I have to give the man credit not just for saying he was wrong, but for saying explicitly that free-marketeerism is a fundamentally flawed way of understanding the way the world works.

Hindsight is a bitch, but it takes guts to do what he did.

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Moved by the debates, I went back and read Age of Reform (1955), mainly because I wanted to get the original context for one of the best phrases yet composed in socio-historical writing (see below).  And after reading it in full, I took away two conclusions regarding current politics.  One of these conclusions Mr. H. states explicitly.  The second he implies. 

As to the first, H. notes, and I quote, that “a great part of both the strength and the weakness of our national existence lies in the fact that Americans do not abide very quietly the evils of life” (pg. 16).*  The methods by which we choose to rectify those evils generally derive from one of two cultural traditions which H., writing in the 50s, identifies with (a) Yankee Protestantism, and (b) immigrant machines.  It is worth delving into his definitions of these “two thoughly different systems of political ethics” (pg. 8). 

The Yankee-Protestant tradition, in H.’s view, was founded “upon middle class life, assumed and demanded the constant, disinterested activity of the citizen in public affairs, argued that political life ought to be run…in accordance with general priciples and abstract laws apart from and superior to personal needs, and expressed a common feeling that government should be in good part an effort to moralize the lives in individuals while economic life should be intimately related to the stimulation and development of individual character” (pg. 9).

There is a great deal to unpack in this long sentence, but as a whole it could be applied as equally to the “reform”-minded rhetoric of today as it could to the Progressive and Populist movements of 100 years ago.  It is the posture struck by every campaigner who assails the power of “special interests,” who fulminates against corruption among the mighty, who strives to change any structure of society so as to benefit “the people” rather than some definable group.  In fact, I would assert, it is precisely this rhetorical tone that Obama has struck so successfully in his campaign.  His call to reform hearkens back, in other words, to a tradition in American politics running right through to his Congregationalist forebears, the ones who stepped off the Mayflower and began the project of building a city upon a hill. 

The second tradition — and again I quote at length — was founded upon “unfamiliarity with independent political action,” and instead “familiarity with hierarchy and authority,” taking “for granted that the political life of the individual would arise out of family needs, interpreted political and civic relations chiefly in terms of personal obligations, and placed strong personal loyalties above allegiance to abstract codes of law or morals” (pg. 9).

This second political tradition Hofstadter identifies with European immigrants, bossism, and urban machines.  The old-style machine we have mostly, but not entirely smashed — especially at the municipal level.  It lives on in memory, however, and to some degree in practical fact at the state level (viz., Richie Ross and Willie Brown, Massachusetts and Louisiana).  More importantly, it arose from the grave we thought we had buried it in, arose in all its putrescent muck in the zombified administration of George W. Bush, a man who rewards nothing if not personal loyalty and who administers by nothing that could be charitably described as principle. 

As to McCain, he has certainly appropriated the rhetorical mantle of Yankee Progress with his self-denominated title of “maverick”(tm).  The aura of mavericity, with its implications of sticking to principles, of bucking tradition, of being one’s own man — all of these are intended to place Mr. McCain within the tradition of Yankee Protestantism.  However, where his actions — the nomination of Palin, the appointment to his campaign staff of the same gang of bastards responsible for swift-boating his ass in 2000 with the ugliest racist horseshit imaginable, and yes, his record as a member of the Keating 5 — where those actions place McCain within Hofstadter’s two political traditions isn’t quite so clear.

What’s even more striking than this imperfect mapping onto current political debates is the way in which the partisan distinctions of “reform” and “machine” have shifted so thoroughly since Hofstadter wrote.   In current politics, the closest parallel between H.’s “Yankee Protestants” and “immigrant machines” are (a) the secular, urban, educated, professionals who today form the shock troops for Dean, MoveOn, and now Obama; and (b) conservative Evangelicals.  Both of which groups, it is worth emphasizing, were reliably Republican into the fifties and even the 70s (at least in the North). 

The second conclusion that I draw from H. is not explicitly his.  Instead it’s something I commenced to worrying over in my brain like a rubik’s cube.  And it has to do with the nature of…not liberalism precisely, but maybe something more general — call it “this-worldly engagement” (to mangle Weber), or maybe just “crusading” — of which liberalism is one variety.   Towards the end of his book, H. describes how the Progressive movement soured and became bitter, how the Prairie Populists of the 1890s who marched behind Bryan turned right around 20 years later and burned crosses for the Klan, bought Anti-Jewish propaganda like it was candy, and smashed saloons with hatchets.  To quote H. at his urbane, drippingly judging, intellectual best:

