Undead Trollblog

Trollblog again walks among us, its craving for brains greater than ever before.

 

Attendant Lords

“I said I never read anyone who takes philosophy personally or confuses philosophy with things that matter in their little lives”

– Philosopher cited in Wilshire, 2002, p. 1

Over the last several decades many books, often by insiders in the discipline, have have been written to argue that American philosophy is in trouble1. It has been argued that its dominant school, analytic philosophy, “has done its work” and that philosophy is thus left without tasks to accomplish. Some even argue that analytic philosophy ceased to exist at the very moment when it became institutionally dominant, by which time the analytic philosophers themselves had refuted most of the core principles of the school’s founders.

Brian Leiter claims that that this is all irrelevant and maybe even a good thing — “analytic philosophy” is no longer a restrictive term, and “analytic philosophy is just good philosophy”2. But this is unconvincing: contemporary academic philosophy is still dominated by the the supposedly non-existent analytic style, tendency, school, stance, paradigm, or whatever you want to call it, and academic philosophy still excludes philosophers who are too far removed from the analytic tradition. And despite all the books talking about a crisis of identity or the need to find a new direction, the rebellions have all been quashed, and the philosophy biz still proceeds imperturbably on its way, steadily continuing to train, certify, hire, promote, and tenure new analytic philosophers.

I basically agree with these criticisms, and in this piece I mostly aim to describe the analytic domination, show how it came to be, and give some indication of what I think is wrong with it. I do not think that analytic philosophy is worthless or that it should be extirpated root and branch. But I do not accept the narrowing of philosophy that has been enforced in the American university: the problem is the monopoly, the crowding-out, the opportunity cost. My piece is organized under five heads discussing the analytic paradigm in philosophy, a similar paradigm in economics, external influences on the American university after World War II, the significance of professionalization and paradigm-enforcement, and professionalized philosophers as lackeys.

The Analytic Paradigm

The gist of Aaron Preston’s new book Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion (Continuum, 2007) is that analytic philosophy’s dominance is institutional rather than intellectual. Beyond that, not only does analytic philosophy not now have a core idea, it never did have one. The idea that contemporary analytic philosophy is now diverse and no longer has a core idea is mainstream, but Preston argues that Moore, Russell, the early Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists never had a common idea at all — that they were never more than a coalition of thinkers somewhat similar in style who had common adversaries. (While this part of the book helps me better understand internal arguments within the analytic tradition, the history of analytic philosophy is not intrinsically interesting to me, and I won’t go any farther with this question but merely use Preston’s conclusions as a starting point for my own argument).

According to Preston, analytic philosophy didn’t triumph because it was true, the way plate tectonics, for example, triumphed, but for sociological or political reasons: one philosophical tendency gained control of the profession and proceeded to enforce its paradigm on the whole field. Analytic philosophy is now defined, not by an arguable idea or arguable ideas (linguistic, scientistic, philosophical, or other) but by an enforced scientistic paradigm or style which is basically Newtonian (pp. 129-132, 151). This claim is not terribly far from Leiter’s conclusion that “analytic philosophy survives, if at all, as a certain style that emphasizes ‘logic’, ‘rigor’, and ‘argument’”. For Leiter, non-analytic philosophy is just philosophy which does not emphasize logic, rigor, and argument — i.e., bad philosophy. Non-analytic philosophy is non-philosophy, only a step up from Kahlil Gibran or Robert Fulghum: illogical, unrigorous, unargued, incoherent, false, silly, and probably harmful.3

Analytic philosophy sacrifices scope for rigor by a continual process of analysis into smaller and smaller questions until one is found that can be handled perfectly, and while there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it is also should be philosophically acceptable to move in the other direction and sacrifice rigor for scope. Rigor has its cost, especially if it’s the sole rule: analytic philosophy’s defeatist perfectionism makes the resolution of any question whatsoever more or less impossible, and its penchant for formalization and hypotheticals tends to lead it away from the possibility of any realism at all, producing only tight arguments about nothings.

The problem with enforced paradigms (or research programs, in Lakatos’s formulation) is that they’re institutionally given and therefore not arguable: “the adoption of a paradigm puts an end to debate about fundamentals (p. 129) ….. one of the things true of paradigms but false of defining doctrines is that neither they nor the reasons for adopting them have to be explicitly recognized, used, and accepted in order to play their role” (p. 130). As a result, “a view might bear a systemic relationship to a community of inquiry without all or even any of its members so much as grasping it, let alone endorsing it” (p. 132). “Operating under a paradigm at all was a departure from traditional philosophical practice” (p. 129).

For Preston the rule of the paradigm is just wrong and unphilosophical — if philosophy won’t examine and criticize paradigms, who will? — and his description fits the experience of most first year philosophy grad students. The paradigms enforced are presented as apodictic (as Michel Meyer would say) — beyond questioning or challenge: “Transmission of the paradigm to new members [= new grad students] takes place via a well-attested mechanism called ‘norm conformism’” (p. 131). (According to Hilary Putnam, one became an analytical philosopher in the 1950s by learning “what not to like and what not to consider philosophy…. I think that is a terrible thing, and that it should be stopped in all schools, movements, and philosophy departments.” [McCumber, p. 50]).4

Preston’s is a fair description of the process from the psychological perspective of a new student being introduced to his discipline and its standards, but it misses the institutional aspect. New graduate students are being inducted into an profession which hires and promotes according to certain standards. The grad school faculty have already been inducted and are already conforming, and any graduate student who rejects “norm conformism” will either leave the program, voluntarily or otherwise, or find himself with a devalued PhD, while the students who most effectively conformed get the grants, jobs, and careers. Even established philosophers have been marginalized or expelled (e.g., Hannah Arendt when the New School philosophy department was disaccredited in 1978), while others have left semi-voluntarily (including men like Toulmin, Rorty, and Gellner, all of whom were completely orthodox analytics in training, though not in their work.)

Philosophy used to be the most comprehensive form of questioning, but in its attempt to make itself into an expert special science, analytic philosophy has put it own principles out of question, becoming just another unthought form of habitual, enforced social behavior.5

(Much more below:
Economics: A Similar Case
External Influences
The Professionalization of Philosophy
Bosses and Workers)

 

Animal Spirits and The Confidence Man

George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Animal Spirits, Princeton, 2009.
.
Herman Melville, The Confidence Man, Norton, 2006.
.

Donald Mackenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, MIT, 2008.
.

C. Wright Mills, “The Theory of the Leisure Class” in Veblen’s Century, ed. Horowitz, Transaction, 2002.
.

Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership, 1964, Viking Press.

 
Akerlof and Schiller ask, “Why did most of us utterly fail to foresee the current economic crisis?”, and their answer is that we failed to take animal spirits into account.
 
