I believe we will obtain the best results when we allow states as much autonomy as possible to address their unique challenges. The principle of federalism works because it allows state and local governments to tailor their policy solutions to the needs of their populations.

Rep Jason Chaffetz just now:

Just dropped the Resolution of Disapproval re DC gay marriage. Will be H J Res 72

The distinguished gentleman from Utah’s solicitous concern for those of us who live here full time is duly noted—but really, it seems a little petty to take it out on us just because you got stuck with that whole “one wife” rule. Look, how about you let us figure out what kind of marriage policy we like in, you know, our city, and if at some point down the line, y’all want to go all “Big Love” again, I promise we won’t say boo this time.

We understand by now that this is a mistake in foreign policy.  The fuzzy liberal cleric has no credibility or influence with the marginal terrorist in the short term. The urbane western-friendly candidate turns out not to have built a domestic support base during his time at Oxford. It’s an error in domestic talk shows too: Conan O’Brien is the late night host most popular with people who don’t watch that sort of show much.

Cover of In Utero

I just had the unsettling experience of being shocked, at 30, by a rock song—one that hadn’t had that effect when I first heard it at 14. Not Margaret Dumont scandalized or ironic Claude Rains “shocked, shocked,” but, well, shocked shocked. In the dumb literal sense of jarred or shaken or slapped in the face.

Because it was mentioned in an essay I’m reading, I tossed on Nirvana’s In Utero for the first time in a while, and actually listened to it for the first time in a good while longer. The first 30 seconds or so of “Rape Me”—that lyric over that ambling, beckoning melody that abruptly turns furious?  I must’ve heard it a hundred times in the 90s, and tonight it made me look up and go: “Woah, what?”

As a teenager, adult taboos all look like absurd Victorian drawing room rules of etiquette. I remember, vaguely, the controversy over the song and the Walmart fatwa requiring it to be listed, bizarrely, as “Waif Me” on any copies Tom Walton’s boy would peddle in his shops. They were being edgy and provocative and pissing off the grown-ups, which was what rock bands were supposed to do, and therefore ballsy and cool even if a bit predictable. At 14, rape was a sort of abstract bad thing—not anything that had happened to me or (so far as I was aware at the time) anyone I knew. Not even something I’d thought about the horror of in any serious way. Probably the same was true of most of the 14 and 15 year olds flocking to Sam Goody for the album. Just: Edgy lyric. Clutch.

The year after In Utero came out, Nine Inch Nails released The Downward Spiral. You probably remember “Closer”—the one with the steampunk-before-steampunk music video and the chorus “I wanna fuck you like an animal.” Now, I spent a decent span of 15 wrecked, but I’m nonetheless confident that at the time I had never fucked anyone like an animal. Or like a robot. At all, really. This was not part of my lifeworld. It was not something I could seriously imagine saying to anyone else, or having said to me—and certainly not in circumstances where saying it might conceivably be a prelude to doing it.

Something about this seems perverse—beyond the obvious, I mean. Precisely at the age where we’re both aware and emotionally raw enough to find rock songs consuming and important—formative, even—we have no context for the elements that make them really powerful as opposed to mechanically provocative. It’s like reading Ender’s Game or seeing Heathers for the first time in college, only in reverse. We’re not even equipped to deal with what makes them conceptually interesting: What does it mean for a male songwriter to deliver Cobain’s lyric, or Reznor’s, either as character-poem narrative or as metaphor?

The thing is, I wouldn’t care enough to listen to either of these songs—at least not in the same way—if they hadn’t been my soundtrack well before I’d assembled the prereqs for either of them to properly slap me in the face. Nostalgia is the hook on a line connecting very different emotional responses, which end up getting sewn into the song’s patchwork audience.

Mulling this makes me a bit more sympathetic to parents who are Margaret Dumont–scandalized by rock lyrics, but no more inclined to credit their fears. They’re imbuing the song with a force it has for them, but probably not for their kids. If nothing else, the worry about what it will do to little Johnny at 14 ought to be balanced by the thought of what he’ll get out of it at 30.

