The Madonna/Whore Complex in American Politics

I think any explanation should include a discussion of the way the phrase “Founding Fathers” remains a default element of American political rhetoric, especially with conservatives.

Well, this isn’t rotisseire baseball, and the bargaining chips sacrificed for the election of Rutherford Hayes (or Poland?) lost more than childish idealism.

How far do you take this?

“Well, that’s just politics,” he smiled regretfully but with calm maturity in the light of shock-and-awe over Baghdad.

Madonna/whore hits the nail on the head. Americans want any given thing to be ALL good or ALL bad, and have no shades of gray, unless it’s Fifty Shades of Grey.

Living amongst Southern fundamentalists, I want to attribute this complex to our Puritan heritage, but I am open to other suggestions.

Addendum: However, in Lincoln, the President achieves a noble end via politics as practiced. That’s not a 45 year old truth or something, but it might be a truth that has at least gotten through a decent high school civics class (if one that admitted does neglect the role of African Americans).

“How many vulnerable oldsters is CR willing to let suffer and die to get a Grand Bargain? 5000? 50000? A range will do.”

I refuse to believe Corey Robin would be so heartless.

I want to attribute this complex to our Puritan heritage, but I am open to other suggestions.

How about, “black and white is more fun and less work”?

We are, after all, talking about movies, not scholarship. In the end, the the only real metric that matters to 95% of the audience is “is it entertaining?”

I think it’s worth keeping in mind that the fundamental difference between a movies and other media is that in movies, the work is costing some tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money to produce. Anything produced under such conditions is not going to be a pure expression of anyone’s artistic or intellectual vision except under the most exceptional of circumstances.

(Although, yes, I’ll admit it frightens me that some people obtain ethical or historical guidance from what must be, by its very nature, an almost purely financial enterprise.)

Correction: Stephens should be Stevens.

10: I expect to find out what is acceptable by summer.

Listen to your Senators. Even McConnell makes his claims, almost always, to an idealism and never to a cynicism. When a compromise happens, it is always a necessary compromise, and never an excessive compromise or betrayal of core principle. IOW, even the realism retains the idealism. As said in Broadcast News you don’t have to cross the line if you can manage to move it a little.

Is the moving of the line as we grow older maturity? Well, besides idealism, cynicism, and realism there is also comedy and tragedy.

The default, probably the necessary discourse is Robin’s 5-yr-olds. We like at least to speak well of ourselves. The collateral damage or 2nd effect of the just war is rationalized within a hierarchy of values so as to be a lesser evil toward a greater good, remaining idealism. Thus always we tender homage to virtue, as is said.

I just see no broad political discourse of either cynicism or “realism” out there.” My group’s interests are universal goods, and cause little harm” is how humans manage to sleep at night.

The discourse is always idealistic.

“the teachers’ unions arguing that the only thing which ails US education is not enough income for teachers.”
So can we take this to mean that, as well as writing for them, you get all your news from the National Review? You do realize that this sentence marks you as a compulsive liar?

MPAV beat me to it. I’d like a credible citation in support of that claim. But then I believe no such thing exists. And CTTOI, it could lead this thread astray.

16: politics is indeed a moral cesspool. It’s who can pick other peoples’ pockets the best.

Reminding people of this sounds more like a moral duty than anything else.

This only really works if you are willing to say you yourself are immoral within that cesspool, and that is what I don’t hear. We may think (though probably not) that getting our bridge for their hospital is an evil act, but we rarely ever say it.

Usually “politics is a moral cesspool” means that the other guys are not as good, have some power, and I have to compromise but it really isn’t my fault, just another lesser evil for a greater good. IOW a contest, competition, agon. As the good guys, we wish it were otherwise.

Anyone out there want Republicans to have a veto-point?

The ‘behind closed doors’ deals and midnight bargains is both typical Hollywood fare and in this case a rather bold exaggeration of the facts as they occurred.

Its hagiography turned into mythology by people who still think the “Civil” war was about freeing the slaves….it was, but then it wasn’t….quite a measurable portion of Civil War historians (both Yanks and Rebs) view slavery as merely the vehicle for a debate, which ended in war, about states rights. It stands as the one and only test of the difference between being the UNITED states rather than united STATES.

