The Lowliest Duties

In his sonnet, “London, 1802,” William Worsdworth praises John Milton in the following terms:

“So dids’t thou travel on life’s common way,

In cheerful godliness, and yet thy heart

The lowliest duties on herself did lay.”

In the leftist/liberal circles in which I mostly travel, Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed is much loved. The novel depicts a radically egalitarian society whose social arrangements are a response to sever environmental conditions. Scarcity of the means to sustain life concentrates society’s mind wonderfully—and everyone chips in to insure survival, understanding that taking too much for oneself threatens not just the lives of specific others but the fate of the whole society. The communitarian solidarity of this society (not without its problems of enforced conformity) are contrasted to a bloated, consumerist society that deploys its plenty to disagreeable ends.

My university has just announced, as part of its re-opening plan for the fall, that teachers and students will be responsible for cleaning each classroom after its use, in order to sanitize it for the next group that will enter. You can imagine (I am sure) the howls of outrage that have greeted this suggestion. Howls that, to some extent, reveal how inegalitarian most contemporary sensibilities are, even among those with a sentimental attachment to egalitarianism.

Let me be very clear. Colleges across the US have been stampeded into announcing that they will open for the return of students in the fall. Apparently, in order to secure student commitments, they feel they need to tell everyone what they will do for a fall semester—even though, in reality, they do not know in our still fluid circumstances. Many colleges, like my own, in fact plan a fairly early August opening in order to finish up the fall semester by Thanksgiving. Once having made that commitment, the colleges are then required to create some kind of plan for how they are actually going to do this safely.

This is insane. First, we currently do not have a good read on what the situation will be like two months from now. The announcement of re-openings are wildly premature. Second, bringing students from across the nation and from around the world back on campus—and having them once again live and socialize together—is a formula for disaster even if you can make (the very limited) time they spend in class safe. Add the notion that classes will be “hybrid,” with some students accessing them virtually and others in person, and the full impracticality of the proposed schemes becomes fully apparent.

It would, at the very least, be honest for colleges to admit they are flying blind and that any and all plans are contingent on the changing facts on the ground. But, apparently, honesty is no longer possible in the world. Pretense is everything. As if anyone is fooled.

All that said: I am still interested in the outrage generated by the suggestion that the “lowliest duties” be shared. Under what conditions, I want to ask, could we achieve communal solidarity instead of a fierce holding on to the privileges of one’s status and an equally fierce sauve qui peut attitude? Global warming is the most obvious case in point. But this pandemic could be another such case—except that the emphasis on “social distancing” pushes in exactly the opposite direction. It isn’t about rolling up your sleeves and joining a communal effort to avert the danger, but about running away from everybody else, stockpiling necessities, and protecting yourself from the general contagion.

At my university, the failure to get “buy in” for a communal effort stems, in part, from the heightened attention to status built into university careers (at least at “research” universities.) It is why such faculty are allergic to unions and fervently support differential pay, with the more productive “star” faculty commanding significantly higher salaries (and often also getting various special perks, including lighter teaching loads). The university (again, despite the announced allegiances of many of its faculty) is neither democratic nor egalitarian.

It seems to me there are only three ways to produce communal solidarity. The first is through a democratic process by which all are consulted and all agree to take on those lowly duties. As has often been noted, that process is time consuming (too many meetings) and often frustrating. Reaching consensus is very, very hard. Getting a majority vote is easier, but then you have to have some way to bring those who lost the vote along. Furthermore, the maintenance of democratically produced solidarity proves very difficult. Communities fall apart.

The second method is compulsion: the group effort is generated in a hierarchical structure with sanctions for those who don’t pitch in. The go to model here is often the building of the pyramids. With enough violence, people can be made to contribute to the communal project. Economic necessity is somewhat nicer than slavery, but it is still compulsion that is doing much of the work in getting the factory hands to do their bit.

Finally, there is the Ruskinian dream (where the building of medieval cathedrals is contrasted to the building of the pyramids) of a collective enterprise that is hierarchical through and through, but in which the authority of the leaders is respected by the commoners because they are convinced of the overall project, of the commitment of the leaders to that project, and feel enabled, even liberated, by their own participation in the project. (The key texts are “The Nature of Gothic” and Unto this Last.)