First, to clarify the original thought a little. When I say that the modern populist right is animated by ressentiment, I’m not claiming it’s composed of people who are somehow jealous of, I don’t know, Nancy Pelosi or New York Times reporters, and want to be just like them, which would be silly. The dynamic I’m imagining looks very different—I’ll sketch it a little further on.  More importantly, I don’t mean this as some kind of Mannheimian “unmasking” where I diagnose the subconscious psychological reasons people hold some disfavored set of political views, thereby supposedly robbing them of their force. (“You only advance this argument because it’s in your economic interest/you hate America/mommy didn’t breast feed you/whatever.”) To the extent we’re talking about the economic issues currently center stage, I’m in substantial agreement with plenty of the explicit political principles of the movement I’m describing.  That is, I don’t think it’s ressentiment that causes people to adopt conservative values or policy positions. This is not the What’s the Matter With Kansas argument; it’s about how people organize in defense of their political values, not their reasons for holding them.  If anything, my worry is that the motivating impulse is not interestingly related to conservative values.

What do I mean? Well, it’s a core conservative insight that communities—and certainly political communities—are defined as much or more by implicit practices and ways of life as by explicit points of doctrine. The most basic level of any political group’s ideology is always necessarily outside the ideology, because in the wild the explicit principles need to be supplemented by implicit rules of action—practices as opposed to propositions—that tell you how to apply, weigh, modify, and for that matter just identify the important articulated principles that define the movement. Logic geeks may think of Lewis Carroll’s dialogue “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles” here; philosophy geeks may insert their favorite Alasdair McIntyre quotation. There’s conservative ideology, and there’s the distinct question of how it’s acted out or advanced by a particular group of human beings in a particular time and context.

The trick in a pluralistic democracy is that you also need embedded background rules and practices that make the national-level political institutions run. If it really is a pluralistic and free society, these won’t be part of some kind of thick monoculture, but embedded in the diverse lifeworlds of the people and groups in the polity. Rawls would have called these “comprehensive conceptions of the good,” but that connotes something a bit too abstract and theoretical—the conceptions are embedded in ways of life, not just lists of explicit tenets or propositions.  The clever alchemy of liberal democracy is to transform this potential source of conflict into an advantage through public deliberation, which (when it’s functioning) gives us collectively a broader pool of perspectives and truths and insights to draw on. But in a very practical way, especially in our electoral system, broad political movements also need to create shared identities that bind together large coalitions and mobilize them to action. The binding element can be something perfectly pragmatic: “We are the small-businessmen who will be put upon by this tax hike.” This works, albeit highly imperfectly, to the extent that the mechanism that pulls people into political engagement has as its upshot a motivation to persuade other people to agree with you about the best policy. If I favor school vouchers, I might emphasize to religious folks that they will make it easier to get their children a religious education, even if I don’t myself consider this much of a benefit, because the point is agreement, not an articulation of my full cultural worldview.

One aspect of the problem with our current politics, I want to claim, is that the political identity of the populist right is too thick. We long ago grew accustomed to this sloppy use of “community,” where we’ll talk about the “medical community” or the “gay community”—even though this is clearly a kind of nonsense above the level of a smallish town. But national-level political communities really are communities now, in a fairly robust sense. Between dedicated cable and radio channels and the Internet, you really can live in them in a pretty literal and immersive way.  But simultaneously—and maybe this sounds a bit paradoxical—political communities are therefore also more culturally autonomous. That is, they need no longer refer to something outside politics. When I enter politics as a small businessman or a Catholic or a philosophical conservative, I’m bringing information from outside the political process into it. What’s really pernicious about a politics of ressentiment is that it cuts that tether—it enables a political identity that’s generated and defined by political conflict itself. When Joe Trippi talks about the implosion of the Dean campaign, he says that one problem was that the internal community between supporter that any political movement needs became an end in itself, a way of satisfying social needs exogenous to politics, rather than a means to an electoral goal. Bringing other people onboard was less important than enjoying internal fellowship. The issue in each case was the way a particular group functioned, not any deep connection to the set of political ideals the group was nominally working to advance.

So that’s the general worry—a populist right animated by ressentiment isn’t going to do a good job of injecting conservative ideas into deliberation in a useful way. This is not, just to be clear, some kind of white-gloved complaint about “tone,” because really, fuck tone. The ascendancy of angry bluster isn’t the problem; it’s a symptom.  The problem is what the anger obscures. Maybe sex is a good analogy here: If you’re not turned on or emotionally engaged, it can look kind of ridiculous. Charging up the rhetoric prevents the kind of emotional distancing that would make the cultural grievances seem absurd, at least as politicial issues. I think progressives have to own their share of this, by the way: Part of the problem is that politics is no longer seen as a narrow tool for addressing some well-defined set of problems, but a kind of all-purpose machine for the satisfaction of human desires. Eating arugula falls under “interstate commerce” right?