Thought of in those terms, the dealings depicted in Lincoln are in fact more cynical – they become deals to protect elected political power rather than anything to do with morals, humans or liberty.

Interestingly the 11 states which have petitioned for succession seem prepared to enter the same debate today…though I doubt we could get 2,500 let alone 2,500,000 to put down their TV remotes long enough to fight with rifles and cannons – unless it was a reality show for prize money.

8: Are you insane?

No he isn’t, just very, very boring.

What is it about this country that makes any description of the moral cesspool of politics seem like the revelation of a brave new truth?

I gather it comes from the fact that lots of people–even lots of informed people–want radical things to happen in the political sphere without dealing with the moral cesspool. Do you want universal health coverage? Well, you’re going to have to buy off insurance and pharmaceutical companies. That enrages lots of people. It should! But what are you gonna do?

The odd reactions to sexuality in US politics have often puzzled me. How the Dickens could Clinton be impeached for having sex with Monica? It just isn’t (wasn’t) that important. And Eliot Spitzer patronised prostitutes. So what – he was doing a good job, wasn’t he? On the other hand, nobody seemed to mind that JFK couldn’t keep his pants on. Why the difference in treatment?

Of course, I’m replying to P O’Neill @1, above.

“What is it about this country that makes any description of the moral cesspool of politics seem like the revelation of a brave new truth?”

This is a very good question – whenever every time I hear anyone yearn for the “golden age of discourse,” I wonder when that was.

The Lincoln hagiography – somehow I think that stems from the Godlike proportions he’s assumed in stone, both on Mt. Rushmore and at the Lincoln Memorial.

Or perhaps we can thank MLK’s 1963 march on Washington, with his brilliant speech that opened with a tribute to the Great Emancipator:

“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”

Perhaps it was the title itself – Great Emancipator. That “symbolic shadow” is long and deep.

But Lincoln was a man. And the president who graces the penny. And a historical figure whose story cannot be contained within the constraints of a 2.5 hour film.

“Ever since David Donald’s Lincoln Reconsidered, which came out in 1947, and Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay in The American Political Tradition (1948), we’ve known about this Lincoln. (And as Aaron Bady points out, getting the gritty Lincoln is the basic conceit of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, which came out in 1939.) When it comes to Lincoln, we lost our virtue a long time ago, yet somehow, in 2012, we’re all still virgins.”

As pointed out earlier in this thread, the audiences for scholarly history and a feature film aimed at a mass market are different. It is safe to say that many if not most of the people going to the cinema to see “Lincoln” are largely unfamiliar with changes in historians’ view of Lincoln, and they probably haven’t seen “Young Mr. Lincoln” either, unless they’ve sought it out on DVD or they can afford a cable package with Turner Classic Movies. Hard to say that Kushner and Spielberg are bringing moviegoers old news.

Some of the audience for “Lincoln” probably have read Gore Vidal’s novel and possibly the old TV movie based upon it starring Sam Waterston (which bombed), in which case your point is a little stronger. For example, Geoffrey O’Brien describes Day-Lewis’ assumption of a high, shrill voice for Lincoln as a novelty – Waterston did that on TV years ago, following Vidal, who made a point of noting it. Vidal’s depiction of a darker and more complex Lincoln did much to alter the popular view of his character. Even so, this new “Lincoln” is the most complex depiction of the President we’ve seen in a feature film (including Ford’s, as wonderful as that movie is).

There’s another interesting dichotomy relevant to the film, which is the way in which in most discussion of US politics, the two options presented are voting simply to pick leaders (president, judges, senators), and armed revolution. You can reasonably call the first largely meaningless in terms of making improvements, as opposed to preventing bad things. And the second is almost certainly impossible, and in any case very likely undesirable.

The thing missing is the space between those extremes. The thing that was always intended to be a permanent part of US democracy, but got dropped somewhere along the way; the constitutional amendment.

The last non-procedural one was in 1965; what should the next one be? How-about something like ‘if any individual or corporation in the Press of the United States shall be proven to have taken payment in fee or kind to influence their protected speech during the period of one calendar year before the data of an election, they shall be guilty of the crime of felony bribery, and subject to such penalties as the law may decree’.

