Losing It

As a rule, liberals don’t collect knick-knacks. It’s a matter of temperament. The need to hang onto souvenirs – ticket stubs from some odd concert long ago or the old high school letter-sweater or that special Christmas tree ornament – is missing in them. The past matters, as you are the sum of all your experiences and all that sort of thing, but there’s no need to make a fetish of it all. Sure you keep stuff. We all do. But if any of it goes missing, or the goofy cat breaks that special ornament, you shrug. These things happen. And you have your memories, which are more useful than the particular objects that might evoke them. And temperamentally, you’re more into looking forward, not backward. The past is what you build on, not where you want to stay. Not only are you generally open to change, you expect it. That’s the way life is. And the unfamiliar is pretty neat – there’s always something you just hadn’t known, or something you hadn’t thought of, and things to learn, and new things to experience. It’s fun. Turning over some object from the past in your hands, and thinking of what once was, is boring, really. What’s the point? So even if you get sentimental now and then, or even get maudlin at times, you’re probably not a collector of things. They don’t matter. They’re just things.

And of course the opposite is probably true for conservatives. They generally like mementos – signed photos on the wall, small but tasteful trophies, presentation objects like model planes or historic pistols and whatnot, or perhaps a moose head above the mantle. This grounds them – such things help you keep your bearings in a chaotic world – and it’s a matter of temperament. Some seek to understand the organic continuity of all life, and establish their rightful place in that sequence of the inevitable, while others just feel trapped by all that. And it is generally accepted that people are born with rather fixed temperaments – shy or outgoing, inclined to prudence or always getting into things – and nothing much changes as they age. That’s just how they are. No seminar on how to overcome your shyness, or on how to manage your money for maximum security and a comfortable retirement, is going to change anything.

Of course you know how this plays out in the everyday world. The wife reduced to tears because the husband of many years doesn’t remember the blue dress she was wearing on their first date, or the husband stunned and furious that the wife threw out his favorite shirt, one that he’s been wearing since high school, in fact the shirt he’d worn to that Stones concert back in the day. Each looks at the other, dumbfounded. That mattered? Or the scene down the hill here in Los Angeles, at the convenience store down on Santa Monica Boulevard – the burly guy with the giant pick-up truck idling outside screaming at the Pakistani clerk to speak English to his Pakistani wife behind the counter, damn it, as this is America, and then turning to the white guy behind him in line for confirmation, only to have the white guy say, gee, I don’t know, human language is pretty neat and it’s cool to hear a new one and maybe find out how another language works and how folks express different things. As you can imagine, that didn’t end well. But maybe you had to be there.

But you could have watched the coverage of all the August town-hall meetings on healthcare reform, with all the people who – whether you believed they were manipulated or not, or bussed in, or plants – seemed sincerely distressed. The anger seemed real enough, as did the tears. And in the end it wasn’t about death panels or creeping socialism or the God-given right of giant insurance corporations to make a profit in an unregulated free market, or nasty, dirty people showing up in emergency rooms where they had no right to be. It was about change, about losing the America they knew and loved. That there was a new black and dangerously intelligent and glib president was only a small part of it. It was about the necessary continuity and coherence in life, the expected and inevitable, and comfortable, dissolving before their very eyes. To those of a certain fixed temperament, this was the end of everything. Those of the other temperament, at ease with change and uneasy with the inevitable, might have thought they were stupid, or faking it for political ends. But how could they understand this was sincere? They were not born with that make-up. Neither side was ever going to understand the other.

Of course Fox News played a large part in this, not exactly abetting the town-hall protesters, or even the Tea Bag protestors, in spite of Glenn Beck and his 9-12 Project. Fox News just gave them a home, a place where they felt comfortable. Fox News, with its breathless wall-to-wall coverage, provided a public service, if you will. No, you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone. That kindness, so to speak, got them in trouble. The Obama administration’s take on Fox News – that Fox is not really a news network – was curious. Maybe Fox News hadn’t, in this case, been doing news. And many said Obama was being petty and vindictive, or risked being seen so, while many liberals cheered. Fox angrily defended itself, while others laughed at them, while still others penned columns on the nature of journalism and the philosophic question of whether objectivity and neutrality was ever really possible.

But this may all go nowhere, as a friend explained in an email:

I would venture that many people questioning going after Fox think that it is shoveling shit into the wind. I do not believe that anyone on the left pays any attention to Fox, for fear of apoplexy. And it probably is not a primary source for independents. That leaves the True Believers who are sure that Beck and Limbaugh just stepped off the plane from Delphi. Some may think the dittoheads are now marginalized. But they ain’t going away. Would that it were that simple.

