A little less hysteria? I'll second that.

This morning both Krugman and Dionne conclude what has been a loud, tedious, and all-around politically exaggerated year with calls for a more moderate new one. Krugman, of course, assesses the expiring circus from an economic angle — which has an encouragingly positive slope, as long as we "avoid more self-inflicted [austerity] damage" — though at the root of the recovery's tardiness have been remorseless, fright-wigged pseudoconservative inanities about President Obama as a degenerate "job-killer," a Marxist "redistributionist," an "anti-business" radical, etc. etc. In a word, we've progressed economically despite all the political silliness, and Krugman's implicit hope is that this conspicuous progress will dampen said silliness.

Dionne, on the other hand, has watched the circus' ill-mannered antics from a more politico-cultural point of view. What's so enchanting about him is that his Catholic faith in redemption simply never gives up. "I am all for boisterous debate and tough political and philosophical competition. It’s how I make my living," he writes. "But our democratic system would be healthier if it … reserved the harshest invective for things that are genuinely monstrous." Alter Dionne's conditional "if" to a healthier democracy when we stop with the mountainous invectives over molehills, and you've the meat of Dionne's philosophical outlook.

Still, he notes, there's that eternal tug between light and polemical darkness:

The reaction to Obama is part of a larger difficulty that involves pretending we are philosophically far more divided than we are…. The boundaries on the left end of what’s permissible in the public debate have been pushed well toward the center. This makes the hysteria and hyperbole all the more incomprehensible.

Except it's not. Unacceptable, yes, but incomprehensible, no. On the right, a depraved, easily recognizable symmetry has been playing out for some time. Its leaders are led by their hysterical followers and the followers are, in turn, pragmatically led by even more hysterical and hyperbolic leaders. In brief, hysteria works — it's the one effective talisman against evil primary challenges.

No doubt we'd see the same symmetry on the left were it not for what Dionne sagely observes: The left, today, is the center. Which is another way of saying that the left is contemporary politics' genuine conservatism. "[E]ven people who call themselves socialists no longer claim to have an alternative to the market as the primary creator and distributor of goods and services," notes Dionne — just as most American leftists honor God, country, family and community. While the right has lost its soul in philosophically deracinated fits of extremism and hysteria, on the left a level-headed Burkean faith in tradition and institutions thrives.

Even so, I'll cop to some of what Dionne charges. In my own dismay against the right's radicalism, I too often paint a post-impressionist picture of what's actually a false American divide. Philosophically, we possess a greater unity than our politics reflect, in that many Republicans possess little idea of just how disastrously their party has derailed. What we lack in our unity is public enlightenment — a wider knowledge that Obamacare isn't the Devil's tool, that Keynesianism isn't Marxism, and that regulation of business evolved only out of natural capitalist animalism.

In other words, I'll try to do better next year in tamping my own hysteria — and here's a New Year's wish that President Obama does better in the arena of public enlightenment.

 

Comments

[Peter G]

"Even people who call themselves socialist...."??? Excuse me Mr Dionne but only people who recognize that the market is the primary creator and distributor of goods and services are intelligent enough to be socialists or articulate a socialist vision. If you are such a person as can't see that by now your best bet is to stay home and pour over Das Kapital looking for the Big Mistake. Or maybe just watch reruns of SpongeBob Squarepants.

[Betsy]

Maybe, also wish that MSM would do a better job at covering what President Obama is actually saying. His "communication" has always been there, but the MSM is refusing to cover it. Think only of NYTimes' coverage of 2014 and the absence of ANY coverage of PBO at all despite the climate deal with China; the historic changes with Cuba...
I get so tired of PBO being blamed for "the arena of public enlightenment" when whatever he says is being totally ignored by all the major networks.