Red Bob
Carlin, David R. Jr.
OF SEVERAL MINDS DAVID R. CARLIN, JR. RED BOB Dole as fellow traveler The trouble with Bob Dole is that he's too much of a Marxist. I don't mean that his heart bleeds for the condition of the...
...Are you worried about crime...
...It is the systern of wealth production that makes the world go round...
...Such is the alchemy of politics...
...Some will object, "Yes, but Clinton's not sincere, he's a mere opportunist...
...It is precisely the platform Lenin would have run on had he been a Republican...
...It is doubtful he had heard of the toiling masses until Pat Buchanan had the bad form to mention them earlier this year...
...The economy is the cause, they the effects...
...But the capitalists won't object to those sops as long as they themselves are taken care of royally...
...Illegitimacy...
...Hence Weber's famous thesis, that the nineteenth-century industrial revolution was the offspring of the seventeenth-century Puritan mentality...
...Most Dole critics have focused their attention on the apparent contradiction between the two economic proposals...
...I have argued in the past that the public senses something has gone profoundly wrong with American culture in the last thirty years (see, "It's the Culture, Stupid...
...But they have paid scant attention to the far more fundamental flaw in the Dole agenda, namely that the Marxist axiom is nonsensical...
...The idea is that a combination of the two will prove a sovereign remedy for all that ails us...
...And to appease the family-values crowd, he's had to throw in a five-hundred-dollar-per-child tax credit...
...All other factors-politics, religion, philosophy, law, science, scholarship, literature, art, education, entertainment, journalism, etc.-are secondary, if that...
...they have been stereotyped as stupid, bigoted, mean-spirited, and sexually repressed...
...Rather it is explainable in terms of a combination of economic and cultural factors-"culture" here being close to a synonym for "religion...
...But it's a point that will make no difference if Bob Dole runs a neo-Marxist campaign, in the meantime leaving Clinton free to exploit the cultural issues.loit the cultural issues...
...Poor schools...
...Commonweal, September 23, 1994...
...Somehow this high-status contempt has never counted as divisive...
...Corrupt business practices...
...But these are sidebar issues...
...But well before the events of 1917 it was refuted in theory by Max Weber, who argued that society cannot be explained in terms of the economic factor alone...
...You can't solve a nation's problems by addressing its economic problems alone...
...Violence...
...Divorce...
...Bill Clinton, whether he's a Weberian or because his pollsters run better focus groups, understands what Bob Dole and his neo-Marxist advisers don't seem to get, that the culture counts as well as the economy...
...Despite the fact that those who sense this most acutely-neocon-servatives at the intellectual level, the Religious Right at the mass level-have become major players in the Republican party, the Dole campaign, with its "the economy is the only thing that counts" theme, has elected to sidestep this gigantic issue, or at least to downplay it...
...Sexually transmitted diseases...
...Just the opposite, he wants to help the rich get richer...
...That's why Clinton has reinvented himself as a cultural conservative, a family-values candidate...
...Tax cuts plus a balanced budget will produce prosperity, and prosperity will make all these problems go away...
...Look, for instance, at his veto of the partial-birth abortion bill...
...Abortion...
...Ironically, in his acceptance speech at the GOP convention he criticized the unofficial Clinton slogan of four years ago, "It's the economy, stupid...
...Or a hundred other moral and cultural ills...
...So does this mean that those who are unhappy with the moral tone of U.S...
...His campaign has made it clear that the real issues are tax cuts and a balanced budget...
...How can we trust the moral bona fides of someone who defends a procedure tantamount to infanticide...
...God forbid that anyone should be divisive...
...In late August, for instance, when drug use among the young happened to be front-page news for a few days, he promised a renewed war on drugs...
...Not at all...
...And despite endless GOP talk about "smaller government," he doesn't favor the withering away of the state either...
...I certainly don't mean to say that Dole favors the dictatorship of the proletariat or the classless society...
...For that matter, you can't even solve its economic problems by addressing economic problems alone...
...Rampant and ruthless greed...
...He's the champion of teen curfews, school uniforms, decency on TV, getting tough on welfare recipients...
...society will have no candidate to vote for...
...A point well taken...
...For a generation people with traditional religious beliefs and values, especially old-fashioned Protestants, have been treated with contempt by America's secularist and quasi-secularist elites...
...All the same, Dole (or whoever designs his campaign strategy) is a kind of Marxist since he accepts the fundamental axiom of Marxism, which is this: The only factor that really counts in society is the economic factor...
...they have routinely been targets of moralistic indignation...
...How can we have a balanced budget," they ask, "if we also have a drastic tax cut...
...They can vote for the incumbent president...
...He's the foe of tobacco, assault weapons, crime, and gay marriage...
...Consistent with his Marxist philosophy, Dole has reduced his essential campaign message to two economic proposals: tax cuts plus a balanced budget...
...Well, worry no longer...
...In addition to their Wall Street Marxism, the Dole advisers don't want their man to address the cultural issue because they're afraid it will make the Republicans look "divisive," a synonym for "Buchananesque...
...Of course to camouflage his proposed windfall for the rich, he's had to sweeten the pot with an income-tax cut for average Americans...
...Yet he's running on precisely the same slogan...
...Oh, from time to time Dole mentions these things in passing...
...Yet when the low-status objects of contempt fight back, this counts as divisive...
...Nor do I mean that Dole wants to expropriate the expropriators...
...Marxism was refuted in practice by the great Communist experiment of the twentieth century...
...They have been the butts of endless jokes and sneers...
...I don't mean that his heart bleeds for the condition of the toiling masses, whether foreign or domestic...
Vol. 123 • September 1996 • No. 16
