Any anti-Establishment movement worth its salt seeks to become the Establishment. In the 1960’s, countercultural forces wanted to end Jim Crow, fight for women’s “liberation,” and keep our country out of pointless unwinnable wars. They were mostly successful in those efforts, but they were accomplished not just by persuading established power-brokers to change their minds but by a new generation moving into positions of power themselves.
The blogosphere arose as an anti-Establishment movement, but today we see people like Steve Benen, Nate Silver and Ezra Klein as part of the political media’s firmament. They have improved the quality of the nation’s political coverage even as they have tamed themselves somewhat to adapt to their new standing as insiders.
The present day anti-Establishment mood of the Conservative Movement doesn’t follow this pattern. They are running for offices that they object to in the first place. “If elected, I promise to do absolutely nothing since the Constitution says that Congress can’t pass any laws whatsoever.”
These people don’t want to become the Establishment; they want the Establishment to go away. The left is often guilty of a similar “permanent outsider” mentality, where power is there to be scolded and critiqued but never gained.
But politics is about power, and if you aren’t seeking it, then you’re just a noisy observer.
Looks like everybody can’t wait for the withering-away of the state — it just comes after a couple of very different looking Revolutions.
NO, if given the power to “practice” government these self-centered, ethnocentric, ignorant conmen will do just that-malpractise government-no matter what they profess now.
It will not be the removal & absence of government laws: it will become an accumulation of new laws declaring “natural givens” which will impose their closed-minded ignorance on our culture.
New laws will be the only way they can suppress and oppress rational and empathetic thinking and action by the citizenry.
There’s more to successful and productive policy than just power or ideology. And those in power need to remember that “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And that corruption starts when you have wangled an invitation into the establishment instead of becoming the power of an establishment. Often the price of admission is compliance with a corrupt system.
Of course, the temptation of corruption comes with the seizure of power through electoral landslides or revolutions as well. And power gained through deception is almost always corrupt and often corrupts those who are opposing it as well. One need only look at AARP’s capitulation to the Simpson-Bowles commission recommendations or the sudden ineffectiveness of the mainstream corporate-funded environmental movement to see this.
An information environment in which deception is the norm rather than the exception creates a politics in which the establishment, anti-establishment are both ineffective in policy and the trans-establishment that can broker changes no longer exists.
Attacks on the establishment tend to show one is not in the establishment (unless one is trans-establishment). Attacks on the anti-establishment tend to mark the transition into the establishment and the risk of corresponding co-option, attack the anti-establishment being one of the first loyalty tests that the establishment requires.
Pointless anti-establishmentarianism is the doctrine of doing the same tactics that have failed over and over because of some doctrine or because thinking through what might work more effectively is too much work for armchair and part-time activists.
What we have in the US is less an establishment than a kleptocracy in which each individual in an “establishment” position is ripping off the public. The revolving door from the Obama administration is absolutely striking in its corruption. Chris Dodd level striking. Erskine Bowles level striking. Keith Alexander level striking. David Petraeus striking. Biden Junior striking.
As always, excellent and thought-provoking points: thanks, TarheelDem.
One small quibble: Lord Acton’s dictum is “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. He wrote it in response (and opposition) to the 1st Vatican Council’s promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility.
Another perspective on power is Alinsky’s: that power is such a good thing everyone should have some.
Alinsky’s view is what is called checks and balances. It fails when there are factions that seek to have absolute power through obstruction, as anyone who has ever worked through consensus-based decision-making can attest.
This is why the moral thing to do is to fight the election, win, and then immediately resign.
(You have to fight and win the election first, because otherwise you can’t prove that a person of color, or an LGBT candidate, or a Muslim, can actually be elected; that progress is possible.)
But then you have to immediately resign, before the complicity sets in, after which you return to the womb of the People, from whence you came.
If the only option is to become a token, resignation is a tactical option to highlight that sort of corruption. Typically, it is not the only option. And folks try to work strategies that use the power of their constituents and whatever base they can attract as leverage against the corruption in the system.
One does not only face this as a member of some class regularly discriminated against by a percentage of voters who would normally otherwise align with you. It is the fate of all reformers who get elected. The journey of Dennis Kucinich in electoral politics is a helpful one to study and contrast with, say, John Kerry.
It would be nice to have some recently elected freshman member of Congress point out that they are running a casino, resign, and build a reform movement. Nice in that one wonders how effective that tactic would be and how cynical voters have become.
Voters have been that cynical since they were putting black and white pebbles in amphorae.
I thought that ostracon actually meant something. Silly me.
Greeks ordinarily voted with psephoi, pebbles, which is why the scientific study of voting systems, etc. is called ‘psephology’. The vast majority of the electorate was illiterate by any exacting standard. Usual procedure employed an amphora for the vote to be counted, and one for the discarded vote. Each voter took a light-colored and dark-colored pebble, and if he released the psephos with his hand below the rim of the amphora, no one could see which colored pebble he was submitting to be counted and which to be discarded.
It was the first widespread use of a secret ballot. The Romans, e.g. voted orally.
The use of ostraca was limited to those cases where more than a yes/no choice was required, such as writing out the name of the citizen to be ostracized. This was a rare procedure, compared with the more routine work of the assembly.
When I first joined a school board (interim appointment to fill a vacancy) the president told me there was one priority above all others — get the voters to pass the budget.
Without it, all other talk — among the board members or the public — was moot. Without a budget all decisions would be made for us, either by circumstance or by faceless people in Trenton. And any meaningful action would be impossible.
Once that was passed then everyone can talk all they want about bringing prayer into the talent show, organic lunches, the world language curriculum, if the kindergarten teachers was nurturing enough, or how do we get around the latest unfounded mandate from Washington or Trenton.
But it starts with an assumption by the people with authority that they will actually govern the school and have funds to do so.
That would be “unfunded mandate”
When I first joined a school board (interim appointment to fill a vacancy) the president told me there was one priority above all others — get the voters to pass the budget.
How does that work in a place like Philly? And the state has ran the Philly schools even farther into the ground then the city itself did.
My point was that those who serve in government have to accept responsibility to do more that just yell at government — as those on the sidelines do .
I don’t have a lot of first hand knowledge of the Philly school problems, and nj school have a fairly unique bent towards home rule, but I suspect that for whatever reason the people in Philly didn’t competently run the schools (political morass, loss of tax base, talent drain, disjunction in Harrisburg, I don’t know), and decision making was taken away from them because they allowed finances to take away all good options and/ or moved to the state because the state felt the kids were being harmed by local leadership (even if the state actually can’t do any better from 150 miles away.
Why the scare quotes for women’s “liberation”? As a woman who came of age in the 60s I can guarantee that women at the time did indeed need more liberty.
I find the Tenthers fascinating. They’re so smug and sure of themselves, and yet their arguments are transparent nonsense. You can see how shallow their analysis is from the fact that they quote John Marshall, of all people, in support of their movement:
(I saw that on their blog) OK, fine, he said that, but he also explicitly rejected the strict constructionist reading of the Constitution in McCulloch v. Maryland. If these people are legal and constitutional scholars, they should know that.
(Of course, there are other Tenthers who are at least consistent enough to say that Marshall was an activist judge and McCulloch v. Maryland was wrongly decided. But the fact is, if they really knew what they were talking about they should be Articles of Confederationists, not Tenthers.)