It is easy to call Ruskin utterly deluded. But at least let’s try to take seriously some of the issues his position highlights. (To be concrete for a moment, all trust in or respect for that authority of the leaders on my campus has been seriously eroded over the past ten years by a series of actions by those in charge. That’s why my campus in particular is in an especially tough spot when trying to get faculty and staff “buy-in” to the reopening plans.)

But back to Ruskin. 1.) Is there something like “authority” which gains allegiance and cooperation, even obedience, apart from threats of direct violence or economic deprivation? Do we really want to say that the notion of this kind of authority is a complete illusion, that all cooperation and obedience stems, in the last instance, from compulsion?

2.) Do we want to deny that participation in a communal effort, where concern for self disappears in the pleasure of contributing to the joint enterprise, is viewed (and experienced) by many as just about the greatest satisfaction available? Self-forgetfulness can be bliss, can seem the most intense, most meaningful, most fulfilling experience of one’s life. The urge to actually find the opportunity for such experiences can be a strong motive, aside from any kind of compulsion, for joining a team, a community, a project. In short, immersion of the self in the communal is liberating in many (hardly all) instances.

3.) Do we want to deny that we admire the competence, integrity, virtuosity, and achievements of others—taking them as models for our aspirations for ourselves? We apprentice ourselves to those we admire in this way, submitting to their authority precisely in order to learn how to become a person like them. Yes, and this is where Ruskin seems most blind, this relationship opens the way to all kinds of abuses—but, still, must an egalitarian insist all such relationships are poisonous and unproductive?

4.) Do we want to say work is always an evil, always something we would shun if possible? Work can be a means of fulfillment—and much work requires collective effort. How to think about the terms—and structures—within which work takes place? To what extent are hierarchies, authority, and coordinating direction required? In addition, I would argue that we need to think about the enabling effects of constraint. The sonnet form imposes various constraints on the poet; but those constraints are productive, even liberating. They are not (or, at least, not in all instances) oppressive. Constraints experienced as enabling are akin to authority accepted because it allows various desirable things to happen.

Ruskin, in other words, can seem a retrograde apologist for the established order. But, if taken at least a bit seriously, he pushes us to think past individualism, past an assumption that any collective enterprise is a threat to freedom—and that a person is a dupe who submits himself to authorities beyond the self. That’s the real rub, it seems to me. Even the liberal/left, when its own positions are challenged, retreats (in too many cases) to the neo-liberal sensibility that equality is a threat to freedom because equality pushes us toward a conformity imposed from outside the self. Getting with the program, cheerfully laying on ourselves the lowliest duties in union with others who do the same, is not experienced as a self-generated choice, but as acceding to an external charge.

We can’t (I believe) make political progress until that sensibility is revised. We need to find a way to endorse, even embrace, cooperation–and it seems to me that cooperation is only sustainable where all are seen (even if there is some division of labor, of responsibility) as equally foregoing individual need/rewards for the sake of the common goal. Everyone has to pitch in, and those with the most should give the most. (The justification for progressive tax rates among other ways of taking into account unequal capacities to contribute.)

So this post returns us to the question of sensibility. I am talking, partially at least, about esprit de corps. The mystery (to me) of the military is how it utilizes harsh compulsion (in boot camp) to forge (in many cases) a deep commitment to the “unit,” to the communal. Football coaches obviously strive to emulate the military’s methods. How do you create this ethos, this acceptance of the group’s priority over the self, this willingness to take upon oneself the “lowliest duties”—where that willingness is not a loss of caste, but in fact a source of pride?

The military seems particularly apt for thinking about all this because it is, in my view, both admirable and terrifying. Its inculcation of blind obedience, its strict hierarchies, are the antithesis of the kind of egalitarian social relations I favor. In some ways it wants to prevent any soldier thinking for himself (in every sense of that phrase).

