Ludwig Wittgenstein, that philosopher whose fields were the foundations of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language, may have been the most important philosopher since Immanuel Kant, and perhaps because when he was growing up in Vienna locals like Brahms, Richard Strauss and Mahler used to drop by the house – his parents were patrons of the arts – Ludwig could turn a phrase, even if only with words. His brother, Paul Wittgenstein, had the musical talent – Paul went on to become a world-famous concert pianist, even after losing his right arm in World War I – Maurice Ravel wrote his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand specifically for the hand that was left. Ludwig himself had absolute pitch and was said to be unusually adept at whistling lengthy and detailed musical passages (and he played clarinet a bit). But mostly he said things that sounded right – “I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” Yep, think of the late nineteenth century Vienna of Freud. That’ll do.
The Wittgenstein quote most often cited is this: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” People generally only cite the last eight words, quoting Wittgenstein when they decide it might be time to shut up or limit the damage already done, or when they want to shut up someone else who just doesn’t have a clue about the big issue they are proudly pontificating about, and sinking into absurdities. In either the I-guess-I-really-don’t know-what-I’m-talking-about situation, or the much more common you-don’t-know-jack-so-shut-your-mouth situation, Wittgenstein can be useful. If you cannot be clear and maybe just halfway right, silence is a fine option, maybe the only good option.
In the week where Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary, surprising the pollsters and pundits, followed by days of what was offered as serious and deep analysis of why this happened and what it could mean, many must have turned to their television sets and muttered a bit of Wittgenstein – “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” Well, maybe not many – just the academic sort. But all the analysis was maddening – no one knows much. Everyone has a theory, and all the candidates have highly-paid consultants, with their theories and action plans based on those theories. That’s why they’re paid the big bucks. But what happened seems pretty impervious to analysis, and no one was being terribly clear. Was it her tears? Was it white backlash against her opponent, the brilliant yet humble yet inspiring young black senator? Were the electronic voting machines rigged? (Dennis Kucinich is on the case,) Who knows?
But with New Hampshire old history and the South Carolina primary looming, it was time to do something, based on whatever theory finally became the “probably it was that” that got stuck in your advisor’s mind. And advisors always claim to know what voters are really thinking – they see it before anyone else does.
Unfortunately what they see in South Carolina is that half the Democratic Party is African-American, and the Republicans there are overwhelmingly white evangelical conservatives, many with a deadly serious grudge about the Late Unpleasantness Between the States (what most of us call the Civil War). Yep, lots of people feel abused and wronged. The operating theory would have to be that this one was about race – fighting the civil war again, without the dead people.
So whatever happened, for whatever reason, in New Hampshire resolved to some sort of consensus that race is the issue. But in modern America that’s hard to talk about, directly. You got the kind of code that would have driven Wittgenstein to tears, kind of like Senator Clinton.
There was the “shuck and jive” business. Andrew Cuomo, son of the Jesuit-trained solidly liberal ex-governor of New York, on the radio talking about Clinton’s victory, said this – “It’s not a TV crazed race. Frankly you can’t buy your way into it. You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference. All those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you’re in someone’s living room.” It was poor choice of words – or it wasn’t. Cuomo’s office said that the quote had been taken out of context - it applied to both leading candidates and both Iowa and New Hampshire, and was offered as an explanation of the health of the early primary process. He was NOT saying no one likes that uppity nigger shucking and jiving.
And you cannot call the brilliant yet humble yet inspiring young black senator “Boy” – but you can call him “kid.” And Bill Clinton did. Democratic strategist Donna Brazile was not pleased. Bill Clinton “shouldn’t take out all his pain on Barack Obama… It sounds like sour grapes coming from the former commander in chief, someone that many Democrats hold in high esteem. For him to go after Obama, using ‘fairy tale,’ calling him a ‘kid,’ as he did last week, it’s an insult. And I tell you, as an African- American, I find his words and his tone to be very depressing.” Oops. Perhaps Bill Clinton was not America’s first black president after all.
And there was that business about pickup basketball at Harvard – that was from Karl Rove’s Wall Street Journal op-ed. Rove flags Obama’s “trash talking” and “his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard” and the alleged fact that “he is often lazy.” This was also a poor choice of words – or it wasn’t. With Rove, one must assume the latter. The man is a master of code. We all know about young black men, don’t we?
