[This commentary by Gerard Baker, former editor and now editor-at-large of the WSJ, appears in the 27aug24 edition of the newspaper’s op-ed pages. It succinctly nails a fundamental tenet of Rebane Doctrine numerously repeated in these pages over the years. (“…, you can fool all the people all the time.”) Since the publisher invites it to be shared on Facebook, I offer this respectfully purloined version below in its entirety; the original may be read here. gjr]
Gerard Baker
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Mario Cuomo’s adage has been updated and adapted by his successors in the modern Democratic Party. The duality they present to voters either side of an election is a deception that has defined American politics and culture for the past 20 years.
As they campaign for office, they present a kind of idealized version of themselves to the electorate as mainstream Americans, seeking merely to bring a little unity and compassion to a fundamentally great country in need of reform. Once in office they act as if they have a mandate to remake a benighted country, to reorder an unjust system, to replace American exceptionalism with European social democracy, and to rewrite the nation’s values with the precepts of their cultural Marxism.
They campaign, to borrow the late governor’s taxonomy, in the poetry of Robert Frost. They govern in the prose of Herbert Marcuse.
Last week in Chicago we got the poetry, a Frostian pastoral of Democrats posing as regular Americans, honest toilers in a darkening landscape (of their own making, as they didn’t tell us). They propose only to enlighten with their benevolence.
I don’t mean poetry in the literal sense. With a few exceptions the quality of our political oratory is dire—and plumbed the usual depths last week. We have reached the point where even the actual poetry is prosaic, as the left’s unofficial poet laureate, Amanda Gorman, demonstrated with another of her recitations of platitudinous banalities and leaden progressive nostrums delivered in her trademark phony iambic meter.
The “poetry,” such as it was—Michelle Obama’s speech was the only moment of the week when the oratory came close to matching the ambition—was figurative, an attempt to paint colorful images of the promise of another Democratic presidency.
Its centerpiece was the semifictional self portrait of the presidential candidate herself. In her own biography-heavy, substance-light acceptance speech, Kamala Harris presented herself as that familiar image from popular story telling—“the happy warrior,” the all-American fighter for our nation’s finest objectives—the tough prosecutor who waged war on crime just as she will wage war on illegal immigration; the proud patriot, product of a classically diverse, American, immigrant family; the commander in chief, ready to face down America’s enemies abroad; the staunch friend of America’s allies—Israel, especially—unafraid to use the military’s “lethal” force in their support, as she explicitly reminded us.
This verbal illusion of American iconography was reinforced by the crowd’s chants of “USA! USA!” like ecstatic fans at the Olympics, and a waving sea of red white and blue “USA” placards.
But the poetry last week came also in the constantly retold personal narrative that was the real theme of the convention. The winsome second gentleman telling cute stories about gawky first dates and tasty brisket like something from the pages of a 1950s yearbook; saccharine testimonies to Ms. Harris’s innate goodness from childhood friends and professional acquaintances; above all, that Giant Middle American Cliché made flesh himself—Gov., sorry Coach, Tim Walz—practically pulling the high-school football playbook out of his back pocket and urging the nation to vote for him so he could go out there one more time and win just one for the Grifter.
Is anyone fooled?
The answer, I am afraid, is yes. Every time.
President Biden is only the most recent example. The lifelong centrist Democrat who campaigned as a regular Joe promising to do his best to heal a divided and damaged country in 2020, promptly became the vessel for a Bernie Sanders policy agenda, splurged trillions in expansive government spending and championed the left’s continuing cultural reformation of America. He prepares to leave office apparently convinced he belongs in the pantheon of great social reformers next to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
Barack Obama reminded us in his speech how successful his own self-portrayal was in 2008 as the unifying figure who could bring cohesion and order to a nation battered from the chaos of war and financial crisis, but who again governed, thanks to rigid internal party discipline, to implement an agenda that produced seemingly irreversible shifts in the economic and social fabric.