As for the specific claim that the populist right is currently animated by ressentiment, I don’t think this is a matter of excavating hidden drives from the subconscious; I’m talking about what’s right out in the open. In fact, I want to suggest we need to read a lot of our current political rhetoric more literally and less symbolically. When Fox anchors make fun of Barack Obama’s choice of fancy dijon mustards, or the way he pronounces “Pakistan,” or say he’s “apologizing for America,” we naturally read these as coded claims about something else—as implying effeminacy and insufficient toughness for a commander-in-chief, or a class divide that shows he’s out of touch the concerns of ordinary workers, or an inability to project strength in foreign affairs.  I want to suggest that we take them absolutely literally: This guy eats different mustard than you do, pronounces words differently than you do, and doesn’t share your affection for national symbols. The coded meaning is actually a red herring—it’s just there to obscure the fact that the surface message is the one that matters.

We don’t need to do some kind of probing psychoanalysis, because this stuff isn’t subtext; it’s text.  Remember Palin’s infamous “death panels” post? It wasn’t just a claim that the government would deny care; the fear was that this was Obama’s “death panels” getting to decide how worthy you are. Liberals treated it as a generic argument about “rationing,” but by its own terms it was an argument about being judged. Conservatives’ favorite photo of Obama has him with his nose in the air looking down on the hoi polloi, testifying to his purported arrogance. Then the outrage over a strained reading of an Obama remark about “putting lipstick on a pig”: He’s calling Sarah (and therefore you!) a pig! The message is pretty insistent: They think they’re better than you. It’s not, again, that I’m asking why people hold certain policy views and concluding that it’s really about this kind of cultural resentment. I’m asking why the political coalition organized around this set of views is putting so much emphasis on this frame, and whether it isn’t ultimately a bad idea to.

Maybe because I write a lot about technology and media, I’m biased toward an account of where this is coming from that stresses those changes. When people want to talk about how television changed politics, they invariably cite the Kennedy/Nixon debate, where folks who heard it on the radio thought Nixon won, but those who watched it favored Kennedy. The effect of a media form, however, may depend significantly on the degree of media saturation: We don’t just see the official  debate and a few news clips in the months before the election. We see national political figures constantly—and maybe we’re even Facebook friends or Twitter followers. And when they appear for those big-ticket events, we’re often networked with fellow-travelers in realtime dissecting every gesture and expression. It seems to be offline now, but recall Jon Chait’s New Republic piece about hating George Bush? That smirk! That swagger! The way he mangles English! The visible and audible signifiers of group membership loom much larger. At the same time, demographic clustering is probably increasing the correlation between political ideology and these other cultural markers.

It’s a bit of a truism that new transit technologies always have their greatest transformative effect on those who were previously at the periphery. If you sat in on the media and tech forums at the last CPAC, this was a source of great excitement: Liberal elites used to hold all the levers of media power, and the great boon of the Internet for the right is that they now have a way of bypassing Hollywood and New York. So no big surprise that a lot of what’s initially released will be tinged with previously suppressed resentment about not having that media power, about being immersed in an alien-seeming media stream where the image of who’s glamorous or cool or important or serious doesn’t match your friends, and the admissible moves in the public conversation don’t sound like your conversations. People have read racial undertones into the rallying cry “I want my country back!” and its cognates—probably because this is a strange way to present opposition to a policy agenda, however misguided you might find it. The instinct is right, but I think the conclusion is wrong: Race—and communism, as Tim Curry would remind us—is another red herring. What we’re seeing is the natural sentiment of people who think of themselves as quintessentially American looking at an American popular and public culture that presents them as marginal. Palin or Joe the Plumber reintroduce to politics the promise of reality television: You too can be a celebrity—if not personally, at least by proxy!

Quite apart from its poisonous effect on deliberative politics, it’s actually striking how un-conservative this is. There’s a potential strategic benefit for any political movement in tapping these sorts of thicker grounds of solidarity, but the way it elevates and expands the scope of political identity—and therefore of politics—seems like it ought to be anathema to conservative principles.  All the spheres of life government must not invade, they’re voluntarily steeping in politics. It’s just another way of living in Washington’ s shadow.

