by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n A Pretentious Word for a World Without Rules<\/strong><\/p>\n Given thirty years of postmodern relativism in our universities, we were bound to get a postmodern president at some point.<\/p>\n Postmodernism is a fancy word \u2014 in terms of culture, nihilist; in terms of politics, an equality of result and the ends justifying the means \u2014 that a lot of people throw around to describe the present world of presumed wisdom that evolved in the last part of the 20th century.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter modernism\u201d or \u201cbeyond modernism\u201d can mean almost anything \u2014 nihilistic art that goes well beyond modern art (think a crucifix in urine rather than the splashes of modernist Jackson Pollock). Or think of the current English Department doggerel that is declared \u201cpoetry\u201d (no transcendent references, echoes of classicism, no cadence, rhyme, meter, particular poetic language, theme, structure, etc.) versus Eliot\u2019s or Pound\u2019s non-traditional modern poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. In politics, there is something of the absurd. The modern age saw life and death civil rights marches and the commemoration of resistance to venomous racial oppression; the postmodern civil right marches are staged events at the D.C. Tea-party rally, as elites troll in search of a slur, or Prof. Gates\u2019s offer to donate his \u201ccuffs\u201d to the Smithsonian as proof of his racial \u201cordeal.\u201d<\/p>\n Genres, rules, and protocols in art, music, or in much of anything, vanish as the unnecessary obstructions they are deemed to be \u2014 constructed by those with privilege to perpetuate their own entrenched received authority and power. The courage, sacrifice, and suffering of past American generations that account for our present bounty are simply constructs, significant only to the degree that we deconstruct the race, class, and gender power machinations that pervade American exploitive society.<\/p>\n Relativism Everywhere<\/strong><\/p>\n But the chief characteristic of postmodern thinking is the notion of relativism and the primacy of language over reality. What we signify and brand as \u201creal,\u201d in essence, is no more valid than another\u2019s \u201ctruth,\u201d even if we retreat to specious claims of \u201cevidence\u201d \u2014 especially if our aim is to perpetuate the nation state, or the primacy of the white male capitalist Westerner who long ago manufactured norms in his own interests.<\/p>\n \u201cAlternate\u201d realities instead reflect those without power speaking a \u201ctruth,\u201d one just as valid as the so-called empirical tradition that hinged on inherited privilege.<\/p>\n The New National Creed<\/strong><\/p>\n OK, so how does this affect Obama?<\/p>\n He was schooled in the postmodern university and operates on hand-me-down principles from postmodernism. One does not need to read Foucault or Derrida, or to be acquainted with Heidegger, to see how relativism enhances contemporary multiculturalism. Keep that in mind and everything else makes sense.<\/p>\n Try healthcare. By traditional standards, Obama prevaricates on most of the main issues revolving healthcare reform \u2014 from the fundamental about its costs and effects, to the more superficial such as airing the entire process on C-Span, or promising not to push through a major bill like this on narrow majoritism. And recall the blatant bribes for votes to politicians from Nebraska to Louisiana. Look also at the enormous borrowing and cuts from Medicare that will be involved.<\/p>\n Well, those were not misstatements or misdeeds at all. You, children of privilege, only think they are, since you use antiquated norms like \u201cabstract\u201d truth to adjudicate the discomforting efforts of a progressive President.<\/p>\n He, on the other hand, is trying to force the privileged at last to account for their past oppressions (insurance companies that gouge, surgeons that lop off legs or tear out tonsils for profit, investors who private jet to the Super Bowl, or the lesser, but equally selfish Joe the Plumber types who do not wish to \u201cspread the wealth\u201d) by extending care to the underprivileged. Your \u201cTruth\u201d about his past statements is something reactionaries evoke to thwart such progressive change; in fact, the constructed truth of Obama\u2019s is that a child will now have regular check-ups. All the other \u201cgottacha\u201d games about abstract truth and falsehood are just semantics.<\/p>\n Mean Speech for Thee, But Not for Me<\/strong><\/p>\n Look at supposed hate speech. An empiricist would ignore Obama\u2019s recent warnings about the new wave of rightwing tough talk from Limbaugh and Beck, and determine instead whether the President remembers the novel\u00a0Checkpoint<\/em>, or the award winning film about killing George Bush, or the venom of a Michael Moore or Keith Olbermann.<\/p>\n That is, a traditional inquirer would weigh the furor of the Right against Left, in ascertaining whether hate speech is at all partisan, or simply politics of all stripes. And he would remind the President that it was Barack Obama himself who asked of his supporters to \u201cget in their face\u201d, and bragged \u201cif they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun\u201d, and who used graphic examples in damning his opponents (cf. the taunt to Hannity (\u201che\u2019ll tear him up\u201d).