Only Stirling Newberry can write like this:
The key moment for the stupid decade politically was the election of 2002, not the election of 2000. It was in 2002 that the public ratified, by a narrow margin, the consensus decision of a nation under siege, and despite poor performance in dealing with economic problems, neither the opposition party, or the cultural opposition, could come up with a simple way of saying that government's of national unity need checks and balances. Instead, Bush was handed undivided government, and then again in 2004.But 2004 represented both the pinnacle moment, and the unraveling of the decade. In essence, the decade was the decade of stupid, charge forward and faith, because its fundamental model was "drill for more oil, let rich people turn it into junk that poor people will buy, kill anyone who gets in the way."
Next installment:
The Fall of the House of Gusher
P.S. For those of you who aren't familiar with Stirling, he was in many ways the intellectual architect of the Wes Clark "movement" - as opposed to the Wes Clark campaign - in 2003. Stirling can be a bit maddening at times, but when he's on, he's the smartest person the political blogosphere, bar none. After reading his latest article, the first by him in a while, my head is spinning - but in a good way. Check it out.
He talks about the puerility of our culture - the stupidity that Newberry speaks of is only one small aspect of it all.
The infantilization of the average American has profound impacts. For companies wishing to sell us crap, it is ideal. It means that people are easily manipulated with advertising, and that people lack impulse control to defer purchases. It means that people are increasingly narcissistic and materialistic.
The infantilization of America is evident in a number of ways. The top movies are nearly all silly escapism with no deeper meaning. The top google searches are to find out more information about celebrities or sports figures. Our evening news and newspapers are increasingly trivialized. People become increasingly obese as they consume more and more junk food, and fewer and fewer people actually know how to cook any more.
According to the author, even religion has been infantilized and trivialized. Instead of focussing on good deeds and compassion, religion is oftentimes reduced to sound bites and checklists. Even the Puritans (the religious extremists of their day) tended to live very modest and austere lifestyles.
From a political perspective, it means that people are easily manipulated with television sound bites or with attacks such as the Swift Boat smear.
This isn't a purely American phenomenon however - there are aspects of it that appear all over the world. I suppose in part caused by the worldwide reach of American media conglomerates.
We oftentimes assume that the problem is just the media - that if we find a way for our candidates to get a message through, that people will listen, and that people can be persuaded. But we also have the realization that most people aren't interested in reading long complicated papers - they still want the sound bites. What is even harder for us is that the current Republican thinking easily plays into the infantile culture - for examples, to individuals with little impulse control a tax cut sounds like an excellent idea.
But Democratic ideals are much harder to package in ways that would appeal to a puerile culture - that oftentimes requires empathizing with those that are less fortunate. We can cajole all we want about the energy situation that we face, but an infantilized American culture has no interest in reducing consumption. Instead we are reduced to playing into it rather than fighting it - by trying to get the populace to develop brand preferences (such as for hybrids or for CF bulbs), which have the side effect of reducing demand.
The author even has something to say about George Lakoff:
Yet if paternalistic stages create top-down forms of infantilization, markets today are creating bottom-up forms of infantilization-the less visible because they arise from below out of supposedly pluralistic and competitive markets that turn out to be coercive in intractable ways as they seek to inspire childlike dependency in consumers. Now even democratic models of citizenship are subordinated to parent-child paradigms. The scholarly linguist George Lakoff has recently strayed off the academic reservation to beguile the Democratic Party with a reductive, even demeaning, paradigm of politics that sees Republicans leaders as a model of the "strict father" and in Democratic leaders a model of the "nurturant parent" (a politically correct version of the "empathetic mother"). This paradigm treats citizens as consumers of government services-needy children in search of parental care.
I haven't finished reading the book, so my thinking about this is incomplete. In particular, I don't know what if any specific thoughts the author has about how we can reverse this trend. Once I do finish, I will probably write a diary of my own rather than comment on another, but Newberry's characterization of this as the "Stupid" decade really seemed to resonate with what I had been reading.
I am even wondering whether Bush is actually the perfect representative of an infantilized culture.