That seems quite right, and an accurate reading of human nature. Some people need those knick-knacks, so to speak. Some people don’t.

But that’s being facetious. It’s far more than that, as Pat Buchanan explains in his most recent column. Of course he has never been a fan of racial, ethnic diversity, or diversity of any kind, but here he comes to the defense of “white working-class voters” who he says rightly feel they’re getting the short end of the stick. You see, public schools no longer endorse and promote Christianity? That’s just wrong. That’s their religion, after all. And white working-class voters’ Christian faith is “mocked in movies and on TV.” Why are these good people being mocked? What did they do wrong?

Steve Benen comments:

I don’t know what channel Buchanan is watching, but the Baseless Victimization Channel isn’t part of my cable package. Did you know that “illegal aliens” are routinely “rewarded with free educations and health care”? Sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

But what it all comes down to is Buchanan saying white working-class voters no longer recognize the country around them. Why don’t people understand that?

And Benen agrees with Buchanan, America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.

Benen also points out that, the previous week, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski said Buchanan was her favorite guest – “because he says what we are all thinking.” Adam Serwer then said this – “Someone should really ask her about that.”

But she does speak for those born that way, those whose world is continuity, who recognize the inevitable as reality. Ask her what you will. The question will get you nowhere.

But Serwer is bothered by the implicit racism here, Buchanan’s notion that the white world, with its certainties, and the whites in control, is passing:

Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today’s legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets. And frankly, the time of people who think otherwise is passing. If that’s the country Buchanan wants to hold onto, well, he’s right, he is losing it.

Benen says good riddance, but when a black man tells Pat Buchanan that he’s right, that he is losing his imaginary white country, Buchanan is likely to bristle, and double-down.

Andrew Sullivan says he does not quite know what to say about Pat Buchanan’s latest column:

Is it too predictable to note? Or too ugly to record? Or too stupid to ignore? Upon reflection, I’ll go with stupid.

And he examines one simple point:

Notice that for Buchanan, in this column, it is axiomatic that America was once defined by its whiteness. This is what he means by “tradition.” America – once uniformly white – is now, for him and those he speaks for, bewilderingly multicultural and multi-confessional. Hence the anxiety. Hence the panic. Hence, in some ways, the confluence of fear and paranoia among the twenty percent of Americans who seem to feel this way and see the federal government in some way as the enabler of this destruction.

But this axiom, while useful as a myth, has a problem. It is untrue. And this “country” that white Americans are allegedly losing is not, in fact, a country. It is merely a self-serving and solipsistic illusion of a country that some white Americans feel they are losing.

Sullivan argues that from its beginning America was “a profoundly black” country as well:

This took a while for an Englishman to grasp upon arriving here, because it’s so easy to carry with you all the subconscious cultural baggage you grew up with. England, after all, is deeply Anglo-Saxon. It makes some sense to refer to England’s roots and ethnic identity as white, its language as English, its inheritance as a deep mixture of Northern European peoples – the Angles and the Saxons and the Normans and the Celts. And superficially, English-speaking white Americans might seem in the same cultural boat as white English people, dealing with a relatively new multiculturalism in an increasingly diverse and multi-racial society. And at first blush, you almost sink into that lazy and stupid assumption, especially if you arrive in Boston, as I did, and carried all the usual European prejudices, as I did.

The English, lulled by their marinating in American pop culture from infancy, and beguiled by the same language, can live out their days in this country never actually noting that it is an alien land – stranger than you might have ever imagined, crueler than you realized, but somehow also more inspiring than you ever thought possible. This is the America I am trying to make my home, after 25 years. It is not the America of Pat Buchanan’s or John Derbyshire’s fantasies.

His evidence:

It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me – and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are. Even their whiteness is partly scavenged from the fear of – and attraction to – its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I discovered to my amazement, was also black from the very start. (Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you’ve never been to a Gospel Mass in an ancient black Catholic parish, try it some time.)

America is, in fact, a product of racial and cultural interaction:

It fought a brutalizing, bloody, defining civil war over that interaction. Any European student of Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined America in the classic text. Has Buchanan read Tocqueville? And that’s why it seems so odd to me that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father is seen as somehow a threat to American identity for some, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity – the oldest one and the deepest one. This newness is, in fact, ancient – or as ancient as America can be. The very names – Ann Dunham and Barack Obama. Is not their union in some ways a faint echo of the union that actually made this country what it is?

That some cannot see Buchanan’s cartoon as a travesty of history remains America’s tragedy of self-forgetting.

