Politics is everything
Today’s Times has an extraordinary piece (behind firewall) on the politicization of the Surgeon’s General’s office . In brief, Richard H. Carmona, Surgeon General from 2002-2006 claims the White House repeatedly intervened in reports on and scientific analysis of emergency contraception, global warming and other hot-button topics. He even claims that administration officials did not want him to highlight the work of Special Olympics given that organization’s close ties to the Kennedy family. (Eunice Kennedy and her husband Sargent Shriver founded Special Olympics in the late 1960s.)
Special Olympics will survive, although this won’t help the President’s poll ratings. But add this to what we now know about the politicization of Paul Bremer’s office in Iraq (where appointees talk about being grilled, not on their knowledge of Iraqi society or command of Arabic, but Roe v. Wade and privatization) and the White House legal counsel and the Attorney General’s attempt to purge “disloyal” (if often Republican) Federal prosecutors.
This level of politicization is new, I think, at least in the post WWII era. How do we explain it? I think it stems from the genuine isolation conservative intellectuals felt from mainstream establishment institutions — i.e. the universities, the courts, the churches, the government — by the 1970s, and the contempt they developed for the same. These conservatives, much to their credit, drew upon corporate money and built some of their own institutions (notably think tanks) and became far more adept than liberals at the art of the polemic. (The Ur text here is Lewis Powell’s fasinating 1971 memo about liberalism in the “respectable elements of society” and the need for corporate America to challenge these views. What’s striking in that memo, given the situation today, is the complete absence of any discussion of abortion.) But has this deep suspicion of institutions left some conservatives predisposed to view *all* questions and programs as ideological?
How to explain it? As you might say, John, history will offer up many explanations, including the ideological view-finders so many conservatives have been wearing over the last 50 or 60 years. (Reading a recent biography of Phyllis Schlafly I was reminded of how she has stuck to the same issues over all these years, and with the same unbending understanding of what those issues are all about.)
But reading George Kennan’s most recent memoir, Sketches from a Life, I wonder if a certain kind of American character may have disappeared from our culture. How to characterize them? Inner-directed is one way; people of principle but who are able to adjust their interpretation by facts on the ground. (Remember the Republicans who resigned from the Nixon Administration over Watergate; they seem to be missing from the Republican Party right now.)
Kennan describes his dismissal from the State Department by John Foster Dulles with surprise but a certain equanimity that allowed him to go right on being a major influence on U.S. foreign policy as a “free agent” so to speak. He was, it appears, his own man at the service of his country in a principled and knowledgeable fashion.
This brings us to Carmona, to Colin Powell, to George Tenet. If they were required to lie, to hide, to act surrepticiously or dishonestly, they could have resigned. What has changed that barred this route for them?
Let me offer the alternative viewpoint: what is missing today is the one-sided consensus that used to exist in government ever since FDR (i.e., the liberal establishment used to run everything, always get its way … the occasional Republican became president, but even he would pretty much toe the liberal consensus line–thus, Eisenhower was hated by conservatives, Richard Nixon presided over the creation of EPA, OSHA, etc. But the Democrats were always in control of Congress (except for very short periods) and the career bureaucrats were pretty much liberal Democrats or at least moderate Republicans … thus, there was little or no possibility for the disagreements we find today because everybody already agreed on just about everything–only it was always the liberal perspective on things (the reason a Clinton surgeon general would not have disputes over stem cells or global warming or sex issues is that they’d all be following the same line anyway, so what’s there to dispute?) … but then along came Reagan in 1981 and then in 1995 a Republican Congress and George W Bush in 2001 suddenly there was a disconnect between what the career bureaucrats believes and what the Congress or White House were proposing … suddenly there were two sides to every issue instead of the one-sided consensus that had existed for so long (because Presidents come and go, members of Congress too–but the core bureaucrats, especially the civil service-protected workers, are here to stay no matter who wins the elections). I believe that explaisn the current controversy as much as any loss of “American character,” which again refers mainly to a mostly liberal to moderate American character and certain excludes the possibility that conservative values could be seen as their own kind of character …
Much of the political and cultural agenda of the Religious Right isn’t really all that new. It’s a classic case study in what Fritz Stern called “the politics of cultural despair,” and the result is reactionary modernism. Over the last century, evangelical Protestants have been facing their gradual dispossession from the center of gravity of the nation’s culture; in other words, it’s no longer the “Christian Nation” as they were used to defining it. First it was the Catholics and Jews who breached the ramparts; then, it was those uppity blacks and other dark-skinned people, demanding their civil rights in the face of white conservative Protestants; then it was women, making “un-Biblical” demands for access to education, work, and political power; then it was gays, lesbians, immigrants, etc. etc., my God, the country is going to the Devil.
