Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Saying “I read something dumb on Salon today” is just a windy way of saying “I looked at Salon today,” but sometimes a headline is too delicious to pass up. Such was the case with “Capitalism disrupts culture, turbo-capitalism will wreck us unless Hillary moves faster.” Sure, I’ll bite. After waiting for the ad to load, which offered a free, six-minute chakra test (because if you’re willing to believe the story you clicked on, you probably already believe in chakras and other metaphysical mumbo-jumbo), I dug into Jim Sleeper of Alternet’s work.
“In a prescient, darkly prophetic lecture at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in 2007, the writer Sam Tanenhaus, biographer of Whittaker Chambers and, soon, of William F. Buckley, Jr., put his finger on American conservatism’s original sin: It can’t or won’t reconcile its sincere yearnings for an ordered republican liberty, rooted in civic virtues and national sovereignty, with its devotion to almost every whim and riptide of a new capitalism that’s destroying the very virtues and sovereignty conservatives cherish,” reads the first graph of the piece. Already, you can see where this is going, but Sleeper isn’t a mystery writer.
“’You can’t build a clear conservatism out of capitalism, because capitalism disrupts culture,’” Tanenhaus said, adding that capitalism can invigorate a society only if it’s answerable to republican vigilance against excessive profit-maximizing as well against excessive government,” reads the very next ‘graph.
A few weeks ago, seemingly out of nowhere, Nintendo invigorated the hell out of its stock price, and an entire society of millions of now-less-pudgy gamers with “Pokemon Go.” In fact, only capitalism could have created not only that game, but the smartphone technology underlying it as well. There is obviously no government interest in having a connected society, so smart phone technology wouldn’t be a priority in a non-capitalist country. And, if a theoretical communist country did allow a state company to build smartphone for sale to the peasantry, they’d likely look like what one would think a cellphone made by Lada would look like, and would come packed with surveillance firmware. That there would be even less government interest in providing the serfs with a fun little diversion to play on their state-built smartphone kind of goes without saying.
Sleeper goes on to complain that the aforementioned “Republican vigilance” depends on getting along and working toward a common goal; something that free markets “don’t provide and that they often subvert, because their very genius in getting certain things done requires them to treat investors and consumers as narrowly self-interested individuals, not citizens. “
What does that Sarah Palin-esque word salad even mean? Yes, in narrow, specific transactions, a business needn’t know a consumer’s hopes and dreams and aspirations and problems; they don’t need to treat the person on the other side of the counter like a valuable citizen, they are, after all, just trying to sell them a cheeseburger.
Sleeper then goes on to excoriate us all for not facing this perceived “tension” honestly and instead blaming liberals for “disrupting culture,” which apparently David Brooks did Tuesday in the New York Times. The guy from Alternet says Mr. Brooks “seems to have learned nothing from Tanenhaus or, apparently, from life, about what today’s capitalism is doing to culture.” You mean, improving it in every measurable way every single day? No, that’s not what he means.
Sleeper did, however, chide his fellow leeches by saying that much of the Left’s efforts against this perceived disruption of culture caused by freedom have been ceremonial at best, referencing NYC’s comptroller Mario Procaccino’s comment about “limousine liberals” in 1969. Like the well-heeled “liberals” of yesteryear, today’s liberals too champion minorities, and now today gays, who “break economic and social structure’s glass ceilings, but don’t reconfigure the collapsing the walls and foundations of economic justice.”
So, a ton of words later, Sleeper appears to be trying to tell us the Left must do more to fix this problem he imagines; electing Hillary and breaking that glass ceiling won’t help because the walls and foundation are rotten. The Left must do this, because “conservatives” just won’t. According to Sleeper, Dubya’s less-than-impressive response to Hurricane Katrina wasn’t just an example of typical government uselessness and idiocy and waste, oh hell no; it was philosophical. To use government resources to help out would be a government “make-work” program and therefore immoral, according to Sleeper. And that’s not all.
“They’ve countered the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ with the worst foreign-policy blunder in American history,” Sleeper wrote.
Yes, so bad that Obama has carried it on for more than seven years now.
Meandering back to his point, Sleeper suggests that something must be done about today’s capitalism, which is different from the sort described by Adam Smith and others, and is now “casino-like,” “predatory,” and “intrusively degrading.” Now that he’s identified his windmills, how best to tilt at them?
“What might stop it? Materialist, ‘glass-ceiling’ liberalism won’t. Materialist, ‘free-market’ conservatism won’t. The reigning neoliberal synthesis of those approaches won’t. Nor will mere preaching or hand-wringing about ‘materialism’ itself. The closest thing to an answer, as far as I can see, comes from the earliest American civic-republican wellsprings, going back to the Puritan founding of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which Elizabeth Warren now represents in the U.S. Senate,” Sleeper wrote, drawing an asinine, spurious and strictly geographical connection between puritan settlers from England four centuries ago and a delusional public throat-leech who thinks she’s an Indian.
