The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Norman Mailer and Joseph Ellis: Unsettling Dialogues on Democracy: Difference between revisions

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 Ellis takes up the topic of enormous economic inequality chiefly in his “then” chapter on John Adams and the subsequent “now” chapter entitled “Our Gilded Age.” Adams was one Founder who saw inequality as embedded in American society. Unlike Jefferson who thought an agrarian, decentralized polity was America’s future, Adams was both more prescient and more skeptical about human nature. (If Jefferson provided our democratic ideals; Adams tempered our ideals by pushing our noses closer to harsh historical realities). Adams agreed with Locke that political power derives from the people, but he was less reverential than Jefferson about popular sovereignty—despotism could arise from many sources, popular, oligarchic, or monarchial. Our passions control us more than our reason; they insinuate themselves into our conscience and our understanding.{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=71, 75–79}} Adams, so to speak, takes Mailer’s formulation a step further: we are all capable of dangerous self-exculpations. But to Adams, essentially, it was the “relentless pressure toward oligarchy,” as Ellis puts it, that “needed constant attention from all branches of government.” That, to Adams, was “the central problem of political science.”{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=85, 88}}
+A Yankee Federalist who had participated in the debate over Hamilton’s proposal for a national bank, Adams saw the serpent in Jefferson’s American Eden of the 1780s as finance capitalism, a capitalism Adams viewed as establishing an emerging “commercial republic.” Adams looked upon banks as “engines of inequality” and bankers as reapers of immoral profits, as “an Aristocracy as fatal as the Feudal barons.” Banks, Adams believed, ought to be public institutions within each state yet under the control of Congress. Our Left-Conservative Founder was anticipating our Federal Reserve Board and New Deal banking regulations, as Ellis puts it, by arguing that the “invisible hand of the marketplace required the visible hand of government to regulate its inevitable excesses.”{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=90–91}} Financial aristocracies, like all aristocracies, would use their power to control political institutions for their own agendas, resulting in political oligarchy. Adams anticipated Thorstein Veblen by locating the financial driver of human vanity as the desire to be seen as exceptional, the ''emotional'' imperative to display wealth as indicator of elite status, “because riches attract the attention, consideration, and congratulation of mankind.”{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=94–97}} If one agrees with Adams (and Veblen), might one reasonably ask whether three million years of primate evolution has culminated in human admiration of Alpha-hierarchical status through displays of wealth? Isn’t display of wealth one engine of contemporary celebrity?
+Ellis’s “then” chapter on “Our Gilded Age” is one of his most convincing, cogently presented, and data-driven. Ellis makes fine comparisons and distinctions between our time and the first Gilded Age (to use Mark Twain’s 1873 terminology). Not only in light of the evidence Ellis marshals, but in light of the testimony of our own senses, a reader would have to perform ingenious mental contortions of self-exculpation to come to believe we have not created a second Gilded Age through the very forces that Adams foresaw and that Mailer uncovers in his dialogues with fellow citizens. Let me add that the most convincing book that I have come across uncovering the historical chain of oligarchs, their ideological enablers, and their financial and institutional mechanisms that led from John Calhoun through Nobel economist James McGill Buchanan to the Koch brothers et al. is Nancy MacLean’s 2018 ''Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America'' (made all the more credible by Professor MacLean’s eighty pages of densely packed notes and bibliography to document her historical findings). Ellis in his “now” section of “Our Gilded Age” makes it clear that “the last thing the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution wanted was for the Supreme Court to become supreme. . . . that status belonged to Congress,” a ''representative'' body. But the “originalists” have fallen prey to fully financed campaigns and institutions to wrest control of government through judicial activism masked by verbal contortions as “originalism.” Indeed, Ellis reminds us, on the contrary, “The seminal source for a ‘Living Constitution’ is none other than Jefferson himself.”{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=154–155}} Ellis’s analysis of how the Supreme Court has abetted the emergence of our second Gilded Age and distorted true original intent on a number of crucial issues is worthy of any reader’s close attention. (Mailer had predicted in ''The Big Empty'' that if Kerry lost to Bush, it would make little difference in restraining corporate hegemony, but Kerry’s loss might nonetheless prove on many issues that the real “price we’ll pay with the Supreme Court will prove too large.”){{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|pp=83–84}} Ellis might not convince those in ideological mind-lock, but those who come to him with a hint of open mind will at the very least be given pause. And if Ellis were to be widely read and discussed, his analysis might have the potential to alter how we perceive our behavior in the voting booth when regularly reconstituting our ''representative'' bodies in Congress.
