Musings on American Right Wing Populist Moronicity...

For most critics of right wing populism, I suspect, the thing that they probably find most interesting about that social movement is its general inability to distinguish fact from fiction and truth from fantastical and fanatical myth. And while the inability of right wing populists to discern fact from fiction is intriguing and important, for me, the most interesting thing about right wing populists is their lack of knowledge about their own identity group history.

While some right wing populists seem to fancy themselves knowledgeable intellectuals, they are, because of their ahistoricism, fundamentally anti-intellectual. For instance, they don't seem to grasp the historical fact that post-World War II "conservatism" is actually a political and cultural hybrid. William F. Buckley style conservatism, for instance, is actually a mashup of Enlightenment laissez-faire liberalism and a pre-Enlightenment conservatism that celebrated the superiority of elite manor house culture and Christian theocratism, hence its Anglo-Catholic and Catholic impulses. Buckley style "conservatism" was an ideology, in other words, that romanticised capitalism--traditional conservatives decried capitalism for undermining the conservative old order leading, eventually, to the rise of the vulgar middle class, economic and political power--along with traditional rural elitism and theocratic Christianity.

Populism, on the other hand, is an entirely different beast born out of similar if differently constituted cultural scripts. It is an intellectual anti-intellectual and anti-academic social movement whose historical forebears include the nativist know nothings of the American 19th century and the nativist John Birchers of the 20th. It is a liberal social movement in its general devotion to the dogma of free market or laissez-faire capitalism and its empathy and sympathy for the capitalist rich peoples movements of the American 20th and 21st century. It is modern and postmodern in its devotion to the theologies of extreme narcissism. It is traditionally and religiously manichean in its division of the world into the good and pure, them, and the evil and impure, anyone who doesn't agree with them. It is traditionally religious in its opposition to intellectual diversity and its seeking out of heretical latter day "witches".

The Books of My Life: Mise-en-Scène

As I have mentioned before I am and have long been a cinephiliac. I grew up watching, along with my sister, film after film in the afternoons and evenings on the television, something that was easy to do back in the "good old days" when you could watch film after film on network era television. Eventually my film watching morphed into reading about films. I got Leonard Maltin's film guide when it first came out and when I found Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films in a used bookstore I bought it, read it, and was blown away by it. I still am.

When I went away to college my film watching and film education continued. Bloomington, home of Indiana University, was a cinephile's paradise when I was a student there. One could watch classic Hollywood films on the big screen at the Union, Hollywood and foreign films at the Monroe County Library where the Bloomington Film Society set up shop, and mostly foreign films at the various locations around Bloomington where the Ryder held film court. I also occasionally went to the night time showings of films for the many film classes at IU. I was in heaven. I had achieved nirvana.

Though I didn't major in Film I did take the occasional film class with Harry Geduld, Peter Bondanella, and James Naremore. I have very fond memories of studying with all three and of Naremore taking me and a few other classmates upstairs in Ballantine Hall to view Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo frame-by-frame. Like so many during the era I, though I was brought up on the auteurist and Movie approaches to film analysis and film criticism, fell in with the semiotics crowd, something easy to do as IU was one of the centres for the study of semiotics and semiology in the world at the time, and I took a graduate seminar with Naremore on the semiology of film. I never forgot my love of the Movie approach to film criticism, however, and it is not surprising that late in life I find myself returning to it.

John Gibbs, a third generation Movieite, in his Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation (New York: Wallflower, Short Cuts series, 2002), argues that it is mise-en-scène, film style, that defines a film's meaning, and that a close study of film style, regardless of the type of film--commercial or artistic--is essential if critics and film goers are to fully understand a film and fully understand how meaning is constructed and works in films. We can't tell anyone what a film is trying to say to us, writes Gibbs, if we do not comprehend what a film is trying to say to us through its mise-en-scène.