My own response is: “What do you mean ‘we’, white man?” Lots of us were uneasy about the twenty-year boom/crash cycle we found ourselves stuck in, but few of us are economists. Lots of people also tried to tell the economists that their models were dangerously unrealistic, but economists were securely protected by tenure and were being rewarded very well by the malefactors who controlled the economy, so why should they care what anyone else said? Economists are smarter than anyone know tons and tons of math, you know.
 
What are “animal spirits”? According to Keynes (A&S, p.3) animal spirits are the “spontaneous urges to action” of large numbers of people which have unpredictable effects on the greater economy, whereas for Akerlof and Schiller (p. 4) they are “the restless and inconsistent element in the economy”. Thus stated, “animal spirits”, whatever it is that causes the economy to behave erratically, might seem merely to be the active equivalent of the dormitive element in morphine — a big fudge-factor, and just a way of kicking the can over to the psychologists and saying “We didn’t do it! The Second Great Depression is your fault, not ours!” However, in fairness, it’s not quite as bad as that. Akerlof and Schiller do describe several of the factors interfering with economic rationality: variations in levels of confidence, considerations of fairness, bad faith, the money illusion, and the ways people understand their world by means of constructing and telling stories:
 

But the current crisis bears witness to the role of such changes in our thinking.  It was caused precisely by our changing confidence, temptations, envy, resentment, and illusions — and especially by changing stories about the nature of the economy. [A&S, p. 4]

 
They seem to think of these factors primarily as impurities or contaminants which unfortunately have disrupted the otherwise perfect descriptive / prescriptive rational economy which economists discovered / created / imposed, rather than as evidence that the economic model they’ve been working with for fifty years is no damn good. Almost sixty years ago, in the “Introduction” to Positive Economics, Milton Friedman claimed philosophically that scientists can make shit up and get away with it. For decades this has been professional dogma, and economics grad students who have had trouble believing this have been weeded out. As one consequence of this, during the last several decades economists have been working with a risible notion of individual economic rationality which is neither empirical nor normative, and which was chosen purely because it makes mathematical modeling possible.
 
Akerlof and Shiller are moving away from this notion of rationality, and in itself this is progress. However, they still  apparently hold to the methodological individualism of economics. For them “animal spirits” are a matter of individual psychology  and consist of enormous numbers of individual volitions — “aggregates” of “variations in individual feelings, impressions, and passions”. But what we are seeing now is not millions of human atoms happening to do the same thing at the same time. Human atoms are not simple and identical: each has had its own history and formative experiences. And they are not fully independent either, because there are commonalities in their histories, and because they communicate with one another, emulate one another, and persuade one another. Animal spirits are contexted and social: historical, social-psychological, cultural, or sociological rather than simply psychological.

Behavioral economists’ efforts to understand The Human Mind and its evolution are quite welcome, but they’re not going to help explain actual behavior unless they’re integrated into the study of economic history, social forms (including market forms and legal structures), culture, and individual acculturation. In other words, the mysterious friction or turbulence or irrational exuberance or animal spirits baffling economics are just the economic effects of the social and cultural forms that economists bracketed out in their attempt to design neat models, and reminders that the economic description of society is false. During the bubble, everyone who was anybody saw their net worth increasing, and for that reason nobody who was anybody cared about what they saw as minor technical problems in economic theory. (Back when they were successful and admired, economists laughed hysterically whenever anyone mentioned “sociology” or “culture”, but now that they have to keep an eye out for peasants with pitchforks, perhaps they’re behaving with a bit more restraint.)

 
One of the major forms of animal spirits affecting the recent crash was excessive confidence:
 

["Overheated economy"] refers to a situation in which confidence has gone beyond normal bounds, in which an increasing fraction of people have lost their normal skepticism about the economic outlook and are ready to believe stories about a new economic boom. It is a time when careless spending by consumers is the norm and when bad investments are made, with the initiators of these investments merely hoping that others will buy them out, not feeling independently confident that the investments are sound. It is a time when corruption and bad faith run high, since they rely on trusting behavior n the part of the public and of apathetic public regulators. This corruption, however, is mostly recognized publicly only after the fact, when the euphoria has ended. It is often also a time when people feel social pressure to consume at a high level because they see everyone else doing so….[A&S p. 65]

 
Americans are especially susceptible to this error (and for the moment, America’s problems are the world’s problems):
 

In identifying with capitalism, the American feels that it is fully appropriate to partake of the goods that capitalism provides and makes him want to buy. If he sees something at the mall that strikes his fancy, it is appropriate not to resist it. That is what the story of capitalism is all about. That is what it means to be a good American. [A&S p. 129]

 
Or, as MacKenzie says, there is
 

“a vague but pervasive feeling that being “bullish” is “American” and of wide benefit, whereas being “bearish” is un-American and of only private benefit. (An Engine, Not a Camera, MIT, 2008, p. 274.)

 
Excessive confidence is cyclically pervasive in American history. 150 years ago it was described by Herman Melville, and as much as a century ago it was more scientifically described by Thorstein Veblen.  My next two sections will consist mostly of citations from these two authors. 
 
 
Thorstein Veblen
 

The current situation in America is by way of being something of a psychiatrical clinic. In order to come to an understanding of this situation there is doubtless much else to be taken into account , but the case of America is after all not fairly to be understood without making due allowance for a certain prevalent imbalance and derangement of mentality, presumably transient but sufficiently grave for the time being. Perhaps the commonest and plainest evidence of this imbalanced mentality is to be seen in a certain fearsome and feverish credulity with which a large proportion of Americans are affected. (Cited  by C. Wright Mills in “Veblen’s Century”, ed. Horowitz, Transaction, 2002, p. 109).

 

Uncritical devotion to the national pretensions being a meritorious habit, it is also a useful article of camouflage, a shelter for gainful purposes and transactions which might otherwise be open to doubt, a means of avoiding unfavorable notice and of securing a profitable line of goodwill. In this sense it has come to have a merchantable value, so that professions of such devotion have become a businesslike matter of course among those who follow “gainful pursuits”. Which weeds out profitless argument and reflection in these premises and dispenses with any irritating afterthought. And men will commonly believe and live up to those things which they habitually profess. That is the meaning of autosuggestion. (“Absentee Ownership”, Beacon Press, 1923/1967).