But—at the same time—it can encourage creative thinking about what steps will best serve the good of the whole, and it inspires a kind of egalitarianism found just about nowhere else in our society. No wonder, then, that Fredric Jameson in his An American Utopia looks to the creation of a “universal army,” the conscription of all, as the way to create a communitarian sensibility. Where else, he asks, are the classes so radically mixed as in the army? And where else are all the members of a group subjected to the same treatment?

The paradox, of course, is that this egalitarianism is embedded within a highly hierarchal institution. But that’s why Ruskin seems apposite. We need to think the ways in which hierarchy, based in authority, can foster equality (in the commitment of all to a common project) and even liberation (in that the self finds fulfillment through the enabling provided by constraint, through its submission to the common.)

I ask myself: “have I ever been caught up in a larger project in which I ‘lost’ my self?” I have to say the answer is No. But surely I am not alone in devoutly wishing I could have that experience. I often say that in retirement I want to find an organization that is doing real good in the world—and offer them my services. I want to be part of a group that is working together and making something I value happen through that collective effort. That heady feeling is what had made war so exhilarating for so many. Certainly, my parents experienced (in their early twenties) World War II that way—and remained nostalgic for those years the rest of their lives.

William James famously told us we need to find a “moral equivalent of war.” What he meant is we need to find a positive, world-enhancing (rather than world-destroying) project that would inspire the same kind of enthusiasm and dedication that war calls forth. The failure of global warming and now the pandemic to inspire cooperation makes The Dispossessed look mistaken in its plausible (at least to me) supposition that a crisis will rally a society to a cooperative effort to solve it. Our sad experience these days suggests the opposite: a crisis only leads to people doubling down on their efforts to save themselves, letting the devil take the hindmost. And if the crisis is one that no one can, in fact, evade, so much the worse for humanity because the conviction that one can personally outrun the danger will triumph over any recognition that we are all in this together. Only a human enemy bearing down on us, weapons in hand, seems to inspire that more collective response.

A pessimistic ending–and certainly Ruskin’s own fate hardly offers much hope. But I do think the pathway to hope lies along the lines he sketches out. Cooperation needs both some kind of respected authority and a fervent commitment to a common cause. The fulfillment, even pleasure, comes with a sense of contributing to the achievement of that cause, irrespective of more individual rewards (rewards understood as money, honor, acclaim, or anything else that marks the self as “more equal” than the others who are also pitching in).

It’s Not the Money

Contrary to what the commentators on ESPN and Sports Illustrated are saying, the dispute between the players and the owners that is preventing baseball from coming to an agreement on how to have a 2020 season, is not about the money. Everybody says it’s about money. It’s about power. America’s oligarchs hate employees having the slightest modicum of leverage. The owners want to “break” the players, want to make them eat shit–and they will happily forego the season (and “damage the game” as all the commentators keep piously saying) to prove they hold the whip.

Not only are the sums they are haggling over risible in relation to the owners’ wealth (none of the stories even divides the gross sum by thirty to show what each individual owner’s losses would be), but (as a Five Thirty Eight article has shown in detail) the owners are also with 99% certainty lying about the financial hit they would take. [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mlb-owners-say-they-could-lose-4-billion-even-if-games-are-played-does-that-math-add-up/] That, of course, is why the owners refuse to open their books to the players.

Another Five Thirty Eight article shows that the average player has a career of less than four years (thus failing to meet the five year minimum for a pension and other lifetime benefits) and makes less than two million dollars total. [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-money-do-mlb-players-really-make/] And that is after losing money during their years of minor league play, where they do not receive a living wage.

This all, of course, is par for the course in the world of “private equity”: no accountability accompanied by every imaginable dodge to evade taxes, strip value, and move money from the bottom up to the top.

Equity is the operative term here. The owners’ complaints about lost revenue are mostly a red herring. Owning a baseball team is more like owning a house than owning a business. The big return on investment is not from revenue, but from the growth in the value of the franchise over time. You cash in big time when you sell the team, not during the years that you own it. Plus you get the status of belonging to one of the most exclusive clubs in the world. Only thirty members.