Bring those people together with once-liberal intellectuals who were freaked out by the 1960s — the neo-cons or theo-coons — and give them access to ample corporate funding, and you’ve got the making of a revanchiste movement, reactionary modernists who love business and the military — two elites they’ll never malign — but who think that, somehow, you can prevent or repeal all the social and cultural changes triggered by capitalism.
Conservatives are always whining about their “exclusion” from debate, but it’s nonsense. The “liberal” media has never struck me as liberal — witness its support for the corporate agenda during the 1990s (NAFTA, Clinton’s pro-business policies, etc.) and their slavish deference to the White House before and for a long time after the invasion of Iraq. As for universities, anyone who teaches in one knows that the ethos of higher education has become markedly more mercantile and technocratic over the last ten years. So what about “lefty” professors when all the students are studying business? When the right complains about “exclusion,” and when religious conservatives lament the “secularism” of the culture, what they’re really saying is that they don’t get automatic deference anymore.
When Hillary assumes office she can return us to the good old days when we had that outspoken Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders.
Mr. Mccarraher:
You are overlooking the strong anti-illegal immigrant fight wherein big corporations are vilified by conservatives (and rightly so) for wanting the illegal immigrant flow to continue so that they may pay outrageously low wages, so low that American citizens and legal aliens refuse to take the jobs that “Americans don’t want”.
By the way, the Internet and talk radio have forever destroyed the CBS/NBC/ABC/NYT/WP media hegemony on how “news” is framed and presented. And the idea that there is a Conservative ideology/party-line but not a Liberal ideology/party-line is just plain incorrect.
Finally, the assertion that there needs to be “balance” in talk radio is misdirected; anybody remember Air America?
Mr Mccarraher:
In addition to the Roberts Court, I think the most useful legacy that George W will leave behind (for conservatives, at least) is this: He managed to drive a wonderful wedge between the undeniably liberal mainstream media and the ideological left, so that people like you can say with a straight face that you don’t believe the media is liberal because it bent over backwards for Bush … Please keep thinking and talking that way–it’s quite helpful in advancing the conservative agenda!
eugene is broadly right even if some of the details are off. This is an argument over cultural primacy, just as the Pope’s outspoken criticism of European acceptance of gays is a fight for cultural primacy. When evangelical or other conservative Christians state that they are victims of a liberal society, what they really are saying is that they don’t dictate the terms much less the outcome of important debates like they used to. However, everyone should recognize that even if it is the only fair result in a diverse society, the loss of deference and prestige is real, and that’s why it is felt so deeply. To frame an analogy, a wealthy person who becomes poor probably feels the loss of dignity more acutely for having previously experienced the sycophancy and deference of others.
As for Colin Powell and the other “organization” men who engaged in acts at the direction of others that, apparently, they found to be unethical, I don’t think there’s much excuse for them. It’s not as if they lack the means or ability to succeed outside of government. This willingness to be used saddens me more than anything else. Especially Colin Powell, who really did have the moral authority to change the terms of the debate.