“The strongest enthusiams of the rural and small-town Americans who understood and loved Bryan were now precisely what the more sophisticated urban Progressive leadership disdained: the crusade to protect fundamentalist religion from modern science…the defense of the eighteenth amendment** from criticism at all costs; and the rallying of the Ku Klux Klan against the Catholics, the Negroes, and the Jews.  The pathetic postwar career of Bryan himself, once the bellweather for so many of the genuine reforms, was a perfect epitome of the collapse of rual idealism and the shabbiness of the evangelical mind… The truth is that Prohibition appeared to the men of the twenties as a major issue because it was a major issue…[It] was the skeleton at the feast, a grim reminder of the moral frenzy that so many wished to forget, a ludicrous caricature of the reforming impulse, of the Yankee-Protestant notion that it is both possible and desirable to moralize private life through public action…Prohibition was a pseudo-reform, a pinched, parochial substitute for reform which had a widespread appeal to a certain time of crusading mind.  It was linked not merely…to the evils that accompanied [drunkenness], but to the immigrant drinking masses, to the pleasures and amenities of city life, and to the well-to-do classes…It was carried about America by the rural-evangelical virus.”

As an aside, I mark the decline of America’s professoriat, of its commentariat, hell, of the entire superstructure of the chattering classes tout court, with the disappearance not of the first course (natch), but of precisely this sort of mandarin, magisterial, language from popular discourse.  But perhaps that is merely peevish jealousy at the glaring fact that I could never write that beautifully.

In any case, what I would emphasize here is that H. notes that to speak of “conservatives” and “liberals” at that moment (indeed, I would argue, most moments in American history) is to miss the broader point that both draw from a common well of crusading fire-water.  As appalled as I am at the thought of the editing into the Constitution a new Prohibition on abortion, and no matter how corrosive it (and other) efforts to moralize private life through public action may be, there is less difference between myself and the sponsors of Prop 8 (or Prop 4) than there is between myself and people that don’t vote .  The really confusing cultural mismatch occurs when I speak to someone (such as one of my colleagues at A Large State Bureaucracy) who literally sees no difference between McCain and Obama and so who intends not to show up on election day. 

To this sort of person I have quite literally nothing to say.  The veil between us is too opaque to cross, too robust to rend.  I simply cannot fathom what sort of logic would lead one to look at the current election cycle and say “hunh.  I think I’ll sit this one out, thanks.  It’s all Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee to me.  My participation doesn’t matter.”  I would quote my mother-in-law here (thank you California Supreme Court for making her “in-law” and not simply someone that I know socially, as it were), but that would be to suggest things that are almost certainly beyond the pale.

In a word: evangelicalism I understand.  I hate its shabby heresies, its pretensions to orthodoxy.  But I understand it.  It is quietism that I do not understand, and by which I am utterly baffled.

*Try imagining what the opposite of this statement would look like.  When we Americans wonder why other peoples do not rebel against injustice — as we did in 1776-91, again in 1861-65, and again in 1956-64, not to mention all the grand social movements in between — what we find puzzling is why anyone would abide evil.  We tend to assume that to cry out against injustice is somehow natural.  Would that this were true.  It is not. 

**The Prohibition Amendment.

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“Don’t hate her ’cause her baby’s got autism!”

Didn’t he get the goddamn memo that the Palin baby has Down’s syndrome?  What was up with all that autism shit?

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It is precisely this kind of statement that sends me over the edge.

Alan Greenspan is not just wrong, he is a dangerous fool when he says “In a market system based on trust, reputation has a significant economic value. I am therefore distressed at how far we have let concerns for reputation slip in recent years.”

How does this statement make any sense at all, even on its own terms? 

Greenspan, like most economists, works within the assumptions of rational choice theory, the same theory which brought us such obvious public policy successes as the No Child Left Behind Act.  Now, leaving that aside for a moment, I want to focus on the way in which this particular gem encapsulates precisely the kind of theory-driven flawed hypothesis for which he and his ilk so routinely deride Marxists.*

Greenspan’s little economistic koin entails the following logical chain of assumptions:

a.) Economic transactions entail various levels of risk.  This should be an obvious a priori statement.

b.) In general, there is an inverse relationship between our willingness to engage in a risky transaction and the reputation of the person with whom we are transacting business.** 

Ergo: for perfectly safe transactions (like, for instance, buying a shirt at Macy’s) you don’t really need to know the person behind the counter, and in fact it doesn’t really matter if they’re a total sleazeball — you’re still pretty likely to get your money back even if they sell you shoddy merchandise, or don’t give you the right change, or rip off your debit card number. 

Ergo #2: for transactions where there’s some risk involved it’s different.  Say you’re buying drugs, or a house, or investing money in the stock market — it’s all pretty much the same when you’re talking rat choice theoreze — in these situations you generally prefer to do business with people that you know (your friendly neighborhood non-narc dealer, a reputable realtor,  TIAA-CREF, etc.).  If the transaction is risky, why would you entrust your money to a sleazeball?

This, in a word, is Alan’s question: “Golly gee.  I can’t for the life of think why so many people gave so much money to all of those bad, bad men.”

The answer is: For two reasons, one of which Greenspan appears to dismiss out of hand, and the other of which he appears to be totally ignorant (but for which somebody else I could name just one a fecking Nobel Prize). 