The fury against workers on the part of employers (how wonderful that in baseball they are called “owners”) is part of the ugliness of our time, when the worst impulses of the powerful are openly, even proudly, on display–and the relentlessness of their sadism (a greediness that gains its edge, its frisson, by being augmented by cruelty) dismays, appalls, and baffles. Such an expenditure of energy on nastiness. Don’t the uber-rich have better ways to spend their time and money? What happened to pleasure?

The players’ resolute (thus far) stand really is the proletariat striking back. And similar to the ways that George Floyd’s death and the subsequent protests have changed perceptions of racism and the police, the needle of public opinion has moved somewhat (although not quite enough). Unlike what happened in previous labor disputes in baseball, this time the players are not getting all the blame from the public. Opinion is more divided, although nowhere close to all in the players’ favor. The success of neoliberal ideology is manifest every time the public echoes the hatred of unions–a hatred that goes hand-in-glove with the concerted efforts by business (aided by the courts, Congress, and the regulatory state) over the past eighty years to destroy unions.

Milton Friedman claimed capitalism could not be discriminatory because that interfered with economic efficiency. Surely, some competitor would arise who didn’t have those sexist, racist, and/or religious biases and would, because more profitable, drive the discriminators from the field. Laughable in its naiveté and in the ability of theory to blind you to what is right there in front of your eyes.

The overlords hate it when people get “uppity”—whether the offenders are workers or people of color or “the weaker sex.” Keeping—or putting—people back in their place is priceless, a motive worth every penny lost for it. The economic history of the American South shows that Friedman, in a certain way, was right. Discrimination does lead to poorer economic outcomes. But the profit motive isn’t strong enough to overcome the will to discrimination. The baseball owners will bite off their nose to spite their face. They will destroy baseball rather than enter into a partnership with their players, a partnership that would introduce a modicum of equality into the relationship between capital and labor.

Leftist Sensibility

As I already mentioned, this one is harder for me because it is my own sensibility. Thus, I am biased. The right wing sensibility, in my view, is always going to end up pathologized. While the left-wing sensibility description will veer toward the panegyric and the self-congratulatory. That warning stated, let’s plunge ahead.

I have always been attracted by Richard Rorty’s claim that liberalism, when it comes down to it, is simply “bleeding-heart liberalism.” The core of the leftist sensibility is compassion. I want to approach this historically. “Sympathy” was the core of morality for Adam Smith and David Hume. It was the basis from which they could explain why any human would care about the plight of any other human. They, of course, thought sympathy was “natural”—and thus the place to begin when trying to construct a morality.

Cruelty (in all its forms from jeering and insulting to torture) tells us sympathy has its limits. A delight in the suffering of others seems just as natural to humans. There is something to be said, I think, for the Steven Pinker (stated positively) and Hannah Arendt’s (stated negatively) arguments that “compassion” is actually a fairly new phenomenon—dating from the Enlightenment century, the 18^th. For Arendt, the entrance of compassion ruins politics. It leads to the collapse of politics into economics, into placing politics at the service of alleviating poverty. (The argument is central to her book On Revolution, with its comparison of the American and French revolutions.)

It does seems to me that Arendt is on to something (even as her contempt for compassion is the hardest thing in her whole corpus to swallow). Were their wars (or violence) prior to the American and French revolutions fought for the ideal of equality? Maybe the Dutch war for independence from Spain? And there were peasant revolts. But mostly there were wars of conquest, not wars for the freedom to forge one’s own life. The “left” after all comes into existence as a political category with the French Revolution. And so does the modern right—which must find new ways (not based on the claim that God just made it that way) to justify inequalities of wealth, political participation/power, and status. This battle between left and right is often fought on the grounds of “rights”—to whom should various rights be extended, and what things should be covered by rights. (Is there a “right” to health care, a “right” to a job, a “right” to old age pensions?)