Should we lynch him in a back alley? Actually, that wasn’t about Barack Obama; it was about Tiger Woods, and other professional golfers may indeed often feel that would be nice. It was just a sportscaster getting with the zeitgeist. She apologized, and Woods shrugged – he likes the kid, and she made a slip. No big deal. But something was in the air.
What does seem a big deal was Hillary Clinton, fed up with all of Obama’s inspirational crap, hitting him hard about referring to Martin Luther King inspiring people, offering hope, when everyone knows that King was a minor figure who really changed nothing much. You see, “It took a president to get it done” – Lyndon Johnson got the Civil Rights Act passed in the sixties, with arm-twisting and threats and gaming the system. Inspiration is useless, of course. Having the Washington insider moves down cold is what really matters. Experience trumps bullshit inspiration.
Needless to say, this assertion may have been a bit unwise, no matter how heartfelt, or how insightful in terms of political theory, and no matter how frustrated she was.
Here is one typical reaction:
That’s right. It wasn’t the courage of King and local Montgomery residents standing up to legalized white supremacy in their hometown that began to change America, it was the white man. It wasn’t Rosa Parks who had enough and refused to sit in the back of the bus that got things started, it was the white man. It wasn’t John Lewis and others facing down billy clubs and tear gas in Selma, it was the white man.
It wasn’t Fannie Lou Hamer telling the racist Democrats at the 1964 convention that black people were sick and tired of being sick and tired, it was the white man. Why credit the people who gave their lives for the struggle when all credit is due to the great white father, in his ultimate, eternal benevolence, for finally deciding to recognize black people as human beings? I wonder where he got that idea?
Johnson didn’t change America. Johnson reacted to the changes in America. For that he deserves some credit, but never mistake the man in the suit for the soldiers on the street. The difference is obvious: Johnson isn’t the one whose life was ended by a sniper’s bullet.
The junior senator from New York really stepped in it this time. And that reaction was a bit of Wittgenstein – “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” She should have read Wittgenstein back at Wellesley.
Over at the Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum had a question – “Are subtle racial appeals on the rise in the past week? Or are we creating news where nothing exists?”
The answer – (1) Ben Smith at The Politico, Racial tensions roil Democratic race: “A series of comments from Senator Hillary Clinton, her husband, and her supporters are spurring a racial backlash and adding a divisive edge to the presidential primary as the candidates head south to heavily African-American South Carolina.” (2) Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice, Clinton Camp Race-Tinged Comments Multiply. (3) AJ Strata at The Strata-Sphere, America’s First Black President Was Clinton - Remember?
And the woman’s husband, Bill Clinton, is backtracking. Obama’s candidacy isn’t the “fairy tale” at all, but his Iraq war opposition is:
Bill Clinton just appeared on Al Sharpton’s radio show, and was asked about his statements in New Hampshire that the media was pushing a “fairy tale” about Obama’s candidacy. Bill insisted that he did not mean Obama’s candidacy itself was the fairy tale.
“I have given hundreds of speeches on Hillary’s behalf in this campaign,” Bill said. “I don’t believe I’ve ever given a single one where I haven’t applauded Senator Obama and his candidacy. It’s not a fairy tale - he might win.”
Instead, Bill said, the “fairy tale” is the idea that Obama has always opposed the war. “We went through 15 debates and the Obama campaign has made the argument that his relative lack of service in the Senate was not relevant because he had better judgment than the other Democrats on the Iraq War…” Bill said. “And I pointed out that he’d never been asked about his statements in 2004 that he didn’t know how he’d have voted on the Iraq War, and that there was no significant difference between his position as President Bush’s.”
Bill then speculated on what Obama might have meant at the time - perhaps he only disagreed with the conduct of the war, or how best to deal with it now. “The point is, it disproves the argument that he was always against it, everyone else was wrong and he was right…” Bill said. “I said that story is a fairy tale, and that doesn’t have anything to do with my respect for him as a person or as a political figure in this campaign.”
Counterpoint:
Obama has said during this campaign that he hedged on his answer about the Iraq War authorization vote because he did not want to openly disagree with John Kerry and John Edwards, as they were the party’s ticket at the national convention where he was speaking, and both of whom had voted for the war and yet to repudiate it.
Good – that’s all cleared up. But wait! There is this story from The Guardian (UK) on Friday, January 11, which quotes some unidentified “Clinton advisor” saying this – “If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.”