 
Herman Melville: The Confidence Man
 
Melville’s novel consists primarily of a series of dialogues between passengers on a riverboat ascending the frontier-era Mississippi. One of the passengers is a con man who takes on eight different disguises in the course of the trip. The phrase “confidence man” had been coined not too long before Melville wrote his book, and had specific reference to a particularly brazen New York City con man named, inter alia, William Thompson. Thompson’s specialty was to preach the virtues of trust to people and then, after gaining their assent, asking them to lend him something of value in order to prove that they really had learned to trust by trusting the con man with something of value: ‘Well, then,’ continues the ‘confidence man’, ‘just lend me your watch till to-morrow.’ (New Orleans Picayune, June 21,1849).

During those wild and woolly, fraud-ridden, overheated days of American finance, the satirical possibilities of Thompson’s con were immediately recognized by ordinary journalists, and Melville shortly developed the confidence man idea far beyond mere satire:
 
 

1.

 
 
A man asks how he can resist the baneful spirit of mistrust. The confidence man replies:
 

“You cannot be sure, but you can strive against it.”
 
“How?”
 
“By strangling the least symptom of mistrust, of any sort, which hereafter. upon whatever provocation, may arise in you.” (CM, p. 42)

 

2.

 
The confidence man is selling the shares of a failed corporation:
 

A month since, in a panic contrived by artful alarmists, some credulous stockholders sold out. but, to frustrate the aim of the alarmists, the Company, previously advised of their scheme, so managed it as to get in his own hands those sacrificial shares, resolved that, since a spurious panic must be the panic makers should be no gainers by it. The Company, I hear, is now ready, but not anxious, to redispose of these shares; and having obtained them at their depressed value, will now sell them at par, though, prior to the panic, they were held at a handsome figure above. That the readiness of the Company to do this is not generally known, is shown by the fact that the stock still stands in the transfer-book in the company’s name, offering to one in funds a rare chance for investment. For, the panic subsiding more and more every day, it will daily be seen how it originated; confidence will be more than restored; there will be a reaction; from the stock’s descent its rise will be higher than from no fall….. (CM, p. 30)

 
Later on, the same man says:
 

“The depression of our stock was solely due to the growling, the hypocritical growling, of the bears.”
 
“How, hypocritical?”
 
“Why, the most monstrous of hypocrites are these bears: hypocrites by inversion; hypocrites in the simulation of things dark instead of bright; souls that thrive, less upon depression, than the fiction of depression; professors of the wicked art of manufacturing depressions; spurious Jeremiah’s; sham Heraclituses, who, the lugubrious day done, return, like sham Lazuruses among the beggars, to make merry over the gains got by the pretended sore heads — scoundrelly bears!” (CM, p. 56)

 

3.

 
The confidence man has a plan to unite all of the world charities into one, sell shares on the stock market, and solve all of the world’s problems in a few years:
 

“But may you not be over-confident?”
 
“For a Christian to talk so!”
 
“But think of the obstacles!”
 
“I have the confidence to remove obstacles, though mountains.” (CM, p. 56) 47-9?
 

4.

 
The confidence man does not like questions:
 

“How is the gain made?”
 
“To tell that would ruin me. That known, everyone would be going into the business, and it would be overdone. A secret, a mystery — all I have to do with you is to receive your confidence, and all you have to do with me is receive it back, thrice paid in trebling profits.” (pp. 79-80)
Later:
“The other trembled, was silent; and then, a little commanding himself, asked the ingredients of the medicine.”
 
“Herbs”.
 
“What herbs? And the nature of them? and the reason for giving them?”
 
“It cannot be made known”.
 
“The I will have none of you”.
 
Sedately observant of the juiceless, joyless form before him, the herb-doctor was mute for a moment, and then said “I give up”.
 
“How?”
 
“You are sick, and a philosopher….. a sick philosopher is incurable.”
 
“Why?”
 
“Because he has no confidence.” (CM, p. 86)

 

5.

 
The confidence man rejects the concept of falsification:
 

“Because, since the common occurrences of life could never, in the nature of things, steadily look one way and tell one story, as flags in the trade-wind; hence, if the conviction of a Providence, for instance, were in any way made dependent on such variabilities as everyday events, the degree of that conviction would, in thinking minds, be subject to fluctuations akin to those of the stock-exchange during a long and uncertain war.” (CM, pp. 72-3)

 
 

6.

 
Watching two hustlers fleece two college boys at cards, the confidence man rejects the idea that anyone can ever lose:
 

“Sour imaginations, my dear sir. Dismiss them …. Years and experience, I trust, have not sophisticated you. A fresh and liberal construction would teach us to regard those four players — indeed, this whole cabin-full of players — as playing in games in which every player plays fair, and not a player but shall win.” (CM, p. 62).

Confidence

 
Behind the “confidence” preached by Melville’s con men lie broader and deeper notions: trust in Providence, optimistic magical thinking, the rejection and condemnation of nay-saying, doubt, and critical thinking, the rejection of negative evidence, the faith that all apparent evil ultimately turns works for good, and  the belief that those who suffer are either being justly punished or else being tested by God. These were all commonplaces of American religion and culture of that era, both popular and elite, and both the con men and their victims express versions of the common belief of the time.
 
Not much has changed: “confidence beyond normal bounds” (and to a lesser degree fraud) have been institutionalized in American culture, and for the last two or three decades irrational exuberance has been the common sense of the middle and aspirational classes.  Melville’s book foreshadowed the fraudulent optimism of yesterday’s finance journalism, investment manuals, pyramid scams, self-help books, prosperity theology, pentecostal Christianity, conservative and neoliberal ideology, futurology, transhumanism, cornucopianism, lottery promotion, TV game shows, and (until just recently) real estate advertising. Without countervailing forces the boom and bust cycle was inevitable — and for these theologies busts are a good thing, since they purge the rottenness, punish the lazy and wasteful, weed out the unfit, and reward the worthy survivors.
 
Economists’ theories, the actions of the Federal Reserve Board, and the conservative / neoliberal deregulation of finance not only failed to take animal spirits into account, by weakening the countervailing forces they helped unleash them, and to the extent that in they they actively encouraged the boom, they were among the irrational “animal spirits” leading us to disaster. (Whether those working in economics, finance, and finance journalism were themselves confidence men, or suckers, or both, should be a topic for future research). But with or without any of these particulars, the fraudulent production and exploitation of confidence are foundational to American culture. Examples could be multiplied from any era, and from any area of American life.

…..

More:

Panurge and The Confidence Man.

“The tweakers are crashing on us.” (Was the irrational exuberance chemically enhanced? And if so, does this mean that we should start pee-testing contestants for the Bank of Sweden Prize?)