Details aside, if the film reminds people that that is the kind of scale of thing that has happened, and could happen again, maybe it won’t be another 50 years before there’s another vote with comparable stakes to elections in every other democratic country on the planet.

Anybody who works with or lives around doctors and nurses knows that the most sincere commitment to the alleviation of suffering can coexist in the same individuals with the coarsest cynicism about human life. Is politics that different? We assume a consistency in human nature that is daily contradicted by experience if we think that the political Madonna isn’t also a whore, somewhat in the manner of the famous rabbit-duck.

In any case, the occasional goodness of bad men is often more helpful to the cause than the routine virtue of better individuals.

It does bother me that we operate with such gross categories as villain and saint. This discussion is about whether the dirtiness of Lincoln’s tactics was a salient feature of the movie. What bothered me about Lincoln, however, was not that; but the film’s depiction of the President as more than Christ-like. After all, as the movie tells the tale, the difference between Lincoln and Jesus is that Jesus only had one really shitty day.

What exactly is the ‘but this was aimed at a mass market’ argument here? I’m really not getting it – That more blacks would turn of American audiences? Or that more bottom up violent insurrection would not have been commercially viable?

I’m mostly in agreement with CR (and others saying similar things in the previous thread). What I find a bit odd is the repeated equation or conflation of “Spielberg” and “Hollywood”, along with blithe assumptions about “What The Audience Wants”. Look Spielberg is one of the biggest Hollywood directors out there obviously, but equally obviously, a big-budget film called Lincoln about the passage of the 13th amendment directed by Scorsese would have been rather different. I’m not saying that it would necessarily have foregrounded black agency, or that it would have been better, or whatever, but it’s clearly true that such a film could have been made and it would have been very different. It could even have been quite successful. (Or say, a film called Lincoln, etc., directed by P.T. Anderson. Or, well, you get the point.) “Oh, it’s Hollywood!” doesn’t get one anywhere, because it doesn’t actually explain anything. Because it really is about Spielberg, and because as a director he obviously has a ton of agency—esp. as a damn successful Hollywood director. (Again, if you’re inclined to doubt this, imagine a biopic of Howard Hughes called The Aviator directed by Spielberg. Etc.)

So, the problem is Spielberg. And the thing is, this was entirely to be expected! I take it this was part of CR’s point, though I’m not sure he meant it in quite the way I do. I find that Spielberg doing fluff, or working in genre, is generally pretty great—he paces the films well, he handles (relatively banal) subtext more or less subtly, etc. Good stuff mostly, though I haven’t seen a lot of his recent films. Spielberg doing Serious Film, like grand historical narrative with obvious socio-political implications—generally a disaster. Like Munich: set aside its political problems for a second (of which there are legion), the scene that effectively serves as the emotional climax in the film is a fucking crime against filmmaking.*

*If you’ve seen the film and are unsure what scene I’m talking, (if this is even possible!) I’ll just note that it involves cross-cutting between two entirely unrelated sets of scenes, one of which reenacts a historical event, and the other… the other not so much.

“So that every time we stumble across some banal item of reality—Lincoln was a politician! Politicians politick!—we draw back in shock and awe at the haunting truth of it all, as if we had just been handed the tablets at Mt. Sinai.”

The “Say it ain’t so, Joe” historical model.

You’re leaving out all the hagiography that precedes the banal revelation. The hero generating media machine relentlessly raises up instant ‘icons’, politicians, mostly. The only reason we are shocked is because the ground was already seeded with gold dust.

It occurs to me that no one in this kerfuffle has yet quoted Karl Marx’s assessment of Lincoln.

Lincoln is a sui generis figure in the annals of history.He has no initiative, no idealistic impetus, no historical trappings. He gives his most important actions always the most commonplace form. Other people claim to be “fighting for an idea”, when it is for them a matter of square feet of land. Lincoln, even when he is motivated by, an idea, talks about “square feet”. … The most redoubtable decrees — which will always remain remarkable historical documents — flung by him at the enemy all look like, and are intended to look like, routine summonses sent by a lawyer… His latest proclamation, which is drafted in the same style, the manifesto abolishing slavery, is the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing up of the old American Constitution.