Gibbs's book tries to provide film critics and film goers with a method by which they can understand what a film is trying to say. In Chapter One Gibbs offers a definition of mise-en-scène, anything in the frame and the way what is in the frame is organised. In Chapter Two Gibbs explores the interaction between mise-en-scène and other elements of a film such as narrative and editing. In Chapter Three Gibbs argues that the interaction between all the elements of a film creates, a la V.F. Perkins, in good films, coherence. In Chapter Four Gibbs explores the relationship between mise-en-scène and film authorship, arguing, like other Movieites before him, that a directors signature in Hollywood commercial films can sometimes be discerned in how a director organises the elements of a film, particularly in how he or she organises his or her mise-en-scène. This claim that Hollywood had director auteurs, by the way, was something that was controversial in the 1960s and 1970s given that many critics assumed  that Hollywood produced commercial and that such popular entertainments were not authored. In Chapter Five Gibbs explores the important role mise-en-scène plays in melodramas, particularly the domestic melodramas of Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, and Nicholas Ray, types of films that often emphasise mise-en-scène adding, in the process, complexity to the meaning or meanings of a film. In Chapter Six Gibbs brings all of the above to bear on an analysis of a scene in Douglas Sirk's famous melodrama, Imitation of Life (1959), and its meanings. In an appendix Gibbs provides readers with a brief annotated history of mise-en-scène criticism.

Gibbs's Mise-en-Scène should be required reading for anyone interested in film and in film meanings. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in culture, criticism, film in general, and Hollywood films of the classic era in particular. That said, not everyone will find all of Gibb's arguments compelling. Some will, for example, wonder about the validity of the assertion that meaning can be discerned and explored in films without an understanding of a films broader social and cultural contexts.

Musings on Political and Economic Utopianism

 The mistake a lot of political "commentators" make is assuming that there is a perfect system, a perfect political, economic, or cultural system. There is and will never be a perfect system be it a perfect economic system--capitalism as utopia--or a perfect political system--autocracy as utopia. Given the reality that power corrupts it is essential, if a degree of freedom is to be maintained, in a bureaucratic and corporate world, to have countervailing powers checking and balancing each other.

There have been, of course, a variety of governmental forms across human history ranging from the autocratic to the more "democratic". Governments of the more republican variety, can and have served as countervailing forces against the massive power of corporate and consumer capitalism, which has dominated the US and the world since the American Gilded Age. That, however, is not and never has been their only function states or governments, particularly those of the republican variety, perform. They also provide services. The Roman state, for instance, provided its plebs with bread and circuses. The feudal state provided serfs and peasants with protection in exchange for agricultural stay in place labour. The Canadian state provides public services, including health care and retirement pensions, among other things to its citizens that are, again at least in theory, of a non-commercial character.

Economic corporations, which are clearly more powerful than corporate governments, operate in the private not the public interest. They operate for the personal enrichment of a few individuals rather than for the public good. A republican form of government, at least in theory, operates for the greatest good of the greatest number of citizens, I say citizens, by the way, since modern nations are not the product of a bunch of mythic monads but are made up of real individual citizens.

Too many on the uberindividualistic or hyperindividualistic right, embedded as they are in myths rather than realities, don't recognise, first, that corporate power, which is hierarchical and bureaucratic, far exceeds the power of governments. In fact, corporate capitalists control not only the means of production but control many if not all government functions and use these to enhance their own power and and their own profits. Second, those on the right don't recognise the difference between autocratic forms of government and republican forms of governance. Many on the right, in other words, have no conception of historical realities and that there really is a difference between electoral forms of governance and governance based on the autocratic whims of an individual.

In America's current form all the right wing utopia of downsizing government will do, will enhance the private corporate power of the wealthy and rich few, just as it has done in the past, at the expense of non-elite citizens. If you want to increase freedom, in other words, you cannot simply eliminate or downsize modern governmental bureaucratic-hierarchical forms but you must also eliminate or massively downsize economic bureaucratic-hierarchical forms. That means that you have to radically break up corporate forms of the governmental AND the economic variety. And this means that you have to not only radically downsize states and particularly the war making powers of states, since, as history shows, economic and political bureaucracies thrive and expand under such conditions, you also have to radically down size economic bureaucracies.

