(Update) Great American Hypocrites — A Book
(posted by Mona)
Glenn Greenwald’s latest book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, release date 4/15, is available now for pre-ordering at Amazon:
Disclosure: I played a very minor substantive role in this work, but a larger one as copy-editor. (But have no financial stake in its success.) So with that caveat in mind, it is my opinion that this book is awesome.
It examines the contrived narrative of Republicans as honorable men of family and spousal fidelity, sobriety and warrior courage — and utterly eviscerates it. The GOP’s Potemkin morality is shown for the sham that it is.Their carefully crafted and marketed myths have become a dominant “truth” in our media, and this book is one important step in revealing the average GOP pol and apologist as a hypocrite on virtually every level, especially when it comes to “family values” such as marital fidelity, or courage in war, that so many of these creatures only preach, but promiscuously violate. IOW, the Democrats are certainly no worse — and are often paragons of virtue — compared with the moral icon status the GOP has successfully peddled about itself.
GAH is now no. six three at Amazon, and climbing — beating Jonah Goldberg. Heh.
******
Update: Greenwald reports, my emphasis:
The Library Journal Political Roundup has reviewed the book for librarians (not online) and says — amusingly, in my view — the author is “caustic but supports his points with sound research. The results may well have appeal in public libraries.”
April 1st, 2008 at 8:59 pm
For most of them, their conventional morality is probably about the same kind Clayton Williams fessed up to that ruined his political career in Texas. In the Jock Ewing culture he described, the men all went to church on Sundays and supported the blue laws, etc., and then went into the bad part of town to get “serviced.”
It would probably save reporters time to keep a prepared template: “Congressman ___, a conservative Republican who ran on a ‘family values’ platform and maintained close ties with the Religious Right, was arrested in a public restroom for offering a cop a blowjob.”
April 1st, 2008 at 9:14 pm
It would probably save reporters time to keep a prepared template: “Congressman ___, a conservative Republican who ran on a ‘family values’ platform and maintained close ties with the Religious Right, was arrested in a public restroom for offering a cop a blowjob.”
Yes, but this book is much deeper than that. Greenwald begins with John Wayne the right-wing icon, and shows with irrefutable evidence that he was a craven, WWII draft dodger who is best known for “playing a soldier in movies,” while his leading male-star competitors, left and right, volunteered for combat in that war. Yet the right LOVES Wayne as a real ‘merican. Wayne dumped wives like Kleenex, with scads of affairs in-between, and was frequently drunk or stoned on the uppers and downers that in that era he could legally get from his doctor.
Right-wingers since Wayne largely (but with some exceptions, of course) follow this debauched model, even as they are regarded as the party of God, Family and Country. Greenwald’s book is not on the level of the National Enquirer, and doesn’t get into salacious details — he simply shows how preponderantly the GOP has been manipulating the electorate with values that that party’s movers and shakers do not remotely embody. It is a huge scam.
April 1st, 2008 at 10:41 pm
The Republicans are at a clear disadvantage because, like the parent who says “don’t do this”, invariably they will have done it themselves. The Democrats are relatively less moralistic, so they can be immoral without the hypocrisy charge.
But seriously, which is worse? Moralism with lapses, or an ‘ethic’ that does away with morality entirely, both rhetorically and in practice? After all, someone without a care in the world for others, themselves or philosophical consistency can NEVER be a hypocrite. This is a more general point, not some kind of backhanded defense of Republicans per se.
There was a book called In Defense of Hypocrisy some time ago. I should read it.
April 1st, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Mona,
The neconservatives are engaged in another form of hypocrisy as well, in adopting the values of Main Street America as protective coloration. I’m talking about their fake populism, their pandering remarks about “Flyover Country” and “latte-sipping elites,” as if the height of their existence were strolling around Wal-Mart in a trucker cap on the way to a tractor pull. The origin of their whole ideology is in the intellectual press, the little magazines and foundations, and such. Half of them are former Cold War liberals directly descended from Art Schlesinger and Daniel Bell, and the other half are former Marxists who were tooling around at Ramparts forty years ago.