It seems weird, of course, in light of Christianity and Buddhism to say compassion is an 18^th century novelty. But I think we need to see the novelty as compassion plus rationalism/secularism. Prior to the Enlightenment, poverty was the result of “fortune.” It was not something that resulted from human actions or arrangements—and thus not something that could be alleviated by human action or that was a moral outrage (when and if humans refused to do anything to try to alleviate it.) Charity to the poor was encouraged, but that didn’t come with the idea that poverty could be eliminated and that the failure to try to eliminate was a moral failure.

The leftist sensibility, then, is a mixture of compassion with the belief that different social arrangements than the status quo (effected by either reform or revolution) would be preferable and are feasible. As Steven Lukes has put it, the left is committed to a project of “remediation.” It points to unjustified poverty and unjustified inequalities, claiming that these sufferings are not necessary (they could be otherwise), and that there are reasonable plans for remediation.

The left’s notion of justice, therefore, is built upon the notion of equality—of the idea that everyone is entitled to an equal chance for a flourishing, satisfying life. No person should have a life that only serves to provide others (and not him- or herself) with the means for flourishing. In short, Kant’s kingdom of ends where no person is ever only a “means.”

I think that this commitment to equality and to the understanding of justice that follows from it entails universalism to the extent that all humans must be accorded the same right to the necessities for a good life. From that conviction comes the idea of “effective freedom” (i.e. that freedom is only “real” when a person has the means to act on freely chosen alternatives). It seems to me that contemporary critiques of universalism are always complaints that the various versions of universalism on offer are not universal enough. And I think that Sen and Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach” offers a good way to reconcile respect for and attention to differences while holding on to the broad commitment to a universalism that can be all-inclusive. But I am not going to get into the weeds of that argument here today.

The formula of compassion plus reason runs into serious trouble when Romanticism comes onto the scene. The Romantics keep the compassion, but are suspicious of reason. Nationalism is the Romantic passion par excellence on the political front. And nationalism limits compassion to one’s compatriots even as it eschews a rationalist approach to social policies. American health care: the best in the world, says the patriot, wonderfully immune to all the facts that clearly indicate otherwise. Romanticism, in short, is not necessarily leftist or rightist. It is wildly overstating the case to say that Romanticism leads directly to Hitler, just as it is a wild exaggeration to say that rationalism leads directly to Stalin.

Still, it does seem we have leftists (like Blake and Shelley) of the romantic stripe and leftists (Bentham and Marx) of the rationalist stripe, and that the romantics are more likely than the rationalists to think art is crucial to the leftist cause. It is also worth saying that, generally speaking, the rightist sensibility comes across as aggressively masculine while the leftist position (with its compassion and desire to care for the well-being of all) is feminized. Within that framework, the rationalist leftist position can look like a compensation against the feminization of a leftist sensibility. Poetry is for sissies–so either men worried about their masculinity must eschew it or write like Ted Hughes as over-compensation.

The leftist sensibility I would recommend features compassion connected (tempered) by rationalism. It is that mixture that has led contemporary leftists to be extremely wary of violence in all its forms, opting instead for various modes of non-violent action to effect political change. The argument is, on the compassion side, that violence harms people, and on the rational side, that violence only unleashes more violence and thus cannot effect the kinds of changes that it aims for. Yet (as I have agonized over on this blog) eschewing violence seems to place leftist reformers in a very weak place in relation to those in power who are determined to hold onto that power and are not shy of using violence to maintain that hold.

Because the left has so often been ineffective (especially over the past forty years—since 1980—of the right’s resurgence), the right accuses it of hypocrisy. The left parades its bleeding heart in public (especially since the chattering classes are full of leftists) while leading very comfortable lives under current arrangements. The left never really puts its money where its mouth is. I know of a professor whose grad students called her a Neiman Marxist.

Meanwhile, the left itself splits between the so-called “liberals” who work for reform within the “system” (i.e. accept democratic electoral politics and some version of the market) and the “radicals” who express contempt of the ineffectual liberals at every turn (but remain muddle headed about what means of change they actually endorse—since very few of them openly call for violence. Terry Eagleton may be the exception in his attitude toward violence, but I can’t tell for sure because his books on tragedy and “radical sacrifice” become obscure—in contrast to his usual bracingly direct style—precisely at the point where the question of political violence arises.) For the most part, the argument between the “left” and “liberals” seems to be an argument about rhetorical style, with the left scorning liberals for their mamby-pandy refusal to denounce capitalism and Western perfidy, and the liberals scorning the left for their gestural politics of absolute purity that has little relation to facts on the ground or any possible political constituency.