<\/p>\n But you see, all this is not so. The postmodernist constructs a different reality. A person of color who is striving to level the playing field against oppressive interests speaks the \u201ctruth\u201d to power. Of course, from time to time he draws on emotive language to drive home his points \u2014 quite unlike the cool, detached and deliberate attacks of those seeking to protect corporate or entrenched interests.<\/p>\n When Obama attacks Beck, or Hannity, or calls for someone to bring a gun to a fight, or has Rahm Emanuel curse a fence-sitting representative, these protocols seem extreme only to those whose economic interests are threatened. Poor children in Detroit or in the barrios of El Paso don\u2019t get the opportunity for tit-for-tat score-keeping, as if millionaires \u201cthink\u201d they are entitled to the same \u201cfair\u201d treatment as their victims. When Limbaugh rails, it is to protect his Gulfstream V; when Obama distorts, it is the expediency needed to wring from the wealthy salvation for the voiceless.<\/p>\n Racialism \u2014 No Such Thing!<\/strong><\/p>\n Race is the same. A person of color can hardly, given the history of oppression accorded to non-whites, himself be guilty of dividing people by race.<\/p>\n So if Obama says \u201ctypical white person\u201d, or entitles his book from the sloganeering of a racist preacher he courted for 20 years, or stereotypes rural Pennsylvanians, or dubs police as acting \u201cstupidly\u201d in matters of supposed racial confrontation, or has an Attorney General who damns the country as \u201ccowards\u201d on race, or appoints a Supreme Court Judge who thinks a \u201cwise Latina\u201d by virtue of race and gender has superior wisdom, or recruits a Van Jones who characterizes everyone from polluters to mass murderers by race (I could go on), well, all this is not at all racial stereotyping with an intent to deprecate.<\/p>\n Why? Because constructs of language, expression, and reality hinge on status and class. Obama is seeking to dethrone traditional nexuses of power. So when he, from time to time, muses on real racial inequality, reactionaries retreat to \u201cobjective\u201d \u201cstandards\u201d of reciprocity to thwart his proposed changes.<\/p>\n Take-overs \u2014 What Take-overs?<\/strong><\/p>\n And those \u201ctake-overs\u201d? Take-over from what to what?<\/p>\n An outraged managerial and capital laden class feigns outrage when working folks at last have a say in how the nation\u2019s profits are derived and enjoyed, originating from their own labor in banking, insurance, auto production, and student loans. All these retreats to \u201cprivate\u201d income, \u201cmy property,\u201d \u201cliberty,\u201d \u201cThe Founders,\u201d and the \u201cConstitution,\u201d simply can be deconstructed to \u201cdon\u2019t dismantle a system that is weighted in my favor!\u201d<\/p>\n No wonder \u201cthey\u201d construct all sort of scary \u201cnarratives\u201d about the Postal Service, Amtrak, Social Security, Medicare, and other shared collective enterprises that are branded \u201cinsolvent\u201d and \u201cunsustainable\u201d despite serving the people \u2014 the economic gobbledygook talk from those who really mean they are not willing to transfer their own unfairly obtained capital to more deserving working folks through legitimate \u201credistributive change.\u201d<\/p>\n The Voices of the Oppressed<\/strong><\/p>\n Finally, examine foreign policy. Now many of us are upset that we court enemies and shun friends, and seem to be reaching out to the most authoritarian regimes imaginable, whether Putin\u2019s Russia or Iran, or Venezuela. Well, once again, that is only because you construct reality on the norms predicated upon your own comfortable globalized privilege \u2014 that, in fact, as Obama thankfully grasps, is a result of thousands of daily oppressions, both here and abroad, of which you are not even aware.<\/p>\n Consider the trumped-up crisis with Iran. We hold Ahmadinejad to our artificially constructed standards of \u201ccivil\u201d discourse and \u201cfair\u201d play \u2014 forgetting (but not Obama) the 1953 Western-inspired coup, the profit-mongering of the global oil companies, and the neo-imperialist role of the United States in the Gulf. We hide all that with constructs like \u201cthe mullahs\u201d, the \u201ctheocrats\u201d, \u201cIslamofascism\u201d and other demonization rooted in class, gender, race, and religion.<\/p>\n If Iran had been behind a past U.S. coup, if Iranian warships were off the coast of California, if an Iranian coal company were buying and selling our national energy production, then we too might sound somewhat unhinged as we sought to employ language to offset our oppressor\u2019s ill-gotten material advantages.<\/p>\n In an American constructed world order, we artificially adjudicate Iran a rogue would-be nuclear menace for wishing five or six small nuclear weapons to protect its vulnerable borders (American troops now abut them); we have thousands of such devices, and have used them, and yet are deemed \u201cresponsible\u201d and \u201cpeaceful,\u201d we of all people, who, as the President once reminded us, have alone used them on real people.<\/p>\n So what Obama has done is \u201ccontextualized\u201d the world, and \u201clocated,\u201d as it were, the seemingly hostile anti-American rhetoric of \u201cenemies\u201d into a proper race\/class\/gender landscape.<\/p>\n And what he has found is that nationalism and the construct of the state have fooled us into thinking that there are \u201callies\u201d and \u201cenemies\u201d, when, in fact, these are mere labels used by the privileged to \u201cexaggerate\u201d \u201cdifference\u201d that only enhances Western entrenched economic, racial, cultural and political hegemonies.