Personally I don't see this happening. Karl Marx's somewhat anarchistic left libertarian notion that communism will lead not only to the freedom to fish in the morning, work a few hours to meet needs in the afternoon, and then philosophise in the evening, and to the withering away of the state, seems to me like a utopian dream, as utopian a dream that corporate capitalism will bring everyone to heavenly nirvana. All corporate capitalism does is enrich the few and here in the States it is the economic few who have control of the government apparatus, such control that they are able to eliminate laws protecting citizens from casino and vulture capitalism and to put taxpayers on the hook for the results of this speculative casino, periodic economic bust. In the meantime perhaps reforms like those proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the best we can hope for in a world dominated by corporate capitalist elites.
 

The Books of My Life: Restless Souls

The heart and the motivating force of Leigh Eric Schmidt's Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), is a critique of the critics of contemporary American spirituality. Schmidt, a professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton, takes the critics of American spirituality to task, whether critics of the academic apologetic and polemical sort like Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton in their Habits of the Heart (1985), the critics of the political punditry sort such as David Brooks in his Bobos in Paradise (2000), or "critics" of the we are OK if you want to be OK you need to be like us "orthodox" Christian sort such as James Herrick in his The Making of the New Spirituality (2003).

Schmidt argues that despite their ideological differences the apologetic and polemical critics of the new American spirituality share similar views on the "otherness" of the new American spirituality. The new American spirituality, they maintain, is new or novel (I would add that they share the notion that American spirituality is not quite "American") and that it has, since its rise in the wake of the culture wars of the mid and late 1960s, resulted in an increase in mass narcissism and world rejecting mysticism that is undermining American values, American duties, the American community, and American authority and, as a result, is hazardous to the continued survival of America.

Schmidt, in his wonderfully written and nicely researched book, however, shows that the "new" American spirituality isn't that new. Schmidt traces this liberal and radical American spirituality back to mid 19th century Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman, and through late 19th and 20th century spiritual seekers or wayfarers like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Rounseville Alger, Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier, Felix Adler, Ralph Waldo Trine, Sarah Farmer, founder of the Greenacre spiritualist retreat and school, Max Ehrmann, Quaker Rufus Jones, Quaker Thomas Kelly, both of whom played prominent roles in the Quaker retreat and study centre Pendle Hill, Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Hurd, Huston Smith, Howard Thurman, and Oprah. Schmidt finds the historical roots of this not so new American spirituality with its emphases on mysticism, solitude, the unity of all peoples and religions, and, worldly benevolence, not only in Transcendentalism but also in the metaphysics movement, mental healing, the new thought movement, Vedanta Hinduism, Buddhism, Liberal Protestantism, Liberal Social Gospel Protestantism, Unitarianism, Quakerism, Swedenborgianism, Reform Judaism, the health reform movement, the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893, and nineteenth century anti-Calvinism.

In his sympathetic, empathetic, and "going native" history of American spirituality Schmidt is willing to concede to the critics of American spirituality that American spirituality is a product of a modernity and postmodernity characterised by globalisation, increasing narcissisms, increasing individualism, and its fetishisation of the status quo, factors that gave rise in the American spirituality, as Schmidt notes, to the seeming contradictions of mystical disciplines for quieting self-realisation versus mystical world changing ideologies and paternalistic particularism versus somewhat paternalistic intellectual openness. He does not concede and he amply demonstrates that the new American spirituality led to quietest world rejection, however. As Schmidt notes, many American spiritualists were abolitionists, health reformers, peace activists, activists promoting women's rights, critics of colonialism, and critics of capitalism.  I would add, by the way, that White American Conservative Evangelicalism with its universalisation of modern American capitalism, modern American nationalism, and modern American WASP culture is as modern if not more modern than American spirituality. American White Conservative Evangelicalism is also, I would argue, far more dangerous to the survival of the US and the globe as a result of these fetishisations than American spirituality will ever be.

I highly recommend this wonderful book to anyone interested in culture studies, intellectual history, the history of spirituality, and the history of religion, particularly in the United States.

The Books of My Life: Anti-Americanism

Once upon a time I was a Biblical Studies major. I was less interested in the theology or dogma surrounding the Bible, however, than its history and its prehistorical and historical contexts. Little did I know when I switched from Biblical Studies to the social sciences that I would still be reading theological and doctrinal works and dealing, in my teaching, with theology and dogma on a fairly regular basis in my history and history of television classes.

