One of America’s leading bloggers, James Poulos argues that the GOP needs to take a class in anthropology to find its guiding spirit
Although Barack Obama has finally begun to learn for himself just how disappointing a second term can be, Republicans have little reason to celebrate. They have not recovered from the trauma of the Bush years. The party’s shell-shocked effort to reboot, rebrand, and reform its way out from under W’s legacy ranks as one of the great bores of American politics. The prevailing fear is the GOP suffers from a wonk gap, or a data gap, or a diversity gap, or some supremely disheartening combo of all three. Meanwhile, the animating fears of grassroots “rubes,” though frequently borne out in jawdropping style by both parties in Washington, are deemed by the establishment too coarse, too divisive, and too impractical to work a positive change in Republican fortunes.
There is, however, one new strain of thought on the right that has livened up this grim procedural. Coming, predictably, from the relative margins of the establishment, a boomlet of “libertarian populists” threatens to remake the GOP landscape by reorienting policy in an explicit way against corporatism, the corruptive alliance between big business and big government so patently to blame for so many of the power elite’s sweeping bipartisan during the long decade since 9/11. “LibPop” advocates and sympathisers now range from movement influentials (like The Federalist’s Ben Domenech) to muck-raking journalists (like The Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney) to prominent newspaper columnists (like
The New York Times’ Ross Douthat).
But however welcome their conceptual shift may be, it isn’t radical enough to offer a new birth of Republican freedom from the post-Bush years. Republicans must really be “born again” – not merely changing, but transforming – to move majorities to the polls. And much as a person who strikes themselves as “broken” can never make themselves feel “fixed,” friends of liberty must abandon the whole framework of “improvement” and “repair” – just those categories of thought that “public policy” and “political science” propose to let dominate our mind.
This is easier said than done. Fortunately, there’s a clear path to accessing a political transformation that can get results. Rather than policy, those on the right should take anthropology as their point of departure. An anthropological attitude toward democracy submits that no degree of wonkish virtuosity or policy chops can save a political movement. Rather, participants win the language game of politics when they connect with fellow humans in the realm of what being human is all about. The American left operates fairly well today
on this level. That’s why, even though President Obama has disillusioned many, the Democrats’ base is growing while the Republicans’ is shrinking.
The interminable lament that Americans can’t come together echoes from Capitol Hill to Main Street. Many blame this on the ongoing “culture war.” Few consider that beneath any
culture war is a seemingly insuperable divide among groups of Americans over anthropological matters – over human being, experienced. Even fewer suggest that the anthropological divides in America at large are strangely mirrored on the political right itself, where you will get at least five different answers - sometimes incommensurable ones – to the question of what being human is all about. Yet, while the right squabbles, the left has little trouble connecting with Americans on an anthropological level. The case for liberty is easily recast as a
case for selfishness. In 2012, Democrats successfully portrayed both moderate Republicans like Mitt Romney and the Tea Party libertarians who kicked off the GOP’s convention floor as acolytes of the same politics of greed.
The key to their success, ironically, is that they, too, take the self too seriously. Anthropological theorists like Rousseau, Tocqueville, Wittgenstein, Hayek, and (perhaps surprisingly) Werner Erhard and Helen Keller help us consider that, in democratic times, we experience “selfhood” in a disempowering way that Hobbes would recognise. We feel enclose within fate but always, to the core of our identity, insecure. To be sure, our animal brains naturally fabricate a sense of the self by interpreting experience in accordance with its deeply flawed patterns of imitation and memory. But in a democratic regime, denied both the pride-civilising order of aristocracy and the pride-erasing totality of Leviathan, we are ruled by envy and fear so deep that no egotism can master it. Yet amidst this disarray, we can notice our folly in action by describing it to others. And we can choose, through mutual declaration, to break hose patterns, freeing ourselves from the big corrupt bureaucracies in our minds that have constructed the “self.” Radically freed from fear in this way, we may recognise the courage involved in regarding how free we always already are – free to the point of being free from the self, free to live life as a site where transfiguring relationships and choices unpredictably but inevitably will occur.
That’s the powerful, selfless vision that Republicans must invite Americans to consider in order to reverse their fortunes. As conservatives’ love of Christianity has long underscored, the
right’s imagination is often captured by cultures of transfiguration. Conservatives are instinctively suspicious of transferring this energy to politics, of course, because in that realm the power of transformation reliably tempts us to tyranny. But the political applications of a “free radical” anthropology can hold a deep and salutary appeal on the right – not incidentally because Republicans will never rack up legitimate victories unless they can pledge their fidelity to a shared articulation of our shared ontology.
