If I were being honest, I would have to admit that now and then I teeter for a moment or two on the brink. Then I recall that I disagree with most of his announced positions on the matters most important to me, and I recover my balance.

After all, we can overestimate the importance of the occupant of the Oval Office. No doubt the character of the President colors the administration, and thus to some extent the American stage. But it seems to me that the President is an expression of the country, and can only do what the population allows. It’s true that Bush and Cheney initiated a war that most of us didn’t want. It’s also true that, unlike the current one, most US wars were popular at the beginning. I would argue that the biggest single factor in the difference is that people are generally better informed about the world than they used to be.

That may sound like a stretch. I mean, have you ever looked at a McGuffy Reader? Along with a bunch of socialization messages, some racial, some religious, some national, the Readers offered some decent literature, expecting quite a high level of reading accomplishment even in the lower grades. It’s as if they were trying to create thoughtful citizens of the world, or at least the weird world they believed in.

Nowadays we see the world as one big market under God, so we teach our children to be intelligent consumers. But our own actions make it a hard sell. We talk to them about the environment as we drive them to school in our SUVs. We teach them to coöperate and to share, but we invade other countries to steal their oil, and to generate opportunities for war profiteering by our most favored families. We tolerate grotesque inequities in wealth, education, and health care, yet we take pride in our classless democratic society. It’s this kind of stuff that muddles the minds of our kids and leaves them angry and vulnerable to odd theologies.

In the light, or rather fog, of the Zoroastrian dichotomy the dominant US religions incorporate, Americans often see candidates for office as avatars of the forces of Good and Bad. Indeed, one can argue that this problem has worsened in recent years as the parameters of political and religious thought have been stretched to extremes.

But a balanced view requires us also to weigh our technological and experiential advances in the balance. We transmit news around the world nearly instantaneously (though we edit it unmercifully). And people are more sophisticated about propaganda because of their lifelong familiarity with advertising. That doesn’t mean we generally notice it; but when we do, we can decode (most of) it.

As evidence for my “the President’s not so important” thesis, I offer the war in Iraq, in particular the beginning of it. What, you say, doesn’t the fact of the war happening in the face of world-wide protests prove the potency of the office? Yes, but that was never in doubt. Even before Walter Lippman manufactured consent, geostrategists understood the nature and importance of public opinion. And that understanding became quite explicit over time; take, for example (subscription required), Mao and Kissinger talking on Feb. 17, 1973.

Mao: We do not understand your affairs. Your domestic affairs, we don’t understand them. There are many things about foreign policy that we don’t understand either.

Kissinger: You have a more direct, maybe more heroic mode of action than we do. We sometimes have to use more complicated methods because of our domestic situation. But on our fundamental objectives we will act very decisively and without regard for public opinion. So if a real danger develops or hegemonic intentions become active, we will certainly resist them wherever they appear. And as the president said to the chairman, in our own interests, not as a kindness to anyone else.

Just in case you were confused about whose interests come first. Were you? If so, then you might want to consider what you probably already know about the history of the United States entering wars: namely, that popular enthusiasm for each one had to be ginned up, usually by employing various levels of falsehood and fable. Whether the war machine was channeled through William Randolph Hearst in 1898, Woodrow Wilson in 1917, FDR in 1940, or Lyndon Johnson in 1964 — and regardless of what you think about the justifications for those wars — the people were not demanding that the nation go to war. Perhaps this is the source of the general fear of rule by elitists: they keep sending our kids to some overseas conflict, the source and use of which we don’t understand.

There have never been such huge anti-war demonstrations before a war as our latest Middle East adventure provoked. The failure of those protests actually to stop the war was predictable; yet they were still useful, because they let the war machine know we’re paying attention. That may not sound like much, but in historical terms it matters.

History can be read as an attempt to set limits on the power of Thorsten Veblen’s leisure class. This task has consumed millions of lives so far in conflicts like the revolt of the English barons against King John, the Napoleonic wars, and the revolutions of 1848. The founders of the United States, rich white male owners of land, and in many cases slaves, were tired of paying for the instruments of their own subjugation. The civil rights movement was a similar revolt against a form of exploitation both longer in duration and more vicious in character. Likewise, the various attempts at gender equality intend to right wrongs perpetrated over millennia.

As we celebrate the bits of progress we’ve made in some areas, we simultaneously notice a consistent pattern of two steps forward and one step back. Sometimes failing even to reach that standard, we’re left playing whack-a-mole with the Seven Deadlies.

I claim this is due to a fundamental advantage owned by one side in the Great American Class War, the single most taboo subject in our culture of free speech. That advantage consists of nothing more than an overt consciousness of the existence of the war.

As much as we strut our so-called democracy, we Americans struggle still with our own monarchical demons. As Bob Altemeyer tells us, there are plenty of people in the US today who pay lip service to the Constitution and the republic, and even convince themselves that they honor the principles, but would willingly coöperate with a heavily repressive government against their neighbors, according to their own responses about hypothetical situations. Many believe that what the country needs is a strong leader to force everyone to follow the rules (lots of Canadians think this too, it’s not just Americans).

