In what now seems a distant epoch of pre-history, President Bill Clinton came before a joint session of Congress in 1996 to deliver the State of the Union Address and announced that βthe era of big government is over.β Even in 1996, no one thought that the era of big government was actually over, least of all Bill Clinton. But it must have seemed like the right thing to say at the time, in order to show that one was in tune with the popular moodβin fact, leading it rather than following itβby putting into a pithy sentence what people were beginning to think, or thought they were thinking, before they had quite thought it. This happened, you may remember, just after the newly elected Republican Congress, the first in forty years, was forced to knuckle under to Mr. Clinton after shutting down the government in a vain attempt to limit big governmentβstyle spending. Thus the President, as it might have seemed, was being magnanimous in victoryβmaking a gesture in the direction of the ostensibly small-government philosophy of his opponents before adding: βBut we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.β
Needless to say, the reference to βthe time when our citizens were left to fend for themselvesβ was as empty of real political content as the claim that the era of big government was over. No one was proposing, as no one would have dared propose, to abolish the social safety net. The President was merely juggling partisan clichΓ©s, but in an original enough fashion that the media were inclined to regard it as a political masterstroke, part of his campaign of βtriangulationβ in which progressive desiderata were introduced cautiously or with an alloy of conservatism (or, failing that, conservative rhetoric) in order to make them more palatable to the centrists in both parties. We disgruntled conservatives used to speak of this as βthe triumph of style over substance,β but in retrospect the joke was on us. Bill Clinton saw sooner than we did that, in the postβCold War 1990s, style was substanceβor as much substance as most people wanted to bother themselves about.
Politics, in other words, had become a fashion statement rather than a serious program for governing. The real business of government was already in the process of being turned over to judges and what is now being called βthe deep state,β leaving politicians free to posture and virtue-signal without consequence. With the departure of seriousness and responsibility from the political culture, what Freud called βthe narcissism of small differencesβ took over, and the rancorousness and hatred which are now the salient features of our political life have been increasing ever since. Way back in the β90s I tried coining the nameβIβm sure I wasnβt the first to think of itββpost-modern politicsβ to describe this new, style-centered political culture based on moral preening, but it didnβt catch on. Of course, we had no need for the name once all politics became post-modern politics. It was just politics.
This is still true. Indeed, it is even more true, now that politics, as I have been noting in these pages over the past three months, have turned revolutionary. Or, more accurately, βrevolutionary.β Nor is this ersatz revolutionism limited to the United States. Here is Benedict Spence writing in the (London) Daily Telegraph about the autumnal struggle in Britain between Brexiteers and Remainers which is to be ended (if it is to be ended) with a general election this month:
We have reached a period of political partisanship where people are so willing to suspend reality in order to pursue an agenda that they view real-life events almost entirely through the prism of their own bias. Like football fans watching the video replay of a penaltyβone set of people are able to scream that one thing is βclearlyβ the case, even as the other shouts that it is βblatantlyβ the opposite. The same footage, the same evidence, through almost identical sets of eyes, is capable of spinning wildly contrasting views. . . . We have reached the stage where manipulation of the facts by spin doctors or government departments is no longer necessaryβpeople take the raw evidence before them and mould it themselves in real time. But what is every bit as chilling is just how effective it is at drowning out reasoned debate on serious subjects.
Weβll take his word for it that in Britain there is at least some βreasoned debate on serious subjectsβ to be drowned out, but thereβs precious little evidence of any in the United States. Even debates over the size of government, which were once the equivalent of Britainβs Brexit debate, can no longer be taken seriously, as Bill Clinton showed us all those years ago.
But Bill Clinton looks serious and statesmanlike in comparison with the latter-day practitioners of post-modern politics. Here is a series of statements made by Nancy Pelosi to the press just before the party-line vote to open the formal impeachment inquiryβan inquiry which had already been conducting business in secret under intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff for weeks:
βItβs a sad day. Itβs a sad day because nobody comes to Congress to impeach a president of the United States, no one.β
βToday, we move forward down the path forward by putting forward our procedures, which are transparent and open.β
βThese rules are fairer than anything that have gone before in terms of an impeachment proceeding.β
βWe take an oath to protect the Constitution. And we cannot ignoreβwe will not ignore when the Presidentβs behavior indicates that that investigation, that that inquiry is necessary.β
βWe will proceed with the factsβthe truthβitβs about the truth and the Constitution.β
βThis isnβt about politics, it isnβt about patriotismβuh, partisanshipβitβs about patriotism.β
I very much doubt that there was a soul present at this extraordinary recitation who didnβt know at some level that every single one of these articles was literally and demonstrably the reverse of βthe truth,β except where she misspoke to say that it wasnβt about patriotism. And yet, for some reason, The Washington Post chose not to turn its βfact-checkersβ loose to give Mrs. Pelosi the Trump treatment and catalogue her words as βlies.β She even included a Clinton-style false dichotomy when she said that βweβre working very hard to defend our democracy, because if we donβt have a system of checks and balances we might as well all just elect a president and go home because it will be that unitary form of government that our founders did not want us to have.β
So Congress has a stark choice between pursuing impeachment and βgoing homeβ? Nobody believes that, and yet it passed unremarked by the media along with the rest of her blatant mischaracterizations of fact. These were just the things she was expected to say by her fellow Democratic partisans in order to maintain the polite fiction that neither she nor they were partisan. So she said them. The performance was of a piece with the multiple, mind-bending, meta-post-modernism, noted here last month, of her wrapping herself in the mantle of Americaβs revolutionary founders to announce that to seek information abroad to the discredit of a political opponent has now become an impeachable offenseβat least when undertaken by someone her political allies have been trying for years to impeach on the strength of information (or disinformation) to his discredit garnered (or manufactured) abroad by her own side.
