Abstract Dynamics: History's Actors

November 10, 2004

History's Actors

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

- Ron Suskind "Without a Doubt"

That all dropped in the NY Times Magazine a few weeks before the election, caused a bit of blognoise and has been reduced to a soundbite. A soundbite by which the American left tries to feel superior those that are now cracking political whips across their backs. But the truth is that this unnamed "senior adviser" (Rove?) gives perhaps the best explanation yet of why the Republican's won this election. And it brings back too me with full force just how much I disagree with much of the left, despite my frequent tactical alignment
with them.

The truth is the American left is in many ways as conservative (if not more so) then the right. While I may align with them in opposition to baby fascisms and banana republic stylistics of the current Republican party, in the end I have a hard time seeing anything but reactionaries and utopians out there struggling with me. There are exceptions of course, but the fact that so many on the left are completely incapable of understanding just how much of "reality" is constructed out of human faith, belief and stubbornness, is absurd. I'm now left in fear that their faith in an unmutable reality amounts to something close to a surrender towards the propaganda mills of Karl Rove and the Christian right.

Compounding it all in frustration is the fact that Rove and company borrow freely from the Hollywood/Madison Avenue terrain dominated by core cultural leftists. They dominate the non political storytelling of our age, yet fall utterly flat when it comes to the construction of the political narrative. Why? Perhaps they know too well how potent their magic is, and refuse embrace the black arts the GOP embrace so readily (cue the Swift Boat ads for reference).

I wonder how much this difference stems from the urban vs. rural/suburban divide that seems so clear in the past election. Perhaps urban space is so overloaded with conflicting constructions of reality that the population becomes immune, and sees only the concrete. Meanwhile out in horizontal, the low-flow, low-density, landscape the evangelicals and friends are busy building new realities just like any other religion of the past milleniums. And here in the cities my compatriots it seems don't quite know what hit them. The reality based community has yet to wake up to the reality of faith, have they?

Posted by William Blaze at November 10, 2004 05:03 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Good point. Someone sent me this article yesterday quoting James Carville:

"Carville said that the party's concern about interest groups had resulted in 'litanies, not a narrative.'"

"'The party needs a narrative,' he said. adding later that one possibility would to become 'an aggressively reform, anti-Washington, anti-business-as-usual party.'"

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35224-2004Nov8.html

Posted by: leslee on November 10, 2004 06:22 PM

The thing is they should have cooked up more crack-cocaine to give to democrat voters in exchange for them to register under a bunch of names like "Mary Poppins". A few more pounds of that white stuff and who knows? The dems might have been able to steal this one.

But it went to the right man. And it's not just "the south" as that sore loser's rant "fuckthesouth.com" suggests. If he would have taken a look at the election map by county, not by state, he would have saw that the whole country is practically red.

And to think... they even said there were more young people voting for Kerry - more young people came out than in any other time in history. Thanks to pistol-waving P-ditty and guys like that. Can you imagine if there was no such thing as MTV's "rock the vote"? No such thing as slutty Madonna and her whining leftwing lunacy? No such thing as Fahrenheit 911? Wow - Bush's landslide would have been ever greater.

Oh well. I understand the anger. I hear a lot of democrats in Florida have been seeking psychological help.

Ellis wishing Ashcroft a nicely written good-bye. Very heartwarming and tolerant, mind you. Yes. Those lefties are so compassionate, aren't they?

Oh and by the way, to the folks at sorryeverybody.com ... Osama bin Laden says he accepts your apology.

While Hillary, Daschle, Gephardt, Kerry, Edwards, and the rest of them figure out how to salvage their nearly destroyed party, the GOP will be busy working on making this country even greater... Protecting marriage is going to be one of them. Hey, it won ... 11 states to 0. I think the people have spoken.

Ahhh... "Four more years"... it's now a reality.

No hard feelings.

God bless America.

Posted by: BillyKess on November 11, 2004 05:04 AM

Abe,

I'm not so sure that there's a left view of an unmutable reality. If anything, there's too much lip service given in the media (the Liberal media, as many will tell you) to views that have absolutely no factual or scientific backing. Some views sound interesting, but that doesn't mean they should be given equal footing with views that actually have a basis in reality. I like to think of myself as an individual that can draw from a variety of source and evaluate facts to determine my beliefs. I can take it when the whole spectrum of views is represented, but most people just don't have the time, the patience, or the knowledge to filter this drivel. The news sources that are doing the filtering (Fox News?) are doing so in this Rove neu-reality.

I thought this article was pretty relevant:
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/6/mooney-science.asp

Posted by: mike on November 11, 2004 11:00 AM

What you're driving at is what I was trying to argue in an article for Bad Subjects shortly after the US invaded Iraq. The Republicans have mastered a politics of affect -- faith being one of the prime ways to affect voters (although I no longer am sure who is driving who: religion and "baby fascisms" are quite intertwined at this point; one is no longer, if it ever was, in service of the other). If there is a "left based reality politic" it is that of, at least in print, Noam Chomsky. But Chomsky in person is an affective --and thus effective-- speaker who generates "faith" in his followers. So I'm no longer so sure. I made the same generalizations you did to make the argument at a tactical level, but I'm not sure I would extend it as far as you have.

So like Mike, I'm not sure there is such a reality-based consensus on reality. Perhaps what you're getting at is that the (American) left has no idea how to tactically deal with religion?

I mean, Nietzsche just dumped it outright.. but today it's all trying to prove who is more Catholic, it seems.