Several years back I read Hungarian born sociologist Paul Hollander's book Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad, 1965-1990, published by the American arm of the venerable Oxford University Press in 1992. Hollander's book proved less an analysis of anti-Americanism than a dogmatic and doctrinal study of, what Hollander called, irrational anti-modernism and irrational anti-capitalism. In Hollander's world, anti-Americans weren't reacting to what imperial America did. They were irrationally reacting to what America was, modern and capitalist, and were thus a primitive throwback to an earlier period of world history. Needless to say Hollander's book is part of the same ahistorical fabric as the contention of American demagogues that America's enemies hate it not for its policies and global actions, but for its "freedoms" and "liberties", things that are, for demagogic purposes, suitably ideological and emotional so that the masses can be easily manipulated by demagogic rhetoric.

Recently I read another book on anti-Americanism, Andrew Ross's and Kristen Ross's edited collection Anti-Americanism published by NYU Press in 2004. Ross's and Ross's collection, which originated out of a conference held in February of 2003, is everything Hollander's book isn't. It is, in other words, less theological, less doctrinal, and more empirical and historical. I found a number of the essays in Ross's and Ross's collection interesting and enlightening. Historian Greg Grandin's essay helpfully typologises various forms of anti-Americanism. Kristen Ross's essay explores elite and more popular forms of anti-Americanisms in France. Timothy Mitchell's essay on anti-Americanism in the Middle East is particularly enlightening on how the United States has used war and radical Islamist groups to try to gain imperial traction in the Middle East and to try to stave off socialism in the Middle East. Mary Nolan's essay explores the history of post-war German anti-Americanism. John Kuo Wei Chen's essay explores elite America's use of the claim of anti-Americanism to demonise the "other". Linda Gordon's essay explores the iron cage of anti-Americanism that America's conservative apologetic and polemical elite and intellectuals have caged liberals and the left in. All of these essays show what should be obvious to any dispassionate observer, that the vast majority of forms of anti-Americanism are a rational response to post Spanish-American war imperialism.

Personally, I have long seen anti-Americanism as similar to something I researched for several years, the claim among intellectual Mormons that all criticism of Mormonism was and is grounded in stereotypes and caricatures of Mormons. It is true that some varieties of anti-Mormonism are grounded in stereotypes and caricatures. Evangelical Ed Decker's various attacks on Mormonism, most notably his attacks on Mormons and Mormonism in The God Makers, is filled with an irrational hatred of Mormons and the Mormon faith. The Tanner's many tomes on Mormonism are also problematic given that they apply methods to the analysis of Mormonism that they would not apply to their own evangelicalism because the results would be the same. There are, however, also valid criticisms of Mormonism. One can readily, for example, argue, on empirical and historical grounds, that the Book of Mormon provides the answer to virtually every quandary in 19th century American religion and so is probably a product of 19th century America. This latter is simply not anti-Mormonism, though you don't have to be Michel Foucault to understand why Mormon apologists and polemicists might want to categorise it as such or to understand why America's elite and their polemical and apologetic courtier intellectuals, like Paul Hollander, might want to categorise any criticism of America as irrational and backward and demonise it.

"Liberalism" versus Liberalism: The Right Wing Perversion of the History of Liberalism

In a recent post, "That Good Old New Time Right Wing Religion", I tentatively explored the demographic, economic, and cultural aspects of that good old time right wing religion of Prager University and others of its ilk. In this post I want to explore another cultural aspect of PU and similar right wing religions, specifically its manichean (mis)perception of liberalism.

For many, particularly in the post-World War II era, "liberalism" has become a dirty word, a caricature and a stereotype. For many on the right "liberals" are to them what the Jews were to the Spanish Inquisition. Those who caricature, stereotype, and demonise liberalism, however, really do not have, and not surprisingly I might add given their manichean religious inclinations, a sound grasp of the history of real empirical liberalism. Liberalism, of course, is the product of several intellectual streams. Historically speaking liberalism is the product of Florentine and Italian city-state ideas about representative government and practise of representative government. Liberalism is the product of the Scientific Revolution beginning of the sixteenth century. Liberalism is the product of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century with its emphasis on anti-monarchicalism and anti-theocratism. Liberalism is the product of mass capitalism, which, while it has antecedents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became prevalent in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the modern world, and dominant in the twentieth century. Liberalism is the product of the American and French Revolutions both of which helped increase the power of the bourgeoisie or middle class. Liberalism is the product of political debates surrounding concepts like liberty, freedom, property, justice, equality, and fraternity since the sixteenth century.

