Dyer Unveils The Consenus

I've long enjoyed the thinking of J.E. Dyer, but with this post she proves to be one helluva cogent and incisive writer. 

 

.... The divorce between the conventional-left consensus and reality has been startlingly clear over the past few weeks. Confronted with reality, the consensus — or the Consensus — is out of ideas. To drum up enthusiasm for new deficit spending, a 20th-century Consensus remedy with the track record of 16th-century medical procedures, President Obama reached backward past decades of left-wing “debunking” to invoke Sputnik. Soon he’ll be rallying us with the cry of “Better dead than Red!” The Consensus knows only that the spending must be done; selling it need not be accomplished with thematic consistency.

Faced now with the Hezbollah coup in Lebanon and the unrest in Egypt and Tunisia, Obama is simply silent. It’s as if he and his advisers are waiting for a new consensus to form. The old, reliable Consensus would tell them only that popular unrest is noble and positive, and the American government invariably does the wrong thing about it when it erupts abroad. These can be satisfying conclusions in an academic or editorial environment, but they offer no useful framework for official policy.

There is still great inertia behind the Consensus. It has been proclaimed dead often throughout the last 30 years, but the continuation of the Pax Americana — with everything that means at home and abroad — has just as often rescued it. Coexistence with an often antithetical reality has been possible because, for the most part, the Consensus has thrived as a self-appointed dissenting opposition, in a stasis maintained on the principles of others.

 

Having been an adherent of The Consensus for more decades than I care to admit, I must say that Dyer has absolutely nailed it. On September 11, 2001, in what seemed like a single moment, I realized two things almost simultaneously.  One was that someone wanted to kill me, for no reason other than where I am. A few months later, when a suicide bomber detonated at a Passover seder in Netanya, I would realize that the same people also wanted to kill me for who I am.  But that, as I said, came later - like the aftershock of an earthquake.  

Feeling thus vulnerable on the morning of 9/11 - truly vulnerable, for probably the first time ever - I sought explanation, instruction, or at least solace, and so looked to my interior file cabinets containing The Consensus.  There was nothing there. Shockingly, The Consensus had evaporated.  I so-suddenly realized that The Consensus had nothing to offer, was nothing. All that rhetoric, duly filed over decades, was out the window, gone, in a flash.  The Consensus was so ethereal, so intangible and insubstantial, that at the very moment I needed Something... there was Nothing.

 

There is no principle in The Consensus. Nor is there any logic to it. There is nothing there to grab on to if/when your world breaks apart.  I don't know how I was able to bear the initial emptiness; it would take years to fill those interior cabinets with questions and then slowly, tentative answers, subject to more questions.  I tried to fill them with actual information, history, Jewish learning and practice... and later, conservative thought.  Then more information, alternating history with current events.

I am certain that what Dyer so well describes as "a self-appointed dissenting opposition, in a stasis maintained on the principles of others" cannot stand the tests of time and trouble.  It doesn't take all that much of a wind to fell a house of cards.  Those who rely on The Consensus out of reflex and with a faith bordering on the religious, will sooner or later find that their bag of tricks is itself an illusion.  Where consistency and logic has failed to go, reality can -and in my experience, does- break through in time of need.

If we hear the sound of heads exploding (in a figurative sense, you understand) it may well be that Trouble has found us, but at the same time it will be a Very Good Sign.  

 

You can file that under

'Non-Evaporative Paradoxical Assessments of Possibility'  :)

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

The problem with the Consensus is that it always deals in abstractions and generalizations while the actual world deals in specifics and particulars. For a long time now in the United States, a major element of the Consensus has been the belief that "Democracy is a good thing." Most of the Left has believed this, most of the Right has believed it, and most of the Center has believed it. Yet today in the Middle East, the Consensus is taking a terrible hammering. We've seen democracy in Gaza produce a Hamas-led government, and we may soon see democracy in Egypt produce a Muslim Brotherhood-led government. This conflict between democratic dreams and democratic realities is causing widespread consternation and befuddlement throughout the West. But there's no good reason for our surprise. A look back at history would have taught all of us -- a long time ago -- that democracy is a good thing only at particular times and under particular circumstances. The democracy of the French Revolution gave us the Terror; the democracy of the Russian Revolution gave us Lenin; and the democracy of Weimar gave us Hitler. History is as clear as it can be on this matter: Democracy is sometimes a good thing -- and sometimes a bad thing. Which means, of course, that a Consensus can be a very dangerous thing. It's a darned shame that all of us have such a hard time remembering that. It's even more shameful when our elected leaders have a hard time remembering it.