What's your take on that? Do the Dems try to appeal to moderate religions, or point out that religion quite possibly is the problem?

Posted by: tobias c. van Veen on November 11, 2004 12:05 PM

So like Mike, I'm not sure there is such a reality-based consensus on reality. Perhaps what you're getting at is that the (American) left has no idea how to tactically deal with religion?

I mean, Nietzsche just dumped it outright.. but today it's all trying to prove who is more Catholic, it seems.

What's your take on that? Do the Dems try to appeal to moderate religions, or point out that religion quite possibly is the problem?

Posted by: tobias c. van Veen on November 11, 2004 12:05 PM

I don't think the issue really stops just at religion, rather its an issue that has traditionally been dealt with via religion, but over the past century or so has somewhat bifurcated. There is now a large set of people who place their faith not in organized religion but in constructs of science and the enlightenment. And the real problem arises in that ironically it is the religious right that now understands that their world view is in large part mediated by faith, while the obstinately reasonable refuse to accept the extent that world can be shaped by quirky passages of the human mind.

So here we have a left out to destroy/understand the world, while the right is out to construct a world more to their liking. Is it any wonder a substantial number of voters choose the later?

Its important to realize the mechanisms of science and enlightenment empiricism are for a large part violent and destructive. A constant challenging and testing that chips away at everything it can until only that resembling the concrete remains. A highly effective method, proven over the centuries, but still one riddled with its own flaws. On one side you have those that take the discoveries as law, and vest them with a deep, but often unacknowledged, faith akin to the religious. And on another side you have an unstable process capable of far more destruction then construction. This is in many ways my problem with certain uses of deconstruction and critical theory, they weight far to heavily on the negative side, and fail to contribute towards the construction of a better reality. This is not a dismissal of these techniques and beliefs, they are important, powerful and useful. But when used with a broad, blunt indiscriminance they become a shear negative force, and strangely enough many humans it seems prefer a more balanced or positively weighed worldview.

As it all adds up, the American right is now in the business of selling a way of thinking that is far more palatable to many Americans. The left on the other hand has no clue they are selling anything, but in fact are selling something that lies closer to the concrete, but also far deeper into the disturbing. And what many in the cities and outside America fail to realize is that the suburbs and rural are presently so far from the concrete reality that it holds little gravity. Ripe space for a Rovean conquest..

Posted by: Abe on November 11, 2004 01:36 PM

mike, unfortunately I'd have to classify your response as being a clear symptom of the problem I'm out to transform. You are placing excessive faith in the immutability of "facts" and "science". What Rove and company realize is that by using FoxNews and its ilk to transform the "news" they are capable of also transforming the concrete. The left just doesn't get how moldable reality truly is. This brings us right back to the original quote. The right is out there creating reality and the left perpetually lags behind, unable to realize that they too have the ability to create a reality more to their taste. Instead by relying upon the negative attracted tools of scientific method they wind up creating a reality that is not to their taste at all, while simultaneously lagging behind the right.

Posted by: Abe on November 11, 2004 02:26 PM

also its important to note that the left was not always beholden to the "reality-based" position its stuck itself into. If you can get your hands on the latest issue of Arthur ( http://www.arthurmag.com/store/index.php?ID=19 ) I highly recommend it. The cover story goes deeply into one example of a radically different approach the left used quite effectively in the 50-70's to essentially shatter the cultural paradigm of the time. And I don't think its a coincidence that Rove, Cheney and company are children of the 60's, albeit coming from a more conservative side of things.

Posted by: Abe on November 11, 2004 02:33 PM

Quote:
/So here we have a left out to destroy/understand the world, while the right is out to construct a world more to their liking. Is it any wonder a substantial number of voters choose the later?/

Some interesting points in here, but I am not understanding the above. This statement begs the question, "The right, in their quest construct a world to their liking, is not destroying the world as well?"

i think the mechanisms of faith of religion are equally destructive if not more so. Crusades, Inquisitions, Holocausts, and Genocides. Given, the religious destroyers are always using instruments of science to do their killing, it seems to be your distinction isn't grey enough.

Posted by: Peter Markatos on November 15, 2004 12:43 PM

Not really making any real historical claims here Peter. Nor I believe, did I say anything about the right not being destructive in their own right, they certainly are.

Posted by: Abe on November 15, 2004 09:25 PM

The person that wrote and operates "Fuckthesouth" appears to be Nick Jehlen according to Rick Bradley. Curiously, the info about Nick is no longer on Rick's site but it can't escape the long arm of Google's cache.
Nick used a pseudonym on his whois.com registration.

Registrar: DOTSTER
Domain Name: FUCKTHESOUTH.COM
Created on: 04-NOV-04
Expires on: 04-NOV-05
Last Updated on: 10-NOV-04

Administrative, Technical Contact:
Swift, Jonathan admin@fuckthesouth.com
1 Main St
Madison, WI 53703
US
608-257-4131 (Now disconnected, I wonder why...?)

Ironically, Nick lives in Wisconsin which Kerry won by the slimmest of margins at just 11,813 votes (1,488,935 to 1,477,122).

It also appears that many of Nick's fellow state citizens don't share his ideology in Dane County where he rents an apartment in the Madison Technical College District. He undoubtedly voted for Kerry who won handily by 181,032 to 90,356 which may have led to his misguided and "misunderestimation" of the nation's shift to conservatism.

Worthy of note is that in 1848, Wisconsin became the 30th state to be accepted into the Union, well after the majority of southern states entrance.

Posted by: Walt on November 17, 2004 07:55 PM