How Informational Overload Destroyed American Democracy (Maybe)

[A slightly different version of this essay appears in Current.]

James Davison Hunter's new book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Politics Crisis, is a wonderful, provocative, and also I think ultimately depressing synthesis of America’s cultural history. “Wonderful” because, while Hunter–as he says at the outset of the book–provides no new historical research, the “selective and interpretive history of American public and political life” (p. xv) which it provides is filled with insights and comparisons worth pondering. “Provocative” because those insights and comparisons point out connections that reveal deep-seated problems that sit directly alongside the very assumptions which most of those who value the liberal democracy Americans have attempted to build over the past two and a half centuries hold dear. And ultimately somewhat “depressing” because, despite the book’s Coda explicitly invoking the idea of hope and providing descriptions of the conditions for such regarding America’s future, it is hard to take in the cultural scope of those aforementioned deep-seated problems and not think, whatever his protestations, Hunter may well be convinced that American-style liberal democracy will not emerge from its present crisis–and as someone who explicitly describes our country’s particular political experiment as “among the greatest achievements of human history” (p. xvi), that can’t help but come off as a little sad.

Let’s begin with the wonderful and provocative parts first. In writing a history of the cultural underpinnings of America’s liberal democracy, Hunter begins by refusing to specifically define what it is he’s talking about. The closest he comes is when he writes that the “ideational center-piece” of democracy in America includes “the premises and principles of individual and collective freedom and representative self-government,” along with the recognition that “society is inherently diverse in its interests, ideas, values, and commitments,” necessitating the creation of governmental “mechanisms for addressing...differences in ways that can lead to common goods” (p. 13) Any of those premises, values, or mechanisms could, of course, be subject endless philosophical and practical debate–and it becomes clear from the start of his history that being purposefully indeterminate about those endless philosophical and practical debates is exactly the point. Repeatedly, Hunter insists that the genius of America’s expansive and always changing demos is that it has, until lately, remained capable of doing the “working through” (he prefers the German term durcharbeiten) which solidarity requires primarily because America’s self-understandings were and are not definitive, nor clear. The context in which these self-understandings arose Hunter calls America’s “hybrid-Enlightenment,” and that context involved, in his view, certain necessary conditions. But so long as those conditions obtained, the self-understandings which followed were regularly opaque, implicit, vague, inarticulable, and that is what made them so valuable, because it made America’s liberal democratic identity adaptable, yet still plausibly continuous with what came before. In his words, “a very specifically American adaptation of the Enlightenment project provided the cultural conditions for the emergence of liberal democracy in America...[and] because of its unique adaptation, flexibility, and opacity, it could in principle...evolve and adapt to historical circumstances over two centuries (p. 49).

He follows this praise of America’s liberal democratic order, however, with the sad observation that “for all that we can see, those conditions are no longer present.” Why is that?

Hunter is far too learned a scholar to propose any single overriding explanation; over the nearly 300 pages which make up the heart of his historical analysis (basically from chapter 4, “America’s Hybrid-Enlightenment” to chapter 11, “A Great Unraveling”) Hunter touches upon an enormous range of intellectual, political, and economic developments, and the responses, involving both inclusion and “boundary work,” which he presents them as having given rise to. Hunter does not present any of the cultural conditions upon which this range of ideas and arguments played out as singularly foundational, but if any comes close to that title, it’s probably what he describes as America’s “epistemology of transcendence,” a “synthesis between the Reformed Christian and secular Enlightenment traditions over the eighteenth century.” As he elaborated: “Even though it was understood in radically different and somewhat competing ways, the notion of transcendence at play was sufficiently capacious as a concept and sufficiently opaque as a sensibility that it could absorb a plurality of views, opinions, and traditions” (p. 60). Accepted by nearly all as the default presumption of nearly all argument and contestation in American life–up to and including the fight over slavery, since in President Lincoln’s famous words, both the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War “read the same Bible and pray to the same God”–this sense of transcendence endured in American life well into the 20^th century, continually allowing those in positions of authority, however constructed or challenged, to speak “a common language and a common grammar,” thereby sowing “the seeds of social solidarity” even in our deepest disputes. 

Hunter, to be sure, is not inattentive to the changes and costs involved in these disputes which what he presents as a long-enduring condition enabled. On the contrary, he lays out, with wonderfully incisive details, many stages in the articulation of, defense of, and overturning of understandings of America’s common culture. There is the rise of the America’s self-understanding as a Protestant Christian republic; its contested collapse in the wake of the Civil War and high levels of immigration; the emergence of religiously inspired (or at least informed) reform movements throughout the late 19^th and into the 20^th centuries; and then the hollowing out of such movements by the economically and technologically enabled power of neoliberal individualism in the decades immediately following World War II; and much more. While there is in all these details multiple points that could be challenged, it is, in many ways, a deeply persuasive and even wise reading of American intellectual history, climaxing in a frustrating half-century of cultural dissolution that began in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts to heal America: “King’s rhetoric....generate[d] greater solidarity than ever before on matters of race in large part because his appeal drew upon underlying assumptions...embedded within America’s hybrid-Enlightenment’s surface and deep structures....It was not to last” (p. 199).

Why didn’t last? Again, Hunter provides a wide range of interrelated explanations, delving into political theories, globalizing economies, and education paradigms. But where I believe his analysis turns most provocative is in his discussion of “the nearly infinite multiplication of sources of information–the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’–and the bewildering number of choices it forces upon all of us,” adding that “the entire informational ecosystem spawned by the new communications technologies and the market dynamics by which they proliferate...render truth and reality beside the point” (pp. 306-307). Hunter never makes this connection explicit, but it seems to me an obvious reading of his cultural analysis. If liberal democratic solidarity is invariably tied up in some kind inchoate trust in the transcendent validity of that which is employed as a common language or invoked as a common authority, and if the very concept of certain principles and practices possessing some kind of transcendent validity depends upon the endurance of cultural conditions whose public meanings are, by definition, undefinable and opaque and adaptable and implicit...then is it not reasonable that the swamp of information–always highly detailed, highly personalized, and highly contentious information, to be sure!--which surrounds us all could be exactly that which is undermining those conditions? To invoke an essay on a related topic I wrote in the wake of the 2000 elections, might it be that the anger and anxiety which characterized that terrible year was at least partly due to “an omnipresent social media ecosystem which rips context from every story,” leading us to believe that “the norms held to by one, or some, or all of the different sub-communities of this country...have been, or are being, challenged, upended, revealed to be otherwise than what we believe, or maybe just simply betrayed?”

I do not mean to reduce Hunter’s wonderfully provocative reading of America’s current condition to my own pre-occupations. Still, when Hunter acknowledges the fact that the cultural conditions for liberal democracy as he understands them actually do still abound on the local level, resulting in “an abundance of goodwill among ordinary citizens who are willing to do the difficult work of coming together to find democratic solutions to the problems they face,” yet concludes that “the interconnected cultural economies of technology, media and social media, the party system, and the like...render all such grassroots efforts ineffective” (elsewhere he wrote “There is no end to good intentions among ordinary citizens, but good intentions are no match for the kind of institutional power wielded by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and their kind”), it’s perhaps reasonable to see the heart of his fear for America dwelling in the fact that our hybrid-Enlightenment adaptation was perhaps just not designed for a world of public discourse wherein “there is not no authority by which questions of truth or reality or public ethics could be settled definitively” since “it is not clear that anything is capable of penetrating [our] echo chambers” (pp. 300-301, 306, 367-369).

Hunter’s own sober and careful conclusions boil down to a hope for slow cultural work and a “paradigm shift” that would involve a sense of realism: “that the sources of social conflict can never be eliminated,” and “that politics is an administrative apparatus and is thus severely limited in what it can accomplish.” Such realism would mitigate against associating political elections with “redemptive or salvific” causes, and encourage the depoliticization of much of public life (pp. 378-380).To give his ideas some hope of survival, I wonder if his own analysis points towards the need for a more stringent structural and technological critique of how we share ideas in the first place—and how we might address the informational overload whose hyper-politicization crowds out the adaptative discussion of once more open-ended and opaque concepts, thus allowing us to do so again.

Songs of '83: "Billie Jean" (Also: Michael Jackson, MTV, and the Year some Comparatively Cosmopolitan Brits Urbanized American Pop Radio)

Forty years ago yesterday, Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," the second single off his early-80s-defining album Thriller, entered the Billboard chart. By March it hit #1, and it stayed there for nearly two months. We all remember the song, and the video, and deservedly so; it was a game-changing song, at least insofar as mainstream American pop music consumption was concerned--and that consumption can tell us something important about 1983, I think. So listen and watch it again, but stick around afterwards for the commentary.