Liberalism has been and continues to be, as a result of this history, multiple. Lockean political liberalism, which challenged absolutism, for instance, emphasised the inalienability of the "natural rights" of life, liberty, health, and estate or property, which Locke, like Marx after him, argued originated in the mixing of one’s labour with the land. The laissez-faire form of economic liberalism, which, ironically, most of those who detest liberalism these days actually believe in, that emerged from the Scottish Enlightenment emphasised the need for a free marketplace in the face of monarchical monopolies. That brand of liberalism relied on a deus ex machina in the form of the invisible hand to make it work making it, in the process, akin to a religion. The American propertied elite liberalism of America’s founding fathers borrowed heavily from Locke with its inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Constitutional liberalism, as opposed to nationalist liberalism, began with the American Revolution, was stimulated by the French Revolution, and was further stimulated by the triumph of mass capitalism and corporate capitalism in some places in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Social liberalism, which emphasised the need for a stronger government to deal with what was seen as the ravages of mass capitalism including poverty and inequality, emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leftism or radicalism, by the way, emerged as a challenge to liberalism during the French Revolution and became a prominent modern subculture or counterculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many on the radical left saw the central symbols of liberalism, life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, as inherently contradictory. Conservatism arose as a nostalgic, theocratic, and romantic or utopian reaction to liberalism.

Throughout constitutional liberalism’s history the concepts of life, liberty, health, estate, the pursuit of happiness, and others that followed, such as equality and fraternity, have had and continue to have, as symbols often do, multiple meanings. Many American liberals, for instance, found slavery inconsistent with their understanding of “liberty”. Many American liberals debated how big constitutional liberal states, which vouchsafed liberalism’s sacred symbols, should be. Some, anti-federalists, wanted a very weak central state and strong regional states. Some federalists, like Jefferson and Madison, wanted a stronger federal state than that allowed by America’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, but disagreed with others, like Hamilton and Washington, who wanted a stronger federal state than the weak federalists.

So given this historical context what is the best way to understand liberalism? First, liberalism is best seen as a continuum with a number of levels to it. Liberalism, for example, is a continuum with free market liberalism at one end of the continuum, and, a mythical total state control of the economy on the other end of the continuum. I say mythical because no liberals I know of advocate total state control of the economy. Social liberalism or progressivism, with its advocacy of things like food and drug regulations, lies somewhere in the middle of this continuum. The social liberals Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, for instance, enacted social liberal legislation that saved capitalism rather than destroyed it. Liberalism is a continuum with right libertarians and left libertarians, differentiated largely by their attitude to big economic institutions, on one end and a mythical group of no liberty or freedom types on the other end. No political liberals I know of want total abolition of free speech, for instance, though some do want limits, hence they lie somewhere along the continuum. Liberalism is a continuum in which some advocate for limits on civil rights--I know of no liberals who advocate for zero civil rights--while others advocate for the expansion of civil rights, American liberals pursing civil rights for Blacks, homosexuals, and trans people, for instance. Liberalism is a continuum in which some liberals, including liberals of left and right, are authoritarian while others are less authoritarian. I know of no liberals, by the way, who advocate for total anarchy and anarchism.

Why do those of the right wing religious persuasion like PU and others of their ilk ignore this real history of liberalism? The reason is simple. They ignore it because they have to. They need to believe in an enemy and proclaim "liberalism" as their enemy because fear, as history repeatedly shows, is a polemicists and a demagogues best friend. Fear allows them to raise money and pied piper the opiated masses. Fear, with its stereotyping, caricaturing, demonisations, and mythhistory, allows right wing cults to try to achieve power and influence with the help of the pied pipered masses they have opiated. Fear with its manichean "logic" gives them collective life. Marking off your group from an "inferior" and "polluted" "enemy" "other" is a tried and true method of creating an identity and a community with a mythic sense of their own superiority. Given this, manufacturing "enemy" "others" is not likely to end anytime soon.