More germane to this ongoing thread in the blog is the connection of the leftist sensibility to an aesthetic sensibility. Where am I headed with this?

The aesthetic sensibility as currently exhibited seems to me to share Romanticism’s suspicion of reason. (Maybe that’s why North has to fixate on “method” and “rigor.” He’s trying to get rationalism back into the aesthetic, from which is has mostly been banned.) So the aesthetic sensibility shares the compassion for the excluded and down-trodden. But it is less attuned to reformist projects or prospects. I will want to say more about how the aesthetic expresses its compassion, its solidarity with those unjustly treated.
I don’t think there is any direct path from the aesthetic to the leftist sensibility—or that there is any necessary connection between them. To the extent that those who go in for aesthetics in the current moment also tend to be leftists of some variety, I think that’s because of a political education, not an aesthetic one. In short, it has been hard to get an aesthetic education since 1970 without getting a political one alongside it. The relation between the two is neither necessary nor direct (as I have said), but their adjacency has been almost universal. I believe it is sloppy thinking to believe there is a deeper connection between the two.
The million dollar question remains: how do you instill a sensibility? What kind of education does the trick? If sensibilities really are the fundamental drivers of moral/political commitments and of actions undertaken, then how are they formed? What are the crucial sites of intervention? Is there a formula?

Right-Wing Sensibility

“You cannot greet the world in the morning with anything less than ferocity, or be evening you will be destroyed.” Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light, p. 543.

What I want to do here is characterize right-wing sensibility. I will, in a subsequent post, try to characterize left-wing sensibility, which I find much harder to do.

I think Dick Cheney, more than Donald Trump, is a good exemplar here. Recall his one-percent doctrine. “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Percent_Doctrine

For the right-winger, it’s a dangerous world out there, full of enemies. If you let your guard down, you are toast. Pre-emptive violence (another doctrine of the Bush years) is best, but hitting back with ferocity is second best. The “bad guys” are everywhere and eternal vigilance is required to keep them in check. Conservatives are always the “party of order” because the challenges to order are everywhere.

The difference between us—the guardians of order—and them, the sowers of chaos—is, inevitably moralized. They aren’t called the “bad guys” for nothing. The maintenance of order becomes the maintenance of moral order. And that requires punishment. Justice for conservatives is “people getting what they deserve.” It has nothing to do with equality, since some people are better, more worthy, than others. Hayek wrote that the whole notion of equality is a travesty of justice. How could equal treatment be just, he wrote? The whole point of justice is to discriminate between the guilty and the not-guilty. A justice system that treated everyone the same would not be just.

Because it is a dangerous world, the conservative wants a strong military, a strong national security apparatus, and a strong leader. The niceties of democracy, the rule of law, and tolerance are distractions, even hindrances, when it comes to securing the nation against enemies external and internal. The moral division between good and bad translates fairly directly into strong-in-group bias. The members of my group—the nation—are good; the outsiders are, at best, never to be trusted, and, at worst, dangerous foes incessantly plotting against us.

Obviously, this mind-set encourages paranoia, the continual identification of new groups that are a threat to my group. Right-wing movements of the past two hundred years have always traded on identifying an “internal” enemy as well as an external one.

The moral component of conservatism rests on a strong sense of “desert” (less politely called “entitlement.”) My standing in the world, the goods I possess, are deserved—and for that reason it is fully just to deny those goods to the undeserving. The right-wing fury about the “nanny state” is about taking what I have earned and giving it to those too lazy or otherwise too morally deficient to have earned something for themselves. A very basic sense of justice is the source of the indignation against the welfare functions of the modern liberal state. (I believe that the fact that conservatives and liberals mean absolutely distinct things by “justice” goes a long way to defining the political divide between the two camps.)