Dain,
You may be thinking of the saying “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” But I don’t think liberals are necessarily nihilistic or relativistic. At least, I don’t think the primary difference between them is that they just feel less guilty about doing the same thing Republicans do. Actually, the rates of divorce are much lower in Blue states.
The real difference, I think, is that cultures associated with the worst moral intolerance also tend to be those with the sleaziest behavior. The more sanctimonious Dr. Jekyll’s professed moral code, the more degraded and brutish the behavior will be when Mr. Hyde comes out.
A good example is the Bible Belt attitude toward alcohol. In regions where most people think of “drankin’” as sinful or shameful, there are much higher rates of utterly beastial alcoholic behavior in road houses and dives, than in regions where drinking a beer or two in a clean, orderly working class bar is a perfectly respectable activity.
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:18 am
“A good example is the Bible Belt attitude toward alcohol. In regions where most people think of “drankin’” as sinful or shameful, there are much higher rates of utterly beastial alcoholic behavior in road houses and dives, than in regions where drinking a beer or two in a clean, orderly working class bar is a perfectly respectable activity.”
If the drunks are the same people as the moralists, then you’re point stands. If they aren’t, then it would seem to make sense that the two go hand in hand, the moralizin’ and the fratanizin’ that is.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:22 am
In the Netherlands, where pot and hash are sold in coffee shops, fewer native Dutch smoke the stuff than Americans in the US do.
When you go in one of those coffee shops, it’s usually American and British tourists you find there. Also, a recent study showed that the Dutch are less sexually promiscuous than any other EU country, even those they’ve got hookers on display for sale in the Red Light District.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:36 am
Dain,
Keith’s example of the Netherlands is another good one. My point wasn’t that the same people who most ostentatiously professed the values had the sordid behavor, but that societies in which the values are most ostentatiously professed tend to be the ones in which deviant behavior is most sordid.
The people hanging out in roadhouses and blind pigs probably aren’t the ones who go to church three times a week with a stick up their ass (although some of them are fond of going to hear some preachin’ as entertainment). The point is only that areas with puritanical religious attitudes toward alcohol tend to have much uglier displays of drunken behavor than those that don’t.
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:51 pm
I see what you’re saying. I guess my point is a kind of chicken-or-the-egg thing. If I saw alcohol destroying my friends and family, I might take a rather dramatic fire and brimstone approach too. It’s a feedback loop. Outrageous behavior elicits outrageous response.
I think your point is more particular to the US and maybe the west in general, due to the tension between mobility, individual rights and consumerism vs. cohesive, binding moral rectitude in a community. In the middle east they actually walk the walk too, though it’s hardly an improvement!
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:21 am
Half Sigma and the Inductivist have documented that the people most in favor of looser rules on things like drugs are also the least likely to screw up and find themselves in jail. Steve Sailer has theorized, using Afghans and Texans as examples, that some groups are prone to screwing up and have to resort to rather puritanical moral codes.
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:25 am
So, TGGP, I guess this explains Rick Santorum’s fear that dog sex will become legal?
April 3rd, 2008 at 7:53 am
Santorum does not seem like most Pennsylvanians. I guess he’s just odd.
On that particular issue, I side with Dave Barry.
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Yes, TGGP fleshed out the point I was getting at.
So then what’s wrong with Americans? Why can’t they handle legalizing drugs? I’ve often thought that if America dedicated itself to public parks the way Scandinavia did, it’d be filled with litter in a week, and assholes with loud stereos would drive out the quiet types enjoying the garden.
Why are Americans relatively reckless adolescents?
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Dain,
The answer is probably complicated and multi-layered, but one quick part involves an issue that strays into taboo territory very quickly - so I’m going to state a disclaimer very quickly - I don’t endorse racism, racialism, ethnocentrism, etc.
That said, there is certainly something involved in the treatment of public goods in relatively culturally homogenous societies that is different from how they get treated in relatively non-homogenous societies. When people don’t have an easily idenitifiable “other” to blame for problems, or to complain about, they tend to take some personal responsibility for the maintenance of public goods. A feeling of ‘community’ can have a noticeable effect in relatively homogenous societies, where most residents feel confident enough in their knowledge of shared values to take some personal responsibility in enforcing the shared values (whether those values be positive or negative) - some of the positive examples of which are caring for poor neighbors, keeping the parks clean, and comporting one’s self in a manner so as not to overly impose on others enjoying a public space, and stopping bullying behavior in children in a public space (negatvie examples are even easier to find, such as de facto segregation and sexism expressed in de facto dress codes).
