was justified by Cold War thinking. And, as my friend Abbe Moshowitz has been exploring, large multi-national corporations are increasing their scope of activities, often at the expense of governmental authority and revenue.

The nature and scope of governmental and political action is being revised. That is what we need to think about.