You recall I posted about this recently, you know, the supposed shift of young Americans toward unfettered free-markets and no welfare state combined with social liberalism. Or, as Connor Kilpatrick labels it, mullet libertarianism: "business up front, party in the back."
Mr. Kilpatrick gives the lie to that baloney that "the kids have all gone Galt" Actually, he doesn't doubt it's real in a certain sense, it's just overblown. Drill down issue by issue, and today's young American libertarians sound a lot like European social democrats.
What's worse is that 79 percent of Millenials don't consider themselves politically engaged, i.e., their views don't count for s**t until they decide to get their white hands dirty in our filthy-corrupt political system. The ones that do join the Occupy movements, not the Young Republicans.
And here's the kicker. When these so-called libertarian kids -- who aren't politcally engaged, mind you -- are polled about a hypothetical matchup between Obama and libertarian hero Ron Paul, 41 percent pick Obama and only 27 percent pick Paul.
Of course Brooks's op-ed is mostly wrong, but it's wrong in a thoughtful way, not a "liberals-hate-America-and-are-trying-to-destroy-it" way, so Brooks deserves a thoughtful response.
To start, we must concede that "liberal" is a dirty word in the U.S. nowadays, unfair and silly as that may be. We liberals have failed to own it and say it proudly. (Except for me). The Right has done a pretty good job of destroying it, by linking "liberal" to anything that goes wrong with government. As Brooks correctly points out, Republicans are in the ridiculous but advantageous position of being able to criticize any lapse of government, including lapses of their own creation, on "liberal" government, or Big Government. When they screw up it's just an abstract "See, I told you so," moment. When they don't screw up, they've defied the odds and "proven" that Republicans govern better. Win-win for them. Give them a pat on the back for excellent spin control.
But as Michael Moore and others have aptly noted, when you go policy by policy, Americans who won't dare call themselves liberals say they hold liberal policy views -- equal pay for equal work; higher taxes on the rich; right to abortion and gay marriage; environmental regulation, etc.
Liberals and liberalism, I believe, are partly a victim of their own successes. I don't distinguish "progressives" from liberals in any significant way, except self-identified progressives seem more interested in reform. Anyway, my point is that the Progressive Era, one of the only hopeful and shining eras of U.S. politics, is now under attack, as is the word "progressive" *. I've written about this before. The achievements of the Progressive Era, presided over by reformist Republicans Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft, are numerous, profound, and enduring. To name just a few: ban on child labor; the 8-hour workday; regulating sweatshops; direct election of U.S. senators; breaking up monopolies and trusts; regulating interstate commerce; food and meat inspection; establishing national wilderness parks (a uniquely American invention); and on and on. None of us wants these reforms repealed. We take them so much for granted, or are simply ignorant about how hard-fought they were, that today's liberal-progressives don't even think to brag about their track record of successful reform within the framework of free market capitalism.
* Evil psych patient Glen Beck's recent "lectures" about the "horrors" of the Progressive Era and Teddy Roosevelt are his attempt at Swiftboating U.S. history; because Republican sharks like him understand they must attack their opponent's greatest strengths, not their weaknesses.
If you want to go back to the post-WWII and Great Society, again, I believe liberals are victims of their own success. After winning two world wars and ending the Great Depression, Democrats passed two programs, Social Security and Medicare, which have helped to keep generations of U.S. seniors out of squalor, suffering and indignity in old age. Compare poverty stats of seniors before and after Social Security: 50 percent in poverty before; 12 percent in poverty today (during a recession, mind you). No comparison. The G.I. Bill and cheap G.I. housing loans put the Greatest Generation through college with a roof over their heads. The War on Poverty did work. It's just that Democrats (and liberal-progressives) don't take credit for it, because, well, maybe we look at those today as American achievements. But strictly speaking, they weren't. They were liberal-progressive achievements. We liberals are always stuck, as David Brooks remarks, defending Big Government's administrative weaknesses, and not celebrating its dramatic successes -- as Republicans would do... if they had any successes to celebrate. (Seriously, think hard and name one in the last 30 years that is all theirs. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. .... OK, I'll name one for you: they ended unfunded federal mandates on the states. Bet you weren't going to say that, though.)
Brooks is right about "rent-seeking" behavior, although let's face it, he's really just talking about the need for congressional campaign finance reform of our pay-to-play system. We don't have bureaucrats regularly soliciting bribes in America, or political patronage on a 19th century scale anymore. What we have are the rich paying for more legislated tax breaks and privileges all the time, to the detriment of the middle-class majority.
Americans may not have a lot of trust in government, but compared to what? The military? Oops, that sort of is government. The priesthood? Big oops. Corporations? Do they trust BP more than the EPA? I doubt it. But again, it's the fault of us liberal-progressives for not constantly pointing out the obvious, which is just how seamlessly our federal bureaucracy works most of the time. We suck at self-promotion. Instead we let conservatives jump on every badly designed program, or dishonest citizen who games the system, and blame it all on hapless liberals, as if the exceptions prove the rule.
For better or worse, America is a country where the loudest voice seems the most convincing, where you spike the ball in the endzone to brag about every achievement, and where you kick your opponent when he's down and call him a loser. But that's just not the way most liberals are. And it costs us. We look terribly weak and ineffective when in fact we are strong and make America stronger. That is our problem, Mr. Brooks.
It's not because liberalism lacks cultural power. Many polls suggest that a majority of college professors and national journalists vote Democratic. The movie, TV, music and publishing industries are dominated by liberals.
It's not because recent events have disproved the liberal worldview. On the contrary, we're still recovering from a financial crisis caused, in large measure, by Wall Street excess. Corporate profits are zooming while worker salaries are flat.