There is, undoubtedly, a tension between the individualism that celebrates moral responsibility and what one has earned for oneself and the willingness to submerge the self in the larger group of the morally just. (The group of the saved, of the elect.) The aggression of a conservatism that is always on the lookout for enemies is complemented (perhaps even washed clean) by a concomitant willingness to sacrifice the self for the group in the event of violence.

Right-wing thought, because so focused on good guys versus bad guys, tends to the Manichean, toward moral absolutism, and, thus, to the conclusion that there is no compromising with the devil. Negotiation is a sign of weakness—and every weakness with be exploited. Strength is the only source of security in this dangerous world. The evil are just evil; their badness is not to be explained away, and the idea that they can be rehabilitated is sentimental liberal claptrap. For this reason (its inability to detect middle grounds), conservative thought is particularly attracted to slippery slope arguments. Medicare is Socialism and we are on the road to serfdom. Give them an inch and they will take a mile. Hysteria about drastic consequences to even the mildest of reforms goes with the territory.

In certain strains of right-wing sensibility, there can be a strong sense of one’s own potential depravity, an Augustinian sense of all humans as weak, sinful creatures. In that case, the appeal of a strong leader and an authoritarian social order extends to the need for external constraints to rein in one’s own tendency to sin. We are in superego territory here, where the masochistic desire to submit to a strong hand flips quickly and almost seamlessly into the sadistic need to punish depraved others. [This dynamic is very complex in US conservatism; it seems to play no role at all in the many shameless right-wing moralists. But it runs through various sites of evangelical fervor, where drinking, domestic violence, drug abuse, and covert hetero- and homo-sexual behavior co-exists with a deep attachment to “saving grace.”]

I do think attitudes toward the necessity of punishment—and to the severity of the forms it should take—are central here. Conservatives (Kipling is a great instance, but think of most policemen and many soldiers) hate liberals because liberals (in the conservative view) leave the dirty work of punishment and the enforcement of order to “the thin blue line.” The liberals benefit from the police and from prisons, yet not only refrain from doing the dirty work themselves, but also disdain those who do that work.

Here we tap into another feature of the right-wing sensibility: a sense of grievance. Their own rectitude, their doing the essential work society requires, is never appreciated, while the spongers, the eggheads, the chattering classes, not the mention the Jews, the blacks, and the immigrants gather in all the spoils. Society rewards the wrong people—a proof of society’s corruption and of the need for a strong leader to pull it back onto the right path.

In short, something is wrong somewhere—and that wrongness is either the product of evil people or of a fundamental, unchangeable fact, of a dangerous world replete with people out to get you. In either case, aggression is the best response. As my conservative students tell me, the Machiavelli of The Prince basically has it right.

Conservatives are capable of exemplary generosity to those in their in-group. That generosity, you might say, matches their ferocity to those deemed outside the pale.

Given the priority conservatives place on security, it was one of the great intellectual coups of history when the neo-liberals (Hayek and Friedman in particular) captured the word “freedom” to describe what capitalism delivered—and, on that basis, make a defense of unregulated capitalism the hallmark of late-twentieth-century conservatism (Thatcher and Reagan). Traditional conservatives (Burke and Carlyle) saw capitalism as destroying communal solidarity by pitting each individual against the rest in endless competition. They associated capitalism with the destruction of social order.

Hayek and Friedman, in contrast, correctly recognize that capitalism (because of the coercive force of economic necessity for most people) poses no danger to order. Assured that order is not threatened, they can undertake their propaganda campaign for “free” markets by insisting that government is the source of coercion (as well as the source of inefficiency) while the market will set us free. Ignore the fact of economic necessity—or of the disastrous results of profitable enterprises always shifting the costs of “externalities” elsewhere—and their argument makes some sense. And it fits perfectly (Hayek’s work is the perfect model here) with right-wing Manicheanism. The market all good; any efforts to regulate the market (either by states or by unions) all bad.