First, I keep seeing defenders of the individual mandate against progressive arguments framing their case in political terms: If you don’t have a mandate, insurers will revolt against the “nondiscrimination” language and block its passage.  That’s probably true, but it’s like pointing out that a UN resolution to nuke China would likely face a Security Council veto. They’d be opposed because private insurance would cease to exist, which seems in some tension with the goal of getting people covered. I think the reason for putting it this more roundabout way is that they all agree insurance companies are foul pitspawn, to the point that it’s hard to persuade people that there’s a downside to a policy that would annihilate them. I watch debates ping-pong across Twitter where each side claims, as though it’s definitive proof of error, that the insurance lobby support’s the other’s position.

Second, I keep seeing people point out that the current bill, for all its flaws, is an improvement over the status quo from the progressive perspective. This is, uh, true… but I don’t want anyone who finds this compelling to represent me as a negotiator.  Look, suppose someone offers to let us split $1,000 as long as we can agree on a distribution.  If I offer you $1 and propose to keep $999, hey, you’re better off! You’d be downright irrational to turn it down! Though you might rationally start to wonder why the irrational people keep walking away from these exchanges with fatter wallets.  The answer, of course, is that I have no reason at all to offer you anything more than the bare minimum unless I’m convinced that you’re prepared to “irrationally” walk away from the table with nothing. That’s what politics is: The art of making irrational threats credibly. On the other hand, this logic only works if I actually get something out of the agreement. If I’m not any worse off because you decided to walk away from the table, well, ciao!

Finally, I saw some progressive blogger or other — this is my rant space, I don’t go hunting for links — drawing a rather strange connection between the current debate and the Iraq war.  The folks on the side of killing the bill, s/he noticed, were mostly opponents of the Iraq war from the outset, while many of those in favor of taking what’s on the table were grudging supporters.  Now, granted that it’s just weird to treat these as related, the interesting thing is that the “walk away” logic is actually more characteristically hawkish.  That is, be prepared to risk your worst outcome in hopes that you won’t have to make good on your threat, because your clear intransigence  will make the other site yield.

Ressentiment is a sense of resentment and hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, an assignation of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.

Conservatism is a political philosophy; the farce currently performing under that marquee is an inferiority complex in political philosophy drag. Sure, there’s an element of “schadenfreude” in the sense of “we like what annoys our enemies.” But the pathology of the current conservative movement is more specific and  convoluted.  Palin irritates the left, but so would lots of vocal conservatives if they were equally prominent—and some of them are probably even competent to hold office. Palin gets to play sand in the clam precisely because she so obviously isn’t. She doesn’t just irritate liberals in some generic way: she evokes their contempt. Forget “Christian conservative”; she’s a Christ conservative, strung up on the media cross on behalf of all God’s right-wing children.

Think back to the 2004 RNC—which I happened to be up in New York  covering. After witnessing three days of inchoate, spittle-flecked rage from the people who had the run of all three branches of government, some wag (probably Jon Stewart) puzzled over the “anger of the enfranchised.” And it would be puzzling if the driving force here were a public policy agenda, rather than a set of cultural grievances. Jay Gatsby learned too late that wealth alone wouldn’t confer the status he had truly craved all along. What we saw in ‘04 was fury at the realization that ascendancy to political power had not (post-9/11 Lee Greenwood renaissance notwithstanding) brought parallel cultural power.  The secret shame of the conservative base is that they’ve internalized the enemy’s secular cosmopolitan value set and status hierarchy—hence this obsession with the idea that somewhere, someone who went to Harvard might be snickering at them.

The pretext for converting this status grievance into a political one is the line that the real issue is the myopic policy bred by all this condescension and arrogance—but the policy problems often feel distinctly secondary.  Check out the RNC’s new ad on health reform, taking up the Tea Party slogan “Listen to Me!”  There’s almost nothing on the substantive objections to the bill; it’s fundamentally about people’s sense of powerlessness in a debate that seems driven by wonks. To the extent that Obama enjoyed some initial cross-partisan appeal, I think it owed a lot to his recognition that most people care less about actual policy outcomes than they do about feeling that they’re being heard and respected.