Thriller--and, most particularly, the enormous demand which "Billie Jean" generated--was a crucial player in MTV finally putting music by Black artists into regular rotation, which 18 months into its existence at the time still mostly conceived itself as serving a national FM-radio-style audience for White rock 'n' roll, pop, and heavy metal acts, and not much else. That story has been often told, but I want to look at another angle--one that was made explicit when (again, forty years ago this month), David Bowie, promoting his soon-to-be-released album Let's Dance, asked some pointed questions of the new network:

You can read a transcript of the key, concluding part of the interview here. Mark Goodman's flailing effort to make sense of his employer's decisions by way of regional distinctions ("we have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or [the] Midwest--pick some town in the Midwest--that would be scared to death by Prince") is easy to mock, given that Prince Rogers Nelson was himself a Midwesterner from Minneapolis, Minnesota. But it does make me wonder what more could be said about the nation-wide infatuation with Jackson's brilliant song and video, a song and video rooted a large variety of music and technological trends...but most of which, I think, really could be associated with cities (and urban activities and an urban imaginary tied to places ) like "New York" and "Los Angeles" in particular way. What was changing by 1983 was, among other things, perhaps that "London" needed to be added that list, and perhaps that helped to make the difference.

Ten years ago, I wrote a 4-part series on my memories of listening to pop radio as a young person and young adult, focusing on 1978, 1983, 1988, and 1993. And just about exactly five years ago, I kicked off a year-long series reminiscing about my favorite of those four years, musically speaking: 1978. My opinions haven't fundamentally changed; from an even greater distance today, I still think the swampy, often campy, often ridiculous mix of rock and country, blues and metal, folk and disco, which characterized that year made for some of the greatest popular music of my entire life. But as the 40th anniversary of 1983 arrives, some different ideas dominate my thinking, and I feel like I'm seeing something cosmopolitan, something comparatively multicultural and, lacking any better word, something genuinely (if however vaguely) "urban" as the best descriptor of how musical sensibilities, significantly due to MTV (even against some of its own founders' wishes), were changed that year.

1983 is usually seen--thanks to mainstream coverage it received--as the high-watermark of the Second British Invasion, of what was called, in the sort of limited pop-music conversations I was able to access as a 14-year-old, "synth-pop" or just "New Wave." Any attempt to confine a multifaceted musical movement(s) to a single calendar period is ridiculous, of course, but still, it's not wrong to see 1983 as a culmination of sorts. If punk music meant anything, it meant that rejecting a rock 'n' roll style which had become ponderous and loud and Americanized in a particular post-WWII way (as the English guitarist Martin Simpson put it in the liner notes to his blues album, Smoke and Mirrors, growing up in England in the 1950s and 1960s essentially meant living on a giant U.S. aircraft carrier), and which had been embraced by thousands of English, Scottish, and Irish English-speaking musicians in the 1970s. (This was true, by the way, even if the ideological content implicitly conveyed by that style was harshly attacked; think of the righteous anger at, yet also the total dependency upon invoking, various America-shaped economic, sexual, racial, and historical memories and norms in Pink Floyd's The Wall.) By 1983, as punk had given way, as the racial diversity of the cities of the United Kingdom brought reggae and glam and dance music into post-punk acts, and as these musicians began to do more with the drum machines and synthesizers that had begun to appear throughout Western Europe in the late 1970s, they had done it; they'd conquered American radio (throughout the year, there were regularly more British acts on any given week's Billboard top ten than American). The music of these artists was often technologically unique, and their sexual and aesthetic style--magnified by the visual element to making pop music which was by then well-established in Britain but still new to the U.S.--left the (White) pop music bad boys of the previous two decades far behind. I'm not sure how you can see all this and not see an urban, multicultural, polyglot, sexually experimental perspective at work.

Maybe it didn't have to happen in the UK; there was still the racially charged craziness of New York City and Los Angeles which MTV programmers were worried about, after all. But think about that, and about the way the larger pop radio establishment in America initially resisted it--the anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ, anti-urban undercurrents of Disco Demolition Night were real, after all. Something David Byrne wrote about those mid-to-late 1970s days in the liner notes to the first disc in the 1992 Talking Heads collection Popular Favorites, 1976-1992: Sand in the Vaseline might provide some perspective here:

I wanted my guitar to sound thin, clean and clanky. Not chunky, distorted and macho, like a lot of what was around. My philosophy at the time being that this puny sound was in the true nature of this instrument....the first truly modern instrument. The first scientific industrial instrument...clean, metallic, precise, yet funky and African...the first instrument to embody our young culture...."American" cool-African-futuristic-trash-aesthetic....[T]he beauty of this "American" aesthetic is that it belongs to anyone who claims it...who grooves on it...who sees the deep zen poetry in James Brown's lyrics, in a juke box, a suburban split-level, a wild hairdo, who sees the hope for the future implicit in the shape of an electric guitar (a hope that was becoming a nostalgic joke). So here it was, waiting...do it yourself art/poetry/sex/life/bullshit that anyone could make possibly reach a sizeable audience without compromise. God, everything we were hearing on the radio was either nostalgic or mired in compromise...at least on "Rock" radio. Disco culture was a radical alternative, as much a cool hip subculture with integrity as the little alternative (punk) rock world we inhabited. We liked it...The Jackson Five Get it Together L.P. rates with Sgt. Pepper in my mind.

It's all there: a discontent with an American rock 'n' roll style seen as nostalgic and utterly unwilling to embrace the irreducible plurality and wildness of the musical/technological/urban frontier, which is "American" only in the sense that it is revolutionary and weird, not in the sense of that it carries the presumptions of a superpower. (I love his description of the guitar as simultaneously "metallic" and "African.") What Black and LGBTQ and other populations were bringing into the discos of New York (and London, and Paris, and Berlin, etc.) is part of what I see the whole Second British Invasion as bringing to American radio, building upon and making nationally dominant what earlier post-punk bands and emerging house and dance beats in Black and multi-racial communities had done in dense urban corners of America. Michael Jackson probably didn't need an invasion to get MTV to change its mind, but it certainly didn't hurt that videos from various racially and sexually mixed musicians and bands from the UK and Western Europe had been piling up on their desks for a year and a half before Thriller hit.

The subsequent popularity of many of these dance-music-inspired artists in thoroughly White college campus cultures--the "college radio" of the 1980s--has given some New Wave music a bad reputation, I think; musicians more proximate to the post-punk moment of the mid- to late-1970s--the Talking Heads or Blondie in the United States, the Police, the Pretenders, Joe Jackson, or Elvis Costello and the Attractions in the UK--are more likely to be respected today than the supposedly frivolous and superficial New Wave acts from England that came later. But I don't think that's fair. I would argue that the racially mixed make-up of many of these bands, and the way Black (including Afro-Caribbean), disco-oriented and other international musical styles were electronically interpreted by many of them, speaks against their subsequent, mostly undeserved, American reputation. And frankly, the fact that these artists brought into the mainstream of American pop music consumption--brought into my radio as a teen-age listener in Spokane, WA--the sort of sexual, racial, and material associations which disco had always flirted with arguably helps put the weirdness of much of American popular culture in the 1970s into perspective. Maybe that weirdness (Cher with Greg Allman! Cillia Black with Marc Bolan!) was partly a side-effect of the American media establishment trying to make sense of--and thus contain--all the urban unpredictability which Byrne made mention of above. And maybe, just maybe, in some very indirect, deeply structural way, the manner which the White rock 'n' roll and metal acts which had been MTV's bread and butter responded to the rise of Michael Jackson and the New Wave can be put into the same story as well.

