THE DON JONES INDEX…
LESSON for JUNE 4, 2013
DOW JONES INDEX 6/3/13… 15,254.03
5/24/13… 15,453.63
6/4/12… 12,118.57
This
following has been adapted from Jack Parnell’s “Entropy and Renaissance”,
serialized each week in major media outlets…
Of late, it
has become more difficult to profile Americans on an existent political
spectrum. This is a consequence of voter
disenchantment with Barack Obama, his bureaucratic allies and the Democrats in
Washington and the Republican
Congress. For some years now,
Republicans… especially since Nixon… have embraced the jackboot thuggery of big government, at least on a selective
basis. Meanwhile, recent Supreme Court
decisions have goaded Democrats into an attempt to compete with the G.O.P. in
raising the sort of money which decides elections by selling their souls to
Wall Street.
As the
donkeys and elephants slide closer and closer together in their big bed of
corruption, ordinary Americans react in varying ways. Some throw away their minds and become
robotic advocates of the one party or other… seeing Americans who disagree with
them as enemies, to be vanquished (if not just plain killed). Quite a bit of this has to do with race, but
this trend was underway before Mr. Obama took office, and will remain long
after he is gone.
To these,
politics is a spectacle… a blood sport, to be sure, but sport nonetheless. The herds of “dittoheads”
(left or right) root for their favorite party the way that they root for the
Cubs or the Cowboys or Dale Earnhardt.
The
majority, however, look upon Washington (and, often enough, their statehouses
and, even, local governments) with disgust.
Increasingly, they refuse to vote.
They are not lazy… they are appalled by the Potemkin choice so often
given. In legislative races, the
advantage to incumbents already swollen by special-interest money is magnified
by a sort of “gentlemen’s gerrymandering”, where poor and minority voters are
crowded into bizarrely-shaped districts that will ensure them representation,
but no influence.
In the past,
you could mark the measure of a man (or woman) on a 7-point, two dimensional line as ran left to right, like this: Communist, Socialist,
Democrat, Moderate, Republican, Libertarian, Anarchist. Then, some intellectuals put their minds to
pondering as to whether the heft of gumment’s foot against the free market might count for as
much as intent, so they drew up a sort of gridly
diamond, a plane with four points and a big, square football field inbetween as measures a society by both its economic and
social issues, and is graded by yardmarkers… call
them north/south or east/west… as measure how one stands (economically) on
Security versus Opportunity and, on the other, (socially) Authority versus
Liberty. You can see a different picture
emerging – your orthodox Soviet propagandists were over there in that corner as
ranks high on Security and Authority (even if reality failed to measure up to
the rhetoric) while your average corporate CEO also ranks high on Authority
(which, of course, is always exerted upon other folks, never yourself) but
moves across the way towards Opportunity (aka“the
American Dream”which remains, for most, only a dream
until they day they are planted in the ground.
Opposite them you have them old New Lefties as wanted the right to
collect welfare and have sex with goats (high Security, high Liberty) and then
that small, but growing, cranky bunch of libertarians over there as don’t want
to pay taxes, and also care not if the majority of American wealth is siphoned
off by a few creative accountants - but also don’t care what other people do in
their bedrooms unless they take it out onto the yard.
A
two-dimensional ideology, I suppose, shows a smidgen more respect to Americans,
but still fails to take in the vast spectra of beliefs, prejudices and codes
which – for good or for ill – have made this country what it is. Reality, for the present, is grounded in
three dimensions. Politics deserves no
more, and nothing less,
But,
once I saw the NAFTA lines forming up without seeming sense or substance except
a commonality of inevitable corruption with both the extremes on the old linear
left-right spectrum winding up in the same bed, I determined that the political
lay of the land was less like a diamond and more like the ring it rode in on…
except there was a tiny chasm where the far Left, curled back against sellout
Democrats, and Rightists recoiling against Republicans were looking at one
another cross a strait narrow as that way up in Alaska where Sarah Palin said
she could see Russia. Meaning that both
of the next cycle’s minor candidates… Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader… were
agreeing with one another. And meaning that the corruption of the existing factions had itself
transcended the traditional lines of political reasoning. And the rustier and corrupt that old ring
goes, the more that the activists and extremist of both major parties… as well
as those as have given up on them altogether… form an alliance based on the
premise that we throw the rascals out… all the rascals!... and start over.
Tommy
Jefferson thought this should happen about once in a generation… and maybe
that’s too extreme for this old extremist to countenance. But however the mathematics go down, it’s
clear that such a reshuffling of the deck (if not even throwing the whole
joker-riddle deck in the trash and breaking out a new deck from a different
card company) is long, long overdue.