And this reminds him of growing up in Britain, a Protestant country that was Catholic before it was Protestant:

As a Catholic growing up in England, and having genealogical roots in both Catholic Ireland and in Doomsday Book England, it took a while for me to appreciate the pied beauty of this identity. Tribalism is a powerful thing, especially for the Irish. I remember one day, as I was herded into the local Anglican church for my high school assembly, thinking: “This ancient building was once mine, ours.” But that was before I realized that Anglicanism itself could not be understood without the profound inheritance of English Catholicism – and that Anglicanism was actually a hybrid of Protestant and Catholic Englishness. And that this was England – all of it. And to be truly English was to own it all.

So fixed and immutable traditions can be the end product of change, and as with hybrid religions, so with race:

Buchanan, of all people, should know better than these tedious recurring explosions of racial panic. And, of course, he does know better. He has read more history than most pundits. He is personally a civil and decent man. But he feels these things in such a profound and tribal way that what he knows is submerged by tribal fear and expressed as hateful hackery.

But maybe this is not tribalism, but a congenital personality trait – the way you’re born, inescapably drawn to stability, not change. Buchanan literally cannot help himself.

And thus Buchanan would never understand this response to Sullivan:

As a southern white man, I was particularly pleased with your description of how “black” our country is. This is a nuanced perspective that few of us seem to see or realize.

I came to the same conclusion ten years ago, spending six months traveling extensively throughout southern Africa. The most salient feeling I encountered was a sense of “coming home.” As “white” as I am, I was completely surprised by this. When I explored the thought further, I realized the profound influence black culture had on me. The smiles, warmth, easy laughter, tasty food, and potent spirituality were all recognizable qualities I saw in the Africans I met and reminded me of so many of my African American friends. But more than that, I saw these qualities within myself.

Unknowingly, I had accumulated them and they had become an inextricable part of who I am. And for that, I was and still am profoundly grateful.

But another of Sullivan’s readers offers this:

Like most young Americans (and Obama voters), I certainly agree that Pat Buchanan is a nut, and I wish he had not added all the bizarre racialism to his essay. But if you strip out the “whiteness” part, a lot of what he says makes a lot of sense. In fact, it mirrors some of the things you have been saying. Unwinnable wars? Huge bailouts that help Wall Street without helping the little guy? Out of control spending? Horrible problem with illegal immigration? A lot of reasonable people think these are serious issues. And Pat was saying a lot of this stuff a long time before it was fashionable.

Pat Buchanan may be a racist, he’s certainly tone-deaf, and he’s never getting my vote. But, while I hate to say it, his essay really resonated with me. One of the pities of the Republican Party is that people like Buchanan, who seem to have legitimate and important conservative points to make, allow themselves to be marginalized by ridiculous discussions of what white people are feeling, whatever that means.

Oddly, Sullivan agrees with this:

I too was complaining about spending when Fox News was ignoring it. I too am deeply concerned about nation-building in places that require long term colonialism to rescue. I don’t see why the border cannot be secured. Or why corporate welfare continues; why it requires professionals to do my taxes; why wealthy seniors keep getting entitlements while poor working families cannot get health insurance; and I too oppose affirmative action and hate crimes laws.

But isn’t this the Republican problem? The party has lost the capacity to convey its ideas with humor and good will or in a way that includes and speaks to non-white and non-Southern voters. (Reagan was rarely angry, always good-humored, civil, adept at arguing, and counted the West as his base. Now think of Huckabee or Romney and wince.) The GOP insults our intelligence with farces like Palin, idiots like Steele, bigots like Inhofe and lunatics like Beck. It expresses anger far more readily than reason or optimism. It rationalizes the evil of torture and the cruelty of discrimination. And its hero worship of the last president would make the most hardcore Obamaphile blush.

I’d like to support a party of the right that made its case with reason and care to the next generation. It doesn’t exist. And it seems further away now than ever.

That may be so, but this may not be a Republican problem. Aren’t you scared to death by all this change these days? Answer, no, not particularly, and you won’t understand Buchanan, or Fox News, or those angrier than ever before that the Obama team is saying that, oh, you know how these Fox guys are, and that’s just not news.

Hey, it may not be news, but it’s not chopped liver. And it may be like that favorite shirt, the one that you’ve been wearing since high school, in fact the shirt you wore to that Stones concert back in the day. Sure it’s old, and falling apart, and hanging onto it is wholly irrational, if not absurd. But you just cannot let it go. That would leave a hole in your heart. That would, somehow, really be the end of you. You know that in your bones. And that’s the way you are. And. Similarly, an imaginary white America in an imaginary 1952 is your totem object, to turn in your hands, and think of what once was.

How can you argue with that? But then, you’re losing it.