The Homeless Mind

Not quite sure why, but this has been a hard post to start. Kept putting it off and putting it off after promising my colleagues this morning that it would be up this afternoon, and now here it is evening and I'm just getting around to it. Maybe I'll have to talk about it with my shrink: wherefore my irrational fear of writing that Michael Lind's essay in Salon this morning was stupid-beyond-stupid, in fact a transcendent new category of stupid?

Lind has always given off an air of bracing erudition. Maybe I'm intimidated by that. But then, I've always hated his style of argument. Like this guy, he organizes the world according to a series of abstractions, and then, rather than arguing about the world, he argues over the abstractions. It reminds me of my college days at the University of Chicago. Once, at a party, me and some friends were having an extremely abstruse argument about Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, which itself is a highly abstruse argument, not about sex, and not even about how the West talks about sex, but about how the West talks about talking about sex. And here we were, talking about talking about talking about sex; we may have even taken things to the point of talking about talking about talking about talking about sex.

At a party. In college. Instead of doing what we were supposed to be doing.

Which was: try to have sex.

(Maybe talking about talking about Michael Lind reminds me of the pain of my tragically chaste college days. Maybe that's why I've been having such a hard time getting started on this post.)

Anyway, the abstractions through which Lind argues in his latest Salon article are "liberalism" and "conservatism." He argues via a dataset of emanations upon emanations that "Whether Obama or McCain wins the White House, liberalism has already won the national debate about the future of the country"—so that, if you happen to be a liberal, it's perfectly fine to vote for John McCain, because if liberalism has already won the national debate about the country, then it must be that John McCain will govern as a liberal.

When he should be, you know, trying to figure out what McCain will actually do if he becomes president.

Which is: govern as a conservative.

Says Lind, "He praised multilateralism in a March 26 speech in Los Angeles and in general is trying to appear more like an Eisenhower Republican than a Reagan Republican."

Abstraction upon abstraction upon abstraction. What does McCain say when asked about specifics? Brian Williams of NBC queried him about his statement that we should be in Iraq for 100 years: "Will your support be there for however many U.S. troops are required?" McCain's answer: an enthusiastic "yes."

Lind won't let that get in the way of his preferred abstractions piled upon abstractions: "The much-hyped 'surge' in Iraq may have succeeded as a temporary tactic, but the right's global strategy is in tatters. By 2008, the catchphrases of the neoconservatives -- "unipolar moment," "regime change," "Pax Americana," "World War IV" -- all sounded quaint and retro, if not sinister. The right's counterrevolution in foreign policy has failed, as even Senator McCain, with his talk of multilateralism, recognizes now."

But this is how the New Republic's J. Peter Scoblic describes where McCain stands, based on what he actually says and does:

Much like George W. Bush, McCain sees the world in oppositional terms -- us versus them, and good versus evil. McCain speaks often of taking the lead 'in fighting this transcendent issue of our time: the battle and struggle against radical Islamic extremism.' To him, it is a 'transcendent struggle between good and evil.'... Like Cold War conservatives, McCain has taken a moral observation that the United States is a force for good battling the forces of evil and turned it into a strategic guide.... Thus, he rejects negotiation with our enemies in favor of "rogue state rollback," repeatedly deriding as "appeasement" the 1994 deal that froze North Korea's plutonium program and mocking calls for unconditional talks with Iran. He conflates our enemies -- perhaps one reason he has confused Sunni Al Qaeda in Iraq with Shiite extremists -- because evil is monolithic. Much like the right wing in the early 1990s, which first sought to prolong the notion of Russia as an enemy and then turned to China as the next great threat, McCain has turned on Moscow and Beijing as adversaries in a time of peace. Even his proposed new international body, the League of Democracies, can be seen less as a rejection of Bush's unilateralism than as an exalted "coalition of the willing," in which America can avoid the hard work of cajoling and coercing countries with different interests and values, as it must in the United Nations."

Multilateral-riffic!

Then there's the Supreme Court, which, Lind argues, "has not repealed Roe v. Wade and, because of its allergy to repudiating precedent, is not likely to do so. (Yes, even if John McCain appoints the next justice or two.)"

And yet for quite some time now McCain said he supported the immediate repeal of Roe v. Wade. More recently, his faux "survey" sent to potential grassroots donors asks these two questions in quick succession:

4. Senators Obama and Clinton support abortion and oppose overturning Roe v. Wade. Senator McCain has a twenty-five year pro-life record and supports overturning Roe v. Wade. Which presidential candidate's positions do you support?

5. John McCain will nominate judges who enforce -- not make -- the law, judges of the quality and character of Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Senators Obama and Clinton voted against Justices Roberts and Alito and favor liberal activist judges. Which presidential candidate's positions do you support?

Lind doesn't let that get in the way of his favored abstraction: the Supremes' supposed "allergy to repudiating precedent." (They do it all the time.)

But that's not abstraction enough. He writes of conservatism, "Now that the counterrevolution has been defeated, McCain must engage in an opposite kind of triangulation, tacking to the left on issues like global warming and healthcare and invoking foreign policy multilateralism, at least in rhetoric."

Well, what about healthcare? Precisely how far left has McCain "tacked"? Jonathan Cohn, again in TNR, notes that McCain doesn't want to merely keep the government out of the business of helping insure people, he wants to strike out the role of business as well: "Let's encourage people to drop their employer insurance and shop for coverage on their own, he said, since that will create a vibrant market in which people can find better bargains." But those with pre-existing conditions—like John Sidney McCain, a cancer survivor—would be left out of the dynamism. They'd never be able to afford the insurance, a exigency McCain proposes to remedy via a policy Cohn calls "absolutely preposterous.... he doesn't realize that, by its very nature, private insurance operating in a regulatory vacuum is incapable of taking care of the people who need medical attention the most."

Whatever, dude. The counterrevolution has been defeated! Sayeth Lind: "President Eisenhower was right in 1954, when he wrote his brother Edgar: 'Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.'"

Lind furrows his brow too much. It's not that complicated: McCain actually intends to drive the counterrevolution further down the road. Here was his chief economic advisor Lindsay Graham the other day. George Stephanapoulos asked, "You said the tax policy and the healthcare policy were essentially...John McCain is calling for an extension or maybe even enhancement of the George Bush policies." Responded Graham, "Yes, absolutely."

just today, McCain said he wanted to lower corporate tax rates, and he's long said he'd make Bush's disastrous starve-the-beast tax cuts permament, waving away the resulting deficits with the worse sort of magical thinking.

Lind concludes his arid exercise thus: " If it is hard for most conservatives to admit that they have lost, it is even harder for many liberals to admit that they have won. But sometimes history forces you to take yes for an answer." The reasoning rather resembles Arthur Koestler's Rubashov, who, sentenced to death by his erstwhile Bolshevik colleagues for some imaginary ideological sin, who turns out to be such a genuine revolutionary he convinces himself that the dialectical forces of history allow him to sign in good conscience a confession of his own counterrevolutionary tendencies.

Vote for John Sidney McCain in good conscience, comrade! For liberalism has objectively triumphed! The conditions have been laid forth by History. So it is, as Lenin has truly proclaimed: "Any cook should be able to run the country."

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