Nothing is simpler than to show that Lincoln’s principal political actions contain much that is aesthetically repulsive, logically inadequate, farcical in form and politically, contradictory… But Lincoln’s place in the history of the United States and of mankind will, nevertheless, be next to that of Washington. …

Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way tip from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance-an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!

Evidently the idea of Lincoln as essentially an ordinary politician goes back quite a bit farther even than Hofstadter.

“I think it was D.H. Lawrence”.
Well, the version of this idea that I’ve heard comes from some French wag, to the effect that America is the only great nation in the world to have gone from innocence to decadence without passing through the stage of civilization…

Was there a prize for the first person to gratuitously bring up Israel/Palestine?

Himmler, in one of his more reflective moments, characterised the SS’s involvement in mass murder as a great and noble sacrifice by the murderers – they were such idealists that they’d sacrificed their own conscience to the cause, and were all the nobler for it. Or you could look at a film like the Untouchables, which sets up a confrontation between forbearing, law-abiding idealist Costner and brutal, lawless cynic Connery, but doesn’t have Costner corrupted by it or led into any grey areas – instead, he adopts Connery’s methods, triumphs and emerges as a brutal, lawless idealist. I guess that way you can have your idealistic cake and eat it.

Yeah, what 56 said.

Actually, my question is: what is it about (some) American academics that makes them see the country, its people and history as just so uniquely and exquisitely weird and inferior? And who exactly are those mature, stably realistic Old World statesmen (statespeople) who are never excessively laudatory or cynical, who accept the moral cesspool of politics (with a knowing shrug?) and never, ever make their leaders demons or saints? Okay, they’re cooler about infidelity, I’ll grant that. Even Russian grannies are cooler about infidelity. But really, the whole starting argument is set up with so many strawmen (strawpeople), and with so many dubious premises, how can anyone respond?

It’s like the poster on the first thread who kept insisting that every other country had freed its slaves without “fuss.” You want “fuss”? Read about the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, and then get back to me.

I await my stoning.

Because I hail from Chicago, that cesspool like no other (unless you compare it to the cesspools that gave us Rove, Lee Atwater, etc.), I am periodically irritated with the stereotyping of “the Chicago way” as being separate and different and worse than how others engage in politicking.

And perhaps because I am from Chicago, the former hog butcher to the world now filled with insurance companies, I feel that if those “arbiters of cultural taste” are today shocked by Lincoln’s adroit ability to “politick,” and are surprised to see a hero sullied or portrayed in such a way, perhaps it is because their tastes are naive and uneducated… and perhaps we should be celebrating Spielberg for sharing this Lincoln with these “arbiters of cultural taste” and exposing them to those dirty realities they like to ignore.

Trader Joe: “Its hagiography turned into mythology by people who still think the “Civil” war was about freeing the slaves….it was, but then it wasn’t….quite a measurable portion of Civil War historians (both Yanks and Rebs) view slavery as merely the vehicle for a debate, which ended in war, about states rights. It stands as the one and only test of the difference between being the UNITED states rather than united STATES.”

Bullsh*t. Read anything written during and before the war, and see what the grievances of the Slave States were. They were slavery, slavery, slavery and, uh,… other stuff. But first, second, third, fourth and fifth was slavery.

Yes, but actually slavery was the main reason for secession. And the secession was the reason for war. So, yes, you could say that indirectly slavery was the main reason. Or, alternatively, you could say that it was the desire of Northern elites to keep the Southern provinces.

But they’re movie critics. They don’t and can’t sit down and read the academic literature before watching a film — maybe they’ll google to check that Anna K really did throw herself under a train in the original and that DDL didn’t make up the high-pitched voice and stooped walk out of whole cloth — but they’re watching a couple films a day and writing on deadline. Most of them are probably not astute political observers — that’s not their profession.

Barry a #61

Perhaps you are unfamilliar with the works of Ayers, Goodheart and several other noted Civil war historians that have actually looked at the real correspondence between and among Southern elected leaders, wealthy land/slave holders and influential voices at that time.