Years ago, the critic Stephen Metcalf, while writing about Morrissey and the Smiths (a band that might best be described as a 1960s-style rock 'n' roll band that skipped punk, went post-punk, and never evolved further), wrote something that has stayed with me ever since:

1983, the year of “This Charming Man,” is the year the ‘80s became the ‘80s. Up until that point, Thatcherism in England and Reaganism in the United States had been little more than hollow promises. Then interest rates fell, the two economies thawed, and spandex was everywhere. It was the year of Flashdance at the box office, of “Every Breath You Take” and Thriller on the Billboard 100; the year of Risky Business and The Big Chill. If this list doesn’t make you want to crawl into your bolt hole--well, you are probably not a Smiths fan. I think the word that best captures the times is heartless, as evident in the stupid rictus of Sting’s face, circa 1983, as it was in Margaret Thatcher’s budget cuts. No wonder Morrissey’s voice sounded so fresh, so slyly subversive. As much as he publicly avowed a hatred of Thatcher, culminating in “Margaret at the Guillotine,” it was Thatcherism that made Morrissey. The Iron Lady represented a hardness of purpose, a pitilessness that would allow England once again to produce winners. But also, inevitably, losers.

I think about this passage today, in light of a deeper awareness of the racial history of the Western world than I had even as recently as five years ago, when I wrote my tribute to the songs of 1978, and I wonder if one might not also see 1983 as being a year when a certain kind of determined backlash to the multi-racial and androgynous dance mixes and synthesized beats that had spread so deeply in Western cities (though possibly not, at least according to MTV, to Poughkeepsie) took root. Can you imagine someone turning on Friday Night Videos (which premiered in 1983 and was my gateway drug, by the way; we didn't have cable) or just the radio, listening to or watching Culture Club or Lionel Richie and realizing "Good grief, we didn't stop disco: it's everywhere!"? I don't know what kind of "response" such a hypothetical realization could have given rise to; it's not like you can separate musical trends from those of other media, to say nothing of the politics of Reagan's America and the final decade of the Cold War in general. All this stuff comes together, after all, with cross-influences going every which way. But still--the fact that 1983 was the year KISS took off their make-up, the year that Metallica and Mötley Crüe released their first albums, the year Def Leppard went head-to-head with with Black and New Wave and similarly influenced pop artists for Billboard dominance...well, it makes me wonder. Not that you can code New Wave and dance music as liberal and heavy metal and hard rock as conservative (if anything, I'd have to think about what was happening to country music in the 1980s to make any of this actually plausible). Still, to see 1983 as a watershed year, with the divides over winners and losers becoming more culturally explicit, such that the majority of White, straight, suburban radio-listeners like myself became aware of them for the first time? There may be some sense to that, I think.

This year, I'm going to do a "Songs of '83" series, like I did five years ago. None of them will be as long as this one, I think. But I see something in the history of pop music that perhaps I didn't before, and as the Billboard chart of 1983 brings songs to my attention, maybe I'll point them out, for whomever is interested. I kind of am, if no one else. For now, though, thanks Mr. Jackson; thanks for making MTV cave into the popularity of an urban-centric, technologically changing, post-American Century musical reality which they'd been surrounded by since they'd begun (MTV's very first video was the New Wave band the Buggles with "Video Killed the Radio Star," after all), but hadn't accepted the racial consequences of yet, perhaps. My youthful radio-listening and tv-watching habits are in your debt.

A Random Thought on Mikey Kaus

A few days ago Robert Farley, of Lawyers, Guns & Money, posted the latest entry in his wonderful "Oral History of the Blogosphere" project, this one focusing on the once-notorious (indeed, widely loathed on the liberal/left/progressive side of the blogosphere), but now mostly-just-grumbled-over journalist and blogger, Mickey Kaus. It's actually a pretty great conversation, if you're into remembering or rethinking what people were arguing about online and why and how they did it, circa 20001-2010. For me, besides enjoying it as I have enjoyed every previous entry in this series (really, if you're a blogger or ever thought you could be one you should listen to them all), it made me reflect on the enduring relevance of a particular ideological niche, however tiny or incoherent it may seem.

I never thought, and still don't think, the loathing of Kaus was mostly due to the controversial positions he took on the dominant political news items in America in the 1990s and 2000s: welfare reform, criminal justice, immigration, the Iraq War, etc. Rather, I think he was loathed because he insisted--to the minds of the aforementioned liberal/left/progressive pundit class, infuriatingly so--that he was taking those positions as a sincere, if appropriately evolved, New Deal Democrat. In a way, I think Kaus occupies the same much-condemned rhetorical space as Ralph Nader: he's someone who is seen as a betrayer, someone who talks the talk of liberal justice and then engages in public actions and intervenes in public debates that seem, to most liberals and leftists and progressives, to entirely contrary to how the liberal political world actually works.

The first minutes of the conversation with Kaus touched upon the legacy of Charles Peters and the magazine he founded, Washington Monthly, which tutored legions of journalists (including Kaus) in a vision of activist government grounded, as Paul Glastris, Washington Monthly's long-time editor, put it, in "the communitarian patriotic liberalism of Peters’s New Deal youth." There are, out there amid the sprawling, multifaceted coalition that constitutes the Democratic Party, lines of reflection upon the achievements of the New Deal, both scholarly and activist, which seriously downplay the ethical and civic part of that triumph of positive liberalism and egalitarianism. According to those arguments, the greatest achievement of the New Deal was that it laid the foundation for erecting social democratic institutions in America, for which many are still fighting for: to make health care a human right, to make higher education available to all, to put workers in charge of the economy, etc. As a democratic socialist myself, I agree with those lines of argument! But I'm also a sometime left conservative, a wanna-be civic republican, and a fan of both Christopher Lasch and the Point Huron Statement, and thus find myself agreeing with Peters as well. The leadership of the post-New Deal, and particularly the post-civil rights movement, Democratic Party really did focus mostly on achieving liberal justice through building ever-more effective (and ever-larger) redistributive institutions and practices. The way that focus partly (but not entirely unintentionally) combined a very un-New Dealish individualism with outright bureaucratic statism, and allowed a entirely new kind of meritocracy to flourish in liberal circles, thus taking the focus off the cultural and communal aspects of what a genuinely egalitarian and just society must involve...well, that's the critical space which Kaus occupied. Entirely coherently? In a philosophically rigorous way? Open-mindedly, kindly, and without self-indulgent contrarian snark? Not at all; in many ways, Kaus's voice was a profoundly flawed vehicle for this critical perspective on post-Cold War liberalism in America. But to my mind, at least, he was a vehicle for it all the same.

My primary evidence for this is a wonderful book that he wrote, The End of Equality. The book never got the respect it deserved, I think, partly because of the weird moment it arrived (right at the beginning of the Clinton administration; but was the book arguing against what Clinton was doing, or supporting it, or both?), and partly because Kaus's subsequent career--intransigently defending some of the worst aspects of Clinton's welfare reform, obsessing about family breakdown even as income inequality skyrocketed, etc.--retrospectively made the book's insistence that "Money Liberalism" was a non-starter and that "Civic Liberalism" was the way to go seem like Kaus was auditioning George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" a decade before it nominally (though never actually) arrived. All those criticisms are fair. But I still use selections from the book in my Political Ideologies classes on occasion, because I find so much of it refreshingly clear and free of cant. He is frank about his conviction that most of those with socialist aspirations have been unwilling to recognize the incompatibility of "fraternity, community, and idealism" with the lack of "material prosperity" that only rapacious capitalism seems to provide (p. 11); he is genuinely eloquent in asserting that differing levels of health care don't actually matter to the egalitarian legitimacy of society so much as "that everyone wait in the same waiting rooms" (p. 93); and he is downright prescient in warning that, if the goal of the Democratic party continued to be tweaking the tax code in some Rawlsian way so as to make it fairer and increase the size of welfare checks but in the meantime said nothing about the lack of community-feeling and solidarity in America, the end result will a general hardening of whatever egalitarian spirit the revolutions of the 1930s and the 1960s may have left us with:

Americans may be social egalitarians today. But give the affluent two more decades to revile the underclass and avoid the cities as if they were a dangerous foreign country, two decades to isolate their "gifted" children from their supposed inferiors, two decades of "symbolic analysis" and assortative mating, and we might wake up to discover that Americans aren't such egalitarians at all any more. Then politics would be really dispiriting (p. 180).

That paragraph can be picked apart and even partly undermined in multiple ways (that large numbers of younger and mostly liberal-learning people, including young families, started returning to America's cities throughout the 2000s is the most obvious rejoinder, but not the only one). But I read it, and I see the once at least moderately liberal suburbs, filled with college-educated, white-collar-job-holding, mostly well-off Americans, voting for Trump across large parts of America. Dispiriting indeed.

Anyway, this is just something that occurred to me, when Robert unintentionally invited Kaus back into my mind. So I thank him for that.

