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As the millenium hove into view, the largest issue dividing the Republicans and the Democrats was the advisability of permitting a remorseless, felonious, incorrigible, serial sociopath to remain in public office. On lesser matters, such as Social Security, health care, education and the like, compromise and corruption enveloped the two parties like kudzu and only a botanist could tell for sure where the weeds ended and the trees began.
In fact, one of many bizarre aspects of the mock trial of W. J. Clinton was listening to commentators roundly denounce with equal vigor partisanship and those partisans with whom they vehemently disagreed.
Why one would bother to have parties at all if partisanship was so venal was never explained. Nor was it explained why, at a time of such clear political confluence, there was such a rhetorical chasm.
Even on the matter of Clinton, both sides used many of the same opprobrious adjectives to describe the president's acts; they differed primarily on the question of whether one should actually do anything about it. Partisanship and extremism should be made of sterner stuff than that.
The key to this debate of unprecedented logical dysfunction may be that while conservatives are still conservative and thus continue to see politics in its traditional form -- a system of belief and values -- liberals have so embraced the lessons of deconstructionism that whatever they once believed or valued now lies scattered and broken on the floor like a watch whose back some child found too easy to remove.
It is not that the watch can not be made to work again; it is just that the liberals don't have the faintest idea how. And so they traipse along behind whoever feeds them, not unlike Chihuahuas out for a stroll with their master. That's a nice liberal. Now heel and Ann Lewis will give you a bone when we get back to the White House . . .
Consider, for example, the purported agenda of the congressional Progressive Caucus. It includes such worthy goals as reduced military spending, progressive taxation, affirmative action improved by class-based criteria, opposition to free trade agreements, the international protection of workers and women's rights, no Social Security privatization, the expansion of Medicare and public campaign financing.
I say purported because the actual agenda of the Progressive Caucus of late has been the aggressive defense of W. J. Clinton who, it turns out, opposes almost everything on its list. Just like, say, Tom DeLay.
In the classic phylogenetic chart of politics, liberals and Clinton should be at best only partners of transitory convenience. In fact, the loyalty that liberals have displayed towards a president to the right of Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush on such issues as social welfare, civil liberties, and corporatism suggests that for all practical purposes American liberalism has ceased to exist.
In truth, for the major parties, politics as a coherent system of beliefs seems largely to have disappeared. To be interested in substantive politics now almost makes one an extremist. An extremist in either belief or hope.
For the rest of America, politics has become either irrelevant or simply another product one purchases to establish one's "identity." Under the new rules you keep possession of your politics regardless of what you or public advocates actually say or do. Just like a Armani jacket or a condo in Aspen. Much of what has occurred in the past few months has reflected this conflict between politics as a philosophy and politics as a commodity, a struggle between inherited ideas and acquired identity.
It was not without reason that David Talbott of the faux-hip Salon magazine described it as a culture war. In many ways it is, not just between right and left but by today's liberals against their own heritage as they fight for the right to bury the past whenever it conflicts with their lifestyle.
Liberalism has become one more personal asset; those who own it can do with it what they wish. In such an environment, it was not surprising to see corporate lawyers such as Kendall, Ruff and Mills coming to the fore; after all they are experts in the defense of property.
In many ways the impeachment trial was like a personal injury case in which one side speaks of human pain and suffering as the other counters with exculpatory subparagraphs of the law. At such times you can lose track of the fact that you originally gathered in that courtroom because someone died.
Still, the tawdry Clinton affair is far from isolated. Corporations were way ahead of the White House in commodifying ideas. Here is a recent TV commercial:
Gentlemen, I'm going to read you your rights. You have the right to be strong, to be healthy, to strive, the right to make your own choices . . . And when it comes to your hair you have the right to choose Pantene Pro-V.
And another:
Freedom . . . to choose the best-tasting cola. That's what Royal Crown has stood for ever since it was first created in Columbus, Georgia, back in 1905. The freedom to decide who you are and what you drink. There's nothing more American than that. So, be free. Drink R.C.
Or as the National Soft Drink Association puts it:
Soft drinks bring people together and provide the quilt of American diversity with a common ground on which to meet, enjoy and agree. By any measure, soft drinks are one of the important elements that bind American enterprise and culture into a system envied the world over.
Then we have Visa's "free speech" web site where you can "express your opinions, place your vote, make your choices. See whether others agree . . . Vote your conscience, vote your mind." The questions, however, are ones such as how often do you read your horoscope and what's the most overexposed TV show. Mario Savio's son, Nadav, notes on his own web site that Visa "is substituting brand preference for freedom of expression." Free speech now means "little more than making consumer decisions."
Capitalist trainer Tom Peters openly preaches the replacement of belief with identity, telling the young and ambitious to 'brand' themselves: "Starting today, you're every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi or the Body Shop."
Similarly in liberal America, logos -- symbols -- have comfortably established their power over logos -- reason. At long as you publicly witness your distaste for Rush Limbaugh and Bob Barr, nobody will bother asking you about Social Security, especially if you walk around with a copy of Vanity Fair under your arm.
One reason, I suspect, the public has been unable to cope with the Clinton scandals is that the replacement of philosophy with brand loyalty is so time consuming. While philosophies can run on for centuries, the collapse of a product-based identity -- whether it be Clinton or R.C. Cola -- can occur in the flash of a Furby. Being someone was hard enough when it was just a matter of faith; now one is constantly in danger of falling into that huge, painful purgatory between the avante garde and the retro.
As I walk along Washington's streets of power, I try to guess what all the suave and important-looking people actually do for a living. Is the brush cut, with the shades the width of a tongue depresser, a stock clerk or a law student? Is the hyped-heel, cell-phoner brushing impatiently by me badly needed on the Hill or is she, perhaps, the woman who will ring up my books later that day at Kramer's?
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