It's not because liberalism's opponents are going from strength to strength. The Republican Party is unpopular and sometimes embarrassing.
Given the circumstances, this should be a golden age of liberalism. Yet the percentage of Americans who call themselves liberals is either flat or in decline. There are now two conservatives in this country for every liberal. Over the past 40 years, liberalism has been astonishingly incapable at expanding its market share.
The most important explanation is what you might call the Instrument Problem. Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, but they don't trust the instrument the Democrats use to solve problems. They don't trust the federal government.
A few decades ago they did, but now they don't. Roughly 10 percent of Americans trust government to do the right thing most of the time, according to an October New York Times, CBS News poll.
Why don't Americans trust their government? It's not because they dislike individual programs like Medicare. It's more likely because they think the whole system is rigged. Or to put it in the economists' language, they believe the government has been captured by rent-seekers.
This is the disease that corrodes government at all times and in all places. As George F. Will wrote in a column in Sunday's Washington Post, as government grows, interest groups accumulate, seeking to capture its power and money.
Some of these rent-seeking groups are corporate types. Will notes that the federal government delivers sugar subsidies that benefit a few rich providers while imposing costs on millions of consumers.
Other rent-seeking groups are dispersed across the political spectrum. The tax code has been tweaked 4,428 times in the past 10 years, to the benefit of interests of left, right and center.
Others exercise their power transparently and democratically. As Will notes, in 2009, the net worth of households headed by senior citizens was 47 times the net worth of households led by people under 35. Yet seniors use their voting power to protect programs that redistribute even more money from the young to the old and affluent.
You would think that liberals would have a special incentive to root out rent-seeking. Yet this has not been a major priority. There is no Steve Jobs figure in American liberalism insisting that the designers keep government simple, elegant and user-friendly. Sailors scrub their ships. Farmers clear weeds. Democrats have not spent a lot of time scraping barnacles off the state.
Worse, in an attempt to match Republican rhetoric, Democratic politicians are perpetually soiling the name of government for the sake of short-term gain. How many times have you heard Democrats from Carter to Obama running against Washington, accusing it of being insular, shortsighted, corrupt and petty? If the surgeon himself thinks his tools are rancid, why shouldn't you?
In the past few weeks, the Obama administration has begun his presidential campaign by picking a series of small fights with the Republican-led House over things like recess appointments. These vicious squabbles may help Obama in the short term by making him look better than Republicans in Congress. But they will only further discredit Washington over the long run.
Life is unfair. Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt. Democratic venality undermines the Democratic argument that Washington can be trusted to do good.
Liberalism has not expanded because it has not had a Martin Luther, a leader committed to stripping away the corruptions, complexities and indulgences that have grown up over the years.
If you'll forgive some outside advice, President Obama might consider running for re-election as Luther. It's not enough to pick a series of small squabbles and then win as the least ugly man in the room. He might run as someone who believes in government but sees how much it needs to be cleansed and purified.
Make the tax code simple. Make job training simple. Make Medicare simple. Every week choose a rent-seeker to hold up for ridicule and renunciation. Change the Congressional rules. Simplify the legal thickets that undermine responsibility.
If Democrats can't restore Americans' trust in government, it really doesn't matter what problems they identify and what plans they propose. No one will believe in the instrument they rely on for solutions.
Kline's critical essay is excellent but long so I'll quote selectively:
"At best, progressives seek to convert.... Thus, they don't frame what they engage in as a fight but rather as a debate."
"It is difficult to think of a major progressive policy which commands less than a plurality. This situation is one reason for the lazy reliance upon electioneering by progressives, they know that their issues are popular, in principle at least. Rather childishly, they just want a show of hands then, as if that is what goes on really in elections."
"One could say unflatteringly that the goal of 'progressives' in activism is to raise their personal karma by standing up for what is right."
And here's how Kline sums it up, how radical leftists like moi can win:
"Money is not the main problem; feet on the ground moving forward are the real problem. A discrete agenda pursued full-time by experienced organizers is the solution. Less talk, and more walk. Progressives have successfully stamped Big Capital as 'anti-us' historically, and they need to return to this. Those active for social reform have to forget about the electoral cycle. They have to forget about what the lunatic Right is doing as much as possible and concentrate on what they themselves are in process of accomplishing. They need a compact reform agenda (yes, bullet points and not more than ten of them). They need a defined activist strategy, no matter how large the difficulties or time horizon appear. They need to build genuinely activist organizations with specific plans to achieve a core set of goals. And they have to reclaim militancy as a word, and deed, of pride. If they do those things, they will make real progress, and moreover they will be ready when the moment comes for breakthrough amongst the wider society."
On third thought, this is a stinging rebuke to me and basically everybody who spends most of their spare time & energy blogging, posting, linking, and writing stuff to support their liberal-progressive causes. Because basically, Kline is saying (while writing/blogging, OK I get the irony here), that preaching to the choir won't cut it, that nothing was ever won politically by persuasion but only by pounding electorally those folks who hate your guts. 'Nords, it doesn't matter what Americans think, it matters how their politicians vote. Point taken. Blog on!....
Like many of you reading these pixels, I've found myself in the last year burnt out on American politics, mostly because it has become a glorified red-versus-blue summer camp color war devoid of substance and logic. That kind of thing, which might have been fun as a kid in summer camp, is neither enjoyable nor mildly interesting as an adult muddling through day-to-day issues here in the real world. Sure, political junkies on cable TV, in the blogosphere and in the halls of power think the world revolves around political palace dramas, but as Jon Stewart so aptly put it, "Most Americans don't live their lives solely as Democrats or Republicans or conservatives or liberals -- most Americans live their lives that are just a little bit late for something they have to do."