Michael Austin, Vardis Fisher, and the Death of the Mormo-American

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Michael Austin, a fellow blogger and old friend, wrote an essay nearly 30 years ago that accomplished what most of us intellectual scribblers can only aspire towards: putting into a words a framework for understanding a problem or question which endures, even if the problem or question does not. This is definitely the case for Michael's "The Function of Mormon Literary Criticism at the Present Time." Most of the specific examples and engagements in that essay are probably inextricable from the intellectual debates of American Mormonism during the 1980s and 1990s, but his general observations--that "embedded in the assertion that there is such a thing as 'Mormon literature' is the claim that we, as Mormons, and particularly as American Mormons, represent a cultural entity whose traditions, heritage, and experience deserve to be considered a vital part of the American mosaic," and "we are [not just] Mormons, but...are "Mormo-Americans"--remain provocative and vital. In fact, the deepest importance of his latest book cannot, I think, be fully appreciated without them.

Michael obviously wasn't the first to look at the American citizens and others who had built a distinct social world along the Mormon Corridor of Idaho-Utah-Arizona and more from the late 19th-century into the middle of the 20th; sociologists, historians, and political scientists have long done the same, and continue to do so. But Michael was, to my knowledge anyway, the first to connect the language of ethnography to that of literary (self-)presentation. In other words, if we want to understand how we talk about and write about ourselves, whether for internal audiences or external ones, we have to keep in mind the fact that American Mormonism, by the first part of the 20th century, had essentially become an ethnicity, a people with a situated particularity, and that whatever one did with or against the cultural or religious or political implications or associations of that particularity, its positioning was paramount. (Keep in mind that "was.") As Michael put it, "since Mormonism--like Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, or existentialism--contains its own philosophical assumptions and values, it does not matter what we ultimately write about but who we write as."

The aim of Michael's wonderful short book Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist is to reveal that "as" in Fisher. He shows how this a talented, hard-working, arrogant, and obsessive writer--an intelligent, opinionated, selfish, sometimes cruel but also guilt-wracked man, a hard-bitten survivor of a desperately poor Mormon settlement in southeastern Idaho at the turn of the 20th-century--expressed himself through his inherited ethnic particularity, despite his own insistence of having rejected it entirely. In the book, Michael (drawing upon earlier work he's done) succinctly weaves together Fisher's biography, a literary analysis of many of Fisher's published works, a portrait of American publishing in the first half of the 20th century, and--in my opinion, most importantly--a vivid, however partial, picture of what it meant to be a marginal hanger-on in the Mormon ethnic world during arguably its most flourishing and tightest phase (say the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s), as Fisher most definitely was. It makes for informative, insightful reading, something that I'd encourage anyone at all curious about American Mormonism to check out, even if their interest in mid-century American literature is zero. I say this because, ultimately, I see this as at least as much a work of cultural and religious exploration as a work of literary critique. Michael's concluding observation--"Vardis Fisher was a religious unbeliever...but Mormonism was the religion that he didn't believe in"--may not be an entirely original formulation, but I couldn't help but feel it indirectly putting its finger on something essential.

That essential thing is the assumption about Mormonness which enabled Michael to formulate a way to cut through and re-frame arguments about Mormon literature ("faithful" vs. "faithless," etc.) decades ago. It is the assumption that one can--and that someone like Fisher did--express a Mormon identity without actually believing or advocating for any of it, meaning that it has, surrounding and accompanying and attending to its truth claims about the universe and sin and God and salvation, an embodied, communal, historically and spatially particular worldview. Again, there are many ways in which many who read this blog post would consider that an old and banal observation: in our lives, or in the lives of those we know or work with or love, the labels "cultural Mormon" or "DNA Mormon" or "raised Mormon," etc., get employed all the time. But Michael's patient work with Fisher presents the argument that, for at least Fisher and those of the social worlds he lived in and moved through, his claim about "who we write as" was (again, a "was") stronger than merely talking about the assorted quotidian practices and preferences inherited by those who were raised in a Mormon family or attended a Mormon university or whatever. Fisher's "Mormo-Americanness," his gestalt, was an active, morally shaping constant in his literary expressions. Through Vridar Hunter, the fictional protagonist of Fisher's "Antelope" novels and stories, he articulates what could be labeled a fiercely individualistic, Mormo-American way of being an Idahoan; more broadly and abstractly, through the shifting protagonists of his sprawling Testament of Man series that Fisher obsessively worked on through the final two decades of his life, he articulates a defiantly self-aggrandizing, Mormo-American vision of the whole human race, complete with secular prophets (always male), constantly searching for an ever-evolving truth.

Do I find these implicit ways and visions of how to be in the world appealing? No; actually they mostly strike me as somewhat monomaniacal and stupid (though I trust Michael's judgment that the specific plots which advance them often make for good reading). So why did I finish Vardis Fisher and feel both fulfilled and kind of sad? Because I realized that that worldview, that particularity, which became arguably monomaniacal and stupid in Fisher's hands, was nonetheless one that I knew in my bones. And it's also one that, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, began to die. It has had many killers: the consequences of post-WWII missionary work, which slowly but surely loosened the Americanness of Mormonism; the rise of church correlation and centralization, which slowly but surely eliminated the spaces within our institutionalized faith for diverse cultural expressions; the technological and economic developments which gave rise to broad cultural conflicts, ones that American Mormonism, being centered in the politically conservative American west, slowly but surely positioned itself alongside evangelical Christianity regarding; and many more. But all together they bring us to point where, for all sorts of reasons--many of them eminently defensible!--the Americanness, even the literal "Mormon"-ness, of this ethnicity, this identity, that at one time structured the cultural and social world(s) of so many of our families and communities, is officially discouraged, sometimes even formally condemned.

It's not total, of course; it's just about impossible to truly, finally, kill off a cultural or ethnic identity. Perhaps as long as Steven Peck is writing novels, or Jerusha and Jared Hess are making movies, some kind of Mormo-American perspective will remain. Or maybe the ecclesiastical and socio-economic squelching of the institutional supports for Mormo-Americanness will just in turn allow for some social space for other Mormon ethnicities to express themselves in writing or music or art (keep on the look-out for Mormo-Mexican or Mormo-Maori literature, perhaps). But for all that, as a white male 1960s-born American Mormon, even one who fervently agrees with no less an authority than Orson Scott Card that Mormon church basketball was a horror that has been justly nuked from orbit (or from the Church Office Building), and even as one who recognizes that dumping Boy Scouts of America was a move the church probably should have made decades ago, I finished Michael's fine book, and felt the loss. Vardis Fisher was clearly a bit of a jerk. But that talented jerk was our jerk, and we can know it, even if he denied it. And that sense of belonging, limited or perverse or ridiculously out-of-date as it may be, nonetheless, I think, ennobled both Fisher and the Mormo-American world he was part of. Thank you, Michael, for helping me see that.

Why Championing American Values May Not Be Enough

[This is an expanded version of a column which appeared in The Wichita Eagle on Sunday, July 11.] 

When Mike Pompeo launched his "Championing American Values” political action committee recently, he employed what some would call some pretty dark and defiant language. The Biden administration's economic policies are "sickening," and their foreign policies are "naive." Claiming that the United States of America is "the most exceptional nation in the history of civilization," Pompeo insisted that America today is confronting “the dividing line between freedom and oppression.” Leaning heavily upon his military background, Pompeo's PAC foregrounds the idea of a conservative, pro-Trump, Republican calvary riding to battle against the Biden administration and the Democratic party, filled with "pipehitters" who will "never give an inch...against the radical Left’s agenda." A milquetoast foray into national politics this was not.

Personally, I don't find any of this language all that unusual, or even especially extreme. It doesn't frame itself in terms of an apocalyptic culture war, as so much political rhetoric today does, after all. Instead, it's actually entirely conventional for political action committees: it aims to win elections, specifically to "take back majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and in state legislatures." You can't get much more normal for American party politics than that.

But perhaps the very normality of Pompeo's stated intentions is what makes his language stand out to some observers? Hard to say, but the fact that some people can look at something as routine as a political action committee and see it as a frightening harbinger perhaps says something about the broader fears held by some in America today.

Of course, fear is actually part of Pompeo’s argument. If “the encroachment of socialism” and “the woke cancel culture” really are dire threats to “our liberty and freedoms,” as Pompeo’s announcement suggests, then perhaps every America should rightfully fear whether our constitutional democracy will survive. But if so, then the fact that Pompeo’s appeal does exactly what, according to at least one understanding of our constitution, we are democratically expected to do suggests that seeing our current constitutional situation as especially dire may be flawed.

