TOWARD A FEDERAL POPULISM: From the Writings of Paul Piccone

“What led the Soviet system, first, into Chapter 11 and, subsequently, into Chapter 7 was neither Reagan’s military Keynesianism nor Stalin’s crimes, but its wasteful central planning, social engineering, and abstract rationalism—characteristics which, in more moderate guises, also define all liberal-democratic regimes. Thus, far from being irreconcilable opposites, the bureaucratic centralism of the former Soviet Union and liberal technocracy in the West turn out to be variations of the same basic [Age of] Enlightenment [political] model—a model that, by defining all conflicts in economic terms, has successfully occluded a more pervasive logic of domination beyond labor/capital conflicts: [a logic of domination] predicated on the political power obtaining between the rulers and the ruled, the experts and the masses, the administrators and the administered. During the last couple of centuries, blaming capitalism for every imaginable problem has been a convenient way to conceal the equally questionable role of the New Class of politicians, intellectuals, and bureaucrats in institutionalizing and administering new structures of domination. [Confronting the Crisis: Writings of Paul Piccone, pp. 271-72]

PARALLEL UNIVERSE (part. 2)

After the hypocritical and embarrassing display of Gov. Mark Sanford's obligatory apology with tears yesterday on every news channel in America except Fox, it should be clear to all that the Republican elite have surely reached the limits of hypocrisy, arrogance and power mongering. As we know from all the naysayers who buy into the mass-marketed sophistry and demagoguery of the Republican party and their army of talking-head hitmen, there are just as many immoral Democrats, not unlike Mark Sanford, cheating on their wives, forcibly coming out of the closet and commiting other smarmy and despicable acts of moral indecency and indiscretion. Yes, we all know that, thank you. [If I hear that “you do it too” argument one more time, I’m going to hurt someone.]

But the fact of the matter is that it is only the Republican ‘holier than thou’ crowd-- who are really the crowd of ‘false prophets’ that Jesus warned us about-- who exploit moralization to the point of inciting violence. Moreover it is the Republicans who want to tell women what they should do with their bodies; want to tell everyone what proper sexuality is; want to tell everyone what constitutes proper marriage; want to tell everyone what a real family is; want to tell everyone who doesn’t practice their morality (that they all too frequently can’t and probably don’t even try to live up to), that they are not real Americans. And Sanford is one of the biggest offenders, biggest of all their many christianist hypocrites.

While they attempt to reduce politics at the national level to mediatized struggles over issues that should be and can only be dealt with at the community level, they exploit the sincere concern of local peoples to preserve their traditions or transform them according to the needs of their times and the demands of historical ruptures or deadends. Moreover this deviously misplaced propaganda allows the Republican demagogues such as Karl Rove and the usual suspects on Fox News to exploit the fear and ignorance of many of conservative and Christian persuasion in order to mobilize a foundation voting block to return the rich and powerful, that is, the war mongerers and globalists to office.

The sad and pathetic if not frightening aspect of such Orwellian style social and civil evil is that they may well achieve their goals even though they have nothing to offer the mass of true believers that they terrorize into swallowing the Limbaughian distortions of fact, interpretation, context, history and perspective.

Karl Rove on Fox News this evening was actually defending Mark Sanford with the “everybody makes mistakes argument” as if that was all that was involved. As if there were no difference between the right Republican, neo-conservative militant christianism and other adulterers not of their persuasion. This same crowd of political deviants who were quite willing to vilify Spitzer or Clinton, suddenly find forgiveness in their hearts for Sanford, one possible prospect for the presidency 2012.

But that isn’t the most despicable part of all of this. All of the manipulation, sophistry, character assassination and exploitation of people’s concerns to reconstitute culture—i.e., a community-based popular culture beyond the reaches of the “culture industry” and the incursions of a parasitic corporate culture and an interventionist bureaucratic centralist state—all of their arrogance and bullying is only and simply to restore the base for the retaking of power in 2012. Nothing else really matters to them because only that level of power will assure fulfilling upon their insatiable drive for profit, empire, and the military reconstitution of all other cultures in the image of Liberal Democracy, a failed one at that. They exploit populism, christianity and American patriotism in the name of their social class's profits, power and elitist resentment.