The fact that so few in our political arena appreciate that truism is one reason I've really just had it. There's only a finite amount of time in a given day, and I -- like most Americans in the real world -- just don't have time or energy to contribute to the part of our culture that pretends D.C. gossip and the day's manufactured partisan controversies are monumentally important when, for the most part, they aren't -- at least not to those of us who are living here in a real recession-hammered world that both parties ignore.
The other reason I've become less interested is because the political arena has become less interesting. It is as if the drama of politics -- once vaguely provocative -- is now all pre-programmed. We know what Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are going to say. We know how progressive media is going to respond. We don't even have to tune in to know the reaction.
This is particularly true after elections -- and, in specific, when it comes to the mind-numbing "Future of the Democratic Party" debate. Indeed, I could have told you months ago that the week after the election would be marked by various self-appointed pillars of the Democratic Party coalition saying Democrats should do this or should do that to rescue their electoral future.
For example, I could have told you that a washed-up has-been like Evan Bayh would publish a New York Times op-ed insisting that Democrats "were too deferential to our most zealous supporters" (read: liberals) even after the Democratic Party crushed a public option, watered down Wall Street "reform," extended Bush-era civil liberties atrocities, escalated the Afghanistan War, further ballooned the defense budget and began moving to extend the Bush tax cuts.
Likewise, I could have told you that those careerists in D.C. who make their livelihood off this kind of pablum would publish a "strategy memo" in something self-importantly called "The Democratic Strategist". And I could have told you that this "strategy memo" would defend the bash-the-liberals meme with bromides about how "all of the major perspectives within the Democratic Party have a legitimate place and role in today's Democratic coalition" and about how "the present moment categorically demands a basic level of Democratic unity from every element of the coalition" (read: liberals shouldn't criticize the corporatists who destroyed the Democratic Party -- and the country).
I could have told you all of this because, as I said, it's pre-programmed. It's not spontaneous. It's not reacting to any reality out here in the real world. It's not responding to a changing country. It's pre-written, pre-conceived, pre-packaged feces sprayed at us in liquid form, all to justify a continuation of how it's always been -- and, frankly, how it probably will always be.
In the past, I may have contributed to some sort of organized pushback. But not this year. No, this time I can muster only one Cheney-esque response to the whole grotesque kabuki theater surrounding the inane "Future of the Democratic Party" debate: Go fuck yourself.
Evan Bayh and Third Way and The Democratic Strategist and the DLC and all the professional pundits and cable-TV zombies and D.C. spokesholes - all of you soul-raping corpses and shit-eating poindexters paid to appear on my television screen and scream at me about liberals ruining everything, please, I beg you on behalf of the silent irritated majority: Just go fuck yourself.
Go fuck yourself because all of your arguments are about what policies should be pursued to rescue Democratic politicians' electoral future, rather than about what policies are needed to rescue, say, the fucking country's future. Additionally, go fuck yourself because if you know so much about winning elections and if you are so sure conservadem-ism/Blue Dog-ism is the way to win said elections, how come it was the conservadems/Blue Dog candidates - not liberal candidates - who lost the most elections this year?
Also, go fuck yourself because the fact that you are even trying to create the same old bash-the-liberals debate exposes you not just as substantively wrong, but as professionally employed to despoil our culture with bullshit -- and specifically, with bullshit that you know is bullshit. That, really, everyone knows is bullshit.
The facts are painfully apparent. Though hundreds -- if not thousands -- of people in D.C. are professionally paid to pretend these facts require debate and analysis and parsing and speculation and press releases and pithy Tweets and Sunday Show roundtables and C-SPAN symposia and to-camera cable-TV rants and lengthy thousand-page books, they don't require any of that. The facts are simple. The facts are obvious. The facts are undeniable to anyone not paid fistfulls of sweaty money to lie or sensationalize:
1. The Democratic Party shit on its base with its policies, as noted above.
2. This demoralized the Democratic base, which responded by not turning out to vote. As CBS News notes, "Hispanics, African Americans, union members and young people were among the many core Democratic groups that turned out in large numbers in the 2008 elections (but) turnout among these groups dropped off substantially, even below their previous midterm levels."
3. In cause-and-effect style, the result of all this was, as the Washington Post reports, a freshman congressional class that is primarily made up of angry, white, lunatic-conservative assholes.
So yes, all of you who are wasting all of our time pretending this isn't the basic point-A-to-point-B story of the election -- and there are a lot of you out there -- please, if not for me, then for everyone else: Go fuck yourself.
We've got lives to lead, we've got struggles to struggle through, we've got bills to pay - in short, we've got to get through the shit you've created and continue to create. And as you now incessantly bitch about the alleged scourge of those evil election-losing liberals, as you whine and wail and cry from the cocktail and hors d'oeuvre paradise of TV studios and green rooms and congressional offices and party fundraising events, you've made quite clear you don't give a shit about the harsh reality we all face - the harsh reality we all face thanks to you.
Knowing all of that, I'll end just reiterate my one succinct request: All I ask is that as you continue your hard work to prop up the kleptocracy, as you continue to clog our last remaining democratic conduits with your viscous rhetorical shit bombs, please, do us all a favor and for the love of whatever god you worship - please just stop wasting our damn time and go fuck yourself.
Come on, lib'ruls, let's think Marketing 101 here. What's your call to action here? This rally was the equivalent of a redneck with a "Honk If You Like Beer" bumper sticker. Yes, you have reached a large like-minded demographic, but what of it? You got a nice feeling when Bubba honked at you, but after that?.... Exactly. Nothing.