The constitutional reading and democratic expectation I'm talking about is the Madisonian one, laid out in Federalist #10. His entire vision of our constitutional system will handle disagreement and diversity is premised upon the idea that we Americans, in order to promote our disparate values, will form discrete factions. Through those factions--which came to be most purely embodied through the mechanism of political parties and interest groups, though it is doubtful Madison himself had any so institutionally formal in mind--voters can attempt to influence the government one way or another, by recruiting candidates and lining up voters and cultivating donors with resources and more, all with the aim of winning elections. But given the diversity of America, none of these factions will ever elect enough people to be able to achieve majority control of the government on their own. Thus they’re forced to compromise, to work together. None of the relevant groups ever get all that they want, but all get enough to keep on going.

As I said, that’s one understanding—an understanding that looks at Pompeo’s new PAC, and salutes him for taking the exact same electoral actions which every other political action committee, working on behalf of every other possible set of values, also does. We may be deeply divided in our policy preferences when it comes to what we want our government to do, but how can we worry too much about the influence of one division or another when we’re all going about our political business in the same way anyway?

Some worry, I suspect--and I count myself as one of them--because we recognize that the bumpy but supposedly consistent “going” mentioned above actually doesn’t always work the way some constitutional thinkers believed it would. For me, the reasons it doesn't work the way it was supposed to are rooted in democratic theory itself; as I've written before, I suspect that Madison's vision of pluralism presumed a controlling classical republic background (as represented by the men who would be the presumed default leaders of these factions; "men who possess the most attractive merit, and the most diffusive and established characters" as Madison called them), and thus by praising factional interactivity as he did, he was actually undermining the conceptual requirements of his own constitutional vision. But even if I'm wrong, and Madison really was just a pragmatic liberal all the way down, with little interest in the common good, preferring just to manage our diverse, we still must confront the fact that he was a product of his time and place. Worried American citizens today don't have to know anything about Madison's philosophy or constitutional theory to suspect that things may go very wrong when factions, thanks to long-standing government dysfunction and increasing cultural divides, become sources of permanent frustration and anger. The hard truth is that the traditional story of American pluralism provides no solution when such impasses emerge. The Civil War, which there was no compromising out of (despite the delusions of some revisionists), is proof of that.

True, vague talk about how we may be facing “another civil war” is pretty common, on both the left and right, so much so that, as I wrote above, Pompeo's language might arguably even seem tame by comparison. And frankly, such language is arguably to be expected. Madison's whole system assumed people will be passionate believers, and will fight hard for their factional causes. But that fighting, at least in the century between the end of the Civil War and the breakdown of the New Deal party system, took place in a context where, among other things, media outlets were subject to political requirements which standardized a certain degree of regional variety and fairness, the controlling presumption of whiteness effectively enabled cross-ideological compromise, and campaign finances were closely watched enough that there was rarely any upside in political extremes. But the civil rights and women's movements, combined with technology and money and deregulation, have long since broken down most of these electoral structures and practices which once defined our factions, with the result that political movements are increasing driven by which ever micro-faction can effectively leverage grievances over values, so as to allow them to dominate their fellows by pure momentum. As a result, it’s become easy for the passionate believers to assume they face uncompromising extremists, not fellow citizens that they’ll have to deal with eventually. As that assumption becomes standard it become self-fulfilling, making Madison's vision seem ever more quaint and out-of-date when we consider the cultural conflicts of today.

I confess I have come, over the past 10 years, to embrace this dark diagnosis almost entirely. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of reasons to think things aren’t all that bad; locally, in particularly, I suspect good government through traditional pluralistic politics is still possible. When all is said and done, though, if you’re one of those who look at political actors like Pompeo and—even if you agree with the values he expresses—wonder a little about just what the endgame of his absolutist language is, then you’re like those of us who are beginning to fear that our constitutional machinery for dealing with disagreement may not be able to handle the internet-empowered, shame-resistant, mutual-destruction, cultural factions of today. Does that mean that some entirely new electoral and political machinery is necessary? I suspect so—but unfortunately, getting any compromise on what that machinery should be remains far away as well.

"Twas a Matter of Timing and the Timing Was Right"

Exactly one year ago--March 27, 2020--Bob Dylan dropped "Murder Most Foul," without any public announcement or preview or warning--his first work of original music in over 8 years, in preview of his first album of new music since 2012's Tempest. I'm not a Dylanologist like many fans out there; I recognize that he's arguably been one of America's most important poetic voices for 60 years now, but even the Nobel Prize people know that. I am comfortable saying that Rough and Rowdy Ways in one of my favorite Dylan albums, and "Murder" is one of the primary reasons why. 

It's not the sort of song that I have any particular interest in listening to at any given time, but sometimes, like almost any truly great poem or work of art, the strange, haunting, tragic, but perhaps even weirdly hopeful incantation of Americana that this song provides is--like "Desolation Row," another one of Dylan's masterpieces--something that I just really want to hear. I'll put it on, and for the next 17 minutes I'm carried away. The greatest poets, like all the greatest artists and performers, are never solely about their chosen medium; they are also about the connection which they, through their various Muses, are able to provide between their times, their moment, and the medium in which they work. Dylan, whatever other criticisms one can make of the man--and surely those criticisms are legion--has continually, over more than a half-century, been able to bizarrely, unsettlingly, regularly connect with and/or comment upon his times. For him to have released this compelling dirge just as American settled into the third week of so of the pandemic, realizing that the year to come would not be a year of quick containment and renewal, but rather a year of difficult, despairing adjustments and realizations...well, some would call it prophetic. Which is a label Dylan has received often before, and hearing it again, would probably just make him shake his head once again, smile his creepy smile, and pick up his guitar again. 

Anyway, thanks Bob, I guess. Can't imagine what America will be like when you're no longer with us, watching us all, and writing your songs. Worse, I suspect.

Biden and (Some) Better Times for (Some of) Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

When President Joe Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan (ARP) a little more than a week ago, I commented to some friends that this may arguably turn to be one of the best things that has happened to Wichita in a very long time. Let me explain that argument here—starting with a rephrase of my original comment: the ARP will likely turn out to be one of the best things that has happened for many Wichitans in a very long time.

Why the change? In part because there are a thousand ways to think about a city, depending on the perspective of the person doing the thinking, and for every metric I or someone else might propose, someone else can surely come up with a different, countering one. While I don’t think that makes it impossible or inappropriate to talk in generalities about the common good (actually, I think it is both possible and necessary to do so), it does mean that I have to respect the perspective of tens of thousands of Wichitans, or more, who, for any number of reasons, hate (or at least have been told to hate, or hold to a political orientation which presumes—wrongly, I think—that they are supposed to hate) this latest stimulus.

Note however, that there are fewer such people than you might believe. While there were nearly 30,000 more people who voted for Donald Trump than for President Biden throughout Sedgwick County last November, leading the former president to win the county with 52% of the vote, that doesn’t hold for the city of Wichita itself, as this precinct-based graphic makes clear:

 

The city of Wichita isn’t entirely blue—not yet, anyway, and maybe not ever. But from Oaklawn to Bel Aire, the zoo to Eastborough, the default Republican preference of Kansans was challenged in our city, with a majority of voters throughout Wichita’s precincts going for Biden. Which means, if nothing else, that the passage of the American Rescue Plan is, for those voters, a huge confirmation of their political choice--a win, in other words. And not just a political win, obviously; nearly 100,000 households across Wichita are going to receive the $1400 per person stimulus checks (it would have been nearly 120,000 households, or easily 75% of the total population of the city, if moderate Democratic and Republican senators, including Wichita’s own two, hadn’t balked).

The Republicans of our city could push back at this point: the CARES Act which Trump pushed for did that too! True, but not to the same extent, and not as effectively. The ARP is actually giving more money to more people than did the CARES Act, which spent nearly three times as much money on businesses than on individuals and households. And while that money, mostly administered through the Paycheck Protection Program, was a lifesaver for some businesses, it was poorly administered, with comparatively little going to the employers that needed it most, thus having much less of an impact as it might have had, not to mention generating a lot of frustration and abuse along the way, as Wichita knows from plenty of local examples.

