Another Rand Prediction: Sanders-Trump Voters
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
En route to other things, I encountered a 2015 National Journal article attempting to make sense of a voting demographic that has at various times backed the likes of George Wallace, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and now Donald Trump. I disagree with the contention that there is a coherent ideology at play, but I do think the author makes a few good points. Among these is the following:
... They were also the group most distrustful of the national government. And in a stand that wasn't really liberal or conservative (and that appeared, at least on the surface, to be in tension with their dislike of the national government), MARS ["Middle American Radicals" --ed] were more likely than any other group to favor strong leadership in Washington -- to advocate for a situation "when one person is in charge."And, a bit later:
The final major element of the Wallace-Perot-Buchanan-Trump worldview has to do with leadership and government -- and like other parts of their agenda, it's complicated. All four, like many conservative politicians of the past 50 years, harshly criticized Washington. Wallace charged that the federal government "was run by pointy-headed bureaucrats who can't park a bicycle straight." Buchanan called for dismantling four Cabinet departments. Perot popularized the term "gridlock" in describing Washington politics. Echoing his predecessors, Trump has denounced the "total gridlock" inside the Beltway. "Our leaders are stupid, our politicians are stupid," he said during the first debate, adding later that evening: "We have people in Washington who don't know what they are doing."Apart from the many contradictions of the "ideology" the author imputes to these voters and the those of the political figures they gravitated to, I recalled that many had switched to Trump from previously supporting Bernie Sanders. What's going on here? I had a hunch, but...
Admiring Ayn Rand as I do and recalling that she commented on at least one of these previous elections, I naturally wondered what she might have said about such voters. I was not disappointed. Observe the clarity with which she writes:
The above comes from a 1968 piece in The Objectivist titled, "The Presidential Candidates." Replace Kennedy with Sanders and Wallace with Trump in the above passage, and you would not go far wrong.Lacking any intellectual or ideological program, Wallace is not the representative of a positive movement, but of a negative: he is not for anything, he is merely against the rule of the "liberals." This is the root of his popular appeal: he is attracting people who are desperately, legitimately frustrated, bewildered and angered by the dismal bankruptcy of the "liberals'" policies, people who sense that something is terribly wrong in this country and that something should be done about it, but who have no idea of what to do. Neither has Wallace -- which is the root of the danger he represents: a leader without ideology cannot save a country collapsing from lack of ideology.
George Wallace, a "MARS" candidate. (Image via Wikipedia, public domain.)
It is enormously significant that in many sections of the country (as indicated by a number of polls) former followers of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy are switching their support to George Wallace. At a superficial glance, this may appear to be a contradiction, since these two figures seem to represent exact opposites in their political views. But, in fact, it is not a contradiction: in terms of fundamentals, both Robert Kennedy and George Wallace are "activists" -- i.e., men who propose (and clearly project the intention) to take direct action, action by the use of physical force, to solve problems or to achieve (unspecified) goals. In this sense, both these leaders are symptomatic of a country's intellectual and cultural disintegration, of the ugly despair which seizes people when -- disillusioned in the power of ideas, abandoning reason -- they seek physical force as their last resort. [emphasis in original]
I have said before that Trump probably buys time compared to the alternative. But given the disease of the body politic of which the last election is a symptom, we don't have a lot of time: Trump is the first such candidate -- correctly likened to a caudillo in the MARS article -- to actually win.
-- CAV
7 comments:
Trump does have an ideology and has identified it over and over. Some people just keep overlooking it because they are unable to take it seriously.
Yoram Hazony's "The Virtue of Nationalism" is a serious philosophical tract and you need to know its conceptual framework to understand the people that think within it. I find the critique of political philosophy descended from Hume and Locke particularly insightful and valid.
Hi Games,
I agree that one could label Trump a nationalist (regardless of whether he has actually read this book), but that is not the same thing as him actually valuing freedom or knowing what to do to advance freedom. (Both are in the best interests of his nation, whether he or the author you cite acknowledges this or not.)