Jon Stewart proved he could write a note on a napkin and attract 200,000+ people to Washington, DC and out-rally Glenn Beck. Good for him. But what have you participants proven? That you can make clever signs that don't mean anything? Good for you, you irrelevant overeducated weenies! Now move to the back of democracy's line.
The aphorism is incorrectly stated as: "If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything." It is correctly stated as: "You better stop believing you're so freaking clever and fight for your liberal ideals with everything you've got before Bubba Twelve-Guage and Grandpa No-Gubument-Medicare shove their insane worldview down your smug throats."
It's past time that we Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers realized that politics is a no-rules brawl, not a fashion show. We're not showing up with a knife at a gun fight, we're showing up to a war with a copy of our senior thesis. Until we learn from Republicans and get mean, angry, and settle for nothing less than victory, we liberals deserve to get our asses kicked.
Just in case some of you think I take my marching orders from Jon Stewart, here are two very strong criticisms of his silly Rally to Restore Sanity yesterday.
First, mean-spirited, angry liberal journalist Mark Ames, who attended the rally for a short while before he had to bail, argued that the rally is emblematic of his generation's prime directives to 1) never risk looking stupid, no matter what is at stake, and 2) always preserve one's ironic detachment from events, even from oneself. That kind of cool pose is great and everything at parties, but not when the general welfare of the nation is at stake. Concluded Ames:
You see, this is why so many cool Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers were so jazzed up about going to the Stewart rally – by definition, they were guaranteed not to look stupid by going to it, because it's not really a rally. They're not putting anything on the line. They're just going to chant the equivalent of that annoying Saturday Night Live Update skit 'Really?' No generation ever looked so cool so late in their lives as my generation. We did it! We achieved our dream! We don't look as stupid as the hippies did when they were in their 40s! Woo-hoo! We still mock ourselves and we're still self-aware, but best of all, we don't look stupid by devoting ourselves to ideas or movements that other people might one day laugh at. We won! We won the least-stupid-looking-generation competition! Let's gather together in an ironic, self-aware way, and celebrate how we're not really rallying or laying anything on the line–not even now, not even when the whole fucking country is collapsing. What's our prize, Don? Meanwhile, behind Door Number 1, the country is in two losing wars and the worst economic crisis in 80 years, behind Door Number 2, over 40 million Americans are on fucking food stamps, behind Door Number 3, millions are being land-transfered out of their property like landless peasants in a banana republic–yeah, it's bad, whatever dude, it's always been bad, nothing ever changes much, don't have a cow, deal with it….
Second, founder of the anti-war group CODEPINK, Medea Benjamin, made a similar although more focused criticism prior to the event, saying Stewart's "slacktivism" celebrates those people who are too "sane" to rally against insane wars, Wall Street bailouts, and other unjust government policies. She also noted how Stewart's Daily Show spent two hours taping her, along with an anarchist and a teabagger, lumping them all together as protesting nutjobs. As if any loud and angry protest by definition is crazy. She concluded:
So let's celebrate the people who walk the talk. Slacktivism did not end slavery, activism did. Slacktivism did not get women our rights. Activism did. Slacktivism won't end war or global warming. But activism just might.
I've said it before: my generation's children and grandchildren are not going to be proud of us because we were so cool and avoided saying stupid things; they're going to blame us for sitting on the sidelines in ironical detachment while our country went to shit. If we don't stand up and stand for something -- and that something should be liberal-progressive ideals which have saved us in the past and can do so again -- then we are irrelevant.
That said, Jon Stewart is funny. That's his job. It's not his job to organize and lead us. We are not like those atomized zombies of the Right looking for a TV preacher like Glenn Beck to tell us where to gather and what to say and do.
Well, I'm obviously a night owl (check the local time of this post), and I'm certainly liberal, but am I a statiscial outlier: a dumb liberal? I'll leave that to you, my esteemed readers, to decide. Regardless, science don't lie, so if you're a religious conservative, chances are, you're not quite as sharp. Sorry to break it to you this way. Here's some consolation though: you've still got Sarah Palin, Pat Robertson, and Glenn Beck to feel superior to... I hope.
More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.
The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years."
"Evolutionarily novel" preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are "evolutionarily familiar."
"General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions," says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles."
An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals. Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk. Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel.
In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.
Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa's hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as "very liberal" have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as "very conservative" have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.
[Now I admit I would have identified myself as "very conservative" in my stupider adolescence, but you might say that my genes got the better of me, and my innate intelligence forced me to become a bleeding-heart, Marxist/socialist liberal in adulthood. - J]
Similarly, religion is a byproduct of humans' tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see "the hands of God" at work behind otherwise natural phenomena. "Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid," says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. "So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists."
Young adults who identify themselves as "not at all religious" have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as "very religious" have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.
In addition, humans have always been mildly polygynous in evolutionary history. Men in polygynous marriages were not expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate, whereas men in monogamous marriages were. In sharp contrast, whether they are in a monogamous or polygynous marriage, women were always expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate. So being sexually exclusive is evolutionarily novel for men, but not for women. And the theory predicts that more intelligent men are more likely to value sexual exclusivity than less intelligent men, but general intelligence makes no difference for women's value on sexual exclusivity. Kanazawa's analysis of Add Health data supports these sex-specific predictions as well.
One intriguing but theoretically predicted finding of the study is that more intelligent people are no more or no less likely to value such evolutionarily familiar entities as marriage, family, children, and friends.
