Posted By BillHeise on March 20, 2010

So what will the Republicans do after they lose the health care vote this weekend, as it now seems inevitable they will? It seems one option is to vent their anger by going after whoever offered a job to Joe Sestak in order to get him to drop his challenge to Arlen Specter. The American Spectator has published an article this week outlining the criminal liability of this action. This will not go away. And, if the Republicans get control of the Senate or the House, they will almost certainly pursue these charges, if not to make the President resign, then to throw his aggressive agenda off track.

The List of Charges

The list of charges that might be coming are not as severe as the authors say, but they make a good point about Robert Gibbs’ resemblance to Ron Ziegler during the two years it took for Watergate to get resolved. Gibbs, they charge, is in the process they call “zieglerizing.” Liberals should read the article because this is what is coming for the Presidency unless they react more quickly than either Nixon or Clinton did.

The cost of ignoring this will be the (potential) reversal in the Supreme Court of the notion having passed the bill without a vote. It is much easier to overturn an unpopular president than a popular one on an unpopular bill. It happened to FDR’s NRA legislation. It could happen to Obama’s bill despite the fact that he assures us that he’s doing “the right thing.”

Criminalizing Politics

My liberal friends will poo-poo the idea of taking such charges seriously, saying that the charges here do not compare with enormity of Watergate. My conservative friends will applaud the notion of pursuing charges against the Presidency. I don’t approve of a strategy of criminalizing political actions, but this was put in place by the Watergate prosecutions. I’m not saying they were wrong. They weren’t. But Republicans have been itching for revenge ever since. They impeached Bill Clinton, who, despite his ability to lie to himself about the underlying criminality of lying under oath in a courtroom in the case brought by Paula Jones, was guilty. The problem with the impeachment of Clinton was that the Republicans were rightfully embarrassed that Ken Starr had publicized the most seemy side of Clinton’s behavior. It was a case brought in the wake of the O. J. Simpson trial. The media was looking for the next scandal, and Clinton provided them one.

The criminalizing of politics is, I’m afraid, here to stay. Not just because Republicans want a President to hang, but because of the underlying philosophy that made liberalism so proud in the 1970s. A fairly minor affair in Washington–the breaking into the offices of George McGovern–became a major affair because it exposed the fact that the the new generation (the Pepsi generation, if you will) were not being heard, they were instead being shut out by “those who knew better.” America responded by reasserting balance into the political process. Nixon resigned in disgrace. Ford pardoned him. And Jimmy Carter was elected. Balance was restored.

The Rise of News to the Plateau of Philosophy

But in the process, the American people forgot just how political the judicial process had become. And this is partly the fault of the philosophy that guided the new wave of the 1960s, where people were talking openly about being the first generation to really “get it.” They were the generation that was going to put the world right for once and for all. It was based in the recent importation of the European philosophies, particularly but not exclusively the French and German philosophies of existentialism, which brought with it the notion that other cultures were better able than the West to deal with notions of pure freedom. (See my Nina Hagen Originals for the ultimate failings of the notion of Western individuality).

And while they grew beyond 30 (the magic number which cut off the in-crowd from the out-crowd), they really did not change their belief that they had a purer vision for the country than their middle class (read “bourgeois”) fathers and mothers did. The liberal mind became more exclusive as they realized that they did not have the power to end debate forever (see my review of My Dinner with André for glimpse of how this happened).

The philosophy of the 60s transformed the case of impeaching Nixon from pursuing a political witch hunt to doing the “right thing.” This gave the news media the sense that they were above the fray. They were giving both sides of the issue. And when in the 1980s news budgets were getting slashed (not for the last time), journalists and media experts cried foul: they should be allowed to operate even at a loss for they were too important to fail.

And this lasted until the day when cable television offered 500 channels and at least one cable channel (Fox) built the largest audience on cable by appealing to the forgotten, Nixon’s “silent majority.” And Fox News has built its audience on the basis of the 60s philosophical model: they do not need to be balanced. They represent, as Rush says, “balance to liberal media bias.” And the only thing that older media philosophers can do is to restrict their borders (again, as André did) to exclude Fox viewers from the pool of the wise.

Politics Itself Corrupt

There was a lot of justice in the pursuit of the criminals involved in Watergate. And that is just. But we need to recognize the fact that there was a large amount of politics in the prosecution of the Watergate case. And this has been swept under the rug by our idealism. Idealism makes it possible to rise above the give-and-take to-and-fro nature of politics. The fact that Obama dows not deign to descend to the sphere of mortal men and take part in the political gamesmanship of Washington means he still retains the notion that there is a political stance in which he can judge without being judged. This position comes from the fact that he has been raised in the cocoon of academia, where business experience and profit are not only not required, they are looked on as liabilities.

Obama’s view that there is a place in the universe that is immune from political give-and-take is dated. More recently, academics have decided that every position you take has a political stance and that you can’t get away from it; you can only be ignorant of your political position. This is the reason I got out of academia: my liberal professors thought I was too conservative, while my conservative professors thought I was shockingly liberal. Everyone knew my position, so people seldom bothered asking me to clarify my thought and when they did got tired of my explanations long before I had finished explaining myself. They just went back to what they already knew: I was evil, like the snake in the Bible, and listening to me could only poison their minds.

We Need a New Philosophy to Guide Us

In my mind, we need a new philosophical approach that doesn’t leave us with various people who decide on the basis of their private intuitions–and not on the basis of the meeting of limited rational minds in the public sphere–who is conservative enough and who is liberal enough and so include or exclude them from the circle of friends and enemies.

Conservatives have been excluded from the circle of “true philosophers,” and thus they are fighting from the margins. Their hope was that their coming into their own after the election of Ronald Reagan would put a nail in the coffin of liberalism. It did not. Instead, liberals regrouped and regained the Presidency with two charismatic leaders. They are operating on the same basis that the liberals of the 60s operated on: each party thinks theirs is the party who has “the rght stuff,” and each party thinks that the other party can be excluded on the basis that their worldview is built on lies. Whether you listen to Rush or Al Franken, the song remains the same, and it is no wonder. Look how many former “liberals” defected from liberal causes–David Horowitz, Irving Kristol, and (my personal favorite) Jerry Rubin–to go into business or to found the neo-conservative movement.

The difference between the conservatives is that they don’t realize how much their message differs from their 60s counterparts. They operate under the aegis of philosophers like F. A. Hayak, whose gave us the counter-intuitive notion that doing collective good for the underprivileged would instead result in doing very bad things for the rest of us. This is why conservatives are so intent of calling our enemies in the war of terror “Islamo-fascists” and also why the liberals who grew up in the 60s are so appalled. In their view. fascism has been transformed from a particulary ideology into stable and secure principle of moral judgment. Hitler wasn’t just a man with a different point of view. He was the instance of evil in the modern world.

The Problem with the New Philosophy

The problem of including money in our well-balanced picture of the universe is that including money in our worldview introduces the instability (which I call asymmetry) into our philosophical system and if it is allowed in this asymmetry will unbalance the picture that both the left and the right operate on in this country.

It is also inevitable that someone will eventually figure out how to do this.

My aesthetic work, both in criticism and in art itself, will be in part dedicated to figuring out the costs of introducing asymmetry into our formerly (and still) balanced system in which costs play no (formally acknowledged) role.

Categories: In the News, Philosophy
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