“Puritans insisted that the world isn’t flat, as neoliberal global capitalists often contend, but that it has abysses that open unpredictably at our feet and in our hearts, and that Americans need coordinates and a vocabulary to plumb those depths, face the demons in them and in themselves, and sometimes even to defy earthly powers in the name of something higher,” Sleeper wrote.
He then teased the fact he’s already laid out those “coordinates” in a different piece to which he provided a link.
“How ironic that Bernie Sanders, no Puritan believer but a prophet of our civic destiny, seemed to have at least some of those coordinates more clearly in mind than anyone else who ran for president this year,” Sleeper wrote, losing any last bit of credibility he had and all but forcing me to click the link.
There I found a very long word salad that basically says we should all go back to our nation’s Puritanical origins, for the Puritans believed in maintaining a perfect balance between rights and responsibility – all in a largely voluntarist society, though Sleeper didn’t use that word, of course.
He tries to argue that our society is out of control and utterly nihilistic, but he ignores international/cultural and language barriers. He contends the “flat earth” as described by capitalists trying to sell baseball caps to kids in Singapore also allows the free flow of ideas and even attitudes and those are what’s influencing society, and capitalism’s collapse; whether it’s ISIS beheading someone on the Internet or a kid playing violent video game. The whole world is an evil wreck, where capitalists sell us outlets for our most base desires and no one is held to account for this, Sleeper laments.
The Puritans had their own ways of dealing with their moral outliers.
“Puritan hellfire sermons and witch hunts—the latter few and far between in America, killing at most a few dozen people in a century—weren’t as widely, relentlessly destructive or terrifying as our media and our conduct now,” Sleeper wrote.
Really? The head of a little settlement, the effective law of the land, in a bout of superstitious zeal declares a young woman a witch and has her killed. Even if that happened only once it’s far worse than all the drivel and garbage the media has put out for us to consume over the last five decades. Because we still all have the right to simply not consume that which we disagree with, to ignore that which doesn’t interest us or offends us. A teenage girl in 1600s Pennyslvania who’s been declared a witch didn’t have that right.
Throughout most of Sleeper’s writing he seems to be fighting some sort of inner battle against reconciling a basic, simple point that he’s trying to make go away with a serious of spurious comparisons, empty rhetoric and unfounded assertions.
The social structures enacted by the Puritans he admires so much were still largely voluntary. Other than the occasional witch burning, there wasn’t much in the way of state coercion in Puritan settlements in the New World. While he admires the “social balance” he believes the Puritans achieved, he’s utterly dismissive of the foundation of the society the Puritans used to achieve that “social balance:” voluntarism.
He doesn’t come out and say it, but it’s obvious. All his “ideas” and “solutions” when he gets around to being specific for a change, don’t involve free will on anyone’s part, but rather more government compulsion and coercion.Someone needs to corral us savages, never mind if that someone is just another human as, if not more, fallable than the rest of us.
“Can she persuade Americans this week that she’s gone beyond neoliberalism, identity politics and cultural sermons?” Sleeper concluded his piece in Salon, “she” being Hillary.
Given that her entire career has been based on exploiting all those things, often as hypocritically as possible, I’d say the answer is “no, and it doesn’t matter.” “No” because, well, no, she’s stuck mired in neoliberalism, identity politics and cultural sermons. Those tools have been on her belt since she started this game decades ago. “And it doesn’t matter” because the only smart thing Sleeper said in the whole piece came two sentences before the last one.
“Defeating Trump is the overriding imperative now, but, so far, it’s eclipsing clarity about what Hillary Clinton’s alternatives are.”
Having slogged through way more of this guy’s work than I expected to this morning, my only takeaway is that he’s used a ton of words to go almost nowhere. What he perceives as a problem isn’t really one, and what he therefore proposes as solutions will only make everything worse for everyone.
Capitalism is not and never has been a problem. Period. Capitalism is the natural state of humankind, of all animal kind. There’s a reason a pride of lions doesn’t pick out the Usain Bolt of antelopes when stalking a herd on the savannah, and instead pick out the one that runs more like I do. They don’t consciously know about calories, but they do know on an instinctive level that the whole point of hunting and indeed eating, is to consume more calories than spent getting the meal. Largemouth Bass don’t chase prey all over a lake, they lurk near weeds and lily pads, and inhale an unwary frog as it swims by; and for the same reason, to maximize caloric profit. Likewise, no one would take a job where they had to provide their own materials for compensation that wouldn’t even cover the cost of those materials. Maximum return for minimum input is the guiding force of all life on Earth.
The Left, from Marx onward, have endeavored endlessly to somehow counter and control this instinct, and in the process have managed to disrupt human societies more than any other manmade force ever created. Sleeper’s “solution” to the problem he has misidentified is to take steps to insure the concentration of wealth and power in fewer hands.
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