Andrew C. McCarthy wrote in National Review Online of βThe Trivialization of Impeachment,β but really this is just one aspect of the trivialization of everything political. A partisan impeachment, like a partisan scandal, would be in the real world (if the real world existed anymore) a contradiction in terms, but now it is just one more absurdity to add to the ever-lengthening list of absurdities our politics have become. Way back in the 1960s, everybody got the joke when President Kennedy was asked at a news conference for his reaction to a resolution of the Republican National Committee against some measure he had proposed. His only comment was: βAnd Iβll bet it passed unanimously.β It was a variation on the contemporary comment by Mandy Rice-Davies when Lord Astor denied employing her services as a call girl: βHe would, wouldnβt he?β But Iβm afraid the joke would fall flat today.
It certainly would on the ears of those now championing the evidence of an anonymous cia analyst who shows, in the carefully understated phrasing of the inspector general, βsome indicia of an arguable political bias . . . in favor of a rival political candidateβ against the President. The βwhistle-blower,β later identified by RealClearInvestigations as Eric Ciaramella, was said to have ties not only to Joe Biden and John Brennan but also to a Ukrainian-American named Alexandra Chalupa involved in Ukrainian efforts to sabotage the Trump campaign in 2016βthe very thing the President was asking his Ukrainian counterpart to look into in the now-famous telephone conversation last July.
Itβs hard to imagine how evidence could be more tainted than that, but Mrs. Pelosi, Mr. Schiff, and the other impeachers know that they need have no fear that this might be pointed out by anyone not identifiable as a partisan supporter of the President. There may be one or two of the highly principled Republican NeverTrump faction who have protested against such monstrous unfairness, but if so I havenβt heard about it. Defending the President on any account just isnβt their brand.
When absurdity becomes routine, it ceases to be funnyβand who can doubt that it has become routine when elected officials proclaim their intention to defy the law in response to the supposed lawlessness of Mr. Trumpβs attempt to enforce our immigration laws? Or when the media insist that the First Amendment must protect their own right to publish, illegally, classified information, but must not protect anything that they, the media, are pleased to call βhate speech.β In these and other ways, absurdity has gone global, as when the prime minister of Canada joins in a protest against a government headed by, er, himself to show how enthusiastically he is prepared to speak out against the βclimate changeβ he is unable to do anything else about.
Yet such an absurdity is a mere trifle next to that of a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl addressing the rapt and applauding delegates to the United Nations and demanding, also on behalf of limiting climate change, that wherever in the whole wide world people are not already enjoying the dubious benefits of a pre-modern, pre-industrial economy they should revert to oneβeven at the cost of embracing with it the universal poverty that any such reversion would inevitably entailβif they want to remain in the good graces of her good self and those other putatively non-polluting innocents she claims to speak for. Imagine, if you can, a performance like that taking place anywhere outside the gaudy fantasy-land of post-modern politics. It is even more impossible than the realization of any of Greta Thunbergβs forlorn hopes for humankind. Their very impossibility is what has given luster to her glory and made a celebrity of her.
It is possible to see post-modern politics, like little Gretaβs ideal post-modern economy, as in some ways rather a reversion to the pre-modern in disguiseβto the politics of Jacksonian America as described by Joanne B. Freeman in her book The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, published last year. Then, too, as she shows in abundant detail, truth became a partisan affair; then, too, the bonds of national unity had all but dissolved and the hatreds of the two main political leanings of the era for each other burned brightly and seemingly inextinguishably. The nation founded half a century earlier under the Constitution that Nancy Pelosi professes to venerate had by then already effectively ceased to exist as a nation: regional and tribal loyalties took precedence, foreshadowing secession and Civil War only a few years later. Then as now people might have spoken of a βcold civil warβ already in progress.
In retrospect, it ought now to be clear that the supposedly βdivisiveβ President Trumpβs βnationalismβ was a doomed attempt to appeal to our waning national spirit against the tribal or βidentityβ politics of the Leftβan appeal that could only be resisted by its portrayal as a disguised attack on one or more of the racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual identities huddled together under the Democratic tent. Hence the relentless advertisement of Mr. Trumpβs βwhite supremacism.β Note, however, that heβs not being impeached for that, nor for racism, sexism, or any of the other forms of political incorrectness that could get him dismissed in disgrace if he were merely a college professor or the chief executive officer of a public corporation. Mrs. Pelosi and her minions had to find something that could be made to look, however unconvincingly, like good old-fashioned corruption or self-dealing, because they knew that the kinds of factional conflict that they are in the business of stoking do not resonate with most people even to the extent that Trumpian neo-nationalism does. That the pretense of a real impeachment must still be upheld ought to give us hope that post-modern politics might not resemble their pre-modern precedent in turning a cold civil war into a hot one.
For the differences between Americans in the 1830s were deep and real, not the mere rhetorical artifacts that todayβs have become. Such revolutionary madness ought to be, but too seldom is, the tip-off that what we are seeing, mostly on television and in the newspapers, is not a real revolution but a post-modern one. It is a revolution staged with the help of the media and mostly taking place in the media (social media included), but characterized by such sound and fury that the media-addicted among us can easily mistake it for the real thingβto the point, even, of embracing socialism (or βsocialismβ), the most thoroughly discredited political philosophy there has been since there has been political philosophy, if that is what it takes to keep us Γ la mode. (See βTrying timesβ in The New Criterion of April 2018.)
I suspect that even those of us who repudiate the would-be socialists and pretend-revolutionaries cannot entirely avoid being caught up in the post-modern fantasia, and must struggle to hang on to such shreds of detachment and self-awareness as are left to us, lest we become as blind to reality as those whom we oppose.