Part II of his book offers even more insight and
information. So instead of doing it all in one longish Post, I will try to
limit each Post to five or six pages and continue with this mini-series of
Posts until I have looked at all of Part II.
It occurs to me that I did not include
page-references in the last Post (in Part I) and I will change that and use
them in this and subsequent Posts on this book.
And I remind readers again that in the Notes at the
back, this book contains valuable information and excellent lists of books and
articles for further reading.
RL opens Part II with a quotation from Justice
William O. Douglas: “As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does
oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly
unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change
in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness”.
(p.137)
Douglas had seen the rise of Communism and Fascism
and Nazism; and how they seduced their target-citizenries while simultaneously
undermining the first-principles of the rule of law and of Western
democracy – all in the name of Great Good and on the pretext of this and that ‘emergency’
that required strong and immediate government power un-limited by any concerns
for ‘democracy’ and ‘law’.
(Douglas – who served for almost 37 years as an
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court – has left a fine little collection of
quotable observations, and you can get a sampling of them here .)
RL follows that quote quickly with the observation
that it was “in the last years of the Bush-Cheney administration” that a number
of observers noted that “something had gone terribly wrong in the U.S.”. Again,
he remains a ‘good liberal’ (although that term means something far different in
the post-1972 era in this country than it does in its ‘classical’ sense) and unless
he watches himself carefully he starts to slide into blaming it all on the
Republicans and the Right. In this he resembles Al Gore, whose 2007 book “Assault
on Reason” also makes acute and incisive comments about the frighteningly
irrational quality of American political discourse nowadays, and assesses the
role of the Right in all of this sharply and clearly, but does almost nothing
to examine the role of the Left in the past forty years or so, especially in
the many years before G.W. Bush came to the Presidency.
Among those observations he includes “the subversion
of democracy”. But I have to add that since subverting democracy was precisely
the objective of the gameplan of 1920’s Italian Communist thinker Antonio
Gramsci and of the Eurocommunists of the 1960s and 1970s – all of whom were ‘valorized’
by Radical-Feminist thinkers here after 1972 and embraced whole-hog by the
Democrats in 1972 and later by the Republicans – then this genuinely lethal
development should be coming as no surprise to any informed observer of
American politics and democracy.
Ditto the thought that ‘it all began’ with the shock
of 9/11: as the SO community may well realize, a great deal of
subversion-of-democracy had taken place before 2001 in this country.
In Part II RL wants to look at the connections
between “sex, crime, and terror”. (p.138)
He gives an overview of what he will be arguing in
Part II: “Fear of Crime”, which spiked in the later 1960s and 1970s, predated the
most recent (and still kicking) American “sex panic”.
This most recent bout of sex-panic developed in the
later 1970s, concomitant with a “period of waxing nervousness about the fate of
the white, heterosexual nuclear family and its attendant moral hierarchies”.
(p.138) I would add that it was precisely the agenda of Radical-Feminism to ‘deconstruct’
each element of that phrase and force the country, the culture, and the society
to abandon them (even if by ‘expanding’ the definitions of those elements beyond
any workable meaning at all).
He notes the concerns and the parallel timing of many developments
(the increasing wobbliness of the economy is one he notes especially – but I
would add a social-psychological anxiety, deeply repressed, about the effect
not only on sexual-morals but also on the consequences for children of ungrounded
‘family’ arrangements, abortion, and a general emphasis on the happiness of the
adult rather than on the needs of the children) helped to make this nation “a
more conservative” one “than it had been previously”.
I don’t want to get into political theory too deeply
here, but I add here that RL’s simple liberal-conservative axis of analysis is
not sufficient to plumb the actual complexity of what was happening in the
country. The ‘liberals’ after 1972 were not really Liberals and the ‘conservatives’
after 1980 were not really Conservatives – and all of them were working toward
an un-democratic, even anti-democratic, polity, using Leftist or Rightist
arguments to get there and to make it all seem like a Good Thing, or at least a
Necessary Thing.
(The SO Mania Regime and its sibling, the Domestic
Violence Regime, were the first large-scale bipartisan thrusts toward that dark
future.)
His second argument is that everything converges on “the
valorization of the victim, who is seen as wholly innocent and whose interests
are understood to be wholly antithetical to those of the criminal wrongdoers;
the stigmatization of the offender, whose guilt becomes a permanent,
irremediable condition of his being and who must therefore be marked or set
apart from the rest of society; the application of criminal sanctions to growing
numbers of behaviors (defining criminality ‘up’); and the elaboration of laws
and surveillance practices designed to anticipate, preempt, detect and punish
lawbreakers”. (p.138)
Which as you can see is a pretty good opening sketch
of the SO Mania Regime.
His third argument embraces the insights of such
writers as David Garland in 2001 that this country is evolving a “culture of
control” in order to preserve “social order”. I would add that this was always
the danger in the later 1960s ‘liberation’ of both the sex-drugs-free-love
Flower Children and the ‘revolutionary’ social-changers: it was going to take a
police-state level of government to keep any sort of Shape and social order in
the country, once generations of citizens had been raised with the idea that
for every individual ‘liberation’ meant ‘total freedom’ for fun and pleasure or
that ‘liberation’ meant doing-away with the ‘oppressive’ and ‘dominant’ ‘hierarchies’
that merely served to ‘marginalize’ most people.