Kennedy makes a good point that Obama's liberalism has always been over-inflated by the right wing to make him into a bogeyman, but nevertheless, Obama has back-pedalled on core liberal promises like a public option for health care. Obama was never the Right's anti-christ, nor, unfortunately, was he ever the Left's messiah. He is a cautious, middle-of-the-road, Ivy League, corporate-funded, Blue Dog/DLC Democrat. He's like Clinton without the angry tongue, reckless labido -- or the ambition for greatness. Obama is not a liberal-progressive. We can't expect much from him. (Republicans, that means you can cheer up and stop predicting a socialist dictatorship in the span of 3 years.)
I'm glad somebody finally wrote a political article about zombies. Zombies deserve their due. I gotta admit, I love zombie movies, (and zombie lit, like World War Z) even though they've ruined so many nights of my sleep. Indeed I like most post-apocalyptic films. Sure, they're full of guns, but I actually don't mind, because it would be silly to argue that we need the 2nd Amendment in case the undead storm our homes and office to devour our flesh. (Right?) Why I really like zombie movies is that humans show their true colors when faced with an unstoppable zombie horde. The loud macho guy turns out to be a whining pussy; the hysterical, frightened girl turns out to be a calm, dead-eye shot when it counts; the loyal husband turns out to be a selfish coward; the pious priest turns out to be faithless; the dried-up cynic turns out to have hidden reservoirs of faith; and sometimes, the decent, selfless and brave guy turns out to be decent, selfless and brave.
I also like zombie movies because you get to see how people behave when they all know they're going to die. I mean, die pretty soon. Most of us live our lives as if death is something that happens to other people. But what if it suddenly dawned on all of us that our lives were not measured out in yawning decades, or even years, but in fleeting days and hours? What if we knew death wasn't just scary, what if we knew our death was going to be downright terrifying? In zombie movies, nevertheless, somewhere toward the end, the last survivors typically come to some kind of stoic acceptance of their fate, while drawing comfort from their comrades. They realize "they're all in it together," as Waldman notes. Whether the "it" here is life or death, or both, I'm not sure.
In real life, we don't all live and die together. We die off one by one, years and decades apart, creating the illusion that we're each of us immune to the zombie's bite. But as Shaun of the Dead's Simon Pegg remarked, that silent, legless ghoul is dragging itself through darkness toward all of us. It's going to get us all, eventually. We are all in this together. In the zombie genre, it's no coincidence that those who decide to split from everyone else to save themselves almost always end up a limb and a brain short. Conversely the brave, decent guy often meets his end by sacrificing himself to preserve his fellow survivors a bit longer, thereby calmly choosing the time and place of his honorable death.
So I spend a lot of time thinking about which character I am in this undead horror flick that is life. Am I basically decent, generous, and brave, or am I a selfish coward? Am I the macho poseur who's secretly afraid? Am I the faltering hysteric who surprisingly manages to save the day? Am I the atheist who still hasn't met his foxhole? I variously feel like all of these people. I identify.
Although it's certainly odd, it might even be healthy to imagine every now and then that zombies have taken over, that death does lumber behind every corner, that precious moments reunited with friends and loved ones really are all that matter now: Have I said everything that needs saying? Did my life have any sense or proportion? Does x, y, z "crisis" really matter? Who are the people that matter most to me, and how fast can I get to them? Is there something left to prove? To show? To forgive? Is there still enough time to...?
Another interesting sub-theme of zombie movies is that the immediate needs of the living take absolute precedence over our feelings for the dead. Those who mourn their dead (or undead) loved ones to excess and forget the needs of the living usually get dismembered and zombie-fied for their trouble. I find this a very harsh moral.
Finally, zombie movies fascinate me because the characters display a will to survive although survival is hopeless. And not just personally survive, but survive as a group. I truly believe there is a species survival instinct -- genetically hardwired humanism -- in all of us which overrides our personal survival instinct. As ravenous zombies take down the group one by one, as the survivors' numbers and options dwindle critically, the species survival instinct always kicks in, turning them all into basically decent, selfless, and brave people who are willing to sacrifice totally for the good of the group. At that point, as a viewer, something weird happens to me: I become jealous of these characters. I want to feel what they're feeling then. I want their absolute certainty and clarity in those last moments. I want to be with them in that barricaded attic or rooftop, because that is where perfectly kind, compassionate, and united human beings dwell. Right there. And maybe only there. The promise of life can't bring us together like that; only the threat of imminent death. And that's a darn shame. Imagine how great the world would be if we could all be decent, selfless and brave all the time -- with no zombies!
Anyway, fast zombies are way scarier than slow zombies. You watch the Dawn of the Dead re-make or 28 Days Later and tell me it isn't so.
The popularity of each resident in our cultural stable of monsters rises and falls as the years pass. Presently, vampires are at the top of the heap, with HBO's True Blood and Stephanie Meyer's unbelievably successful Twilight book series (22 million copies sold in 2008 alone) leading the way. The last few years saw a glut of ghost stories, many adapted from Japanese horror films. Werewolves are in a bit of a rut right now, but perhaps they'll make a comeback sometime soon. All of these menaces can be presented in the context of campy fun, genuinely frightening horror, or even highbrow (or at least upper-middlebrow) entertainment.
But then there's the zombie. There are no highbrow zombie movies or novels, and admitting you love them amounts to a declaration that your tastes are unrefined. In truth, zombies should be boring. There are only so many things you can do with them, narratively speaking. They can't charm you, like vampires, or make you pity them as they relate their torment while in human form, like werewolves. They clumsily lope after you, hoping to feast on your flesh, and they have almost no personality as individuals. Instead, zombie mobs are just an undifferentiated mass of malevolence. What's remarkable is that a villain with such little complexity has thrived for so long.