 

Novus Ordo Seclorum

“I am here to enable dreams,” he explained to me long afterward. Bob’s view was that if I’d been unemployed for seven years and didn’t have a dime to my name but I wanted a house, he wouldn’t question my prudence. “Who am I to tell you that you shouldn’t do what you want to do? I am here to sell money and to help you do what you want to do. At the end of the day, it’s your signature on the mortgage — not mine.”…. My lenders weren’t assuming that I was an angel. They were betting that a default would be more painful to me than to them. If I wanted to take a risk, for whatever reason, they were not going to second-guess me. What mattered more than anything, Bob explained, was a person’s credit record…. “Don’t worry,” Bob reassured me, saying what almost everybody else in real estate was saying at that moment. “The value of your house will be higher in five years. You’ll be able to refinance.” (From here via DeLong.)

The pyramid isn’t there on the dollar bill for nothing. Because of complexity, emergence, disseminated intelligence, the singularity, the cosmic vortex, the Aquarian Age, the Power of Love, Jesus, and the free market, there are no limits anymore. Be all you can be!

More: The tweakers are crashing on us
We are living in Greenspan’s experiment
A funny math joke just destroyed half of everything)

 

The Intellectual’s Role in Society

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not A Camera, MIT Press, 2006, p. 125:

After 30 hours of blackjack, Thorp’s $10,000 had become $21,000. He went on to devise, with computer scientist William E. Walden of the nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, a method for identifying favorable side bets in the version of baccarat played in Nevada.

Thorpe found, however, that beating the casino had disadvantages as a way of making money. At a time when American casinos were controlled by organized criminals, there were physical risks. (In 1964, while playing baccarat, Thorp was nearly rendered unconscious by “knockout drops” in his coffee).

A parable of theory and practice, knowledge and power, the intellectual in the real world, etc. If Thorp had been allowed to continue, eventually he would have owned the whole city of Las Vegas, but somehow that didn’t happen. How counterintuitive!

Of course, if Thorp had been playing against The State, or against Microsoft, things would have turned out entirely differently, since those are both law-abiding entities. That’s where his mistake lay.

 

Where are the Pitchforks?

If there was ever a time for pitchfork populism, it’s right now. Unemployment is past 8% and still rising, and most people have seen a third to half of their retirement money disappear, and this was all the result of multimillionaires’ financial machinations. But so far we haven’t seen much public rage.

Partly this may be because, so far, only the unemployed and the people who know them have directly experienced the problem. Certainly it’s in large part because the media and both political parties are so close the malefactors that they don’t want the electorate  to figure things out. This is the result of twenty years of bipartisan deregulation, freemarketism, and financial utopianism, and the culprits obviously don’t want us to think about it.

Someone is going to be blamed, and the Republicans have figured out who: Clinton and Obama. But the Democrats are staying above the battle and refuse to “play the blame game”. This responsible, patrician, professional approach hasn’t worked for the Democrats for thirty or forty years, not even during normal times, and it’s certainly not going to work now. But the Democrats don’t realize this, and they’re so committed to their cool, professionalism that are unlikely to be able to deal with the politics of the impending disaster at all.

It’s only in the last decade or so that I’ve learned how absolutely anti-populist the Democratic Party is. At all levels within the party, from the leaders  down to the up-and-coming young pros, populism is identified with racism, bigotry, ignorance, conspiracy theorists, lynch mobs, and the like. (The pros also claim that populism loses elections, though considering their own knack for losing elections I don’t know why anyone should listen to them about that.) The result is that, by now, populist rage is — rather improbably, if you think of Phil Gramm, for example –  a Republican monopoly.

As I’ve said many times, Republican populism is fake, but Democratic elitism is real. So that’s my problem: figuring out how the “party of the common man” became elitist. *1

THE PARTIES

Between 1870 to 1932, the Democratic Party was no further left or more liberal than the Republican Party, and it was often more conservative. Even after 1932, many Democratic regulars opposed Roosevelt — Al Smith, the Democratic Presidential presidential candidate in 1928, campaigned for the Republican candidate in 1936 and 1940. The two parties were sectionally and ethnically defined  (basically Northern Protestant Republicans versus Northern Catholic and Southern Protestant Democrats), and both of them  were totally controlled by finance, manufacturing, and monopolies like the railroads. There were a few token issues they consistently disagreed on (prohibition and tariffs), and members of the establishment would play one party against the other for specific purposes, but labor and poor farmers in general (altogether as much as 70% of the population) had no advocate in  government. In effect, that meant that the Eastern middle and upper classes ran the show: the rest were divided by ethnicity and geography and received no reward for their party loyalty.

The two parties were interest groups in their own right and were completely non-ideological. Party pros delivered votes to the party’s candidates and were rewarded with plum government jobs which they used to enrich themselves and buy more votes. Government resources were delivered selectively to loyal voting blocs, and during elections the big policy questions were often not a concern at all. Of course, once they were in office and it was time to govern, politicians did deal with the serious questions: they delivered big favors to the business concerns who lined their pockets.

As a result, between 1860 and 1940 most of the creative political work was done by third parties and extra-party pressure groups: the Farmer’s Alliance, the Greenbackers, the Populists, the LaFollette Progressives, the Farmer-Laborites, the Nonpartisan Leaguers, the Farmers’ Holiday, the Knights of Labor, the AFL, the CIO, the Socialists, the Communists, the Trotskyists, and so on. There were dozens of these groups — some of them existing only on paper or during one election in one state, some of them with millions of members, and some enduring for a decade or more. Sometimes they ran their own candidates, sometimes they took over one of the major parties via the primary system, and sometimes they cut a deal and supported a friendly major party candidate – e.g., William Jennings Bryan (a Democrat). Groups of this type were the first to call for many things we now take for granted: women’s suffrage, the secret ballot, open primaries, the graduated income tax, social security, minimum wage, the eight-hour day, unemployment insurance, trust-busting, the regulation of business, and paper money. (The Greenbackers, often thought of as rustic lunatics, pioneered monetarist economics). The most progressive Republicans and Democrats during that era — Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and the unsuccessful Bryan — stole third party ideas when their parties were under pressure from the left.

The difference between then and now is that we don’t have any third parties any more. The two parties have professionalized and are no longer dependent on graft in the strict sense of the word, but the party pros are still non-ideological mercenaries chasing after the dollar. The dollar they’re chasing is overwhelmingly corporate, and the parties themselves have converged on pro-business, pro-war centrism.  Campaigning tends toward peripheral wedge issues and “baffle them with bullshit” rhetoric, exactly as it did in the past — except that the Southern Democrats and the Eastern Republicans have switched places, Tweedledum-Tweedledee style.

In short, it’s just as it was during Boss Tweed’s era. The Democratic pros are against populism and radicalism because they would interfere with their influence-peddling. They get more money losing a centrist campaign than they would winning a populist or radical campaign.

WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EURASIA

The New Deal was divided by Pearl Harbor into two parts: the liberal, quasi-left, quasi-populist period before the war, and the military, technocratic, managerial period during the war. During the first period Roosevelt relied heavily on third parties, left-wing groups, and populist extra-party movements to help him ram his domestic program past Republicans, conservative Southern Democrats, and machine Democrats. Politics was turbulent, frightening, and uncontrolled in that era, with many Communist and near-fascist groups active, but more was accomplished than could have been during a more orderly period. As WWII approached, however, many progressives,  populists, and leftists (but after June 22, 1941, not Communists) stuck to their neutralism  and resisted and opposed the war, and some of the populists (following Gerald L.K. Smith and Father Coughlin) veered off in a fascist direction.*2

Pearl Harbor changed everything. Most of the anti-war voices fell silent, voluntarily or otherwise, and those who didn’t were marginalized. Roosevelt had a much freer hand than he had had during peacetime, and ironically, the Keynesian spending he had not always been able to do during peacetime became possible during the war. Roosevelt had always had a “Brain Trust”, but during the war it was no longer balanced by popular movements, and government relied increasingly heavily on university expertise in a wide variety of areas. Both government and the university were massively transformed by this: government became more technocratic, and the university became more bureaucratic, more administrative, and more involved in government policy. These transformations worked strongly against populism and popular politics generally; increasingly electoral politics became a separate technical specialty separated from governance called “engineering consent”: “Why should anyone care what an orthodontist thinks about foreign policy?”

With the professionalization of Democratic politics, the Democratic Party is now staffed mostly by freshly-scrubbed Ivy-Leaguers of various ages. One problem with this, which I will not go into in detail here, is that people of that sort lack street smarts and initiative and have several times succeeded in throwing elections to the Republicans despite general popular support for the Democrats on the issues. (Karl Rove had one year of undergrad education at a second-rank school, but he kept on winning). But the main problem is that persons of that sort are incapable of empathizing with commoners in a non-condescending way — even if they went to Harvard from a plebian background, they spent at least four years of their lives, and often as many as ten, forgetting their past and learning to present themselves successfully in elite circles. Professionals are successes and have organized their whole lives around success, and by their standards most voters are losers. (This is also a problem in areas like medicine, education, and counseling.)

In 1936 Roosevelt was strongly neutralist and refused to aid the Spanish Republic. As WWII approached, Roosevelt increasingly tilted toward war, but before Pearl Harbor he was held back by strong neutralist sentiment. On December 7, 1941 our entry into the war (in alliance with Stalin, and with the full support of American Communists) became inevitable.

Within three years of the end of the war, the four-decade-long Cold War (and our alliance with fascist Spain) began, and in another two years we were in a hot war in Korea. But during the war a certain proportion of Americans had developed a degree of sympathy with our Soviet and Chinese Communist allies,  including many who had worked directly with them, and not all of them were nimble enough to switch allegiances in a hurry. Considering our three-year alliance, McCarthy’s claim that our government was infested with Communist sympathizers could hardly have been completely false.

The about-face had a double effect. On the one hand, everyone who had supported WWII reluctantly felt vindicated, but at the same time furious and demoralized: it’s hard to motivate ordinary people to give the last full measure of devotion in the service of a strategic alliance. On the other hand, the technocrats running the government had an additional reason to be wary of popular politics: managing the twists and turns of great-power  foreign policy requires a lot of cynicism, and it’s risky and difficult to have to deal with public opinion every step of the way. The anti-popular theory of democracy had always been strong (e.g., with Walter Lippmann), and it became increasingly dominant within the Democratic Party. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson campaigned as the peace candidate even though he had already made up his mind to go to war in Vietnam, and four years later the Democratic Party and Hubert Humphrey immolated themselves in support of that war. (Judging by the response to Bush’s Iraq War, “Support All Wars” seems to have become the Democratic conventional wisdom.)

Orwell’s 1984 is usually read as an anti-Communist tract, but it also portrays the demoralizing effect of a heavily propagandized, aggressive, cynical foreign policy.

RICHARD HOFSTADTER *3

If you ask well-educated Americans about Populism, unless they are American history specialists what you’ll get is regurgitated Hofstadter. The Populists are usually thought of  as  angry, ignorant anti-intellectual, sometimes-murderous rural white racists and anti-Semites who were living in the past and who reacted with blind rage to a world which they didn’t understand. Tom Watson, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Gerald L. K. Smith, Father Coughlin, George Wallace, and other undersirables are thought to be characteristic Populists. Very few contemporaries are even aware that much of the New Deal simply put into effect 50-year-old Populist proposals, or that much of the support for the early New Deal came from populist groups, or that Roosevelt’s administration would have been much more conservative (and less successful)  if it had not been for populist and leftist pressure from outside the Democratic Party.

Hofstadter’s criticisms of the populists were not really about the populists at all; they were motivated by issues nearer to him in time. For him Joe McCarthy was the representative populist — quite a doubtful judgment considering that McCarthy was a conservative Republican who appealed to a non-populist demographic and  became Senator by defeating an actual progressive / populist.  Hofstadter took McCarthy’s antisemitism to be evidence of populism, but in America antisemitism was found in all classes, but above all in McCarthy’s Republican Party.*4 Similarly, while the Populists did have a mixed and in a few cases horrible record on civil rights in the South, Democrats of Hofstadter’s era were hardly in a position to point fingers at them. The refusal of many populists and progressives to support WWII has to have been another of Hofstadter’s motivations, though this does not jibe at all with Hofstadter’s accusation that the populists were militarists.

Hofstadter was a “consensus historian” who wanted to minimize conflict, both analytically in history and in the reality of his own time, and he was a strong advocate of the continuation of the post-ideological, post-popular, non-adversarial, technocratic rule by experts that had been developed during WWII. There was no place in this consensus for popular movements, whether progressive, populist, or leftist, so Hofstadter could not possibly write affirmatively about past American movements of that type. His view of populism quickly became dominant within the Democratic Party, and after the 1988 election it became stranglingly so,  as it remains to this day.*5

GEORGE WALLACE, MARTIN LUTHER KING, AND THE HIPPIES

Less than a decade after Hofstadter’s book was published, the Democratic Party was faced with three more or less populist mass movements, and as a result it was crippled for a generation. The first was the civil rights movement, which is not usually counted as populist, but was:  religious, bottom-up, mass involvement, outside the parties. (The Kennedy Administration supported the civil rights movement only very reluctantly, though in the end their support and LBJ’s was substantial and meaningful). The second was the anti-Vietnam War movement, which also was atypical in membership even though it was populist in organization. The third was George Wallace’s racist presidential run with the American Independent Party in 1968. And the combination of the three (two of them in conflict with the other) was deadly.