If so many people – especially youth – were trying
to live their lives internally ‘free’ from any sense of order or hierarchy,
then what happens to the Shape of the culture and the society and the Order
that helps define culture, society, and person? The only possible outcomes
would be a) the whole shebang would dissolve and fracture or else b) that Shape
and Order rejected by individuals would have to be provided by Government and
imposed on everybody ‘from the outside’.
Thus, as RL rightly reads Garland, “crime control
has become the central ‘pivot for governance’”. This is a government, now, that
is bigtime into the business of ‘control’. And if you want to get into ‘1984’
or Kafka territory: the government will control everybody in order to liberate
everybody. And an even more toxic variant of that is what we have seen in the
SO Mania Regime: the government will do ‘whatever it takes’ to ‘control’ one
half the population (male) in order to ‘liberate’ the other half.
RL calls the emerging system “punitive governance”
in order to “emphasize its connection to perpetual punishment, a presumption of
guilt, unending vigilance, and modes of citizenship that would have been
understood as premodern forty years ago”. (p.138) (What he means by that last
bit is that for Americans before 1972, no American citizen would have accepted
such a role for government; it would have seemed to an American of forty years
ago some sort of throwback to monarchy or communism or Nazism … which is an
insight that offers an awful lot of food for thought about the past forty years
around here.)
RL will “stress the role of fear in organizing power
and regulating social relations under this regime”. (p.138) ‘Fear’, I would
add, is the great lubricator of all such ‘emergencies’ that are specifically designed
by governments to stampede their citizenries into becoming cattle, with the
government being the Trail Boss (alternately singing to them or whipping them
along to keep them moving – if you recall your old Western movies).
He also
notes, most insightfully, that this type of regime is inherently unstable. This
is a level of political analysis you aren’t often going to see in general
public discourse about the SO Mania Regime. In his view, governments operating
on this gameplan are sooner or later going to be pushed “to the point of excess
or breakdown, giving rise to abuse, overreach, and other illicit form of power”.
(pp.138-139)
I would say that the government went over the line
in its very first attempt – the DoVi and SO Mania Regimes. No, I am not denying
the ‘victimization’ (where it is genuine) and not defending ‘victimizers’ (if
they are genuine) and not denying the good intentions of various advocates and
advocacies. But I am pointing out
that no matter how good the intentions, these schemes have consequences that –
this has to be a matter of wide public deliberation – are so very dangerous for
the legitimacy and robustness of democratic governance that you have to
consider whether the ‘cure’ is more lethal than the ‘disease’.
And I would add another factor to RL’s causes for
inherent-instability: once a government has kicked-free from the limiting
requirements of solid evidence and even from fact-based, rational, careful
analysis, then there is no limit to who can set themselves up as needing the
government to ‘control’ some other group of Citizens. And there is no limit on
the government deciding that it is both authorized to and competent to expand
and impose its controls even more widely and deeply.
And I would also add that to some advocacies and
politicians nowadays this type of government abuse and overreach and expansion
is precisely not illicit, either because from the Left they can’t imagine that the government helping
to bring ‘closure’ or ‘justice’ can possibly result in anything dangerous and
because the Constitution is fundamentally flawed in not being concerned for ‘victims’
in the first place or because from
the Right there has to be law-and-order and the government can and must do ‘whatever
it takes’.** And both buy into a government that can and must ‘protect’ from
pain and ‘prevent’ it by whatever means necessary.
RL’s last point here is that it “may seem that the culture of fear is in retreat today”
(p.139) [italics mine] But, he continues, “the authoritarian political culture
that I am tracing is no simple or unitary phenomenon”. This “increasingly
repressive political culture” has become attractive to persons concerned for a
broad range of public issues: he names urban unrest, street crime, drug uses,
gang activities, and pedophiles as well as terrorism (since 9/11). There has
been an intensifying “erosion of rights and liberties” but he then goes on to
say that this development has been going on “over the past forty years” – and in
that observation I completely concur.
“The system of panic, punishment, and preemption”
has become part of legal practices across the board at this point, and spans
not only ‘conservative’ and Rightist administrations but also “center-left”
presidencies such as Carter’s and Clinton’s.*** (p.139)
As RL concludes in this Introduction to Part II, “This
decades-long reconstruction of U.S. society has been advanced by Democrats no
less than Republicans, by liberals almost as often as conservatives”. (p.139)
I would only disagree with him about that “almost as
often as”: the agendas and gameplans of Radical Feminism were dangerously authoritarian
from the get-go, long before Reagan’s first administration and the first
full-blown governmental embrace of Victimism by the Right.
Well, that’s RL’s Introduction to Part II. In my
next Post I’ll move into that Part.
NOTES
*Lancaster, Roger. Sex Panic and the Punitive State. Berkeley: U/Cal Press (2011).
ISBN: 978-0-520-26206-5 (pb). 246pp plus Appendices, Notes, and Index.
**It should be no consolation (or surprise) whatsoever
that Rep. Peter King (R-NY), a staunch and vigorous supporter of SO Mania
controls, is now Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.
***Although this is a very recent (2011) book, he
omits reference to Obama’s presidency here. I would say that this omission is
itself worthy of note: Obama’s presidency has turned out to be as ‘controlling’
and ‘authoritarian’ as the prior presidency of G.W. Bush. And – although I don’t
want to politicize these essays – I would say that this is not only because
Obama has found himself being carried along by an already well-established and
strong and dangerous political riptide, but because in the essential
Left-philosophy in which he was politically raised there has always been an
inherent authoritarianism that sought control of the levers of government in
order to impose and bring about its desired ‘new model’ American society and
culture.
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