And "thrive" does not begin to describe the status of the contemporary zombie. They've come a long way from their roots in stories of Haitian voodoo masters using magical powder to enslave unfortunate souls. Consider some recent developments: One of the big publishing hits this year is Seth Grahame-Smith's refashioning of Jane Austen's classic novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Later this month, Chicago will host its first ever Zombie-Con. The New York Times' Paul Krugman is obviously a secret zombie-phile; his blog contains multiplereferences to zombies. There are too many zombie comic books to list. Increasingly, we're seeing "zombie" used as an adjective in a widening variety of contexts, from "zombie banks" to "zombie computers" to "zombie ideas."
At the center of this cultural juggernaut of the undead, are the films. Zombie movies have been around almost as long as there have been movies. While some scholars point to the 1919 silent German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as the first zombie film (the zombie in question was actually a hypnotized mental patient), the first mainstream zombie picture was probably White Zombie (1932), starring Bela Lugosi. For the aficionado, though, the truly seminal zombie film is George Romero's low-budget 1968 masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead. Before that film, zombies were usually employed as slave labor, guided by the master who had created them. Romero reimagined them as a mob whose purpose was to destroy and assimilate all living humans. And to eat brains.
Although previous efforts certainly referenced current events (for example, the first film in the Nazi zombie subgenre, Revenge of the Zombies, was released in 1943, while World War II was still going on), Romero's films set observers looking for political themes amid the brain-eating. When Night of the Living Dead was released, many saw it as a metaphor for the Vietnam War or domestic social upheaval. Perhaps most notably, its male lead, Duane Jones, was black, a rare casting decision at the time. In interviews, Romero insists he was not trying to make a point about race. "We cast an African American actor because he was the best actor from among our friends," Romero said in 2008. "And when we finished the film, literally as we were driving it to New York in the trunk of a car, that was the night Martin Luther King was assassinated." Jones' character is shot at the film's end by a group of vigilantes who mistake him for a zombie. Romero's sequels became much more explicit in their societal critique; in Dawn of the Dead, the zombies mindlessly wander around a shopping mall, as if repeating the essential activity of their former lives.
But most people who love a good zombie romp aren't too interested in political subtext -- they want to see arms being gnawed and large numbers of the undead blasted to kingdom come. And they've got more opportunities to feed their (OK, I'll admit it -- our) zombie jones than ever. Wikipedia contains a long list of zombie movies made since the 1930s, and if we turn that list into a graph, we see that the genre has exploded in the past decade. While there may be more films being produced overall, any way you slice it, if you're a zombie lover, this is the time to be alive.
Zombie Movies by Decade
So what's going on here? Why is our love of zombies only growing stronger?
In part, it's because the subject the zombie most directly addresses is so universal. For all the metaphoric possibilities zombies hold, at their most fundamental, they are death itself, pursuing us through the countryside. As Simon Pegg, the co-writer and star of the zombie homage/spoof Shaun of the Dead, recently wrote in the Guardian:
Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.
Their ineptitude actually makes them avoidable, at least for a while. If you're careful, if you keep your wits about you, you can stave them off, even outstrip them -- much as we strive to outstrip death. Drink less, cut out red meat, exercise, practice safe sex; these are our shotguns, our cricket bats, our farmhouses, our shopping malls. However, none of these things fully insulates us from the creeping dread that something so witless, so elemental may yet catch us unawares -- the drunk driver, the cancer sleeping in the double helix, the legless ghoul dragging itself through the darkness towards our ankles.
Metaphors aside, one can't examine the zombie phenomenon without addressing the genre's extreme violence. A vampire movie involves lots of skulking around and a few bites here and there. A zombie movie, on the other hand, will inevitably feature buckets of blood and dozens of zombies dispatched in almost comically violent ways -- limbs severed and bodies torn asunder. And that's not even mentioning the cannibalism.
The particular nature of the genre's violence may lie at the heart of the contemporary appeal of zombies in films and especially in video games. Imagine an action movie in which the hero repeatedly put a shotgun to the head of actual human beings and pulled the trigger. Even if they were very bad people, as an audience we'd come to feel that the hero was a sadistic freak, whatever the nobility of his larger cause. But not so with zombies, who are visibly human, despite their lack of consciousness and life force.
And in video games, you move from observer to participant. You can chop off their arms, blow off their heads, and generally engage in the most vicious kinds of violence one can imagine, and it's OK because, hey, they're zombies. Yet unlike the games in which you are fighting aliens or robots, your victims look basically human. When you play a zombie game, you get to act like a psychopath without saying to yourself, "I really shouldn't be enjoying acting like a psychopath." The zombie game allows us to indulge our inner barbarian without self-doubt.
There's so much more we could discuss -- an entire book could be written on the unending dispute over the relative merits of fast zombies and slow zombies, for instance. But since TAP is a magazine about politics, we must ask this question: Apart from the extreme violence, is the zombie genre fundamentally liberal or conservative? Does its increasing popularity serve anyone's political ends?