This can be debated, of course, as anything that involves hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars can be. Those who see the ARP as the second coming of the New Deal--whether hopefully or fearfully--should be prepared for disappointment; fundamentally, it’s really just another emergency stimulus package, first and last. It’s even possible that the CARES payment, when one really gets into the weeds, did more for working people than the ARP will. Now, if it works out that the additional child tax credits and increased unemployment and pension assistance which the ARP provides are made permanent—and the language of President Biden himself surely indicates that such is his intention—then that would retroactively turn the ARP into a genuinely transformative accomplishment, as much as Social Security or Medicare were. So if Wichita’s Republicans want to insist Biden didn’t do anything Trump didn’t already do, insofar as actual cash investments in the lives of struggling parents, workers, and retirees are concerned, the fairest answer may be: maybe; let’s wait and see.

But fortunately, there is an additional element to the ARP which we won’t have to wait a long time for, which demonstrates the true value of the act to Wichita’s development, and which involves something that the CARES Act barely touched upon: namely, direct aid to cities. Not just states (though they’ll getting plenty of support for all the programs they’re obliged to carry out too), but the municipal governments of "metropolitan cities," to use the actual language of the law. Wichita’s budget is facing estimated shortfalls of nearly $30 million over 2020-2021 thanks to the pandemic, with more likely to come in the future; the fact that the ARP will likely deliver close to $73 million to the city (according to the latest estimates) will make a massive difference in the costs which that revenue loss will mean to the quality of life in our city. 

(As an important aside, note that by setting up a program which bypasses states and counties, Wichita, and cities like it, may be able to avoid what looks likely to become a sticky constitutional and political fight, as some state leaders--including our own Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt--have argued that they ought to be able to use the ARP funds which will be given to states to cover new tax cuts, leaving the issue of making up for budget cuts to state programs aside. And that doesn't even touch the proposal by some Kansas legislators to grab up to $100 million of federal relief funds, presumably out of that which would be directed to Kansas counties, and use it to compensate businesses for their losses as punishment for the counties having imposed shut-down mandates as the governor directed. Wherever these destructive arguments go, they should touch that money directed to Wichita itself.)

I wrote “quality of life” up above purposefully. Thanks to the covid budget priorities the city council established last August, in which the Wichita Police Department enjoyed (in the midst of much protest and counter-protest) a large increase, the cuts which were introduced were overwhelming in the area of public arts, city libraries, capital improvements, parks and trees and sidewalks and bike paths and like. While clearly ARP funds will need to be used to first and foremost to support and supplement various localized covid-relief and anti-poverty measures (though honestly, given the distribution of responsibility between the city and the county, those should mostly come out of the $100 million or so which the Sedgwick County Commission will receive), if the spirit of this aid is adhered to by our city council at all (perhaps as encouraged by concerned citizens like you and me?) then we’ll see this important source of relief used to help begin to rejuvenate, and perhaps even re-direct, a city whose cultural offerings and music scene and patterns of growth (or lack thereof) have been taking major hits not just throughout the past year, but for quite a few years previously.

What is the “spirit of this aid” I mention? Simply the fact that the Biden administration, as it shaped and pushed for this relief package, had a set of priorities very different, and far more urban, than those of the Trump administration. The latter was happy to contribute to already deepening divisions in American society by tweeting at great length about “Democrat-run cities” with their “anarchist jurisdictions,” which is the sort of thing which leads Republican politicians like Kansas First District Representative Jake LaTurner to dismiss the whole thing as a scam to “bail out liberal states.” Those who are actually involved in administering cities, whether in red states or blue ones, know that is absolutely not true, and have said so at length. But the real story is buried within many and various ideas, plans, and people which Biden has brought with him to Washington.

While Trump’s re-election built itself in part upon distracting claims about how Biden’s crazed socialist ideas were going to destroy the (white) American suburban ideal, Biden’s campaign instead recognized that America’s suburban homeowner form houses a lot of racial and ethnic minorities, whose social and economic challenges required a response quite different from Trump’s culture war attacks. Biden’s push for more racial equity and low-income options among America’s suburban development goes hand-in-hand with lessening exclusive zoning requirements, encouraging greater density in development, and looking to expand transportations choices beyond just the well-subsidized suburban access roads and freeway on-ramps which have defined metropolitan sprawl for far too long, which in turn makes his nomination of Pete Buttigieg--a favorite of the Strong Towns movement!--as Secretary of Transportation potentially so important.

To be sure, you can legitimately criticize all of these supports as something that will actually undermine, rather than democratically empower, localities; I take all these criticisms seriously (even, to my surprise, the ones about zoning reform), and so should anyone else with genuinely localist and small-d democratic concerns about urban spaces in general. And yet, to see all of this happening in Washington, and underwritten at least in part by the ARP, at the same time that Wichita’s leaders are finally seriously talking about these related matters via their Places for People initiative, makes me wonder if there isn’t some kind of unforeseen alignment taking place. An alignment that will allow the different Wichita that is out there to take the support being offered it, and use it to build and encourage, in the midst of what is sure to be a long and difficult economic recovery, the kind of culturally-enriching, family-rewarding, individually-satisfying, community places and practices that Wichita has too-often sacrificed in the name of its usual, easily-fallen-back-into growth-centric routines.

It won’t come easily, of course, and it may not come at all. And if it does come, it won’t be a change that pleases the large number of Wichitans who look upon any push for greater urban sustainability, density, and equality in this city as antithetical to the small-town conservatism which they want to continue to imagine is appropriate for an urban area of a half-million people. That’s fair, I suppose. But I also suspect that, as a great many Wichitans emerge from what was probably, for the majority of us, one of the worst years of our lives, at least a few of us can see the possibility of some better—and even, maybe, differently better—times ahead. And even if not—well, 2021 can’t get any worse than last year, can it?

Jazz and Me, 20 Years On

One day during the Christmas holidays, I went downstairs to where our old television with its still-working DVD/VCR set-up stands, and I pulled out an old treasure: the complete documentary Jazz, which I had recorded on VHS tape when it was first broadcast, 20 years ago. Maybe some part of me realized that the show was hitting its anniversary, or maybe I just wanted some of that old-time jazz as the cold and dark January days settled in. It's a long documentary: 19 hours worth. I finally finished it, and it was a fun journey through times and music that I remember well.

I didn't grow up listening to jazz. The closest thing to that music in our house when I was a child was probably the omnipresent Hollywood musical soundtracks, some of which were downright jazzy in the old big band sense, and whose music has been an enduring part of our family life as our daughters have grown up. It was until years after I'd grown and developed my own musical tastes that I found out my Dad had been a big fan of Ahmad Jamal when he'd been in high school, but he hadn't kept any of his albums, any more than he'd kept any of Elvis's. Melissa's family was a little different; her mother and father (especially him) loved--along with lots of cheezy 1960s folk-pop like The Monkees--big, brassy, orchestral numbers, and they had kept their records, and so her young life was filled with all sorts of classical music (the louder the better) in addition to soundtracks, and you had some Gershwin and Brubeck and other jazz elements thrown into the mix there. But still, neither of us could really be considered jazz fans.

But a couple of things happened as we both made our way to Brigham Young University and eventually meeting and then marrying in 1993. Melissa played the French horn in marching band and orchestra in high school, and among her friends were some trumpet players who did jazz as well as classical. They introduced her to the music of Wynton Marsalis--who, in the mid-to-late 1980s, was probably better known (before he made the cover of Time Magazine in 1990, anyway) for his recordings of the trumpet concertos of Handel, Purcell, Haydn, and other artists than for his jazz. She, in turn, introduced his prodigious output to me. As for me, well, as I've documented at great length, I've always been a creature of radio--mostly pop and rock radio, but I've always been willing to spin the dial (back in the day when radio had dials) to see what I could discover. After moving to Utah to attend BYU, I discovered the Salt Lake City radio scene, which was worlds more diverse and sophisticated than what I grew up listening to in Spokane, Washington. Specifically--I think I can even remember the place; it was the house of a Utah relative of one of the fellows in my freshman dorm, whom we were visiting some Friday evening for some reason, in either late 1987 or early 1988, and the radio was playing in the background--I discovered KUER, the University of Utah's public radio station, and Steve "Daddy-O" Williams's "Nighttime Jazz." Something about the program--Williams's delivery, perhaps, or the way he made every tune he spun seem like both an original discovery and something whose history I felt embarrassed not to already know--absolutely hooked me. Discovering the distinctive lyrical possibilities for different instruments, as they soloed both fast and slow, upended--for the better--what little I thought I knew about music at that time, and while it didn't make me throw out my Paul Simon or Police cassette tapes, it did made me want to learn more. For the rest of my time in Utah, I'd tune in whenever I was in the mood--and in time, I found a lot to supplement that wonderful resource. (Turns out Williams retired from KUER about six years ago, after having run the program for more than 30 years, and the station has gotten out of jazz programming entirely. From a distance of decades, I tell Utah residents today: you have no idea what you've lost.)