On the other hand, non-homogeneity leads to, at the very least doubt about what common values are. Disputes between cultural expectations lead people to be less assertive in self-enforcement. At its extreme, indifference and fear of those who you don’t personally know sets in. When these informal, social enforcement mechanisms don’t function, the cost of maintaining public goods increases and becomes increasingly authoritarian in nature.
Since Northern Europe is traditionally (though recent immigration trends are making a difference) very culturally homogeneous, state socialism tends to work better there than in the U.S. because of this mechanism. Again, I’m not trying to oversimplify - there are obviously other factors that are possibly just as important (I would consider large size/centralization of community institutions as a factor to be just as important, if not more so, and possibly an overlapping category). And I certainly recognize that these mechanisms can be used for ill as well as for good. The key is to try and keep the positive aspects while eliminating or minimizing the negatives.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:58 pm
quasibill,
I think you’re on the mark about the overall phenomenon you’re describing, but it probably has more to do with size and cohesion of a community as with ethnic homogeneity. A demographically stable neighborhood community where the extended families have been acquainted for several generations is likely to display this kind of cohesion even when it’s ethnically mixed. So the answer may be to promote demographically stable small communities with stable extended families. IMO there are very few public goods that cannot be provided by primary communities of a few thousand members or so, whether a small town or urban neighborhood of that size. And even in ethnically heterogenous societies, ethnic subgroups tend to cluster in communities of several thousand or more and provide the kind of cohesion you describe. If most “public goods” are provided by some central administration on a scale far above the local community, it’s the result of promoting centralism even when it’s less efficient.
This strays way off the field, but it’s interesting to look at an ethnic map of southeastern Europe, where the distribution of ethnic Germans, Magyars, Czechs, Croats, etc., looks like a shotgun pattern. My gut impression is that the ethnic conflict between them was mainly a result of one imperial center after another playing them off against each other as a divide and rule strategy, or by promoting one group as “colonists” at the expense of the rest. We’ve never seen an ethnically “Balkanized” society that *didn’t* spring up in such an empire, but my guess is that absent the rise of the central state, such population distributions might easily have occurred naturally through peaceful migration–but with none of the ill feeling that has occurred when the state was involved.
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Kevin,
I agree, as i noted, that size is at least as important as homogeneity, I was just noting that in the context of Northern European state socialism, that what appears to be the big distinguishing factor from the U.S. is the cultural homogeneity. While the Northern European states are clearly smaller than the U.S., they are still larger than most U.S. cities that fail miserably in providing public goods in a comparison.
In fact, my real position here is that, like you, I think the best of both worlds comes to play at small community levels. Beyond that size, cultural homogeneity can help provide public goods, but also brings the negative aspects I mentioned into the picture.
BTW - can you tell I’ve been reading Human Scale?
(great book so far, and one I think is particularly relevant to AoTP.)
April 4th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Since you mention Human Scale, I thought I’d let you know Kirk Sale is holding another secessionist convention this year.
http://middleburyinstitute.org/secessionconvention2008.html
April 4th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Quasibill,
You can’t go wrong reading Human Scale.
Keith,
Is Sale still totally averse to the Web? For a major writer who’s influenced so many people, he’s got virtually zero direct presence online. Reminds me of Nader talking about the emails he’s “been told” he received, as he continues to write on an old Underwood.
April 4th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Here’s his website for his secessionist group:
http://www.middleburyinstitute.org
I’ve corresponded with him by email so he must pay some attention to the web.
April 4th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
but it probably has more to do with size and cohesion of a community as with ethnic homogeneity. A demographically stable neighborhood community where the extended families have been acquainted for several generations is likely to display this kind of cohesion even when it’s ethnically mixed.
Maybe Putnam should do another study to test that. I wrote about him in “Be grateful diversity reduces trust“.
April 4th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Thanks, Keith.