Piercing the Cloud of Unreason

Here's my review of Robert Reich's Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America. Of the reviews I've written (131 at this point), this is is one that many find especialy helpful (164 "helpful votes" as of today).

Piercing the Cloud Of Unreason, May 11, 2004
A good and noble project is REASON, but one which ultimately fails. Not because Reich is not reasonable. Not because he is not clear-eyed, prudent, and good-humored as well.

No, REASON fails because fair reason, that powerful engine of the Enlightenment and a mainstay of the Founding Fathers, has been short-circuited by 1) the socially corrosive bought-and-paid-for cant of the right-wing libertarian think tank crowd, 2) the intolerant and divisive fulminations of Christian Right and their self-appointed public scolds, and 3) the tendentious free-market fables told by the Chicago "School" to serve and protect the prerogatives of the wealthy. Perhaps most threatening of all to sweet reason is 4) the trillion megawatt transmission system carved out of the public airwaves that stuffs this quasi-philosophic farrago of half-truths and outright lies into the ears of a stunned American public.

Reich intends REASON as a kind of handbook for the politically moderate American who knows that the grand egalitarian tradition is under siege, wants to understand how the Radcons have done it, and wants to do something about it. Reich knows that many Americans who grew up in a more optimistic, yes, a kinder and gentler liberal America are at a loss in trying to understand and counter the manipulative rhetorical tricks and absolutist dogma of the Radcon crowd. (Radcon is Reich's shorthand for the new model conservative -- the radical conservative -- a species of political animal bearing little resemblance to either the traditional Burkean conservative,or to that moderate, fiscally conservative Republican who until just recently held the Radcon's revanchist tendencies in check.)

With REASON, Reich shows how the Radcons have stacked the deck of public discourse through various debating club stratagems -- the classic argument from authority (because I said so and I'm in charge) and perhaps the even more favored "slippery slope" argument (if we let one person spit out their car window, then everyone will spit out their car windows and soon no one will be able to drive because all the spit will make it impossible to see out the windows and chaos and anarchy will ensue and that mustn't be allowed to happen, and so more police must be hired and more jails built).

Reich also shows how Radcon absolutism works, too. He shows that the seemingly contradictory Radcon "philosophies" -- libertarianism, "objectivism," fundamentalism -- do share one simple idea: that man and womankind are evil. Further, generally speaking, evil is in these philosophies anything that might give more power to those who traditionally have had less power. This means more power given to women, gays, and people who are not white is evil. It means that more power given to people who are not religious in the way that they ought to be religious, and people who are poor are evil. It means that people who do not believe that the Market God and His biblical counterpart form a perfect interlocking machine that impartially sorts humanity into the deserving and undeserving are evil. It means that anyone who believes that humanity can and should make decisions about what is good for humanity is evil. This, of course, describes a core liberal belief. It is also a core tenet of democracy which believes with some optimism tempered with some reasonable amount of pessimism that through discussion evil might avoided, that the common good might be found and that provision might be made for it.

REASON ultimately fails to do what Reich acknowledges must be done to stop the Radcon threat to American society: light a fire in the reader, a burning, all consuming fire of commitment to the tenets of liberalism that surpasses the absolutist Manichean view of the Radcon. Unfortunately, Reich's belief in and reliance on reason is exactly why traditional liberalism is fast disappearing as a viable political philosophy in these United States. Reason, at its heart is merely reasonable and as such is a weak argument against the overwhelming moral absolutes of the Market God,the other God, and their handservants, dissembling and deception. In this contest, REASON is overmatched, overwhelmed and overturned. When the liberal says "let us reason together," the Radcon cries "60s radicals almost destroyed this country, and you're just like them!"

Still, perhaps there is hope for Reich's cause. In books like REASON and MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS (by Godfrey Hodgson) one can begin to see a slow recovery of Liberalism's strength, i.e., its coherent philosophy of equality and justice and its abiding belief that man is more or less good, and capable of doing good through institutions in addition to churches, the market and the military which are the only institutions the Radcons endorse even as they have taken over the government, the one institution which is intended to be by the people, of the people and for the people, and which in the Radcon view is responsible for much of the evil in the world. Through such books, liberalism's condition has perhaps been stabilized. What is necessary now is a bold new prescription, a prescription building on a new COMMON SENSE, one that will cleanse and bind up the many wounds the Radcons have inflicted upon the American body politic, that will contain a message of hope and freedom that will lift its spirit, arm it properly against its powerful foes, and send it marching bravely into battle against this terrifying and unreasonable enemy of democracy.