Melissa's and my courtship and early marriage was filled with live music, which is something poor college students can do when they live in a university town. And for all the limitations of Provo, the home of BYU--and believe me, there are, or at least were, a lot--getting out to musicals and concerts and guest performances and student groups was easily accomplished. Right off the bat during her freshman year, Melissa volunteered to be an usher for shows in the fine arts building, and consequently got into to see just about everything. I was lucky enough to fall in with a wonderful gang of guys, some of whom ended forming Vocal Point, BYU's premier male a cappella ensemble--and through them, attending early rehearsals and shows, and just hanging out at their apartments, I (and later Melissa and I together) were never at a loss for creative, jazzy vocalizations and tunes. It's thanks to those talented dudes that Glen Miller's "Tuxedo Junction," Ella Fitzgerald's "It's Only a Paper Moon," or Benny Goodman's "Sing, Sing, Sing" became a part of my consciousness. Still, for all that, jazz wasn't at the forefront of what we listened to or sought out.

It might have been the man himself, Wynton Marsalis, who added some necessary fuel to my jazz fire (as obviously he also has for probably hundreds of thousands of others over the decades, to the delight and the chagrin of the man's many fans and equally many haters). Marsalis played with one of his large ensembles at Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake City in 1994--on his 33rd birthday, as it happened (at one point during the show, dedicated to the work of Thelonious Monk--and it was fantastic--a number Marsalis was conducting was interrupted by a member of the band, who had sneaked away in full sight of audience while Wynton was briefly soloing a minute before, suddenly reappearing with a cake with lit candles, and who marched across the stage while the whole ensemble shifted on a dime to "Happy Birthday"). It was a great evening, and it lead to multiple others, especially after Melissa and I moved to Washington DC, where were blessed--for the first couple of years we were there, anyway--with the much-missed WDCU, the public radio station at the University of the District of Columbia and simply the finest jazz radio I've ever listened to, and probably ever will. DC didn't have the a cappella scene we knew back in Provo, UT, but it more than made up for that so much more. Through our church we got to know an FBI agent who was also a skilled jazz pianist, who could do killer Bud Powell numbers when his mind was set to it, and a ferociously talented (and wonderfully, ferociously opinionated) cabaret singer who could put on some killer shows. During our time in DC we got to see artists like Ray Charles, Branford Marsalis--and Branford's brother Wynton again, which was probably the jazz highlight of my life. It was in 1997 at the old Warner Theater, with his Jazz at the Lincoln Center Orchestra, soon after he'd begun his tour for his just released jazz oratorio, Blood on the Fields; the original vocalist on the oratorio, Cassandra Wilson, wasn't with the band, which was a loss, but Jon Hendricks was, and that was an exposure to some tremendous jazz history there. While not the most enjoyable concert I've ever attended--Blood is a pretty heavy work--it was easily one of the most memorable, not the least for being able to wait along with all the other fans and spent a minute or two with Marsalis himself, who--for all his terrible reputation--was a total gentleman, despite his shirt being soaked with sweat from the show (he asked which one of us were musicians, and when Melissa said she was, he focused entirely on her, asking her why she hadn't kept up the French horn).

Looking back over all this, the fact that I simply at up Jazz when it premiered seems kind of inevitable. Ken Burns comes in for a lot of criticism from different segments of the progressive left, and as much as the NPR-listening, PBS-watching, bourgeois liberal part of me wants to fight against it, the socialist in me knows it's true. Rewatching Jazz makes pretty clear that the man really is a Pax Americana Democrat, with not a sliver of postmodernism complicating the way he constructs historical narratives. As with the documentary series that made his name, The Civil War (which I also have fond memories of, despite all the historical reservations that I think any educated person today ought to have about that beautiful but deeply flawed accomplishment), Burns approaches jazz music as a Great Man of History story. At one point while working through the episodes over the past month, I decided to keep track of how many times the narrator would introduce the focus of the next segment by saying something along the lines of "this man will change jazz forever" or "after this man, jazz was never the same," but I literally lost count.

For actually working jazz musicians, or for people who really get out to the clubs and the shows regularly enough to watch the improvisation of these talented musicians in real time, the near-exclusive focus of Jazz on the various titans of the music--the Duke Ellingtons, the Charles Minguses, the Dizzy Gillespies, the Count Basies, the Herbie Hancocks, and more--is probably more than a little depressing. And annoying too, given how the Burns's narrative celebration basically ends in 1960, skips the next decade and a half, and then only admits the jazz story is still ongoing once Dexter Gordon returns to the United States and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers is rejuvenated by the addition of the Marsalis brothers (Wynton and Brandon) in the late 1970s. If you love fusion jazz and Miles Davis's Bitches Brew (and I eventually came to, every bit as much as I love his Sketches of Spain or Birth of the Cool), this show isn't for you.

But I say: watch it anyway; you'll be glad you did. Or at least, I'm glad I did. Life goes on, and the sort of stuff which inspires and entertains you at one point of your life won't be the same at another. These days, it's our daughters who fill our home with songs from musicals and film soundtracks (when they aren't informing us about their new-found passions for, in the case of our oldest, Van Morrison, and in the case of our second-to-youngest, the k-pop sensation BTS). Melissa is much more likely to listen to zumba and dance music, and I probably listen to more Paul McCartney than anything else. But this series got me to go to my CD cabinet and pull out just a sampling of all that I've collected over the years. Ken Burns may be a failure as a critical historian, but as a documentarian of musical stories and historical excellence, I can't fault him one bit. So much wonder and tragedy and joy and sadness are packed into those 19 hours, all of it done in conjunction with tremendous music, whose chord changes and progressions and melodies can make you swing, weep, laugh, or just sit back comfortably and be carried away into the musician's own private world, which might discover to your surprise that it connects with memories within your own as well.

If you can listen to jazz musicians at work live--or if you can look forward to doing so, when the pandemic finally ends--you really should do so; I'm fortunate to teach at a small school that nonetheless has built tremendous instrumental and vocal jazz programs over the years, and they've been wonderful to support over the years. But even if that sort of resource isn't available to you, keep an ear out, tuned to whatever channel you can find on Spotify of Pandora or even humble radio. Jazz surprised me, years ago, delighting me with a range of mood and tone that I'd never known before. No, it hasn't defined my life--but it has added to it immeasurably. So poke around yourself (and, again, Jazz is a pretty good place to start, for all its limitations), and be surprised. You never know what you might find.

On Cities and Tongdong Bai's Confucian Modernity

[The following is a version of comments that I have been invited to give at a book symposium being hosted by the Center for East Asian and Comparative Philosophy at the City University of Hong Kong in October. It'll take place via Zoom, unfortunately. I'll get back to Hong Kong again someday, but not this year.]

Tongdong Bai’s Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case is a sprawling, ambitious, and often (though not always) compelling book. Going far beyond its title, Bai’s book does not only thoughtfully add to the ever-increasing literature on the relationship of the Confucian tradition to arguments about egalitarianism, meritocracy, and liberal democracy generally, but also aspires to make a comprehensive case for a Confucian alternative to liberal modernity entirely. Such a philosophical and historical claim might seem to be biting off more than any one book could ever chew, but there is much to be learned from the Confucian perspectives Bai brings to bear on the book’s many topics. In these comments, I will focus solely on the provocative framing which Bai sets up so as to situate the alternative which he spends the rest of the book describing, a framing which presents a way of conceiving of the Confucian tradition that leads directly to questions that, under some common interpretations, Confucianism had been assumed to have no answer.

Foremost among these interpretations is the assumption that the “familism” of the classical Confucian tradition--which Bai explicitly centers his analysis upon--is inapplicable to, or at least greatly constrains it direct applicability to, the modern world, which Bai himself characterizes as centrally involving the establishment of “large, populous, well-connected, mobile, plebeianized states of strangers” (p. 26). Given that, to quote L.H.M. Ling, classical Confucianism converges all the “various domains of human activity--political (ruler-to-subject), familial (father-to-son, parent-to-child), conjugal (husband-to-wife), and fraternal (brother-to-brother, friend-to-friend)--into one set of family relations writ large,” the notion of discovering in the Confucian tradition an arrangement that provides guidance to a society of characterized by mobility and anonymity is a surprising one. Bai’s argument this was accomplished through “the introduction of compassion-based humanness as a virtue,” thereby providing “a bond for a society of strangers” is powerful, though not, I think, entirely persuasive (p. 120).