What are the lessons of 1968? It might merely be the fatalistic one that in America, race ruins everything: this was the story of the original Populist party, or at least a big part of the story. Another might be that war politics trumps domestic politics, and also tends to ruin things: both WWI and WWII destroyed a lot of popular movements. (I still wonder what would have happened if LBJ hadn’t listened to the generals in 1964 –  and according to report, so did LBJ). But by and large the lesson the Democrats took from those events was Hofstadter’s: popular movements are just no damn good. And by this they delivered populism permanently to the Republicans.

POPULISM TODAY

At this point I have to ask myself: Is my interest in populism just nostalgia? Even if you count late movements like the LaFollette Progressives and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, populism was dead before I was born. In 1930 or 1940 the average American was dirt poor, whereas Ruy Texeira and others have concluded that the contemporary “poor” demographic is relatively small and  hard to mobilize.  Furthermore, a high proportion of middling Americans have decided — actively or passively, explicitly or tacitly, for better or worse — that they’re in on the game, and that they shouldn’t rock the big-money boat. (America has been economically successful enough to produce a demographically significant group that thinks of itself as “elite”).

All I can say is that that is going to change. High finance has done its work, and we’ll be paying the costs of their financial collapse for a decade or more. Right now, except for the unemployed and their families, we’re still just talking about numbers on paper rather than personal disasters: 30-50% declines in net worth, trillions of dollars slopped out to the malefactors who caused the problem, and so on. As the years pass we’ll increasingly feel the effects in our daily lives.

Someone is sure to demagogue this issue — certainly someone should — and the brain-dead party of Phil Gramm has already started. Rationally and objectively the Democrats are in a slightly better position than the Republicans to go on the offensive, but none of them seem capable of it. They’ve spent the last fifty or sixty years deliberately destroying their populist and radical wings, and now they’re going into battle with no weapons except slogans, good feelings, claims of competence, lesser-evil policies, and pleas for bipartisanship.

Hopefully, if they can’t or won’t do the job, a third party will. And maybe this is just as much of a hopeless dream as is the revival of the Democratic Party, but without these fantasies, America is a fantasy too.

(Notes Below at the “More”)

 

Ignatius Donnelly’s Preamble to the 1892 Omaha Platform of the People’s Party

The below has been edited entirely by deletion, mostly by the removal of sections  (e.g.,  on Free Silver) which are not relevant today and which seem unlikely to become relevant in the future.

[Note: If you think the below is irrelevant at this point in time, you should still check back in again every year or two.]

Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized.The newspapers are largely subsidized, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists.The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating into ["European" = terrible] conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of those, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.

The national power to create money is appropriated to enrich bondholders; a vast public debt payable in legal tender currency has been funded into bonds, thereby adding millions to the burdens of the people. A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at once it the establishment of an absolute despotism.

We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform. They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires.

While our sympathies as a party of reform are naturally upon the side of every proposition which will tend to make men intelligent, virtuous, and temperate, we nevertheless regard these questions, important as they are, as secondary to the great issues now pressing for solution, and upon which not only our individual prosperity but the very existence of free institutions depend; and we ask all men to first help us to determine whether we are to have a republic to administer before we differ as to the conditions upon which it is to be administered, believing that the forces of reform this day organized will never cease to move forward until every wrong is remedied and equal rights and equal privileges securely established for all the men and women of this country.

Preamble to the 1892 Omaha Platform of the Populist Party

 

How many Fargo mortgages are now underwater?

I have no idea, and don’t really care, and doubt that it’s a major question even for North Dakotans. Probably relatively few; my guess is that North Dakotans still have a peasant terror of debt and flee from avant-garde finance schemes.

I just wanted to get the headline up on Google. I really, really hate to see good headlines wasted the way “Di Dies” was wasted. Or the way “Stick a fork in him, he’s done” is wasted when someone (especially an athlete) succumbs to sunstroke.

They’re there to use, folks!

 

Why Analytic Philosophy Should Rankle Your Ass Too

Q: What about after you’ve destroyed philosophy, though? What about once trolling has destroyed everything but trolling itself…. leaving nothing but a desolate wasteland haunted by the howling winds and the ghosts of extinct disciplines. Is that what you really want?

– J. Elson

A: Yes, but you forgot the lamentations of their women.

(Note: These days the wreaker of havoc obviously must also be willing to accept male lamentations, but analytic philosophy is notoriously dominated by married feminist dudes.)

With the collapse of the world economy and Western Civilization generally,  my vendetta against academic economics is now less likely to be ascribed to eccentricity, mental illness, or a grudge, but for most, my vendetta against philosophy is still suspect.Why should something as “quixotic”, “mostly harmless”,  and null as academic philosophy rouse any strong feelings whatsoever?

Because of the opportunity cost. Harmless-and-null philosophy is crowding out something better, and has been doing so since 1950 or so. Philosophy did not have to be what it is today; it was made what it is by purposeful, destructive action. The social institution of philosophy (the biz, the forms of production) has  distorted philosophy itself. The job has destroyed the work. Philosophy could be a resource for the educated, thoughtful adult, but it isn’t.

Brian Leiter is indeed a crap philosopher of no real intellectual interest, but my struggle is not with him personally. His institutional importance dwarfs his person and his work. He is the Second Assistant Secretary Philosophy Commissar,  and despite his lowly philosophical status, he’s in command  because he controls  the Philosophy Gourmet Report. This system of rankings provides the default standard according to which the philosophical nomenklatura decide hiring, firing, and promotion. By reading this report, philosophers and would-be philosophers at every level down to high school can find out who’s who and what’s what, what’s hot and what’s not.  The Leiter Report displays and produces the interlocking, mutually reinforcing hierarchies by which students choose schools, schools choose students,  and schools hire and promote.

NOTE: Since my crusade began I’ve repeatedly had to deal with two standard retorts: first, that I don’t enough about contemporary analytic philosophy to criticize it, and second, that the stuff I’m looking for is really out there, but that I just haven’t found it. My recent good-faith efforts to understand analytic philosophy better have been entirely in response to these two criticisms. I’ve never promised to change my ideas about what philosophy can and should be; I’ve  just committed myself to verifying that the stuff I’m looking for really isn’t there.

So what’s wrong with contemporary academic philosophy, and what do I think that it should be instead?

1. Philosophers today (like most other scholars) systematically narrow the  scope of their questioning in order to get more precise and more certain results. This is analyticity, or a version of it anyway. The process of narrowing iterates repeatedly, until finally you’re discussing sub-sub-sub-questions of original questions which have been long forgotten. Beyond that, often enough the analytic method is further ornamented with fanciful counterfactual hypotheticals which themselves can become independent objects of study. The outcome of all this is a perfect Potemkin village of conditionally rigorous conclusions which are irrelevant to anything actual or actually imaginable.