Or consider the study Ryan Sager highlighted a while back, showing that many SUV owners don’t merely think their choice of vehicles is harmless or morally neutral, but positively virtuous. Apparently the “moralistic critique of their consumption choices readily inspired Hummer owners to adopt the role of the moral protagonist who defends American national ideals.” Note two things here.  First, this is classic ressentiment: It’s not just that SUVs are great in themselves because they somehow “embody” some set of ideals. They’re good just because they symbolize an inversion of the “anti-American” values of critics. Second, think what it reveals that people feel the need to construct these kinds of absurd rationalizations—to make their cars heroic rather than simply denying that they do much harm. It betrays an incredible sensitivity, not to excessive taxes or regulations on the vehicles, but to the feeling of being judged.

Since everyone’s favorite way to excuse indefensible political behavior is to point out that they staaaaaarted it, let me point out that the ’70s mantra that the “personal is political” and some of the the ’90s obsession with policing language and attitudes  probably exacerbated the blurring of lines between questions of public justice and matters of personal virtue. Hell, we can translate the the basic beef of the Tea Partiers into faddish 90s jargon easily enough: They’re reacting against a hegemonic discourse in the centers of power that constructs them simultaneously as a bearers of class privilege and as a bestial Other.  The elevation of figures like Palin represents an attempt to reappropriate an oppressive stereotype, akin to the way some hip-hop embraces a caricaturish racist vision of violent black masculinity. To be sure, most of what gets cast as “oppression” here is just the decline of privilege, but the perception is what matters for the social dynamic.

Ultimately, this is a doomed project: Even if conservatives retook power, they wouldn’t be able to provide a political solution to a psychological problem, assuming they’re not willing to go the Pol Pot route. At the same time, it signals a resignation to impotence on the cultural front where the real conflict lies.  It effectively says: We cede to the bogeyman cultural elites the power of stereotypical definition, so becoming the stereotype more fully and grotesquely is our only means of empowerment.

To see how the difference between ressentiment and simple schadenfreude matters, consider Palin one more time.  If the goal is just to antagonize liberals, making her the Republican standard-bearer seems tactically bizarre, since ideally you want someone who isn’t so repugnant to independents as to be unelectable. If the animating force is ressentiment,  the leader has to be a loser to really deserve the role. Which is to say, expect the craziness to get worse before it gets better.

As upset as I was to not physically be at the rally, there were other issues with the overflow room that were really irksome. We were surrounded by men and women who traveled with us on [the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health]’s bus that did not speak English, and yet there was no interpreter in sight. Uh, BIG problem. They came to show their support, but how could they when they couldn’t understand what was going on? This was an example of inexcusably poor organizing.

Man, do I ever know the feeling. Whenever I show up at an event with a large, organized group of Spanish-speaking people, and they haven’t thought to provide an interpreter for us, I get so frustrated that I write a long irate blog post about it.

And when I say “write a long irate blog post,” I mean “translate.”

“We’re seeing more and more younger folks who are admitting to using” marijuana, she said. These younger adults usually range in age from 18 to 25, and many behave as though using marijuana is not that serious.

“People don’t see it as a big deal,” she said. “That’s the thing that’s the scariest.”

Ms. Martin attributes the slight resurgence in marijuana use to the coverage the drug has received in recent months during the California legalization debate.

“When it looks as though someone is condoning the use of it or saying, ‘Oh it’s not that bad. There’s a good use for it,’ it makes [marijuana] look less threatening,” Ms. Martin said.

IOZ responds:

[E]ven in judgment I have never, to my recollection, heard a twelve-stepper announce that the problem is that our society doesn’t take alcohol, marijuan, heroin, ad inf. seriously enough.

Treatment facilities, on the other hand, are business ventures, and prohibitionary public policy is good for business, not only because the courts and prisons funnel thousands of people into treatment every day, but also because addicts like my brother who are insincere in their desire for recovery use treatment facilities as means of escaping and preempting social, financial, and legal problems.

Presumably R.J. Reynolds executives find it “scary” that sitcom characters don’t talk muchabout the smooth relaxing flavor of a Camel these days, but there, at least, most journalists know better than to dignify their cupidity with coverage.

Up to now, the president hadn’t done anything to upset any of the constituency groups of the Democratic party.

Possibly Fred doesn’t know any progressives, civil libertarians, or gay people. But we have this Google thing now.