An Open Letter to Kathy Sheehan, Mayor of Albany, New York

Dear Mayor Sheehan,

The other day as I was walking along Holland Avenue in the city of Albany, New York I spied something with my two little eyes taking place at that lovely old apartment complex on Holland between Walgreen's and Delaware Avenue. The beautiful shrubs which had not been trimmed in ages had become stubble sticking up out of the ground. The windows that once were in place in the apartment building had been replaced by plywood, you know that ugly plywood made out of wood shavings and paste. The plywood that replaced the windows didn't fully cover the space where windows once were making it likely that the elements can and will undermine the apartment complex. As I was thinking about this as I was walking I couldn't help but think of the historic Tudor homes lying intentionally vacant for years on the other side, the southside, of Holland Avenue across from Walgreen's and the VA.

The reason that both the apartment complex and the Tudor homes are lying vacant and have been left to decay is not difficult to fathom. Now that Holland Avenue and New Scotland Avenue have been transformed from more residential areas into areas zoned for business at the behest, no doubt, of Albany Medical Center and its cheerleaders, owners of these properties, worshipers of the great golden green god Mammon, see dollar signs in them there properties. All the while the city of Albany twiddle their thumbs in wonder and look the other way making one wonder if they too will accrue profits from the destruction of these properties thanks to that old time American past-time of the greasing of palms.

I have learned a lesson from my excursions along Holland Avenue. The lesson I have learned from all of this is that Kathy Sheehan the supposed Democratic reform candidate that many believed would be the messiah that Albany had been waiting for for seventy some years who would finally turn over the tables of Albany's old machine politics moneymakers and bring back life once again to this once great ancient city by the Hudson was yet another of those false messiahs. Meet the new boss, new mayor Kathy Sheehan, much the same as the old boss, former mayor Jerry Jennings.

The Left Wing Media????

In an article in the Guardian today, 6 January 2012, Joshua Alston blogged about the return of the Independent Film Channel's (IFC) hit comedy Portlandia. I have never seen Portlandia, which debuted on IFC in January of 2011. Alston sees it as a show which skews liberals, much like the earlier unsuccessful The Goode Family, Mike Judge's (Beevis and Butthead, King of the Hill, Office Space) comedy about a family of environmentally responsible socially conscious politically correct liberals which ran on ABC for 13 episodes and on Comedy Central for four.

Portlandia, set in the trendy bastion of liberalism, Portland, Oregon, lambasts, according to Alston, liberal zealotry, on a cable channel that most people would presumably see as liberal. His point: See liberals CAN make fun of themselves. Can conservatives?

Neither Portlanda nor The Goode Family were the first American television shows in which liberals laughed at themselves. The "skewering", some intentional, some unintentional, of various types of American liberalism has been around for awhile. Think All in the Family (the US version of Till Death Do Us Part). Think the wonderful "Quickie Nirvana" episode of Rockford Files which makes much wonderful fun of the diverse liberal spiritualism of the 70s that arose out of the individualist yet conformist hippie middle class culture and was, in some cases (as Quickie Nirvana shows) transmorgified into, as it did in the life of Jane Patten/Sky Aquarian/Gopi/Hester (Jane Curtin), the central character in "Quickie Nirvana" along with private eye James Rockford (James Garner), Jesus Peopleism.

Though one right wing blogger and his cyberposse seems to see "Quickie Nirvana" as the ultimate media warning about the dangers of liberalism in general and see Sky's everywhere in America's schools, unions, political parties, well the Democratic Party anyway, and political bureaucracies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, the irony is that the Sky's of the world, the spiritualist hippie liberals of the world, are the ultimate in bourgeois individualism while, simultaneously, being the ultimate in American conformism. This description, bourgeois, individualist, conformist, can, of course, also be used to describe most of the American right. And that is, dear unreaders, is irony.

Bibliography:
Joshua Alston, Look Out Liberals, Portlandia Returns for a Second Season, http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2012/jan/06/portlandia-liberals-second-season-tv?commentpage=last#end-of-comments
American Digest, Quickie Nirvana, http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/5minute_arguments/the_more_things_change_th_1.php