To systematically broaden the scope of questioning in order to bring in additional factors and produce more realistic descriptions of reality, while keeping as much rigor as possible (but not the maximum rigor)  would be an equally valid philosophical strategy — the contextual, constructive or exploratory strategy — but professional philosophers at every level (above all during the Pavlovian early years) are strongly discouraged from doing this.

2. This general philosophy would be readable and usable for thoughtful, educated adults whose training is in non-philosophical fields; in various ways it would help them understand the world better. Philosophy would regain its adjacency to history, literature, maxims, wisdom literature, aphorisms, reflections, meditations, pamphleteering, social criticism, utopias, etc. and would quit pretending to be a expert specialized science (which Aaron Preston has shown it has never been). This philosophy would not privilege proof and science over persuasion, and could be constitutive of persons and peoples.

Historically, some philosophers have been read for pleasure and others not. (It is not a question merely of difficulty). In general, philosophy today models itself on the less readable philosophers: Aristotle, the scholastics, Kant and the Kantians, and the more barbarous writings of the early moderns. Many authors once read as philosophers are now classified by philosophers as mere literature,  and others (e.g. William James) are read purely historically with respect to specific contributions  relevant to the institutional philosophy of today. (According to Wiki, the  philosophy pros blame Russell for giving too much attention to early philosophy in his History of Western Philosophy; I find this highly amusing).

3. The usability of philosophy to which I refer is usability in practice. People go through their lives living mostly routinely, but very frequently they can find themselves facing an unknown, unpredictable future which is  to some degree capable of being formed by human initiatives; such cases range from the trivial and purely personal  on up to the historically decisive and weighty. At these times they can only rely on the  “philosophy” (in the popular sense) which they’ve developed in the course of their lives on the basis of their experience and knowledge. In my opinion, being a resource of for someone forming a personal philosophy is one of philosophy’s primary tasks, but contemporary philosophy minimizes this aspect when it doesn’t aggressively reject it.

4. I do not know how original this next thought is, but in my opinion the situation just described in #3 is the source of ethics and normativity. When facing an open future the questions “What should I do?”, “What should we do?”, “Who am I?”,  “Who are we?”, in one form or another, are unavoidable. The practical is the ethical, the ethical is the practical, and both are inextricable from and constitutive of personal being, belonging,  and  social being. This orientation toward an unknown and open future should be the anchor and reference point for all thinking on normativity, but for most contemporary philosophy it is not. By and large Anglo-American philosophy during the last half-century or more has avoided these questions, or has apodictically declared them to be undiscussable and nonsensical, or has muddied them up with fake precision to the extent that they are difficult or impossible to do anything with.

5. The situation in #3, facing an open, contingent  future partly formable by human actions and human choices, renders some traditional goals of philosophy and science obsolete or even potentially harmful. If the turning points are real turning points, and if there really are two or more  importantly different possible outcomes at many different points in time, of which only one can be realized, and if the actual outcome is contingent and systematically unpredictable, and if there are diverging paths from every moment of decision through new moments of decision onward into the future, then there are important kinds of Truth which are in practice impossible to attain or even state (i.e., possible only in the sense that a million monkeys might eventually type the works of Shakespeare). Tomorrow becomes a single particular partnered with one or more other ghost particulars which never came into being and never will, and the understanding of tomorrow’s outcome reality becomes simply a recognition that it’s there, rather than its explanation in terms of Truth. (Davidson talked about events as particulars two decades or so ago, but no one seems to have gone anywhere with it.)

6. The kind of question described in #5  is much discussed in many  disciplines, but I think that there’s often an attempt to minimize or deny its impact, for example by convergence theories, fluctuation theories, or many-world theories, which all allow you to preserve Truth while making change, indeterminacy,  real multiple possibility, and human choice insignificant. Be that as it may, questions of the type “What should I do?”, “What should we do?”, “Who am I?”,  “Who are we?” are not truth-functional, and do presuppose an open future of real uncertainty. And since the future is by definition as yet undecided, even simple practical statements like “I’m going to build a shed in the back yard” cannot be true, since they are about an act that hasn’t happened and might not, and a thing that doesn’t exist and might never. Projects and proposals can’t be truths, but life consists above all of projects and proposals, and if philosophy is to be usable in the way that  I’ve proposed that it should be, the insistence on Truth is a fatal impediment. Personal identities, group identities, and individual affiliations with groups are all projects and proposals, and group-formation is a multi-dimensional, multi-player process of persuasion involving much more than Truth.   (Whether this has anything to do with Wittgenstein’s assertion that there cannot be a propositional ethics I don’t know;  I think that it does.)

7. Philosophy should be a philosophy of wholes. Holism is distinguishable from generalism, though similar to it, but it’s above all contrastive to universalism. By and large universalism consists of rigorous truths which are everywhere and always true, and truths of this kind (for example in mathematics and logic) are found by narrowing the topic and making the definitions more abstract until finally rigorous Truth is achieved. Generalism uses the opposite method: it expands and contexts the topic, and makes the language more concrete until a realistic  (but less certain) description of a broader reality is achieved.

8. The whole is more than just the general, however; in fact, a whole can be a part. A philosophical whole is an attempted description of everything about a topic — in the most general sense, everything about everything, but most often just everything about some specific question, particular or situation.

Holistic statements are always false. You always leave something out or get something wrong, and in any case, the world’s always changing, so that even if an ambitious holistic statement happened to be true today, it wouldn’t be tomorrow. Any holistic statement — above all any generalist holistic statement — immediately elicits opposition, and this is of necessity. Some will find the proffered holism suggestive, or usable with adaptations; others will find it thoroughly objectionable — and the debate will continue. Nobody should ever take holistic statements at face value.

9. So why do we want wholes at all? For practical reasons; we have no choice. We live our lives in accordance with  our own holistic schemes.  When we make decisions, we make on them on the basis of the whole we have constructed to model our own world, and a new holism presented by someone else might help us to improve the one we already have. No matter what, holism is a a gamble; it accepts responsibility for everything about a topic, including aspects not yet understood, and does the best it can. If we fail or screw up, we cannot (or should not) say things like “How was I to know that? Nobody told me about that” unless the unknown factor was something which was in actual fact unknowable. Holism deals with realities as they present themselves.