While one can certainly use zombies to express all kinds of ideas, I would argue that at heart, the genre is a progressive one. It's true that fighting off the zombie horde requires plentiful firearms, no doubt pleasing Second Amendment advocates. And in a zombie movie, government tends to be either ineffectual or completely absent. On the other hand, when the zombie apocalypse comes, capitalism breaks down, too -- people aren't going to be exchanging money for goods and services; they're just going to break into the hardware store and grab what they need (and if you think your private health insurer is going to be paying claims for treatment of zombie bites, you're living in a dream world). But most important, what ensures survival in a zombie story are the progressive ideals of common cause and collective action. A small group of people from varying backgrounds are thrust together and find that they can transcend their differences of age, race, and gender (the typical band of survivors is a veritable United Nations of cultural diversity). They come to understand that if they're going to get out of this with their brains kept securely housed in their skulls and not travelling down some zombie's gullet, they've got to act as though they're all in it together. Surviving the tide of zombies requires community and mutual responsibility. What could be more progressive than that?
Very interesting theory. I wonder, what does it make you if you'd slap somebody else's father?
I'm constantly disgusted. I nearly faint at the sight of my own poo. And I wash my hands like 20 times a day. I guess that makes me a fascist.
Seriously though, I've long believed that one's political persuasion is immune to logical persuasion. It's like arguing about what flavor of ice cream is the tastiest. (Of course, I am the exception, as my correct beliefs are based solely on impeccable logic and universal experience.)
How's this: Would you be willing to slap your father in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit?
And, second: Does it disgust you to touch the faucet in a public restroom?
Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don't worry as long as Dad has given permission.
Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance's drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.
The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don't just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.
This came up after I wrote a column earlier this year called "The Daily Me." I argued that most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices. To overcome that tendency, I argued, we should set aside time for a daily mental workout with an ideological sparring partner. Afterward, I heard from Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. "You got the problem right, but the prescription wrong," he said.
Simply exposing people to counterarguments may not accomplish much, he said, and may inflame antagonisms.
A study by Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania found that when people saw tight television shots of blowhards with whom they disagreed, they felt that the other side was even less legitimate than before.
The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren't a result of a deliberative process. The crucial part of the brain for these judgments is the medial prefrontal cortex, which has more to do with moralizing than with rationality. If you damage your prefrontal cortex, your I.Q. may be unaffected, but you'll have trouble harrumphing.
One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust.
Some evolutionary psychologists believe that disgust emerged as a protective mechanism against health risks, like feces, spoiled food or corpses. Later, many societies came to apply the same emotion to social "threats." Humans appear to be the only species that registers disgust, which is why a dog will wag its tail in puzzlement when its horrified owner yanks it back from eating excrement.
Psychologists have developed a "disgust scale" based on how queasy people would be in 27 situations, such as stepping barefoot on an earthworm or smelling urine in a tunnel. Conservatives systematically register more disgust than liberals. (To see how you weigh factors in moral decisions, take the tests at www.yourmorals.org.)
It appears that we start with moral intuitions that our brains then find evidence to support. For example, one experiment involved hypnotizing subjects to expect a flash of disgust at the word "take." They were then told about Dan, a student council president who "tries to take topics that appeal to both professors and students."
The research subjects felt disgust but couldn't find any good reason for it. So, in some cases, they concocted their own reasons, such as: "Dan is a popularity-seeking snob."
So how do we discipline our brains to be more open-minded, more honest, more empirical? A start is to reach out to moderates on the other side — ideally eating meals with them, for that breaks down "us vs. them" battle lines that seem embedded in us. (In ancient times we divided into tribes; today, into political parties.) The Web site www.civilpolitics.org is an attempt to build this intuitive appreciation for the other side's morality, even if it's not our morality.
"Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart," Professor Haidt says. "Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games."
Thus persuasion may be most effective when built on human interactions. Gay rights were probably advanced largely by the public's growing awareness of friends and family members who were gay.
A corollary is that the most potent way to win over opponents is to accept that they have legitimate concerns, for that triggers an instinct to reciprocate. As it happens, we have a brilliant exemplar of this style of rhetoric in politics right now — Barack Obama.
The professional movie critic Michael Medved (who has spent his whole adult life watching Hollywood films and then blasting Hollywood for promoting immorality and anti-American values) wants to tell me how I, a liberal, see the world. I give his lame attempt 2 thumbs down.
The ferocious fight over the Obama budget exposes some of the deepest differences between liberals and conservatives, contrasting not only their goals for the country but their desires for themselves.
All human beings feel a drive for power, but leftists and right-wingers express that urge with opposing (and often irreconcilable) strategies. They employ very different means in pursuit of power in part because they seek distinctive ends: at the most basic level, liberals want enhanced control through political authority while conservatives crave greater sway through accumulation of personal wealth. Understanding the true nature of this distinction clarifies the most polarizing political disputes that currently divide the country.
[Right, that's why Republicans don't try like hell to get elected or anything, not using tactics like gerrymandering, voter intimidation, and SC judges' 11th hour decisions. They just concentrate on making money and concede most elections to Democrats. - J]
The liberal preoccupation with governmental control characterizes every major initiative of the Obama administration. The reflexive response to the financial crisis is to blame it on insufficient regulation and to demand an instant expansion of bureaucratic authority to deal with the emergency. The left places its faith in governmental institutions, and even though most leftists will never personally involve themselves in politics or the bureaucracy, they support and trust those who do.
For instance, recent polling shows that big majorities of Americans want government to require more fuel efficient cars. Of course, the countless sincere citizens who demand such regulations could easily purchase high-mileage vehicles without waiting for some new federal policy, but the demand for sweeping regulations shows that many Americans trust bureaucrats more than they trust themselves.