This is the Republican/Neo-conservative's parallel universe. They have no real concern, understanding of, nor compassion for America as intended let alone the America that many are still struggling to achieve. This is possibly why they were so outraged by Obama’s use of “empathy” when describing what may well serve a Justice of the Supreme Court.

Hopefully, the base of true believers who support the neo-conservatives and the likes of Rush Limbaugh will soon see through the hypocrisy and virtual Hitlerian big lie, and transform themselves in the name of a true conservatism and a neo-populist federalist reconstitution of an authentic confederation of true American communities.

And lastly, let's note that Sanford didn't make a "mistake" as Karl Rove insipidly and unabashedly proclaimed. Sanford knew quite well what he was doing. He consciously and intentionally did wrong. That's not a mistake. A mistake is a consequent error made in an honest attempt to do right or tell the truth but which fails to understand what is right or what is true. Sanford understood what he was doing and knew it was wrong and he did it anyway. Sanford is slime. Did he consider it a mistake before he got caught? No.

PARALLEL UNIVERSE

Did you ever get the feeling you were missing something? How is it possible that the financial “experts” who drove the banking system into crisis are now in greater demand than ever?

How is it possible that public money will continue to be poured into a parasitic financial culture that has questionably anything to do with a sustainable real productive economy? How is it that millions upon millions of people are living virtually and actually hand to mouth while others get rich beyond imagination by buying and selling money which it is questionable really exists?

So a parallel universe does exist. But it’s not the physicists' possible world mathematically inferred. It is a world of symbolic manipulation of the value of the real world by the financial wizards pulling the levers that keep us fearful and who dare us to pull back the curtain. Many thought Obama would do that. How wrong they were.

PRIVATE SECTOR PROMISES

Former President George W. Bush came out of retirement to join the Republican attempt to consolidate the fragmented grand old party. Bush admonished us that only the private sector could produce wealth and presumably pull us out of the now nearly normalized economic crisis.

We will, however, never really know, this time around, whether Bush’s claim regarding the power of the private sector is true. We’ll never really know during this crisis, whether “we can spend our money better than the government can” as Bush chided. Why will we never know? Because the government is spending our money for us in the private sector to the tune of billions if not trillions of dollars. They’ll even be spending much money we don’t have, just like the Bush Administration. We lost our chance to see if the private sector can really pull itself up by its bootstraps.

The Congress had its chance to let the private sector put up or shut up when the banks crashed. But they backed out in the end when the last 15 or so representatives in the house preferred the proffered pork over republican conservative principle which would have required opposing that first Bailout package.

It seems there are many in the private sector who don’t have the faith that Bush seems to have. He himself would have been a failed businessman if Daddy hadn’t bailed him out. All too many corporations and big farms would also be bust if it weren’t for corporate and agricultural welfare. Just ask GM and the tobacco farmers in the Carolinas.

When are we going to allow the private sector to test its power of wealth production? If the government is to blame for disrupting the private sector, why can’t the capitalist faithful just say no. After all just saying “No!” is a tactic the conservatives seem to like to use in various venues of political concern. But there always seems to be an excuse why they just have to take the public money and run. Why can’t they stay in integrity with their beliefs and commitments and just say “No!”

Seemingly, as the private sector needs more and more taxpayer money to survive possibly the crisis and the capitalists lack of faith in their ideology means that the private sector, the capitalist economy, has reached its logical conclusion. Greed doesn’t work. Competition is not sustainable. The segregation of private and public sectors is an illusion.

The new populism would be much truer to capitalism and to the conservative insight that “the accumulated wisdom of the past can only thrive [in the context of] traditions and customs, i.e., as ‘lived realities’ internalized” in communities, not as the dictates of governmental bureaucracies and exploitative corporations.

