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In fact, among the most dramatic changes in Washington has been the disappearance of the practical person, the individual -- whether pol, hack or advisor -- who more than compensated for deficiencies in formal learning with a superb understanding of life. It is these individuals who lent some sanity to Washington life when politicians went bad. They were either masters of the pragmatic or of the moral, but in either case served as the gyro compass of national politics.
In their place we find a town overflowing with decadent dandies who, to quote a 19th journalist, have been educated well beyond their intellects. They keep busy creating fictions about the nature of politics and the presidency that coincidentally serve their own ambitions, until they become incapable of returning to reality and helpless before the banal practicalities of such evils as high crimes and misdemeanors.
For many of the elite, the Clinton scandals have forced them to look at real politics for the first time. They have few tools for this. After all, they work with paradigms and perceptions -- not with life.
Above all they have been taught to rely excessively on deductive thinking, in which inferences are drawn from theories rather than from facts; and in which, too often, life's phenomena are misfiled according to musty and presumptuous principles rather than truly understood.
If you think I exaggerate, consider this: while in discussions about a title for my last book, The Great American Political Repair Manual, my editor called with a concern. She said that two of her colleagues had told her that repair sounded too much like work. Of course. I had forgotten that in many parts of Manhattan the idea of repair was alien. When something broke, you just called the super.
The problem with such a dependent culture is not new in America but it doesn't have a particularly happy history. For example, one cause of the failure of early Virginian colonization was that every cavalier brought along a valet who was meant to do all the work. Thus the colony had to feed two people for every one on the job.
While the feeding problem has been largely solved in modern America by turning the cavaliers' valets into restaurant waiters, the liabilities of entitled inutility remain, among them the desiccation of the mind.
The intelligentsia, like everything else, has become corporatized. This can be seen at its worst on campuses and in publishing houses. Journalism and academia have become so subordinated to the needs of their controlling conglomerates that the vital ground between starvation and surrender has become, economically at least, increasingly difficult to hold. The safest route is to cling to symbols while shucking substance, to serve in a House of Lords of the mind, robed and bewigged but naked of power and meaning.
This alteration in the relation of the intellectual to the culture was instinctively grasped by a DC elementary school student the other day as she defined the difference between art and graffiti as "Art is when you have permission to do it." These are days when you not only need permission for art, but also to think. And the place you go for permission is, more likely than not, a corporation.
The blacklisting of skepticism.. For much of my life I have hewed to H. L. Mencken's dictum that the liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by those "who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving that doubt, after all, was safe -- that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud."
For much of my life this strategy has worked. Even in the gathering gloom of the Reagan-Bush years. But with the arrival of the Clinton administration and its cultural as well as political authoritarianism, skepticism began being blacklisted. Not only was belief to be unopposed by doubt but the terms themselves were banned. In their place was only loyalty or disloyalty. Not unlike the situation a free thinker might have run into in late 17th century Marblehead or mid-20th century Moscow.
To retain doubt was to risk being declared, among other things, a conspiracy theorist. One didn't need either a conspiracy or a theory to earn the title. Just a reasonable interest in facts and what they might mean. Or, perhaps, reasonable questions about the reliability of those serving a president who would defend himself before Congress by lying under oath about his previous lies under oath.
In fact, conspiracies are most often redundant in such a context. Put enough Yale graduates in the same room and you can reasonably predict their consensus on many matters, particularly those of interest to the Council on Foreign Relations or the Washington Post. If you are educated well enough, you'll know what to do when the time comes. No conspiracy is necessary.
Under the rules of the Clinton years, truth belongs to the one with the most microphones clamped to his podium and the most bucks to buy them. In the end it has become a struggle for the control of fact and memory not unlike that described in 1984:
"Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.
In such a time those with wrong memories and wrong facts are considered mad, disparaged, and dropped from the Rolodex. To hold power happily, one must not be curious and one must not question fully accredited paradigms. To think is to fail. Again from 1984:
"From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated."
The decline of the struggling intellectual. America has frequently been blessed by the bitter dissatisfaction of those still barred from tasting the fruits of its ideals. It has been the pressure of the dispossessed, rather than the virtue of those in power, that has repeatedly saved this country's soul.
In this century, three such influences have been those of immigrants, blacks, and women. Yet in each case now, social and economic progress has inevitably produced a dilution of passion for justice and change.
Thus we find ourselves with a women's movement much louder in its defense of Bill Clinton than about the plight of its sisters at the bottom of the economic pile. We have conservative black economists decrying the moral debilitation of affirmative action but few rising to the defense of those suffering under the rampant incarceration of young black males. As Angela Davis recently told a group of black newspaper columnists, today some people don't even know what you mean when you speak of "the struggle."