Thoughtful liberals defend this deep-seated yen for government supervision by affirming that they feel no pressing need for Washington to regulate them, but they do want more rules and bureaucracy to rein in the destructive excesses of their greedy, irresponsible, selfish neighbors. In other words, leftists seek greatly enhanced power for those they consider enlightened and generous and broadminded—best exemplified, of course, by President Obama himself. They seek vastly increased funds for these wise, steady, philosopher-kings who guide the federal government, and sharply decreased money for the wealthiest, most productive private citizens (and, for that matter, for private charities). They believe that society will benefit greatly if progressive leaders define new goals in health care, energy, education and every other field, rather than relying on the often benighted impulses and preferences of the public at large. The great unwashed may enjoy "American Idol" and "Dancing with the Stars," but if the feds pump enough taxpayer money into PBS, maybe the culture commissars can facilitate the appreciation of higher things. In view of the painfully high cost of health insurance, tens of millions of Americans choose not purchase it – though many of them clearly can afford it. In response, progressives want to force them to get government insurance whether they want it or not, and plan to bill them (and everybody else) with increased taxes. In short, liberals seek power and influence over their fellow citizens by means of a more energetic and intrusive government, with the belief that everyone will benefit from more supervision, regulation, and social workers to administer the new agenda of compassion.
[Um, ever heard of voting? It's that thing we do every 2 years. It's when we get to choose gov't representatives who share our "often benighted impulses and preferences." Seriously, Medved would have us believe that the only time the public ever expresses personal preferences is when they buy something. - J]
While liberals seek to advance their values and priorities with more bureaucracy and federal spending, most conservatives yearn for a different sort of power: the control and privilege and security that comes from the accumulation of personal wealth. Right-wingers want above all to take care of themselves and the people closest to them – family, co-workers, friends, and fellow members of churches or other affinity groups. Conservatives generally feel less concerned about the welfare of strangers than they do about the fate of those who are close at hand, though they understand that personal success also brings benefits for the whole society. A flourishing business creates new jobs, and those workers can use their paychecks to stimulate the entire economy. Conservatives distrust bailouts, stimulus packages, welfare programs and redistribution of wealth because such initiatives reward the sort of behavior that right-wingers would never want to encourage personally.
[Naturally, being less concerned about the welfare of strangers jibes perfectly with conservative Christian morals. As Jesus said, "It's tough out there, people, so take care of your own. Let the guy in the next village worry about the next village." Or something like that. - J]
The power that conservatives most fervently desire involves self-sufficiency: the ability to control your own circumstances and your future, without depending on government or charity. Accumulating wealth – or at least putting together some modest savings – insures that you'll be well-treated more effectively than any governmental regulations or guarantees.
The contrast between the liberal and conservative pursuit of power gives the left two big advantages in politics, while providing the right with an even more substantial edge in terms of personal happiness.
In politics, the liberal focus on influencing government and controlling the status of other people allows the left to claim the mantle of superior compassion. Because leftists talk more about the welfare of strangers, they portray themselves as more idealistic and more concerned with humanity at large. By contrast, the conservative emphasis on private institutions – businesses, families, churches – is often derided as selfish and insular.
[I deride these institutions as poverty-fighters because they don't work; they haven't put a dent in poverty, or at least families and churches haven't. Indeed, during the recession people are contriubting less money to charities, despite a greater need. - J]
The left enjoys a second built-in political advantage: because of its emphasis on the importance of public life and governmental activism, the most ambitious and gifted people in the progressive community will often choose politics as a higher calling. Conservatives, with their preoccupation with the private sector, will much more likely choose to emphasize building families, businesses or communities rather than constructing electoral careers.
This means that those observers who perceive superior political ability on the liberal side of the spectrum are probably correct. Moreover, it's a structural imbalance, and not a temporary aberration – a reflection of the fact that the left sees government as a source of enlightenment and accomplishment, while the right views government as a locus of corruption and potential tyranny. It's not surprising that those who look on bureaucracy and political power most favorably will choose disproportionately to involve themselves in those pursuits.
[Wow, what an admission! Finally, Medved hits the target! Yes indeed, when you elect people to gov't who believe that gov't is bound to be cynical, inefficient, ineffective, and even corrupt, well, then... don't be surprised when that's exactly what kind of gov't you get. Just like Coca-Cola wouldn't hire a CEO who drank only tea, or you wouldn't choose a surgeon who recommended pills instead, or you wouldn't send your children to a teacher who hated kids. - J]
Conservatives, meanwhile, enjoy a mirror-image structural advantage when it comes to personal happiness. It is obviously much easier to control your own circumstances than to secure the welfare of society at large. It's inherently more possible and more satisfying to influence yourself and your intimates than to impact millions upon millions of utter strangers.
In other words, it's easier to change yourself than to change the world. [Duh. - J] It's therefore only logical that conservatives would report far higher levels of contentment and personal happiness than liberals, according to Syracuse University's Arthur Brooks (author of "Gross National Happiness"), and everyone else who's studied the subject.
[Is liberals' ennui due to their pre-occupation with the sadness, suffering, and moral complexity of our messed-up world, whereas conservatives' happiness is due to their blissful ignorance, instead spending their time thinking about the accumulation of personal wealth? Perhaps. But if you look at how Americans vote, in fact rich people -- especially the super-rich -- are more likely to vote Democrat than Republican, especially from the richest East and West coast "blue" states. This inconvenient fact kind of shoots Medved's whole theory to hell... unless we allow for the possibility that, despite all their time & effort spent trying to get rich, conservatives are still worse at making money than politically 'distracted' liberals! Can you say 'multi-tasking'? - J]
Both conservatives and liberals pursue power, but the left wants to influence other people and society at large while right-wingers want enhanced control over their personal circumstances. That contrast may give liberals the edge in many political scraps, but conservatives will still have a better and more satisfying time in the process.
