American Humility and Humiliation
Oct. 17th, 2011 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsCorey Robin's new book, The Reactionary Mind, has created a stir, and over at the left-leaning Dissent magazine Sheri Berman dissents from the book's message. Robin insists the books is a serious effort to understand the right and examine its leading ideas; Berman asserts that the book is one-sided and full of polemical attacks. Toward the end, Berman writes:
The missing word is "humiliation."
For the past forty years, the right has done everything it was told to do by its leadership. It voted, it prayed, it gave money, it got active when it was necessary. Yet modernity arrived nonetheless. Gays are getting married. Women occupy high office. The country is getting browner. There's a black man in the White House. Liberal states continue to get wealthier; conservative states continue to falter. Liberal states not only adhere to their own moral values more successfully than conservative states, they adhere to conservative moral values more successfully than conservative states.
All of this humiliates the right. They know they're in an unwinnable war with, if not The End of History, at the very least the end of the racially and religiously homogenous little worlds they lived in when they were young. With the coming of the Internet, they've been shown just how full the world is of people unlike them. It's worse then they thought.
The mission of the left should be (indeed, must be) to convince the right that continuing to identify with those who tilt our legislators and executives toward favoring those who "make money with money" rather than those who "create wealth by making good things and providing good services" is not in their best interests.
Instead, sites like Daily Kos continue to put forward the idea that conservatives deserve to be humiliated, and that the only successful way forward is to not reason with them, not bargain with them, to not feel pity, or pain, or remorse, or fear, but to just roll over the conservatives.
And this is why I have such deep cynicism right now about the whole process. Neither side has any genuine humility, no genuine interest in looking at the premises under which they labor. "The 99%" (and this includes most of the so-called "53%") believe in the dignity and creative power of labor. But deep within the two poles of James Sinclair's Venn Diagram are a pair of magnets, each labeled "a sense of security," but with different illustrations, that draws people out from the center, and makes them forget what they're really protesting.
if one instead accepts that the rage, disenfranchisement, and disillusionment [of the right] are real, then the question becomes: why in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has it found its home so often on the right rather than the left? This is a question that The Reactionary Mind leads directly to; it is not one that Robin—or the Left more generally—can or should avoid.There's a problem with Berman's formulation, and it's the word missing from her list of... well, two are emotions, and one is a consequence of the action of others.
The missing word is "humiliation."
For the past forty years, the right has done everything it was told to do by its leadership. It voted, it prayed, it gave money, it got active when it was necessary. Yet modernity arrived nonetheless. Gays are getting married. Women occupy high office. The country is getting browner. There's a black man in the White House. Liberal states continue to get wealthier; conservative states continue to falter. Liberal states not only adhere to their own moral values more successfully than conservative states, they adhere to conservative moral values more successfully than conservative states.
All of this humiliates the right. They know they're in an unwinnable war with, if not The End of History, at the very least the end of the racially and religiously homogenous little worlds they lived in when they were young. With the coming of the Internet, they've been shown just how full the world is of people unlike them. It's worse then they thought.
The mission of the left should be (indeed, must be) to convince the right that continuing to identify with those who tilt our legislators and executives toward favoring those who "make money with money" rather than those who "create wealth by making good things and providing good services" is not in their best interests.
Instead, sites like Daily Kos continue to put forward the idea that conservatives deserve to be humiliated, and that the only successful way forward is to not reason with them, not bargain with them, to not feel pity, or pain, or remorse, or fear, but to just roll over the conservatives.