Mr. Schwartz:
I take your point about the intra-conservative debate about immigration. However, most corporations don’t employ illegal immigrants. Most illegal immigrants are employed by small businesses — those same “little people” romanticized by Lou Dobbs. And besides, corporations don’t need the presence of illegals to lower wages — as Doug Henwood and other business journalists have shown, the threat of moving overseas, together with aggressive anti-union activity, have been far more effective weapons against employees’ demands for higher wages.
As for the Internet and talk radio, I’m not entirely convinced that they’ve destroyed the corporate media’s hegemony over news. Cable news shows are still corporate entities — as well as, I should add, Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s, so beloved by Cathy Kaveny, which should tell us something about their “dissident” status — and many Americans still get their news from the network and cable sources. Talk radio is overwhelmingly right-wing, Air America’s troubled existence notwithstanding. And I made no assertion about “party lines” either way — left and right are both big tents, though they still have definable boundaries.
Mr. Reid:
“People like me” will continue to say such things with a straight face — or maybe with a smiling face, or an angry face, depending on the issue — because it’s true. You yourself acknowledge this by conceding that the “liberal” media “bent over backwards for Bush.” If they’re such incorrigible liberals, that posture is inexplicable.
As for your conservative agenda, I think it’s swirling around somewhere in the smoke over Baghdad.
Mr Mccarraher:
This will be my final post on the subject because too often Commonweal threads become private give-and-take dialogues (of which I am certainly guilty) but I did NOT say the media bent over backwards for Bush–I attributed that position (pun fully intended) to howe liberals feel (which I would never equate with any form of reality). As for your depiction of what’s happening over Baghdad–again, I can only beg you to keep expressing sentiments like that since they will only help remind the average American of how smug, elitist, and self-focused liberals are when they let their guard down or get their dander up … I doubt many typical Americans see the tragedy of Iraq in such terms of petty partisan triumphalism.
FDR-style liberalism, if it could be called that, reflected a genuine populist consensus, which centered almost exclusively around the economy and steered clear of issues like jim crow.
Sure, there was a measure of civil rights tokenism, but substantive measure, such as FDR’s famous executive order against racial discrimination in defense hiring only came in response to threats of massive demonstrations.
Then there was the fear of college presidents that the GI Bill would lower the tone of college campuses as hordes of the unwashed invaded bucolic campuses reserved for the sons of the rich or the parade of academics from respectable Ivy League schools who justfied segregation by testifying thet society was always in need of those fit only to serve as hewers of wood and carriers of water.
To understand the extent of the deference to religious and conservative hegemony, go look at the now-defunct Production Code, or, better yet, spend a few hours watching Turner Classic Movies to see the comforting old stereotypes at work.
It seems very difficult to give the present White House group good grades. This former surgeon general is a republican and unlike Powell and others he is speaking out now, however late, What about Nixon Counsel’s Dean who describes this group as worse than Watergate?
JFK realized that he did not exactly have a mandate so he sought out the Republicans. Clinton had Republicans in his cabinet even with a mandate.
This group overrides comparisons with convervatives and liberals. Hubris is its mantra and they are ramming through whatever they can get away with.
I am saddened by the deeply ideologicasl commentaries thus far.
Carmona was on CNN yesterday – he acknpowledged that there had been some politicization in the Surgeon General’s Office for years – but nothing like the curren tregime!
On public radio tonightwhile driving home, I heard a speaker push together all the anti-science positions the christian fundamentalists hold with the Bush administration’s reliance on that base – a tie begun in the Reagan years.
Here in this high science community where I live, there is not yet such a tie, but a lot of dismay on several Bush positions,
What’s problematic is that real “life” positions will be seen as non-=scientific when coupled with issues about evolution, fighting AIDS and (as Bernard noted well in another thread here) global warming and care for the environment.
Standing up for biblical fundamentalism for political ideological reasons will do real harm to important theological considerations and broad gebneralizations about liberals and conservatives does no use!