+{{* * *}}
+The third central topic Mailer addresses is American foreign policy. Those entangling alliances and imperial impulses that the Founders also debated. Mailer sees the imperial impulses as taking several forms: cultural invasions with commercial roots, military invasions, and political invasions, the latter instigated by the corporatization of international politics and emboldened by Christian fundamentalism. None of the three types are mutually exclusive, and they all arise from similar hubris. But as expected in a book entitled ''Why Are We at War?'' the military aspects of the latter two impulses toward imperialism get the sharper focus.
+Our cultural invasions, first, “have this tendency to take over large parts of the economies of other countries,” Mailer writes. “Often we are the next thing to cultural barbarians. We don’t always pay attention to what we are trampling.” But what intensifies the anger against us is “how often we are successful in these commercial invasions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=24}} His first example is his own experience of McDonald’s in Moscow and how Russian students were excited and proud when Mailer told them their Micky Ds were better than our own. But older Russians were upset by Moscow’s McDonald’s because we had a role in bankrupting the old Soviet Union, communism had betrayed them, and they felt culturally invaded by “our money-grubbing notions of food.” Still, it is our cultural invasion of Islam that is now (in 2003) more significant to us. Muslims feel endangered by our modern technology and corporate capitalism. Our culture, our Western values, seem to them to be eroding theirs. Although Mailer understands that fundamentalism and human nature can distort Islam as much as it distorts Christianity, he believes that we nonetheless blundered in without understanding that many Muslims feel devoted to and directly related to God. “Their Islamic culture is the most meaningful experience of their lives, and their culture is being infiltrated.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|pp=25–27}}
+In Part II of ''Why Are We at War?'', which repeats the book’s title, Mailer tries to understand the “logic” of post-9/11 military invasions during the Bush administration’s first term. How we ended up going from Afghanistan to Iraq as the principal enemy. It is a complicated tale, as Mailer describes it, but the most conspicuous element is a lack of evidence for the originally announced purpose for invasion—Weapons of Mass Destruction. Mailer reminds us that while the world was reacting in horror of the Bush agenda for war, a ''Time'' magazine poll (European edition) revealed people’s feelings across Europe. Which country poses the greatest danger to the world in 2003? Of the 318,000 European votes cast, the U.S.A. came in first, at 84%. North Korea came at 7%, Iraq at 8%.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|pp=35–43}} When our “evidence” for war was revealed to be fraudulent, both Democrats and Republicans by a majority started to believe we could bring democracy to Iraq by invasion. An ancillary benefit might be the expansion of our Christian values into the region, even if our own acts for decades smacked less of Christ’s teachings than of piling up earthly wealth. The old isolationist conservatives weren’t with Bush, but the new conservatives, flag conservatives, and fundamentalists looked to our striving for world empire as the solution to our own moral dissolutions at home, Mailer argues. We had become, after all, a full-fledged empire, a planetary policeman, a hyperpower whose military expenditures were about to equal those of the next fifteen most powerful states combined. I am giving the mere outlines of Mailer’s investigation of the topic, but any reader is welcome to examine it in detail for him or herself to assess its credibility.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Mailer|2003|pp=35–75}}.}}
+By 2006, Mailer’s dialogues with his son John in ''The Big Empty'' now had the benefit of some hindsight on how our adventures in the Middle East were turning out. Our “unholy urge to purvey democracy to all countries of the world was not working out.” Nor was our empire-building, because “global capitalism does not speak of a free market but of a controlled globe.” In the post-Cold War world of the 1990s, the political—and economic and military—“exceptionalists” felt the “need for America to become a Roman power in contrast to other nations who will serve as our hard-working Greeks. . . .”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|pp=41, 150}} To a large extent George W. Bush was their man.{{efn|See esp. {{harvtxt|Mailer|Mailer|2006|pp=71–77}} for an extended analysis of Bush and his administration for some of the root causes of our twenty-first-century adventures in imperialism.}} George W. Bush had something to prove, in relation to his father, in relation to his own vacuous military service, in relation to his corporate and fundamentalist enablers. In one of several moments in both books of what we can now see as prescience, Mailer asks, “How clear will it be in the awareness of Middle America that Kerry was a combat hero and Bush was a National Guard flight suit? It will be interesting to see how the Republicans will look to tarnish Kerry’s war record.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=47}} Mailer hoped that our failures to expand Pax Americana into the Middle East and elsewhere during and since the Cold War might make for a chastened view of our “exceptional” status and powers, might dampen our willingness to expend blood and treasure for the foreseeable future. Certainly, one element of the rise of Left and Right populism is populism’s isolationist tendencies that could be bearing Mailer’s hopes out, but as yet we are still enmeshed in (if struggling to end) decades of our miscalculations in the Middle East.
 ===Notes===