Reason #1 (which Greenspan really ought to recognize).  When the possible rewards really do get totally out of hand — when you think you’ve essentially got a license to print money by flipping condos in Florida, selling bad mortgages to people desperate to get in on the action, or, building houses in places three hours commute from the nearest place with jobs well-paid enough to support the mortgage it takes to buy a home on a golf course in a “resort” community*** — when what you have to gain is so out of proportion with what you could lose, you cease to give a rat’s ass who you are dealing with.  I submit that Mr. Greenspan (and his successor) presided over the biggest bubble this country has ever seen.  Why on God’s green earth would anyone in their right mind care about reputation when money was falling out of the sky?

Reason #2 (which I’m unclear he’s aware of).  Reputations depend upon bounded networks (see Coleman on this).  If you don’t know somebody (person Y) who knows somebody (person Z), then when it comes time to do business with Z, and they fuck you on the deal, how the hell are you going to trash their reputation?  Talk shit about them all day long, bitch.  They don’t even know your ass, so who cares****?  This is not just a matter of cocktail parties or even some giant home-room in the sky — though I gather Alan-boy thinks that the world of Wall Street still revolves around whether or not you’re going to get invited to join the Maidstone Country Club or whatever — it’s a matter of what a globalizing economy means for our ability to sanction and reward good and bad behavior.  

To put the matter plainly: reputations only have economic value where the players are embedded in the same network(s).  If the network suddenly ballooned in size — and that is precisely what globalization means, in a nutshell — why the fuck is anyone surprised “at how far we have let concerns for reputation slip in recent years.”  Honestly?  Reputations matter when you have X number of nodes in the network (and, by the by, there’s actually relatively interesting mathematical modeling out there that can estimate X.  There’s a reason, for instance, why Wesley founded new churches whenever the membership got up to 200 families).  Reputations couldn’t pay for drinks at the bar when you have two-times-an-order-of-magnitude-times-X number of nodes in the network.

Rational choice theory got us into this mess, Alan.  Why do you persist in the delusion that it will get us out? 

*My personal favorite ad hominem argument: the Soviet Union failed, so why are we still reading Marx?  He’s obviously wrong! 

**Of course, there is also a third obvious variable here, namely the amount of reward at stake.  Since risk and reward are generally taken to be positively correlated, we will assume for the moment that we need not independently vary reward.  However, see point (c) above.

***I have never, not in all my born days, understood the appeal of living in a “resort community.”  Frankly, it sounds like my worst nightmare of suburban dystopic gated viciousness. 

****Does anyone remember that one girl who stalked me in high school?  Yeah, I thought not.  After I said whatever the late-80s equivalent was of “beat it, skank”  she sould talk bad about me up one end of the Career Wing and down the other.  Hell, I’m sure she did, since she tried to physically assault me at least once in the hallway.  But you know what?  It never got back to the people who judged me by my reputation.

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I was flabbergasted.   My students demanded — demanded! — that I put it on during class.

Needless to say, I complied. 

This was massively encouraging not simply because they wanted to watch it.  This warmed my much-hardened heart most because several of them stayed afterward and discussed it.  The quality of their conversation betrayed a level of knolwedg ethat could only come from reading, paying serious attention to the news, and previous dialogue.

For those of your who spent time in the Hornet’s Nest, you may be justifiably proud of your alma mater and (more especially), your soon-to-be fellow alumni. 

On my part, however, I found myself literally almost physically ill.  Why? 

Because I deeply, desperately, want to believe that most Americans watch the debate, and that they do so with the same degree of thought and care that my students evidently do: evaluating the truth-content of various statements, judging answers against their own values, projecting into the future the implications for potential policies and actions.  And the like.

And yet I’ve read way too much political science and mass communication research — and frankly too much SacBee, CNN, etc. — to actually believe that most people watch the debates (most don’t), to believe further that people react “rationally” (saying to themselves “gee, is what they’re saying true?”), as opposed to affectively, emotionally (thinking to themselves “Gosh, I’d like to have a beer with that fellow!” or “Golly, she looks like the kind of gal that could do a shot of Crown!” or “Yeah, baby, I’m hot for teacher!“).

To be fair, this a problem not of voter stupidity; as maddening as I find the positions held by the vast majority of the nattering nabobs of babbitry in this country, I remain resolute in my commitment to mass democracy.*

No, the problem here is that debates are a gladitorial contest.  The problem is that the exhortations of the commentators call for gore in the sand.  The problem is that we respond to the gestures of the contestants, with every quantum of blood-thirst we have in our throats.  The problem is the medium, and the sickness in the pit of stomach is that I want it all — I want to see the blood and the gore and the sand and the roar of the crowd and most of all I want to see that lying b*itch’s head spitted on a goddamn pike.

This is why I cannot watch the debates.  I become that which I fear most: a zealot.

*As a matter of cold logic, I cannot let go of my commitment to democracy.  No matter that voters can — and do — vote for evil, even to the uttermost end of the destruction of their own privileges (witness Hitler, who was legitimately elected Chancellor). 

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