<\/p>\n Once, thanks to Obama, we \u201cunpack\u201d that \u201creality,\u201d then we can see that most Americans have much in common with Venezuelans, Russians, Iranians, Syrians and others who likewise struggle against the same enemies that brought us the 2008 Wall Street meltdown and now oppose healthcare reform, cap and trade, amnesty, and the takeover of the automobile, banking, and insurance industries.<\/p>\n So a postmodernist looks at the Falklands and does not rely on archaic notions of \u201csovereignty\u201d or a \u201chistory\u201d of a prior war. Instead, one sees a postcolonial power once more claiming \u201cownership\u201d of a far distant island, proximate to a Latin American people, with long experience with European and American economic and political exploitation. Presto \u2014 we are now \u201cneutral,\u201d which means we don\u2019t see anything intrinsically convincing in Britain\u2019s claims to the Falklands.<\/p>\n Note Israel. What are we to make of the Netanyahu humiliating smack down, the seeming indifference over the Iranian nuclear program, the nominations and appointments on the Middle East front of a Freeman or Power, the reach out to Syria and Iran, the interviews with\u00a0Al Arabiya<\/em>\u00a0and the Cairo speech, the bow to a Saudi royal, the ritual trashing of George Bush juxtaposed to the praise of a Saudi king, the strange past outbursts of Obama advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, the ranting about Jews from the former spiritual advisor Wright, etc.<\/p>\n In short, Israel is a construct of Western privilege \u2014 its democratic, capitalist, and Western customs hinge on the oppression of a vast \u201cother\u201d that is far more egalitarian, socialist, and antithetical to Western consumer-capitalism with all of its pathologies of race, class, and gender exploitation.<\/p>\n In that context, in archaic fashion, we struggle to damn any effort to end such hegemony and empower the voices of the oppressed. We are not, in fact, \u201callied\u201d to Israel, but properly speaking instead to the underprivileged in the Gaza slums, to those without healthcare on the West Bank, and, yes, to the progressive Israelis of noble spirit who are trying to battle the reactionary Likudniks and instead do something about the tentacles of their own discriminatory state, whose capital is derived from exploited labor and resources of a silenced other.<\/p>\n I could go on but you get the picture of our first postmodern presidency.<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media A Pretentious Word for a World Without Rules Given thirty years of postmodern relativism in our universities, we were bound to get a postmodern president at some point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[590],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-rY","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6957,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-poison-of-postmodern-lying\/","url_meta":{"origin":1734,"position":0},"title":"The Poison of Postmodern Lying","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 30, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor David Hanson \/\/\u00a0Tribune Content Agency\u00a0 All presidents at one time have fudged on the truth. 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It was certainly not as alleged a \u201csmall number\u201d who destroyed swaths of\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9519,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-postmodern-nfl\/","url_meta":{"origin":1734,"position":3},"title":"A Postmodern NFL","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 17, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ The Corner: The one and only.\u00a0\u00a0 In an essay that could come right out of 1984, Washington Post Ministry of Truth writers Drew Harwell and Rick Maese struggle to explain the abrupt erosion of the NFL\u2019s televised audiences. 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The\u00a0Times\u00a0knew that in recent years Jeong had posted a series of unapologetically\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The New York Times"","block_context":{"text":"The New York Times","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-new-york-times\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6333,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-postmodern-angst\/","url_meta":{"origin":1734,"position":5},"title":"Our Postmodern Angst","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"In our unheroic age, victimhood has replaced valiant struggle. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online In the globally connected and affluent world of the 21st century, we thankfully have evolved a long way from the elemental poverty, hunger, and ethnic, religious, and racial hatred that were mostly the norm\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "America's Future"","block_context":{"text":"America's Future","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/americas-future\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/800px-Beer_summit_cheers.jpg?fit=800%2C315&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/800px-Beer_summit_cheers.jpg?fit=800%2C315&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/800px-Beer_summit_cheers.jpg?fit=800%2C315&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/800px-Beer_summit_cheers.jpg?fit=800%2C315&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1734"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1735,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734\/revisions\/1735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}