How they reconcile this naïve faith in the strongman theory of government with professed beliefs in freedom and democracy is, to say the least, beyond the scope of this discussion. But Altemeyer’s work leaves no doubt that more of our neighbors fit this category than we might expect or hope. Not convinced? Consider how many Americans will vote for John McCain in November. Think of those who spent their day trying to get within cellphone-camera range of the Pope. High RWAs are everywhere; I still see, here in perhaps the ultimate Left Coast city, bumper stickers proclaiming the owner’s true President to be the no-longer-Presidential Charlton Heston.

The most hopeful aspect of Altemeyer’s data is that those students who arrive at his university classes are able to grow and to some extent transcend their limited viewpoints when their personal experience doesn’t fit with their preconceptions. This, really, is all one can hope from a human, it seems to me. We make models of the world. When we’re young, our models are pretty much mashups of stuff from adults we like and admire. As we grow up, we encounter mismatches between our models and the world around us. Then what? As long as we keep modifying our models, we’re okay; it’s when we begin to berate the world for not matching the model that we create trouble for ourselves and those around us.

Altemeyer’s data suggest that people, even those brought up in very conservative households more oriented toward tradition than thinking things through for yourself, do tend to modify their models when confronted with new information. Education, thankfully, does seem to impart some wisdom along with the socialization.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.

Which brings me, finally, to my central question. What is the source of, and where are the supply lines for, the sense of entitlement that oozes from the Clinton machine? As we see this new strain of activism arise among younger Americans, why are Clinton supporters moved to complain that Obama has brought so many into the party?

They make no secret of it ! They BRAG that this new party is made up of Newbies and Youngsters and Independents and CrossOvers from the other party.

Yeah, well, you certainly wouldn’t want to attract any new voters into the party; that would upset the apple cart, or more accurately the bribery trough (subscription again, sorry).

I plan to keep reminding people that I predicted Obama would win at least as long ago as May 2007. I still doubt I’ll vote for him, largely because I don’t agree with his policies.

But what I find particularly galling is the Clintonites’ apparent belief that the nomination is theirs by right. From Herself to Carville to Penn to bloggers, the Clinton folks somehow can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that line is being cut, that they might not get that chance at the wheel (or the trough) that they’ve striven and sacrificed and perhaps prostituted for.

How do they justify trying to show that Hillary would be leading if only the Democratic primaries were run like the Republicans? Why do they persist in thinking that the nomination is theirs by right, and anyone who fails to help them get it is cheating? Is it just that they think their time in line deserves the expected payout? Can they imagine actually caring about the country more than themselves? Can they even separate, in their hearts and minds, the country’s welfare from their own personal advancement?

I’ve come, I must admit, to a certain cynicism about establishment politics. The American system, like all others, is at root a cover for plutocracy. In reality, this is the only type of government, though there are many skins for it. The question is, who profits, who’s fooled, who’s angry?

It seems at this moment that the Clinton/DLC wing of the Democratic party would rather see McCain in the White House than Obama, would choose to be in charge of the flailings of a dying empire rather than contribute to the building of a new world. I hope that evaluation is wrong.

When I encounter some of the ravings of the Hillary crowd, the thought crosses my mind of climbing on the Obama bandwagon, just to drive the Clinton machine and the DLC crazy. But I admit I’d probably be hoping also that we’d recover the wheel of the Democratic party, a hope bound to be frustrated. At least, so says the omniscient TM.

In this one-size-fits-all analysis, Mr. Obama must be the new Dukakis, sure to be rejected by white guys easily manipulated by Lee Atwater-style campaigns exploiting race and class. But some voters who lived through 1988 have changed, and quite a few others are dead. In 2008, they are supplanted in part by an energized African-American electorate and the young voters of all economic strata who fueled the Obama movement that many pundits didn’t take seriously before Iowa. And that some still don’t. Cokie Roberts of ABC predicted in February that young voters probably won’t show up in November because “they never have before” and “they’ll be tired.”

However out of touch Mr. Obama is with “ordinary Americans,” many Americans, ordinary and not, have concluded that the talking heads blathering about blue-collar men, religion, guns and those incomprehensible “YouTube young people” are even more condescending and out of touch. When a Washington doyenne like Mary Matalin, freighted with jewelry, starts railing about elitists on “Meet the Press,” as she did last Sunday, it’s pure farce. It’s typical of the syndrome that the man who plays a raging populist on CNN, Lou Dobbs, dismissed Mr. Obama last week by saying “we don’t need another Ivy League-educated knucklehead.” Mr. Dobbs must know whereof he speaks, since he’s Harvard ’67.

Posted by Chuck Dupree at April 22, 2008 05:48 AM

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