Withering Heights
With the decline of the left in advanced Western societies and the shattering of Stalinist bureaucracies in Eastern Europe, the notion of “post-modernity” — an often aggrandizing, trendy cliche--has been used to describe the zeitgeist of the present. Certainly we seem to live in an era in which the ideas of progress, militant Enlightenment, and rationality have been debilitated, if not jettisoned. So-called post-modernists have illuminated many of the problems facing the present, but, just as much, they have been trapped in their own problematics.
The academy has seemed to successfully swallow postmodern cultural “critics” (if one can use the term critics in the same sentence with postmodern), making the discussion they have begun overly professional — that is, loaded with useless jargon--and often ahistorical and apolitical, due in many ways to the strong attachment to literary theory. Much of the implicit relativism and silly notions that “all is power” — Lyotard’s combative discourse theory and Foucault at his worse — lead to a demoralized, status quo quietism and a relinquishing of the original impetus behind the left: democratic change towards social justice. And thus the much-needed analysis of the present configuration of politics and culture--especially in America--must lie elsewhere.
Wither the post-modern right? In light of the foregoing epitaph of the left, can we obtain any ontological insight from a seemingly revivified right — if the current reading of the tea leaves of U.S. electoral politics is to be trusted, and similarly reactionary forces in Western Europe grow and gain new adherents, particularly in lieu of unfettered immigration and the absence of acculturation? While the post-modern turn would seem to accord any post- or pre-rationalist critique more promise, the right’s power is destined to remain flaccid and diffuse, due to a (still) culturally conservative political base and a more libertarian-oriented leadership. (And while the current “Tea Party” movement would seem to challenge this dichotomy, its populist attack on “Big Government” will eventually jam in the revolving door that still exists between the corporate boardroom and the halls of real centralized power.) Moreover, this division, rendered superficially as a “split” within the American G.O.P., is in fact a manifestation of what Daniel Bell once referred to as the “cultural contradictions of capitalism,” and inevitably bound to occur. The market of the late-capitalist variety commodifies social relations as it does material ones. In the process, it seemingly writes its own obituary: the stability that markets need is undermined by their immanent demand for growth. The family is but one of the most recent sites dubbed fit for exploitation and the focus of much (past?) political concern, as parents cede power to media-generated peer groups (the counter-culture, e.g.) and in worst-case scenarios, the state. The state steps in when markets go too far. Thus, neo-conservative cheerleaders for corporate gangsterism (and their Tea Party minions) ineluctably ensure government expansion, and the circle remains unbroken. Today’s G.O.P. is weathering this inherent and inevitable contradiction. [Worse yet is the right’s propensity to marginalize countervailing “in-house” opinion. Conservative critics of current “enlightened imperialist” foreign policy are deemed “
isolationist” and/or “anti-Semitic,” depending on the circumstances. Pro-life advocacy is regarded as “outside the mainstream.” Such cynical political machinations provoke not only the likes of the Tea Party, but potentially create the unsavory conditions that politically unassimilable others call home. How many more “McVeighs” are quietly finding form?]
“To ‘live within the truth.’ That means that responsibility is ours, that we must accept it and grasp it here, now, in this place where the Lord has set us down, and that we cannot lie our way out of it by moving somewhere else.…” — Vaclav Havel
