Will dau tranh destroy the United States?

 Eleven and one-half years ago, in the spring of 2012, I made one of my most important posts here.  I have reposted it twice in the last three years.  Now the issues it raised have entered a new phase, and I think it's time to revisit it again.  Here it is.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Struggle

One of the most important readings about the Vietnam War that I have ever encountered is a chapter by the late Douglas Pike, a real authority on the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, about dau tranh, or struggle, the philosophy behind the Vietnamese Communist revolution. Dau tranh, Pike explains, had two forms: military and political. Of the two, the political was far more important, and indeed, the Viet Cong always had several times as many active political workers as soldiers during the Vietnam War. Their mission was to rally their own troops and sow confusion among the enemy, doing whatever they could, in particular, to make the South Vietnamese government unable to function effectively. They also infiltrated that government at every level and tried to influence the views of enemy forces. Their goal, essentially, was to reduce society to chaos and allow the well-organized Communist Party to take over. The other day I raised some eyebrows in a small group setting by suggesting that the Republican Party has been practicing dau tranh for more than twenty years. It has now crippled government at all levels and has a good chance of reducing much of the United States to chaos in the next ten years.
Dau transh in its current form started with Newt Gingrich's all-out assault on the Democrats in the House of Representatives, whom he was determined to demonize in order to take away their majority. Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge, now signed by almost every Republican in Congress and thousands more in state legislatures around the country, is another form of dau tranh. So, of course, is the ceaseless drumbeat of propaganda day after day, week after week, year after year, on Limbaugh, Hannity and the rest. So is the attack on the authority of the mainstream media, universities and scientists. Oddly, while this attack on government probably did more than anything to land us in our current economic mess, the mess also makes dau tranh more effective, because it undermines confidence in the government. Conservative Republicans have also waged long-term dau tranh within our legal system, using the Federalist society to develop a network of conservative lawyers and judges and packing the courts whenever they can. Jeffrey Toobin has analyzed the increasingly significant results of that effort in a series of articles in the New Yorker.
I was moved to write this post because I have to deal with dau tranh almost daily myself in managing this blog. One of my regular readers is a fanatical right-winger who probably posts 50 comments a week here, week in and week out. They are not really comments, for the most part--they are links to some piece of right-wing propaganda, often accompanied with personal abuse towards myself. I think I know who he is, although we have never met face to face, and I also regard him as the prime suspect for having put my name on the Obama=Hitler email which is still circulating, even though he denied it when we were both still on the same discussion forum. (He was kicked off the forum when his dau tranh and personal abuse went too far.) I warn, of course, on the blog, that abusive anonymous comments will be deleted, but he berates me for doing so nonetheless. The attempt to keep the extreme Republican view of the world in the foreground is a key element of Republican dau tranh, just as it was for Nazis and Communists.
The Republicans' real target is the idea that dominated the last century--the idea that human reason can design, and create, a better world. That is why Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson have been given places in their Pantheon of villains. I'm afraid they have sufficiently discredited that idea that it no longer dominates our political life, and might be disappearing altogether. Their lust for power is much, much greater than their respect for the truth. This is the threat the nation faces. Pike also argued provocatively in one of his books that there was no known counter-strategy to dau tranh, and I'm afraid he may have been right. [end post.]

The Republican battle against the political theory of the Enlightenment--that government must mobilize resources to secure important public goods--has a new vanguard, composed of twenty or thirty Republicans who believe that the federal government is unreservedly evil that that we would benefit if its operations came to a halt.  That vanguard comes to life in a story by Carl Hulse in today's  New York Times. "Most of what Congress does is not good for the American people," Charles Good, a Republican from Virginia, no less, declares in this piece. "Most of what we do as a Congress is totally unjustified."  "Members of the far-right Freedom Caucus and other right-wing House members see themselves as courageously doing the people's work," Hulse writes. "They believe they are reining in government and taking on what they call a corrupt 'uniparty' of Republicans and Democrats who conspire with rich donors and special interests to bankrupt the nation and beat down the average American."  And not only do they oppose the whole thrust of the last 90 years of federal domestic policy, they also are taking a stand against establishment foreign policy, including our effort to aid Ukraine.  They do not care, crucially, that Republicans have only a narrow majority in the House while Democrats control the Senate and the White House, the other two equal partners in the budget-making process.  It is not clear that anything will satisfy them.