10. “Personal philosophy” is holistic, and public philosophy is also holistic, and holistic philosophies developed within the university could conceivably be resources for  either of them. But they seldom are.  One present-day impediment is the liberal dogma that individuals are all strangers to one another, so that personal philosophies are subjective and purely private, which makes it an intrusion on privacy and a violation of freedom for anyone to try to influence someone else at any very deep level. (People today are exceedingly scrupulous about “not telling others how to live their lives”.) A second major impediment is the scientistic dogma that every statement that’s not a statement of fact is meaningless hand-waving nonsense, and you still do find many traces of this in academic philosophy and social science.  But the most destructive impediment at all to the development of a usable philosophy in the universities is the enforced principle that only truth is important, and that all truths are specialist truths.

11. Holistic thinking is managerial thinking. Specialist thinking is subaltern thinking — specialists are docile bodies and attendant lords. (See Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds.) Even in philosophy, which I think should be the broadest and most independent field of study, the university trains philosophers to do their jobs according to apodictic rules (paradigms) which are  not to be questioned or even to be discussed much, but are only to be obeyed. The university does not teach freedom or free citizenship, and for good reason: free minds make managements’ job more difficult, and nowadays everything is managed. The university is managed by university managers, politics is  managed by PhD politicos, and government is nothing but management by experts.  This is the golden age of management, and for the nomenklatura it’s really terribly unfortunate that Western Civilization is collapsing right at the point when they were ready to achieve total world domination.

12. What do the managers — the real men — study? Well, they’re all practical, high-testosterone men, some of them (e.g. Karl Rove) with very little formal education indeed.  Managers are as smart and hard-working as academics, and they resent academic arrogance and take pleasure in making academics look bad (not that it’s hard). Their educations seem mostly to be in engineering, economics, finance, law, and mushy quasi-fields like international relations, public relations, and management. Graduates of Bible colleges are probably as common as humanities graduates.

And without much help from philosophy or any of the liberal arts, they’ve all patched together their own holistic personal philosophies, and based on what we know, these personal philosophies are horrible indeed. And they rule the world, and we obey them.

13. So the world fares on, its docile, jellified citizens obediently performing their assigned tasks and  intermittently emitting subjective, purely-private grumbles about the management they always obey. High above them, the real decisions are being made by real men, and down at street level unemployed humanities majors scuffle for scraps and remember the far-off days when anyone gave a shit what they did.

 

The Best Congressional Election Ever: Part One

I’ve just found my favorite election of all time: the 1936 Congressional contest in Minnesota’s Eight District. This election provides us with  an  example of how democratic government ideally should work,  and offers us guidelines for election reform.

In 1934, legislative stalemate blocked redistricting, and all Congressional candidates ran at large. Minnesota effectively had a three-party system at that time, with the leftist Farmer-Labor Party fighting the Republicans for control of the state and the Democrats bringing up the rear (and sometimes threatening to disappear entirely.)

The ninth and last Congressional slot was claimed by Francis Shoemaker, a leftist muckraker and scandalmonger who looked like a tough-guy detective in a noir movie. In the 1929 Congressional election he had done well in defeat,  even though he had been indicted and briefly jailed on charges of libeling a local banker as a “Robber of Widows and Orphans” (which the banker probably was). In 1930, after the election, Shoemaker was finally convicted of libel and given a suspended sentence, but because of his defiant attitude in his newspaper account of the trial the suspension was revoked, and he spent a year in Leavenworth.

For the rest of his career he bragged about his time in prison, while continuing to slander opponents and to physically assault critics and various others. (He was arrested for assault twice during his single Congressional term; neither attack was politically motivated). He was an undistinguished Congressman, and after one term he left the House to challenge Minnesota’s mealy-mouthed Farmer-Labor  Senator Shipstead. He threw a scare into Shipstead at the FLP convention, but was soundly defeated in the primary.

In 1936 Shoemaker was back in action  despite various legal problems, some of them rising from his support of the Trotskyist Teamsters Local 574 in the bloody 1934 trucker’s strike. (He succeeded in pissing off  the Trotskyists as much as he did their opponents). He decided to challenge Republican Congressman Pittinger in the Eighth District. Whether or not Shoemaker had been an effective Congressman, and despite the fact that he was opposed by the Farmer Labor Party leadership, he was a fearsome, no-holds-barred campaigner and Pittinger dreaded  the thought of having to run against him. Through an intermediary Pittinger donated money to Shoemaker’s primary opponent, John Bernard, who defeated Shoemaker but also defeated Pittinger and became the district’s Congressman .

Bernard (a Corsican immigrant miner and fireman with a fondness for the poetry of Lamartine, Musset, and Racine)  was probably a Communist Party member. This period, specifically in Minnesota, was the high point of Communist influence in America, and Bernard was one of the very few Communists ever elected to national office. He distinguished himself as the only Congressman in any party to oppose Roosevelt’s weaselly pro-Fascist neutrality policy in the Spanish Civil War, a  stand which gained him the fierce opposition of the Catholic Church and others, and he was defeated in his run for re-election.

Trivia: one of the other Communist Congressmen, Vito Marcantonio, began his career in the Republican Party. More trivia: Bob Dylan was born in Bernard’s Communist district only five years after Bernard left office.

The Moral of the Story

(Is Emerson Really Serious About This?)

I’m more serious than you are, buddy. Look at your own Congressman. How well is he responding to the present economic crisis? Better than Bernard and Shoemaker would have?  Almost certainly the answer is “No!”

We’re headed into The Second Great Depression. Almost no one in our present political establishment has any clue as to what’s happening or what to do about it. Most of them are bought and paid for, and the vast majority are jellified lackeys who are incapable of any initiative on a topic more substantial than earmarks and constituent service.

Our political elite is offering us two choices. Obama, Summers, and the machine Democrats propose that we give finance almost everything it asks for, wait for things somehow to get better, and start thinking about squeezing the money out of Social Security and “entitlements” somewhere down the line. Meanwhile the Republicans and Blue Dogs are hoping for Obama to fail so that they can take over and institute “Hooverist” austerity measures immediately. (These are really Mellonist measures:  Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate…. purge the rottenness.)

You’re asking yourself:  “Does Emerson really believe that a Communist or a thuggish populist demagogue would better serve the American people than the Congressman I actually do have?”

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m willing to bet 10-to-1 that your Congressman is effectively worthless.

Neither Bernard nor Shoemaker would put up with any of the Obama / Blue Dog / Republican bullshit. Either of them would have the good sense to scream bloody murder about what they saw happening. But your own Congressman will almost certainly do nothing much at all about all this.

You should be working to bounce him from Congress, but I doubt that you are.

I’m serious and you aren’t.

(Part II will explain the institutional reasons why Minnesota’s political system was healthy in 1936, in contrast to America’s present toxic system.)

“From Leavenworth to Congress”, Frederick L. Johnson, Minnesota History, Spring, 1989.

“The One Man Who Voted ‘Nay’”, Barbara Stuhler, Minnesota History, Fall, 1972.