The overwhelming conclusion of this extensive body of work is that while these people were unquestionably seeking to defend their rights to hold slaves and protect their property – rights that were enshrined in the Constitution of the United States – what they actually wanted from Washington D.C. at large and Lincoln in particular was the right to set their own laws within their states…as had likewise been guaranteed to them under the constitution. State rights was the cause – slavery the vehicle.

They didn’t want a Federal government telling them what they could and could not do fearing the slippery slope – now well established, that Federal power would ultimately have no end. The stance was if Slavery was to be abolished, do it by constitutional amendment which the Northern states rejected because they knew they lacked the votes to do so – as such, it was done by federal fiat….much like any number of things are now done today.

My full comment as you quoted is that the debate “was….but then it wasnt” about slavery…I never said it had nothing do with slavery, quite the contrary. My point was that the Southern states wanted the right to their own self determination. They wished to be more STATES, than UNITED by a Federal master.

To be clear – I do not defend the Southern view on either the exclusivity of states rights or the institution of slavery…the former has its flaws and the latter is clearly morally wrong. My commentary is historical accuracy, not political revisionism.

That said, mythologizing that the vast majority of Northern power gave two rips about southern slavery and were willing to fight a war over it is plainly bogus…neither the North nor the South wanted to have a war which is likewise quite plain in the correspondence of the day. Hawks were the minority in both constituencies.

What the North wanted was a powerful federal government because they had sufficient population and resource to control it. The South wanted the opposite because they didn’t and they knew it, so were forced into defending the status quo, which was a weak federal government.

Slavery was clearly the choice issue to propagandize and it was done extremely well – its little wonder that 5 year olds and 15 year olds were taught that the cause was right and just, rather than greed and power. This I think the film portrays rather well.

I suppose I could have made more such interventions, but I tend to be allergic to that kind of hand-holding. In any event, I thought three was more than enough to give the reader a sense of whom I was talking about.

Jeez, dude. For what it’s worth, I do know whom you were talking about. And, I also feel that their takeaway from Lincoln is spot-on accurate. That is, it’s not that they inexplicably feel this movie has revealed a Great Truth about Lincoln. It’s that the movie very much encourages all of us to do so. The movie plainly asserts that Politics Is Dirty a gigantic, monumental insight into not only politics, but also the practical meaning of virtue. But, yes. The people who should know better than to celebrate this fucked up by writing awful and awfully stupid reviews, by falling for the vision Lincoln constructed without realizing it’s insightless old hat.

Bankers, merchants and industrialists certainly weren’t behind 1963 draft riots. In fact, the rich being able to buy their way out of the draft was the main reason, iirc.

James McPherson used Isaiah Berlin’s analogy of the Hedgehog and the Fox. The fox has many wiles and strategems, but the hedgehog has only one big thing – its principles. There were many foxes around in 1860 – Stephen Douglas for one, James Buchanan, probably even William Sewart. Hedgehogs? – well, besides John C. Calhoun, who was dead, I cannot think of one.

Lincoln was an ususual combination, and that is the only way I can describe him, a sort of Hedgefox, who could use his wiles to defend his principles. My favourite Lincoln example has nothing to do with slavery, but with the Minnesoa Sioux Rising of 1862, one of the biggest Indian wars, and one that was attended by slaughter of both whites and Indians, plus the biggest mass rapes of white women in American history.

Lincoln was presented (after a trial) with a list of over 303 Indian names for public execution by hanging. Though in the midst of many crises, by patient enquiries and reading transcripts, Lincoln whittled the names down to 39. It was stil the largest single execution in American history. And historians found that some of the worst offenders escaped trial altogether, and some innocents were undoubtedly executed. But Lincoln had done his best, despite the outcry among Minnesotans.

In 1864, Lincoln only carried Minnesota narrowly. The Governor told Lincoln he would have won by more if he hanged more Indians. Lincoln replied “I could not hang men for votes”

Lincoln could somehow flirt with cynicism, but not become its slave. Did he calculate the minimum Indians he could hang and still get re-elected? Or was it all in a noble spirit of justice? With Lincoln, we will never know exactly, because he was an inensely private person. Tellingly, he often argued that the best speech written by Shakespeare was Claudius’, the one where Claudius admits his guilt “My offence is rank, it smells to heaven ….”, but cannot reverse his course or surrender its fruits.