We are also near the end of an succession of Jewish writers and thinkers, raised on the immigrant experience, who created much of the form of progressive 20th century America. Economic progress has calmed the sound of revolution and reform; in its stead we find the conservative Ben Stein speaking at a Jewish anti-abortion conference:
I'll tell you how I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Jewish position in America had changed dramatically. The wife of a very close friend of my father died a few weeks ago and they had the memorial service at the Chevy Chase Club. And there was a cantor with a yarmulke giving the service at the Chevy Chase Club. And I cannot describe to you how astonishing a turn of events this was.
Wow. If Emma Goldman could only see you now.
The point is not to begrudge anyone's social and economic progress. But if you listen carefully to black and feminist leaders today, if you press them as to why they remain so attached to Clinton, you will often hear something quite similar to Stein's view of achievement -- such as "look at all the appointments he's made" -- in fact a Reaganesque trickle-down view of cultural triumph.
Meanwhile, those truly at the bottom -- such as black and white men without a college education or new immigrant groups -- are rarely heard from or about except in reports on crime and poverty.
Outside of rap and rock, the economically disposable young male -- forming no small portion of the nearly three million Americans in prison -- remains a crisis rather than a validated culture. And when was the last time you read about Ethiopian and Salvadoran American life in the New Yorker?
The dirty secret of 20th century social movements is that they have been successful enough to create their own old boy and girl networks, powerful enough to enter the Chevy Chase Club, and indifferent enough to ignore those left behind.
Their elites have joined the Yankee and the Southern aristocrat and the rest of God's frozen people to form the largest, most prosperous, and most narcissistic intelligentsia in our history.
And as the best and brightest drive around town in their Range Rovers, who will speak for those who, in Bill Mauldin's phrase, remain fugitives from the law of averages?
We are building an oligarchy that gets its faces from Benetton but its economics from Dickens. Which is why a new President Clinton could claim his administration would "look like America" and still have the most millionaires ever in a White House cabinet. In a more recent example, a biracial coalition of successful Washingtonians went to the polls to vote for a black man alleged to represent highest ideals of the corporatist state -- it was claimed he was a "good manager." But no one in the major media noted that in the city's poorest and blackest ward, turnout for this "new era" dropped 51% from the previous mayoral election.
The rise of a post-modern adhocracy. Behind the disintegration of interest by the intelligentsia in justice and human decency has been the triumph of the various cross-currents of post-modernism. Clinton is the archetype, the man who -- so it was said in Arkansas -- would turn green if he lay on a pool table. The man who is advised weekly by pollsters on what to say he thinks. The man, who when confronted with the crisis of his life, turned first to a spin doctor to see if he could once more talk his way out of it.
But it goes much deeper than that. Once a culture accepts a value vacuum it delivers itself to an adhocracy based on propaganda and force. Truth becomes the privilege of those who are the best liars and biggest bullies.
Such an adhocracy requires not just Napoleons of the moment, seizing each sound bite and every news slot as though it were another mile of Europe, it also requires the acquiescence of all those who once would have said simply, but with force: no, that is wrong.
Instead we have an intelligentsia that, rather than doing its true work on behalf of human betterment, has become merely the technocracy of a Peronist post-constitutional regime. Instead we have an intelligentsia believing that all facts are malleable, all truths disposable, and, in the end, the only real test is what you can get away with
Long before the rise of deconstructionism, there was a name for such an approach; it was called anarchy. And those who practiced it best were not scholars and philosophers but the leaders of gangs, armies, mobs and dictators
Hence we find the journalist who asked a source the other day, "putting morality aside, what do you think?" We have a president whose disposition was greatly complicated by the fact that no one could figure out any way to shame him. We have talking heads treating the darkest of public affairs as though at just another sports contest. We have a MSNBC lightweight expressing righteous annoyance that the Lewinsky tapes weren't more interesting. And we have member after member of the intelligentsia pimping for Clinton as though it were a sign of solidarity -- wearing sophistry like a crossed ribbon on their lapel.
How long Weimar America can go on like this is anyone's guess. There is enough disgust around to fertilize yet another national transformation. There is also enough despair to prevent it.
I do know that much of this need not have happened if those blessed with the time, intellect, and position to reflect on something other than survival had used their gifts more wisely. Their betrayal of America shares with that of Clinton an egregious failure of stewardship for our times.
One of Camus' characters writes a German friend after the war:
This is what separated us from you; we made demands. You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth.
This then is what comprises the high crimes and misdemeanors of America's intelligentsia: it was willing to trade in the truth just to sit a little closer to power.
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