It seems clear that a majority of the House does not favor a shutdown and would live with the budget deal that Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached with the White House earlier this year--but the extreme faction that includes Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene has intimidated McCarthy and, it seems, the rest of the Republicans, so far.  They appear to have the support of Donald Trump, whom no House Republican seems to have the courage to defy any longer,  For the time being, their Senate leader Mitch McConnell does not support their plans, but it is not clear how much longer he can keep his job for medical reasons, and the grass roots pressure for the Senate Republicans to replace him with another fire-eater will be intense when he steps down.  Kevin McCarthy presumably could try to pass a continuing resolution with the support of the Democrats and a few Republicans, but that would probably lead to his immediate replacement, an option which the far right insisted upon when he was elected Speaker.

I would like to suggest a few reasons why we have reached this point in our history--comparable in some ways to the eve of the Civil War, but with the difference that the House Republicans don't seem to want secession--they want to destroy the federal government that belongs to us all.

For approximately the first two hundred years of our history our citizenry--including leading citizens of all kinds--took an intense interest in politics.  They understood the novelty of the experiment that the founding fathers had begun and took great pride in trying to make it work.  Large landowners, successful lawyers, and some businessmen felt an obligation to enter the political sphere, and most of them--although never all--had a commitment to our institutions that went beyond political partisanship.  The last generation that showed these qualities, I think, were the GIs (born 1904-24), whose commitment to our institutions had become unshakable after they fought to preserve them in the Second World War.  People like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene--to say nothing of George Santos--did not get elected to Congress without making any name for themselves in some other endeavor.  And until Donald Trump, most politicians recognized some obligation not to pander to the most extreme emotions of their voters--the tactic Trump rode right into the White House, as he may do again.  Yes, Joseph McCarthy was an exception to everything I have just said, but the havoc he created lasted only four years, and his downfall discredited his kind of behavior for a very long time to come.  He embodied the idea of the exception that proves the rule.

There is another big reason, however, that the Republican Party won 50.6 percent of the popular vote for Congress in 2022 to the Democrats' 47.8 percent--a margin that could easily have given them a larger majority than they have now.  Our highly educated ruling elite, which controls all our major national institutions--the educational system, corporate America, our professions, our traditional media outlets, and the federal bureaucracy, including the foreign policy and defense establishment--no longer cares about the lives or the views of ordinary Americans.  Higher education taught them that they would graduate knowing what was best for us all, and they have carried that attitude into later life.  This development has been very carefully and effectively analyzed by Yale law professor Daniel Markovitz in his book, The Meritocracy Trap, which is summarized in this power point presentation.  In the book itself Markovitz emphasized that our new elite has increased its dominance by choosing solutions to problems in areas like law, health care, and higher education that increase their numbers and their power.  It is very hard for their counterparts in the media to see any of this as a problem, because they belong to the same elite.  But the one-time autoworkers who have lost their jobs to Mexico, today's autoworkers who fear losing theirs in the transition to electric vehicles, the hundreds of thousands of families who have lost their farms in the last few decades, and the socially conservative and religious people of many different faiths understand this problem very well, because they have suffered from it both materially and emotionally.  

Surveys have shown the extraordinary numerical dominance of liberals and Democrats on college faculties and in certain newsrooms.  I am not aware of any similar survey of federal, state or local bureaucrats, but I suspect that they would show a similar pattern except in the state and local bureaucracies of the reddest states. Only 41 percent of adult Americans have college degrees, but they occupy nearly all positions of any power, and they increasingly trend Democratic while those without degrees are trending Republican.  The Republican vanguard has nothing to offer the country but chaos, inequality, and a completely anarchic wider world, but they are speaking for a very large number of Americans who feel no stake in our system as it has evolved. 

Dau Tranh worked for the Communists in Vietnam because the government they sought to break down was largely a creature first of the French and then of the Americans.  It also worked because the Communists had the discipline and focus that their enemies lacked.  Republican dau tranh is working, I think, because our elite no longer takes the views of the uneducated seriously.  This is a very dangerous situation.