The role of artists and intellectuals in political resistance is a well documented and generally well respected modern and contemporary feature, but their role in actual governance has been littered with failure and ignorance.
Up until fairly recently, art and intellectuals were primary supported by (or actually part of, by way of birth) the governing class, which placed them in a different role vis a vis politics.
But at least since the Romantic period, certainly artists and also, to a great extent, I think, intellectuals have been put into a role as outsiders.
This is all about Ezra Pound and what to do with him. Because that question never goes away, does it?
I was reading this article about Pound’s relationship with Mussolini and the impression is that Pound was roundly duped by Il Duce.
Listen to this comment by Mussolini’s aide:
Pound as a stupid little man, tossed meaningless sops to keep him happy with being effectively ignored so he could be blithely trotted out as a meagre tool of propaganda when time permitted.
The great genius… reduced to so little.
I’ve read a lot of stories criticizing Romney’s campaign for ceding the airwaves to the Obama campaign this summer, sitting back while they blanketed swing states with advertising.
I’ve also read a lot of stories about how the Obama campaign has been hemorrhaging cash and spending more than he raises.
Virtually every critique fails to mention a key point of federal campaign finance law that has been driving this: there are two pots of money, primary and general election money.
Someone who donates the maximum to candidate gives $5,000. But that money is divided up into two parts, half for the primary and half for the general election. You see, the maximum is actually just $2,500, but the primary and general are considered two different elections.
Much of those great flipping wads of cash the Romney pulled in last year and in the spring went to pay for his surprisingly expensive and drawn out primary season. When he finally killed off his opponents (at least, for all intents and purposes), he had to conserve what primary election cash he had left to keep his operation running and he couldn’t spend his general election cash until the he was officially nominated at the Republican National Convention.
Meanwhile, Obama found himself with a lot of cash that he had to spend prior to officially becoming the nominee at the Democratic National Convention. So he had to burn through it, which made it look like he was being profligate.
That Paul Ryan is buying $2 million worth of air time in his congressional district? Besides that he is also running for re-election to Congress and is worried about losing.
I assume he’s accepted the fact that he will not be vice-president. Nor, one day, president (I think that this current little debacle will incur brutal a round of pseudo-soul gazing that will end with anyone associated with Mitt’s campaign being excluded from higher office as a matter of course).
I assume that this is about whether he keeps his chairmanship (or position of ranking Republican, should Democrats win back the House) of the House Budget Committee and whether he can work his back into being a leading voice in the GOP.
And you can guarantee that, behind the scenes, he’s laying the groundwork for the future claim that his ‘bold, Republican ideas’ were overruled by Romney’s band of weak kneed RINOs and that this why they lost, or at least why they lost shamefully.
You probably heard about this: a PPP poll that found that 15 percent of Republicans in Ohio think Romney is “more responsible” for bin Laden’s death than Obama; that 47 percent of Republicans are “not sure” whether Obama or Romney deserves more of the credit; and that 6 percent of all Ohio respondents gave Romney credit where credit is not at all due and thirty-one percent of them weren’t sure whether the President or the candidate deserves more credit.
And if you’re on my side of the ideological divide, you were most likely horrified.
But speaking from a purely partisan perspective, this is nothing but good news for Democrats. It’s why contemporary Republican leaders and consultants are so desperate and why the contemporary Republican party (which is not what the Republican was and probably little like what it or its natural successor will be). The current version of the Republican party is slipping ever more quickly away from everyone else.
GOP pollsters and strategists look at those kinds of numbers and they see a party which will soon no longer look like anything that moderates, centrists, independents, or pretty much anyone else can relate to.
Everybody sees the world and (shades of Wittgenstein, for those paying attention) the facts that make up the case that is the world differently and we all put our own slant on it. But most people still tend to accept most facts as, well, facts. By publicly and vocally not accepting basic facts as facts (like a former governor of Massachusetts who had never served in the military having had nothing to with a federal, military action that occurred while said former governor was a private citizen with no formal relationship to any state, local, or federal government agency, including the military), it makes it much for anyone but the minority of core ideological followers to accept anything they say because when so much they say is so kooky, everything they say becomes suspect.
The contemporary, American conservative movement and the GOP are fundamentally post-modern and post-Christian. The contemporary left remains (and this might be a flaw) an essentially modern project – or perhaps it is better say that the contemporary left is an effort to complete (an) unfinished project of modernism.
The key for American conservatives is Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of ‘legitimation.’
Science, rational thought, and, yes, facts, are no longer sufficient. Legitimacy is no longer something determined by knowledge, but something malleable, changing, and able to brokered and manipulated for subjective purposes.
When George W. Bush the candidate was asked in a debate about global climate change, his response was: don’t scientists disagree about that?
Of course, the ‘legitimate’ answer in the modern(ist) sense is no, no the overwhelming majority of scientists working in the relevant fields do not.
Since the field in which the modern Republican politician operates is not the field of knowledge or facts, but legitimation. A few oil company paid scientists manage to produce something which sort of kind of suggests maybe not, then climate change can be de-legitimized. Which is the point: not to ascertain truth (which is a modernist goal) but rather to legitimize or de-legimitize aspects of the world in support of one’s goals.
Ultimately, Christianity and religious authority, becomes something for this post-modern gaming of legitimacy – with the tendency of many American conservatives to speak (preach) in religious terms is just another part of the legitimation game.
When Paul Ryan creates a budget (which also plays legitimation games with math, but not using it, but questioning the legitimacy of criticism of the lack math by asserting his own legitimacy as ‘taking entitlements seriously,’ even though pre-post-modern thought would have pretty quickly dismissed any budget that gets such things as addition and subtraction wrong as being fundamentally not serious) that the Catholic Church (of which he is a member) criticizes as being immoral, he attacks the legitimacy of their argument. He takes a minor theological idea known as subsidiarity and uses that to de-legimitize the criticisms of bishops, priests and nuns (which are based on a far more central and basic social argument within the Catholic Church – the preferntial option for the poor).
The Church, to put it mildly, is not a democracy. Untrained lay figures like Ryan should not have any ground to stand on here, at least not theologically. But by appealing to the post-modern idea of legitimation, Ryan makes an appeal for the religious and Catholic rightness of his budget through (pseudo) intellectual games that are post-Catholic and post-Christian. Because legitimacy ceases to be something relatively absolute, something determined by scientifically accepted facts or even by religion’s eternal truths. For the Catholic Ryan, even the truths of the church can be gamed through efforts to de-legitimize the unwelcome positions held by the Church or written out in the Bible.
the coffee philosopher 