But
even the prospect of taking radical action frightens most decent Americans, who
have become inured to the give and take of Democratic/Republican goals, even as
the process and results decay and continue to decay into a foreseeable future –
until the inevitable conclusion (whether with a bang or whimper). Radicalism, like its nearest neighbors
Communism and Anarchism, is used as a synonym for mindless violence and,
moreover, is presumed to augur a politics of extremism. However, the origins of the word… radix, or
root…simply means that the radical assesses a problem, determines its root cause
and solves it (rather than buying off this faction or that, or nurturing a
festering sore on the lip of democracy so as to exploit the inherent passions
aroused for personal gain).
Let’s
contemplate a visual of typical line and grid ideologies…
X x
Communism
Socialism Liberalism Moderation
Conservatism Libertarianism Anarchism
Here is the typical spectrum (line, one-dimensional)
representation of ideology as most Americans and, indeed, most literate humans
perceive it. Issues are, for the most
part, packaged by the political parties – even among Independents, positions on
the spectrum tend to cluster based on factors such as race, religion,
regionalism, class status, age and so forth.
Designations themselves are often in dispute as to the identity of the
questioner… the academic liberal may prefer to term himself “progressive” (a
designation derived from radical Republicans of a century ago) and dismiss his
enemies as Fascists and Nazis, rather than Libertarians or Anarchists, while
the working-class conservative may reject all four epithets, preferring nonideological yet emotional terms such as “patriot” or
borrowed identities, as in the case of “tea partiers”. The term “radical” is seldom used to
designate ideology, rather, it is associated with violence as may arise from
either extreme. The spectrum, being
one-dimensional, often does not fairly represent most Americans who do not
consider themselves proud “dittoheads” of left and
right – of late, in consequence, a two-dimensional or “grid” reckoning has been
proposed… one that takes the measure of a man based on predilections for 1) a
preference for either security or opportunity (usually, but not always,
applicable to economic issues – for example, the government’s role in
protecting Americans from themselves), and 2) for authority or liberty (most
often applicable to social issues). The
resultant diagram may look something like this…
Maximum
Security Moderate
Security Middle
o’ the Road Moderate
Liberty Maximum
Liberty |
▐▐▐▐▐ |
Communism Utopianism Socialism
Libertarianism Liberalism Conservatism
Consumerism Syndicalism Corporatism Fascism Plutocracy Naziism
Anarchism |
|
||
Maximum Moderate Moderate Maximum Authority
Authority Liberty Liberty |
The resultant profile seems fairer and more
comprehensive to those who consider themselves politically sophisticated as,
for example, employees of the U.S. State Department and political commentators
who have graduated from talk radio to talk television. Again, however, it is morally neutral… the
fascist or Nazi, after Wagner and Nietzsche and other philosophers of the late
19th century, may espouse freedom and nature, but only for
themselves. At the other end, there have
never been large modern societies that practiced utopianism or anarchism for
long – the former is perhaps best represented by the strange interlude of the
French Revolution or the efforts by heroic (and often demented) dictators to
create new men for a new society… people like Pol
Pot, Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier and, perhaps, Ralph Nader. The only anarchist state, meanwhile… and a
not very anarchical one at that… was the Spanish Republic, which found it
attacked from both sides by the Communists and Fascists and sank beneath the
tide of history. Nonetheless, the
margins have some merit in defining the limits of the whole, much as the earth
is surrounded by an atmosphere with a density that lessens and lessens the
farther away from the surface that one might go. Again, however, the radical view… that
emerging problems should be solved by appropriate means irrespective of
ideology is viewed as laughable. This is
because the core of the grid model, underlying even the banality of a
consumerist center, is corruption. So,
then, we proceed to what some have called Catfish politics but, in all modesty,
I prefer to refer to as ring ideologies (not to be mistaken, of course, with
Mr. Wagner’s ring cycle… which proved to be fine opera, but rather shaky
politics)…
STAGE LEFT |
THE
RADICALS Ʊ MODERATES/the DISGUSTED |
STAGE RIGHT |
UTOPIANISTS COMMUNISTS SOCIALISTS LIBERALS (PROGRESSIVES) DEMOCRATS |
ANARCHISTS LIBERTARIANS TEA PARTIERS (TRUE) CONSERVATIVES REPUBLICANS |
|
|
|
FINALLY, A FEW DIRECTIONAL
REFINEMENTS and EXAMPLES…
OLD OLD LEFT
– Labour advocates; the New Deal; traditional
morality (somewhat misogynist); internationalist (often interventionist); civil
rights (if at all) through nonviolent protest. HABITAT: Small,
rural family and sharecropper farms; urban factories, docks, union halls. REPRESENTATIVE ICONS: William Jennings Bryan; Teddy Roosevelt
(after 1910); FDR; LBJ; JFK (except for that sex thing); Joe Biden; Huey Long;
George Meany; Castro; Frank Capra; Ronald Reagan (as union boss); J. K
Galbraith; Gandhi.