Above all we were reminded how far Democrats managed to move the needle in government in their direction along the political spectrum by the appearance of those two aging icons from another epoch—Bill and Hillary Clinton. Mr. Clinton’s presidency, which ended a little more than two decades ago, now looks to most Democratic activists like an exercise in political reaction. If many of its ideas were preached on a university campus today, they would probably get the speaker canceled.
Republicans also pitch themselves in campaigns as unifying centrists but in office they have too often lacked the ambition or determination actually to govern as Republicans. It is to his credit—and a reason he is widely loathed—that Donald Trump bucked that trend.
Does anyone doubt that a Harris presidency would continue the Democratic pattern of divergent pre-election promise and postelection reality? Will a President Harris more closely resemble Candidate Harris from last week’s convention than Vice President Harris from the last four years or Candidate Harris from 2019? If you think she will, then it isn’t poetry you’ve been reading. It’s a fairy tale.
Culture Drives Reality
George Rebane
It is the unfortunate case that individuals can not only have their own opinions, but also their own facts that substantiate those opinions. – Rebane Doctrine
A person’s reality is a manifestation of his culture. More specifically, an individual’s ontology or worldview of reality is, at a minimum, strongly influenced or maximally determined by the culture in which he was raised or has since adopted, and now lives.
This thesis has been argued by philosophers, historians, and psychologists for the better part of the last 50 years, and today goes a long way to explain the behaviorally cohesive cultural cohorts worldwide. In America we have reverted into a strongly politicized polyglot of cultures (tribes?) whose diverse adherents no longer practice a common culture in the public square. Instead, we take great pride in demonstrating to one and all our particular complement of unique behaviors which declare our cultural bona fides and tribe memberships. And woe be it to anyone to dismiss, discredit, or discriminate against such behaviors as expressions of a sacrosanct culture whose dimensions include any combination of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, etc.
Everyone has unique rights when operating under the obvious mantle of their culture, since all cultures are held to be valuable and of equal worth. Actually, upon closer examination, some cultures have been and remain definitely worth more to humanity than others, especially if they derive from western or European cultures.
To illustrate the veracity of the above thesis, we can appeal to several examples that range from recorded history to current events from the present day. We start by recognizing that one reality of human consciousness itself rose from a cultural transformation that reaches back to about 1200 BC (or BCE, if you prefer). The late Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes gave a very convincing account of how consciousness, in the sense of the rise of the personal agency of I/me, arose in the middle east during the 400 years of the so-called Dorian Invasions (1200 – 800 BC).
In his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1990) Jaynes describes how ‘pre-Dorian’ people, who then lived nomadically or in small towns and villages, actually saw and interacted with their gods. They recorded such occasions and incidents in their written records and graphic arts (e.g. murals and pottery). From early youth their cultures taught them to see and hear such gods, and behave as the gods’ agents, essentially expressing little or no of what we today call consciousness or ‘free will’ – in short, you did what the gods prescribed ‘in vivo’ or in your culture’s recorded scriptures/myths. Personal decision making and its attendant stress were minimized or even absent from such people’s lives. (more here)
In the pre-enlightenment age even the most advanced western nations/kingdoms had populations that overwhelmingly believed in and interacted with witches and other agents of evil. They actually ‘saw’ witches fly and cast hideous spells, and therefore felt quite justified in denouncing them for extreme punishments by the authorities. These beliefs were cemented early on by the religious teachings of their culture.
In more recent times we have teams of cultural anthropologists (e.g. Margaret Mead) who have encountered and studied primitive tribes with cultures that embed drastically different realities in their members. An example of such a discovery occurred in the Papua-New Guinea highlands during the pre-war years. There a tribe was discovered whose members believed that the world ended in the middle of a river on whose bank was their village. They literally saw nothing of the other bank less than a hundred feet away. Anthropologists visibly encamped on the other side were received as aliens emerging from a fog in their inflated dinghy.
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