That classical Confucianism lays out a moral and social system of signification and ritual which as a matter of theory served, and in practice through Chinese history frequently did serve, to tie together people beyond their basic family or village units is well understood. It is more commonly the case, however, that this understanding underscores a “civil,” as opposed to a “civic,” formulation of the possibilities for a Confucian politics. That is, the civilizing aspects of Confucian universalism are seen as not tied to any particular place or community, but rather to the simple fact of humans being everywhere in community with one another, beginning with the family and expanding out to potentially encompass anyone that any other given person could name (and be named by), thereby give real affective meaning to the obligations and bonds between them. As A.T. Nuyen put it, it invokes an “outward expansion of the individual self to a universal framework that encompasses the whole world.” How well can that vision of ritually realized civil relationships be adapted to the socio-economic reality of diverse populations capable of independent movement pursuing distinct, private goals in pluralistic civic spaces? Here, Bai qualifies his suggestions somewhat, and these are exactly the points where I find his basic framing of his argument most provocative.

Bait presents the centuries-long period of transition from the Zhou dynasty, through the Spring and Autumn periods and the Warring States period, until the establishment of the Qin dynasty (roughly 770 BCE to 221 BCE, a time which he abbreviates as the "SAWS"), as a time of modernization--though not the “modernity 2.0" brought on by the “industrial revolutions” of western Europe which “eluded traditional China” (p. 26). Nonetheless, as the SAWS saw the collapse of Zhou-era feudalism and its replacement with “a few large and populous states in which the kings had to deal with thousands of strangers without the nobility-based delegatory system available to them anymore,” Confucianism emerged in part as a response to “the demand for new political orders” which this early modern moment required. Bai elucidates this interpretation through some innovative use of well-known passages from the Mencius (in particular 1A7, with the story of King Xuan of Qi), concluding that “after the collapse of close-knit communities in feudal times [meaning the Zhou dynasty], the lord of a state lost the motive to care for his people, most of whom were now total strangers.” The Confucian tradition, in the hands of Mencius, presents compassion and humaneness “as a new bond between the ruler and the people, and as a new motivation for a leader of state to rule his people.” Thus the humane meritocracy of classical Confucianism, Bai goes on to argue, thus should be understood as a philosophical resource of direct applicability to the challenges facing liberal democracy today, since Confucian compassion and fellow-feeling were articulated in very socially similar--if very culturally distinct--milieus of modernity (p. 122).

My struggle with this--in many ways ingenious--justificatory argument is that Bai’s attempted association of the unique circumstances of the period of Confucianism’s emergence with the same period in European history which bequeathed so many of the conceptual developments that get lumped into “modernity” (the rise of skepticism and individualism in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the scientific developments of the Renaissance period; the development of advanced capitalist forms as changes introduced by travel, exploration, technology. and imperial expropriation were codified into government and law in the 16th and 17th centuries; etc.) simply lacks one of the fundamental elements which his own original description depended upon: urban spaces of genuine mobility, diversity, and personal subjectivity. This is not to deny that the ancient Chinese cities of Linzi, Yangzhou, Jicheng, or others lacked any sprawling or cosmopolitan character; on the contrary, the evidence is clear that many did. But for the Confucianism of Bai’s SAWS “modernity” to be truly accepted as, in his words, an order fit for “a society of strangers,” then it must incorporate some analogue to the kind of “heterogeneity of anonymity,” to quote Stephen Schneck, which slowly but surely emerged through the changing urbanism of Late Middle Ages and the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe. It is not clear that is the case.

Bai suggests, in reference to the long periods of disruption in Chinese history, that the overwhelmingly agricultural and local “close-knit society of acquaintances” which most take to be the default character of Confucian communities might be better seen as temporary refuges which developed in the wake of turmoil, or perhaps even “a mistaken projection of contemporary observations on the whole history of China.” His support for that revisionary argument is thin, however. Thus he follows this argument with the observation that “even if we accept the judgment that the economy of traditional China was agriculture-based, and its villages were societies of acquaintances that were mobile...only at a rather slow pace,” that still doesn’t account for “the mobility of government officials who were often not even allowed to take a post in their hometowns.” He thus argues that his interpretation of Mencius’s emphasis upon the bonds provided by humaneness is compatible with a “dual structure...in which there were communities of acquaintances on the level of the common people and societies of strangers on the level of the political and commercial elite.” Admitting that “for businessmen and officials in traditional China living in cities, their economic base was still often in rural areas, and thus they couldn’t sever the ties with the communities of acquaintances they grew up in,” he concludes that “[n]onetheless, the bond developed by Mencius for the society of strangers remains relevant” (pp. 123-125).

On that I certainly agree! It is vital to consider, as Bai does, how the bonding power of Confucian humaneness can open up our conversations about representation, gender equality, health care, civil rights, international institutions, and so much more, all of which most Westerners have tended to conduct alongside unquestioned assumptions about liberal democracy. But it is equally vital to acknowledge that those assumptions became as widespread as they did not solely due to the success of liberal democratic states, but also because those states recognized, and institutionalized practices pertaining to, the new, transformative forms of human life that were the creation of the modern urban space. The cry of the apocryphal 15th-century German peasant--Die Stadtluft macht frei!--reflected far more than the particulars of feudal law, but rather a general appreciation of the diversity, privacy, and distant formality that urban spaces came to offer in modern Europe. Thus have arguments about strengthening the kind of intimacy and community which the shift from gemeinshaft to gesellschaft arguably weakened, perhaps fatally, always had to struggle against accusations of agrarian nostalgia, and find ways to express themselves in the context of modernity’s seemingly inevitable liberal and urban character.

It is unfortunately that Bai, in this fine book, did not consider building parallels between what he presents as the modernity-compatible Confucian conceptualizations of humaneness, and the large literature on republican civic virtues, civil religion, and other communitarian and neo-Tocquevillian forms of social organization that have emerged over the past 35 years, especially considering that a great deal of that literature has both similarly struggled to clarify its theories in light of the rural-urban divide, the controversial place of elites, and other matters which clearly relate to Bai’s own reconstruction of the classical Confucian tradition, as well as having frequently connected with the Confucian tradition itself as well. Without that comparative work, the conceptual reach of some of Bai’s most interesting arguments remains an open question. To posit the classical Confucian tradition as possessing conceptual elements that can resolve the same theoretical dilemmas as liberal democracy, by virtue of that tradition being rooted in and have developed in response to similarly “modern” conditions, means that Confucianism must possess, within its teachings about civil morality, resources that can be adapted to not only the context of “strangerness” which elites may encounter in carrying out their ritual roles and responsibilities (as hypothetically adapted to the contemporary moment), but also the “mass strangerness” that the characterize modern civic spaces.

As a further example, Bai’s discussion of such civic spaces when conceived in terms of the nation-state and international relations generally, following what he labels a “new tian xia model,” is rich and thoughtful. But it, too, bypasses the space which must exist between, at one end, those street-level communities of moderns which will invariably partake of an urban character--the “ballet” of strangers who nonetheless acknowledge one another, as Jane Jacobs described so well--and at the other end, the sovereign state. Bai, influenced by an argument by Friedrich Nietzsche, dismisses the idea of there successfully existing under tian xia “quasi-autonomous communities,” since “a small community with even a few thousand people may not be able to maintain even the most basic technologies and institutions to sustain itself as a significant competing unit” (p. 177). But while it may have been reasonable for him to set that question aside while demonstrating the ability to extend Confucian arguments into current global debates over state competition, it reveals, again, something missing: an argument about how, and to what degree, classical Confucian humaneness, and the civilizing connections it enables, can be brought into modern civic spaces of urban diversity, subjectivity, and contestation.

My belaboring of what appears to me as a gap in the original framing of Bai’s argument should not be taken as a greater criticism than it actually is; disputes over the actual “modernity” of classical Confucian ideas do not compromise the value of what Bai suggests regarding the prioritization of equality, as well as much more, in modern life. Bai’s work stands as a great accomplishment, even if the way it presents its valuable political engagements may be less than fully persuasive on their own.