“But it would be like trying to explain Nazism without mentioning the Germans, or the Holocaust in Eastern Europe without mention the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians, and more.”

Are we still discussing the 5 year olds? A normally developed 15 year old should already be able to explain Nazism without mentioning ‘the Germans’.

@49: I don’t know, calling Lincoln equivalent of George Washington, the author of the ‘most important document in American history since the founding of the Union’, and some who accomplished ‘feats that only heroes could accomplish in the old world’ doesn’t sound very ordinary-politician to me. Seems that Marx is saying Lincoln is an ordinary person who became an extraordinary and historic politician because of the space the American system gives to the true popular will.

You might also check out Marx’s letter to Lincoln on the occasion of his 1864 reelection, which says that the international working class “consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world”.

Here is the review Corey Robin maybe wishes he had written:

http://www.notevenpast.org/watch/historian-views-spielbergs-lincoln

Or you could look at a film like the Untouchables, which sets up a confrontation between forbearing, law-abiding idealist Costner and brutal, lawless cynic Connery, but doesn’t have Costner corrupted by it or led into any grey areas – instead, he adopts Connery’s methods, triumphs and emerges as a brutal, lawless idealist. I guess that way you can have your idealistic cake and eat it.

As for the last sentence, given the question posed in the OP (which I’m personally not sure about), something like the preceding sentence would be necessary if the tolerance for “smallness” was as low as I think the OP’s suggesting. Another way of putting it would be that it’s a different definition of “lawless.” If so, Scorsese isn’t saying something about the brutality of Ness (government) as about the failure of ordinary American life to live up to his ideals (the audience generally). Though there’s an awful lot of wiggle room there, and it could mean anything up to Himmler and back again, with only the level of outrage to judge how serious it seems to be understood to be.

One of these things is not like the others:

a.) Costa-Gavras
b.) Gilles Pontecorvo
c.) Glauber Rocha
d.) Steven Spielberg
d.) Elio Petri
e.) Francesco Rosi

A Mamet screenplay – did not realize that. Haven’t seen Untouchables in a while. Somehow I think DePalma was more like the guy in Blow Out, picking out random things to use. He probably really liked the Union Station staircase. He was big on channeling Hitchcock too in his early days.

If you look at the Odessa Steps and the Untouchables Union Station scenes, they provide a terrific example of how our visual literacy has transformed over the first century of film – and how cultural narratives are woven into celluloid.

Don’t you think that this obvious problem is at least something of a failure of American political reporting, still shackled by the cult of objectivity into not reporting on rumor about the actual process of the sausage making? When you set this alongside the much later in time account that comes down when the history books are written, it seems easier to hold simultaneous beliefs of innocence and cynicism at the same time. Contemporaneous denatured news, radio-TV-newspaper – all surface (I think here of the inane interviews with politicians that populate NPR in particular); much later revelatory history, after the fact for a proportionally smaller audience always requires work to reconcile. As for the bad conscience of cultural elites, Upton Sinclair’s quote comes to mind: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”

Roger Ebert was a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. He is pretty smart.

Robin Corey is doing an injustice to David Denby, the only review I had time to look at. Denby is saying that this is a great MOVIE about gritty legislative processes. I see no evidence that Denby is unaware of the standard historiography of Lincoln, or of the fact that the MAN Lincoln was a gritty politician. Out of this category mistake Mr. Corey spins this flashily erudite to-do about the whore-madonna complex in American politics. A clever, well-educated boy on the make in the moral cesspool of American journalism. Got it.

he was a man, neither to be browbeaten by adversity, nor intoxicated by success, inflexibly pressing on to his great goal, never compromising it by blind haste, slowly maturing his steps, never retracing them, carried away by no surge of popular favour, disheartened by no slackening of the popular pulse, tempering stern acts by the gleams of a kind heart, illuminating scenes dark with passion by the smile of humour, doing his titanic work as humbly and homely as Heaven-born rulers do little things with the grandiloquence of pomp and state; in one word, one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good. Such, indeed, was the modesty of this great and good man, that the world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1865/johnson-letter.htm

As for the unrealism, it’s funny to see it discovered with surprise here. Zizek explained it all.
http://krebscycle.tumblr.com/post/14171228736/slavoj-zizek-for-the-win

“The truth is somewhere in between” is surely the wisdom of 10 year olds, is it not? Which isn’t to say that Corey is wrong, but seeing the tension between a situation’s being both very black, yet also very, very white in a fully fleshed-out, tangible artistic work is usually a satisfying aesthetic experience. It’s like the 10 year old scowling at a Picasso: “But I already knew that faces have a left side and a right side – everyone knows that! When can we go to the cafeteria?”