Why do I say that? Even granting an objective review of traditions one reviewer of this book asserts, merely conserving said tradition will not save us. And our tradition can be improved upon, but only if what makes it great is properly understood.
Consider the case before slavery was abolished. I would submit that our nation was, even then, the acme of civilization because slavery contradicted the premise that the government exists solely to protect individual rights, and citzens were free to discuss the issue and eventually correct the problem. Our nation needed improvement then, and it does now. So were the abolitionists, who opposed slavery the true nationalists -- or were the slaveholders? There are some today who would say the latter, and this fact illustrates why embracing that label is wrong, even if one is right about everything else (which I don't think Trump or this author are): It offers no clue as to what makes our nation great, and worthy of our support.
For a start on that, I refer the you and anyone else interested to Ayn Rand's 1974 speech at West Point, also published as the essay, "Philosophy: Who Needs It." She ends in part as follows:
"You, this year's graduates, have a glorious tradition to carry on -- which I admire profoundly, not because it is a tradition, but because it is glorious."
We should say the same of America, and calling that "nationalism" is a disservice to what makes her glorious.
Gus
Yo, Gus, you write, "Consider the case before slavery was abolished...It offers no clue as to what makes our nation great, and worthy of our support." Indeed, and I'd make this point even more strongly: Consider the constitutional observances, let us say, of slavery. It is hinted at but not explicitly mentioned, which occasioned great mischief down the line, yet at the time it was in some respects a great and valuable compromise. It was acceptable largely because many of the Founding Fathers from the southern states, who felt acutely the conflict between their ideals of human equality and the slave system built so deeply into their contemporary societies, were advocates of some form of gradual emancipation, so this compromise would allow this process to continue without becoming a federal issue, roughly. However, later generations of southern intellectuals had no such beliefs; James Henry Hammond, for example, when he wasn't giving himself mercury-salt enemas (you might remember that passage I showed you from his biography), was proclaiming loudly that all men are NOT created equal, which was later stated in the Cornerstone Speech that Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the CSA, gave to defend secession. (Basically this was due to the decline of the Enlightenment traditions that people lie Grames look very much askance at and their replacement by the age-old beliefs in human inequality along group lines that people int he alt-right either flirt with or proclaim loudly and forthrightly.
Slavery predated the Constitution and forced labor of various sorts was fully accepted within the common law tradition, and Southern opposition to emancipation was therefore the more conservative position, and by the sorts of arguments Grames plumps for to be preferred; the belief in the political equality (not just their spiritual equality) of all men was a radical new position supported by such men as Hume and Locke that Grames considers overrated and suspect. Therefore, if this position is taken to its logical conclusion, slavery is right and the Civil War was evil. Either you have to posit other ideas than just tradition to avoid this position, or else abandon the life of the mind entirely and say logical conclusions as such are not to be drawn.
Snedcat,
Thanks for addressing the conservatism of Hazony, which I failed to comment on.
Gus
'Both are in the best interests of his nation, whether he or the author you cite acknowledges this or not.'
'but only if what makes it great is properly understood.
Yes. It's common sense that in order to make America great again, you need to understand what made America great in the first place. There has never been any evidence that Trump has an inkling of that. In fact, just the opposite. It's clear he has no clue.
Well, that post is what happens when I have to go pick some people up from school. Too darn many typos.