Hayek and Friedman also have to ignore all the evidence that capitalists hate risk. Security remains the watch-word. Capitalists always try to minimize competition, to shift costs and risks elsewhere, to never face personal bankruptcy. That’s why capitalism tends toward monopoly. Competition (just like economic downturns) does not spur risk-taking; it spurs ever more ingenious ways to mitigate risk. Innovation occurs within secure environments—like research tanks and universities.

Conservatives hate liberals—and the most common charge is that liberals are hypocrites. Somewhere in the conservative psyche (maybe I am giving them too much credit) there are guilt feelings about their aggressive, uncharitable relation to their fellow human beings. I would think there is a similar guilt about the costs of aggressive behavior (both military and economic) on the world and its inhabitants. Such massive destruction (of cities, of the environment, of the people trampled by military and economic adventurism) is hard to justify—and do-gooder liberals keep pointing out that unpleasant fact. For a conservative like my father, that finger-pointing spurred rage. In his milder moments, he would brand war a sad necessity, taking a tragic view of what this world inflicted on us, these constantly fighting human animals. But in less mild moods, the rage generated fantasies of violence against those liberals, the desire to place them in the front lines of battle, to have them subjected to violence.

Because determined to defend their own rectitude (no matter the deep, hidden doubts or guilt feelings that make liberal accusations sting), conservatives respond with similar rage to accusations of racism. They will fall back on “desert”—which is why a certain kind of Darwinian and/or free market fundamentalism is so appealing to the right wing. There has to be a mechanism (shades of Calvinism) to separate out the “elect” (the deserving) from the “damned” (the undeserving). And it is much better if that mechanism can be demonstrated as “natural,” as a process uncontrolled by human hands and, thus, unbiased in any way.

Hayek himself avoided the crude claim that the market’s creation of winners and losers was just. Desert, he was willing to concede, played only a small role in market success. But Hayek was adamant that the processes of the market were beyond human control—and that all efforts to control them would lead to worse results than laissez-faire. The point is that the conservative is going to strive to avoid taking any responsibility for the ills the liberal harps on (poverty, racism, environmental degradation, workplace dangers etc.)

Three final thoughts. One, I don’t know what to do with people like the Koch brothers. Their animus against workers, environmentalists, and any kind of regulation is so over the top, so relentless, and so directly hostile to the well-being of millions of people even as their own wealth is beyond what could be spent in a thousand life-time, that I cannot fathom their motives or sensibility. What is at stake for them? They have been given a sweet, sweet deal by this world—and yet are filled with rage against it and a desire to do hurt. What’s their beef? It’s baffling. As Gary Wills put it many years ago (reporting on either the 1992 or 1996 Republican convention in the New York Review of Books), what explains all these aggrieved millionaires? It is one thing for politicians (eager for power) to exploit the sense of grievance among those the economy has not served well, providing those souls with enemies to focus on. But why would a millionaire fall for that poison? And I end up thinking (simplistically, but with no place else to go) that even as there are souls for whom no amount of power will ever suffice, there are souls for whom no amount of money will ever suffice. Just greed simpliciter.

The second thought is spurred by Walter Benjamin’s insight that the logical end of fascism is war. At the extreme right, the only plausible response to the identified enemies is extermination, and the only way to offer “the masses” participation in power (the opportunity to exercise that strength, that “ferocity,” that insures survival into the evening—to recall my opening quote) is to put a gun in their hands and march them off the battle. Trump’s America has not reached this point; the undercurrent of violence in his politics is unorganized at the moment, only inspiring lone shooters, not para-military or official violence. With the courts increasingly in right-wing hands, most of the contemporary conservative movement (especially its “respectable” political and business wings) is willing to effect its coup through the law. And liberals have been hand-tied by this strategy, with its vote suppression, roll back of regulations, business friendly court decisions etc. The left, I believe, will eventually have to resort to defying court decisions–the way much of the South defied the Brown decision.

Third: I have deliberately not talked of Trump in this post. I don’t think him easily exemplary of the right-wing sensibility. His craving for attention, his obvious insecurities, his participation in the pursuit and circuits of “celebrity” make him a rather different animal. There are overlaps of course, but better not to be confused by thinking there is a perfect match.