THE SWORD'S OTHER EDGE: On Populist Possibilities in Local Politics

Historically populism has been a “grassroots resistance to encroachment by state and capitalist agencies on the basis of local traditions, customs and ethical norms” …. “ populism becomes a useful concept for configuring current as well as incipient developments both in the communist east as well as in the West. … populism has not emerged spontaneously during relatively “normal” times, but has always developed as a response to concrete threats to existing communities, lifestyles or other established relations.” (The Crisis, P. Piccone, pp. 202-04)

Populist thought and action has always been an attempt to restore the existence of the whole individual to life in the public sphere “rather than only a splintered economic or public persona. This is precisely what populism promises by vindicating concrete individuality rooted in communities, traditions, customs, etc.” (The Crisis, P. Piccone, p. 204)

Usually in American political discourse populism's image is reduced to the cliché of “pitchfork wielding farmers” or far right fanatics often of either the religious/millennial or militia types. However the historically sedimented motives and current momentum of such spontaneous movements have been lost on the American populace due to media manipulation and a universally degraded and distorted educational system.

At least since the presidential campaign of Ross Perot the populist slogan has been bandied about almost always opportunistically to secure various voting blocks which might not otherwise be harnessed for partisan purposes. Few have taken a serious look at the potential and possibilities of populist political self-understanding in America. When Perot’s “populist” communities and constituencies insisted on connecting with one another without his mediation or interference, Perot objected. So it was not difficult to see that Perot’s “use” of ‘populist’ slogans was for purely instrumental purposes, having no intention to promote the unfolding of concrete individuality and self-determining and self-sustaining communities. Perot had no intention to allow the spontaneous support that came his way to practically prefigure radical changes in democratic America. He wished to use it and then return it to the easily manipulable condition of alienated, massified individuals living in a homogenized and standardized culture and economy.

Bob McCarthy detected something of the populist rumblings in America locally here in Western NY in his Buffalo News Opinion piece entitled “Locals with pitchfork and torch.” He was referring, of course, to the ‘conspiratorial’ part played in the recent ‘Albany procedural coup,’ that reconfigured power in the State, by George Maziarz, HenryWojtaszek, Steve Pigeon and Anthony Baynes. McCarthy refers to these players as “upstate revolutionaries.”

Wow! I’ll have to re-check the definition of ‘revolution’ real soon. Because if that was a revolution I’ll eat my hat.

“We changed the way New York does business,” Baynes said. “And there were no tanks in the street.”

What unmitigated arrogant elitist Orwellian bullshit. Firstly, let’s disabuse ourselves of the notion that Maziarz and Co.’s actions led by the money of Tom Golisano has anything to do with Populism let alone revolution. It obviously doesn’t despite the ubiquitous pitchfork and torch metaphor. What happened in Albany was the proceduralist treachery of a corrupt bureaucratized party politics of entrenched politicos defending the interests of big business, not business in general let alone sustainable business and not for any other meaningful and transformative “reform” in NY. Of course they were also shoring up alliances to guarantee their own future power positions amongst the political class in Albany.

Maziarz has had numerous opportunities to take populist discontent in the county of Niagara and turn it into meaningful political power and the leverage for real change for local sustainability, improved quality of life and integrating the communities of Niagara County. However rather than spending time playing a part in organizing the organic potential of populist discontent in Niagara County in fighting the toxic waste business polluting our environment, helping to consolidate public services and mediating the political forces that perennially manages to keep Niagara County working against itself, Maziarz chooses to play bureau-boss in Albany. Maziarz too cuts with the other edge of the populist sword. Rather than grasping the power of populist discontent and its potential for real change in the quality of local life he chooses to play the part of shot-calling, cash dispensing local party boss. While he is objectively positioned in a region materially poised for real populist political power, his cynicism, careerism and Republican self-misunderstanding leave him wallowing in the shallow waters of state politics as usual, but waters in which real political leadership and creativity can easily founder and drown.

I believe it’s pretty well established that the merry-go-round of musical political chairs in our state capitol isn’t going to do anything for real political and economic change in Western NY. But the disconnect and vast divide between the people who, in a sense, are a “part of no-part” and the New Political Class is so starkly great that even the likes of Sarah Palin conceptualizes this divide between local interests and what she recently coined as the “party of government.” In her own down-home style Palin names the preponderance of political, economic and bureaucratic forces that have crystallized in the formation of a New Political Class that serves to systematically facilitate the centralist regime that looks out for the interests of mega-capital and the mega-corporations that keep the profits flowing to the top 1% or so of the “people.” But this class analysis applies as much to the politicos of Albany as it does the political professionals of Washington, D.C.