I should add that on many concrete issues, I probably don't differ much from Grames, though given the wide variety of thought within conservatism, it's hard to say. The problem is that many conservatives attack the Enlightenment on essentially fallacious grounds--A followed B, therefore A entails B. (For example: The widespread decline of religious authority was accompanied by increasingly bloody wars fought increasingly in favor of secular views, culminating in atheist communist slaughters, for example, and therefore we need to restore genuine Christianity. That doesn't follow either philosophically or historically: There are other views of man than the Christian that insist on human dignity and the supremacy of individual rights; moreover, the decline in religion accompanied unprecedented economic growth, industrialization, and the scientific revolution, all of which made the wholesale slaughter of the 20th century easy.) And tradition is not an intellectual primary in any event--it grows out of and is sustained by the ideas within a society, and changes as those change, with some delay. Nor is tradition unitary, by any means, even in small-scale primitive societies studied by anthropologists (though anthropological analysis does seek to project unities where there might not be any). The books by conservatives I've read attacking the Enlightenment have a strong tendency to slap everything in one period together as a unified system of thought even when the people of the time saw them as diverse and mutually contradictory. By the same token, it allows far too many people to pick and choose, saying that since Christianity and political liberty coexisted in 18th century Britain, then they are indissoluble and have to be taken together to ensure liberty for all. Perhaps this is so, but you have to do a lot better than just point to their coexistence (which is an interesting historical issue that deserves close attention, I hasten to add, but is of supremely little interest to the current atheist movement, who intellectually and philosophically, never mind historically, are a pathetic group).
A similar approach, even more bastardized, is the tendency to bash everything conservatives don't like as "cultural Marxism." I've argued with brain-dead idiots on a far higher intellectual level than they turned out to merit only to be attacked and dismissed as a "cultural Marxist" because I argue that economic factors have to be understood when analyzing history, as if the fact that tools enable people to do things is equivalent to the position that they determine 100% what they do with them. This dismissal (which in practice results in cherry-picking like a migrant farm worker) is nonsense that makes for very bad history, but it is very popular among some rightists. (An even more bastardized argument is that Lenin made abortion legal in Russia, therefore the pro-choice movement is Marxist. This was the pronouncement of some of God's little helpers studying at a nearby seminary I worked with once. Yeah, and Stalin banned abortion in the 1930s, therefore pro-lifers must be Stalinists.)
(Basically this was due to the decline of the Enlightenment traditions that people lie Grames look very much askance at and their replacement by the age-old beliefs in human inequality along group lines that people int he alt-right either flirt with or proclaim loudly and forthrightly.
Slavery predated the Constitution and forced labor of various sorts was fully accepted within the common law tradition, and Southern opposition to emancipation was therefore the more conservative position, and by the sorts of arguments Grames plumps for to be preferred; the belief in the political equality (not just their spiritual equality) of all men was a radical new position supported by such men as Hume and Locke that Grames considers overrated and suspect. Therefore, if this position is taken to its logical conclusion, slavery is right and the Civil War was evil. Either you have to posit other ideas than just tradition to avoid this position, or else abandon the life of the mind entirely and say logical conclusions as such are not to be drawn.
I don't believe any of what you infer. I am a long time poster on Objectivism Online, look me up if you can be bothered. I don't care about conservatism I care about Objectivism. This moralizing screed you've typed might have been very satisfying to you, but it just shows you are not familiar with the Hazony's critique. No doubt you haven't read it yet, quite understandable there is no reason why the title would get your interest.
Hazony's critique is that the view of human nature underlying the "state of nature" premise in Hobbes and Locke's politics, a narrowly calculating version of petty economic self-interest, is laughably inadequate. (To digress, this parallels attacks by others on the traditional view of rational self-interest in economics, which is that rationality does not equate to maximizing one's stack of cash.) He further attacks the methodology employed of equating the study of political philosophy with the study of states and governments, as if those things were not created out of lower level pre-existing (and logically prior) formal and informal political structures.
Hazony argues that a concept of political order is necessary and prior to studying government. He further introduces mutual loyalty as the mechanic that bonds people together from groups of 2 on up to all larger sized groups. It is a coherent theory and in my opinion is actually compatible with what little passes for the Objectivist philosophy of politics. I won't elaborate further, this comment is long enough and you can read Hazony's presentation first-hand if you care to.
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