TRANSITIONAL
FIGURE: Bob Dylan (before/after he went
electric)…
OLD NEW LEFT –
Peaceniks; Vietniks; noninterventionist;
sex/drugs/rock and roll; civil rights through armed revolution. HABITAT:
College dorms; urban ghettos; rural hippie communies;
“the street”. REPRESENTATIVE ICONS: the Yippies;
Black Panthers; MLK and Malcolm X (who were broadening their perspective when
assassinated); RFK (also assassinated); Che (ditto);
those Easy Rider dudes (ditto – does a pattern suggest itself here?); McCarthy
and McGovern; the Beatles; Jane Fonda; Timothy Leary; Shirley McLaine; Nelson Mandela.
TRANSITIONAL
FIGURE: Edward Abbey
NEW NEW LEFT
– Political correctness; domestic and international policies based on hierarchy
of victimology; morality of “choice” (someone
misanthropic); civil rights through litigation and bureaucracy… except when
people have to be protected from their own bad choices by insurance, public
scolding or the law. HABITAT: College faculty lounges; foundation boardrooms; law
offices; Hollywood; some media outlets; organic grocery stores. REPRESENTATIVE ICONS: Gloria Allred; Mayor Bloomberg; PETA-philes;
assorted doctors’ and insurance lobbies; tree-spiker
environmentalists.
TRANSITIONAL
FIGURE: Paul McCartney (post-divorce)
NEW OLD LEFT – mostly nonexistent, to
date… perhaps best represented by Eminem’s teenage loser in a dead-end fast
food job spitting into people’s burgers.
Hard to contemplate, much less organize, a labor movement when jobs are
being shipped to China faster than you can whistle Nike. HABITAT:
Hobo camps; College student loan offices; pawnshops. REPRESENTATIVE ICONS: Mass murderers; furloughed government workers and the vast
armies of the disgruntled.
THE SYNONYMICAL DEPTHS – where one finds MODERATES,
INDEPENDENTS, UNDECIDED, APATHETIC, APOLITICAL, “TURNED OFF”, DISGUSTED, and
also a few potential radicals for, as Dante presumed, the quickest way out of
Hell is through its centre.
OLD OLD
RIGHT - isolationism;
morality variable (but discretion prized).
HABITAT: East Coast enclaves; small town
businesses; country clubs REPRESENTATIVE ICONS: McKinley; Harding; Coolidge and
Hoover; Teddy Roosevelt (pre-1910); the Rockefellers; Bushes and their
imitators; Lindbergh; Churchill; Billy Graham (who could be civil towards pre-Clintonian Democrats); William F. Buckley; Richard Nixon
(an economic progressive).
TRANSITIONAL
FIGURE: Barry Goldwater
OLD NEW RIGHT - Supply-siders and “muscular”
Christians who envy and admire Francisco Franco (if not You Know Who);
snake-handlers; think-tanks; favorite tactic for dealing with dissenters is to
lock ‘em up and throw away the key. They hate the Kenyan/Islamic President Obama
(but have a sneaking admiration for the way he used the IRS to torment his
opposition. HABITAT: the South; the West; suburbs and
exurbs; urban white minorities; VFW halls; churches; oilfields; corporate
boardrooms. REPRESENTATIVE ICONS: Ronald Reagan (as union buster);
Newt Gingrich; John McCain; Franklin Graham; Falwell/Robertson/LaHaye et. al.;
Rush Limbaugh; Pat Buchanan and Bob Barr and David Stockman (20th
century).
TRANSITIONAL
FIGURE: The Tea Party
NEW NEW RIGHT - organized and
angry. May not know what they want… but
certainly know what they don’t want. Angry enough to occasionally make common
cause with angry leftists over issues like NAFTA, China and the government’s
secret role in promoting the World Trade Bombing. Some even admit to having had sex and smoking
marijuana! HABITAT: bunkers and compounds across America; state and local
legislatures; school boards; churches; talk radio. REPRESENTATIVE ICONS: Ron and Rand Paul; Paul Ryan; Sarah Palin;
organized and disorganized militias; Pat Buchanan and Bob Barr and David
Stockman (in the 20th century); Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
TRANSITIONAL
FIGURE: Adam Sandler
NEW OLD RIGHT – still struggling to be
born, but slightly more developed than the NEW OLD LEFT. Minorities not only welcomed, but wantonly
pursued. Most are still Republican, but
can speak of a “big tent” without breaking out into laughter and some can even
laugh at themselves. HABITAT: Armani and Gucci raves; internet blogs; wine tastings,
house-flipping seminars; REPRESENTATIVE ICONS: Bobby Jindal;
Marco Rubio; Christ Christie; Dennis Miller; P. J. O’Rourke; the guys who made
South Park.
THE
RADICALS:
Anybody who feels out of place among all of the above.
You?