@ JW Mason 49,

Great Karl Marx quote. Marx really was a brilliant journalist (though a lousy economist and philosopher in my book).

It’s striking that Marx there is really voicing a grudging admiration for what we could call “bourgeois politics”—the complex of tortured parliamentary compromise, constitutional legalism and aggrandizing of the nation-state. His back-handed enthusiasm for Lincoln must have fed on his astonishment over what bourgeois politics was accomplishing in the Civil War. In Europe Marx had seen bourgeois politics do nothing except cut deals with reactionary authoritarianism. But in America it was doing something useful and progressive—freeing the slaves!

But Marx’s tribute cut’s against the grain of left ideology, which continues to feel a visceral suspicion and disdain for bourgeois politics. Leftists’ preferred form of politics is insurrectionary direct action from below. They like to see militias organized, communes founded, land seized, plantation houses sacked and general strikes called. That’s the left’s conception of a serious, “real” politics that cuts right to bare-knuckled class struggle and doesn’t get distracted by the corrupt, propagandistic elite machinations intrinsic to bourgeois politics.

And those are precisely the kinds of scenes that leftist critics wish Spielberg had put in his movie. Lincoln is a tribute to bourgeois politics (and one that Marx the journalist might have appreciated) and that’s what I think really bugs leftists—not that it leaves out blacks, which it doesn’t, but that it leaves out the popular insurrection. To the left, popular insurrection is always the real story, the only form of progressive politics that actually makes history happen, with bourgeois politics providing at best a superfluous ratification of the “facts on the ground” that insurrectionary class struggle has already established.

But as I argued on the other Lincoln thread, that impulse in left historiography is wrong-headed. Bourgeois politics broadly construed—not just the congressional wranglings but the attendant nationalist project of military conquest, the public moral-political debate and the constitutional revolution that entrenched abolition—was far and away more important to the cause of emancipation than was the insurrectionary direct action of slaves. And crucially, bourgeois politics was the mechanism by which blacks themselves could most powerfully influence history and exert control over their own destinies.

Action from below isn’t necessarily “insurrectionary” but is just as necessary to bourgeios democracy as are legal acumen, back-room politics, and if necessary force. Nor does the fact that according to their critics, Kushner and Speilberg did not sufficiently show such grass roots action, necessarily mean they were “blinkered” and “unable to imagine it” and that they are therefore bigots bent on perpetuating “damaging” (Kate Masur’s word) stereotypes. But don’t worry, Masur and Robin in their superior enlightenment will, dare I say it, “rescue” us from such “damage.”

There is a kind of soi disant liberalism, or “moderate” centrism, in our own day, which archly supposes that activism, protest, and political organization from the bottom, are dubious and unnecessary distractions at best, when not actively counter-productive. I suppose the same spirit enjoys historical narratives of wise, “serious” men, responsibly deliberating over what is best, guiding the nation with Olympian detachment. And, there is a (sometimes unconscious) racism, which would erase all, but white faces from the cast of speaking parts, in relating our national dramas.

I find the racism in Masur’s critique somewhat repugnant, but I am sympathetic, in general, to the cause of social history and representing the roles of ordinary people, and think it is useful, if people are led, on the occasion of this film, to think about how the oppressed can act in their own interest, and collectively, to challenge their oppression, and not depend on the moral character or good intentions of a single individual.

In the defense of Kushner and Speilberg, any two and half hour movie is going to leave out a lot; what’s included has to be focused: every scene, every line and gesture, must tell. I wonder what Masur thinks should have been excluded.