From the widely-read Josh Marshall, some common sense:
It is remarkable, or perhaps it’s not so remarkable, how rapidly this punching match over race has escalated between the Clinton and Obama camps. Even calling it that is perhaps controversial in itself.
… It’s genuinely unclear to me how much one side or the other is consciously pushing this, how much it’s escalated based in part on misunderstandings, or whether, in a somewhat related fashion, hyping journalistic accounts has given the engagement a life of its own.
Some of the statements recently attributed to the Clintons have seemed at best awkward in how they’re discussing race and the civil rights movement; others have struck me as unobjectionable statements interpreted in a tendentious fashion.
Yes, some of the “code” may not be code at all. The item in the Guardian is just puzzling:
Now, as I said, I have a bit of a hard time knowing what’s going on here. If this is really the word the Clinton campaign wants its surrogates putting out, they’re really much stupider than I could have imagined. On the other hand, ‘advisor’ is a notoriously slippery phrase that can mean almost anything. Campaigns have hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who in one fashion or another ‘advise’ them. A lot of those people aren’t under any kind of real control. And if a reporter talks to enough of them one of them is bound to say something stupid. On the other hand, you have to rely on the journalist and the news outlet not to send you down the wrong path or give you the sense that this is a Clinton insider rather than just someone spouting off.
Well, as many have said, the Guardian folks have their enthusiasms, but they do not flat-out lie. The British press is like that. We are the ones who have a problem:
Race is an inherently compromising issue in American culture and politics. And some of what I think is happening here is that it is ricocheting in all sorts of directions in this campaign which is about the heart of the Democratic Party.
I don’t have any global answer here. This has spiraled pretty far in the last forty-eight hours. And I’m just now taking stock of it again. Like I said, it’s not completely clear to me the mix of intention, inertia and accident involved. But this is explosive. So we’re going to do the best we can to tell you what’s happening, not to hold anything back but also to be conscious of each step we take as we report on and thus in a real sense relay these increasingly inflammatory statements and reports.
Fair enough. We can argue about other things. Like this from Hillary Clinton on Barack Obama:
He was a part-time state senator for a few years, and then he came to the Senate and immediately started running for president. And that’s his prerogative. That’s his right. But I think it is important to compare and contrast our records.
Matthew Yglesias has a problem with that:
Part time, okay….
Meanwhile, the experience thing is obviously a good issue for Clinton but I feel like when you put it this bluntly, it sort of evaporates. I mean, compare their records? Clinton’s record turns out to be really thin - she’s only been a Senator since 2001 and hasn’t authored any major legislation. Barack Obama’s been in the US Senate even more briefly, but did write some significant bills as an Illinois Senator, and has served more years in elected office than has Clinton. Like everyone else, I can’t shake the sense that Clinton’s years of first ladying amount to some kind of substantial experience, but they don’t really amount to a record. What’s more, in a lot of ways she’s really not running on her husband’s record - she’s certainly not emphasizing the idea that she’s going to be a committed free trader and budget balancer.
To be clear, it’s not Clinton’s fault that she hasn’t authored any significant legislation - it wasn’t in the cards given the larger political situation. But that’s what makes it strange for her to specifically ask us to compare her “record” with Obama’s; what are we supposed to find when we look?
That’s better. It’s not about race, just about bullshit.
Still, it’s better bullshit than we have now. Michael Hirsch on Bush in the Palestinian territories:
Enough already. We’ve had a president who was the Great Emancipator. And another who was the Great Communicator. Bush is the Great Conflater. In his first term he conflated the threat from Al Qaeda with the threat from Saddam (”You can’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,” Bush said in September 2002), and then tossed groups like Hezbollah and Hamas into the mix (though their goals were markedly different from Al Qaeda’s). Now Bush is suggesting that all the problems he lumped in together can be solved by an equally lumpy panacea of freedom and democracy.
If hollow sloganeering were an adequate substitute for serious American leadership freedom would, of course, have been on the march long ago. On the specifics of the Palestinian issue, Bush’s conflation of freedom, democracy, and self-determination are especially dangerous since he plainly has no intention of taking any of the steps that might actually lead to the creation of an independent Palestine as the main impact at this point is to simply re-enforce the idea that high-flying American rhetoric is just a mask for violence against Arabs.
This really would have driven Wittgenstein to tears, kind of like Senator Clinton – “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”