It is the people who are a “part of no-part”-- especially not a part of that sector of the population represented by Palin’s concept of the “party of government” -- who manifest the populist discontent of the country. However just as Perot was not to be trusted in ’92 and ’96, so also Palin is not to be trusted since her interests are also not genuinely populist. She is a New Class wannabee manipulating every imaginable constituency in her bid to be the first woman President of the United States. So her sword also clearly cuts in more than one direction.

While the local state party politicos, especially DelMonte/Thompson, Stachowski and Maziarz fight against or ignore one another, the common issues of restoring our environment, regaining control of our local parks, creating a sustainable economy and expropriating our rights to water power go essentially unaddressed. Although efforts such as Dennis Gabryszak’s to return profits from unused power sold on the open market back to the region’s Economic Development Fund is a move in the right direction I wouldn’t hold my breath that we see that money any time soon, nor that this effort sparks any further consciousness of the political will and self-identity which such demands could ignite.

Until the people and the politicos can think beyond party politics, corporate configurations of the markets and centralist control of local economy and culture, the sword of politics, which seems to be slashing against those interests which continue to rape local economies and civic autonomy, will surely, as history proves, cut hardest against us on the backswing.

Lastly, it should be clear that populism privileges politics over economism and the bureaucratization and corporatization of culture as the source of our redemption and vindication as American communities, that is, as a confederation of communities and regions that still believe in self-maintaining and self-determining localities as the source and sustenance of the autonomous, responsible, not to mention, happy democratic individual. The values and preference that make a people free and strong are not determinable for us by de-localized professionals, bureaucrats, lawyers, financiers, social engineering experts, business specialists, technocrats and Ivy League professors. Populism is first and foremost about taking back the political sphere and the public realm of democracy as the lifestream of the civic and spiritual autonomy that embodies and assures any possibility of the good life.

LET THEM EAT WORDS

From “Confronting the Crisis: The Writings of Paul Piccone” [Telos Press, 2008]::

“…..the loss of a traditional grounding [of society] has brought about a veritable Orwellian predicament. Within the context of today’s conformist political theory, modern representative “democracy” can hardly be regarded as democratic anymore; contemporary “federalism’ has nothing to do with federations or the preservation of cultural and political autonomy: the concept of “law” has lost all normative import; degraded to the level of arbitrary and expedient “regulations,” it no longer warrants unquestioned compliance.

Even more recent concepts, such as “the nation” or “the people,” have lost all substantive meaning and have become crude instrumentalizations meant to legitimate the status quo. In the hands of Panglossian ideologists bent on pleasing the powers that be by demonstrating the “universal validity” and therefore the “unquestionable truth” of whatever happens to be the case, these affirmative concepts neutralize and deactivate the normative content they originally embodied.

Thus, “the nation” no longer exhibits any axiological dimensions which designate a particular, self-determining, and geographically circumscribed citizenry sharing a common history and common goals. Similarly, “the people” has ceased to have any specificity or qualifications; it designates only an amorphous mass of physical bodies whose only redeemable attribute is that it can be counted and instrumentalized to legitimate “democratically” whatever mediatized agenda it can be manipulated into supporting.

No wonder, then, that the very notion of “community,” degraded to a positivistic description of “really existing communities,” no longer connotes anything held “in common” other than the fact that some people happen to be in physical contiguity at some particular time.

The reduction of the "people" to an abstract quantifiable mass "democratically" approving or disapproving whatever pre-constituted agenda is placed before them or voting for candidates and parties that operate within a political sphere with no organic roots in active public life is not democracy, but manipulation. ... [T]his kind of [Orwellian] mass democracy often contradicts another fundamental democratic principal: self-determination.

The solution to this [contradiction] rests with a 'federalism' allowing maximum possible autonomy to the constituent elements [communities; regions] whose fundamental units will have to be sufficiently small to permit direct democratic participation. Only within such a context can organic participation in public life define the participants as "a people" determining their own destiny and, in the process, establishing a common identity."