Necessarily, a film about a legislative process is going to focus on those in the legislature. There were no black faces on the floor of the House, and imagining some would have been a falsification. The critical votes and voices were those of the least enthusiastic, the most conflicted, the least committed to the cause. The inframarginal passion of the abolishnists hardly mattered at all, except as portrayed by the case of Thaddeus Stevens, to the extent that it might scare the horses.

If Kushner and Speilberg were to show the effect of the activism of blacks, they might have shown, not more of the activism itself, as Masur advocates, but something more of the effect of that activism — a legislator, say, whose racist assumptions may have been undermined by the examples of black soldiery. Blacks remained throughout, a marginalized minority, even if the central issue concerned them most vitally, and they appeared as actors, as much or more through the imaginations of white actors, than as central and active figures conducting their own motion — that’s just historical fact, which Kushner and Speilberg transferred to drama, with considerable sensitivity for the power of imagination.

For our own time, the least plausible aspect of the film is also the least plausible aspect of the political events themselves: that a conservative party or politician might actually try to do the right thing, might actually want to do something other than cut a rich man’s taxes or excuse a powerful business its crimes.

To me this ‘madonna-whore complex'[1] is very reminiscent of how (it often feels to me) people will readily admit that the political system is very corrupt, and yet have trouble accepting particular narratives about how politicians are bought off by such-and-such interests on any particular important issue. Because nobody wants to be a conspiracy theorist.[2] “You’re saying we went to war with Iraq because of the MIC and the Israel lobby?[3] What are you, a conspiracy theorist?”

There was a This American Life episode many years back called, I think, “Smoke-Filled Room” with a story about how agricultural commodities companies were caught colluding to fix prices. And Ira Glass’s comment was smthg to the effect of: ‘You would think that a scheme to fix prices would be more subtle than a bunch of guys sitting in a smoke-filled room, deciding what the price of milk should be. There must be something else to it. But that’s pretty much what it was: a bunch of guys sitting in a room saying “so how much should milk cost?” and working it out.’ If there is corruption and price-fixing and secret meetings with representatives of powerful industries, it has to look like something. But to believe that there are actual smoke-filled rooms just seems too credulous.

ChapatiMystery once pointed that if a head of state is assassinated in a third-world country, it’s a coup d’etat, but if you describe the Kennedy assassination that way you’re a conspiracy theorist because those things don’t happen here. That seems like yet another variant on the theme.

“Of course our politics is corrupt. Just don’t ask me how.” Because if you accept all the explanations, that makes you a pinko radical. “But of course I don’t trust the government.” I feel like anti-intellectualism has a lot to do with this, but also a kind of high-brow disdain for straightforward explanations.[4]

fn 1: educated ice @92, Couldn’t you say that politicians are expected to be pure-as-driven-snow idealists, and that they’re also supposed to ‘get things done’ (which means horse-trading, pragmatism, compromise/corruption), and they get blamed for whichever one they’re not doing enough, sometimes blamed for both at the same time?
fn 2: Hofstadter was mentioned in the OP, is this ‘reverse-paranoia’ something he talks about?
fn3: There, I did it! I brought up Israel and Palestine in a thread on American politics! Israel Israel Israel Israel!! Palestine Palestine Palestine! OOooooo I’m so bad.
fn4: Am I just paraphrasing Hofstadter at this point? I should read Paranoid Style so I’ll know…

Per ‘War of Northern Aggression’ posts – The South wanted to expand slavery, not preserve their freaking “rights”. You have heard of Dred Scott ? The Kansas-Nebraska act ? Both of which paved the way for the expansion of slavery everywhere.

The only problem with the Civil War is it didn’t fully liquidate the southern aristocracy, but rehabilitated them under Johnson.

Kaveh (at 103): “Because if you accept all the explanations, that makes you a pinko radical.”

And people don’t want to be pinko radicals because that implies they ought to do something about it. That in turn means they have to confront two scary things; first, that there may be bad personal consequences (people stop talking to you; you lose your job; your wife leaves you…) and second that, even if against the odds you make some progress, the ruling class takes revenge by wrecking the whole shebang.

rootless 108

The progressive left is not an “it,” not a “the,” and “a” political program does not exist. Rather, a broad, internally conflicted constellation with multiple overlapping “programs.” I, among many, have been wandering around in there for 50 years, and will remain.