Counter Revolution

Posted on August 20, 2004 in Folly Watch Myths & Mysticism Reading

Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham writes an impressive history of the rise of the conservative ideological machine, from the time when, as a young editor, he was tempted to join their ranks as editor of The New Criterion to his growing disillusionment with the apparatchik lockstep of our present age. He writes:

How does one reconcile the demand for small government with the desire for an imperial army, apply the phrases “personal initiative” and “self-reliance” to corporation presidents utterly dependent on federal subsidies to the banking, communications, and weapons industries, square the talk of “civility” with the strong-arm methods of Kenneth Starr and Tom DeLay, match the warmhearted currencies of “conservative compassion” with the cold cruelty of “the unfettered free market,” know that human life must be saved from abortionists in Boston but not from cruise missiles in Baghdad? In the glut of paper I could find no unifying or fundamental principle except a certain belief that money was good for rich people and bad for poor people. It was the only point on which all the authorities agreed, and no matter where the words were coming from (a report on federal housing, an essay on payment of Social Security, articles on the sorrow of the slums or the wonder of the U.S. Navy) the authors invariably found the same abiding lesson in the tale — money ennobles rich people, making them strong as well as wise; money corrupts poor people, making them stupid as well as weak.

We can save America in only one way, I think, and that is by counter-revolution founded on Truth and dignity. This terrible mythology which confounds virtue with conspicuous consumption is the present undoing of this nation. The secret Spencerism which has destroyed the Commons with its fences of self-righteousness can only be undone by public discourse and affirmation of the value of people living with one another. “Public” is not a bad word. Nor is “compassion”. Let us insist that they form the basis of our life together.