Re: Cockburn Embraces Newtism

[dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx (Doug Henwood)]

Unsurprisingly perhaps, I have to take exception to Tim Wohlforth's
critique of Cockburn's review of Hillary's book.

Just because Hillary's a target of vicious right-wing attacks doesn't mean
she's worthy of defense. She combines the worst of the two worlds that
constitute modern American liberalism: her day job as a bank/corporate
lawyer, and her free-time pursuits as a high-end social worker. (I won't
mention her uncanny skills at futures trading, which allowed her to turn
$2,000 into $100,000; most amateurs, who lack HRC's prodigious gifts, start
with $100,000 and turn it into $2,000.)

I assume most people on this list are not fond of the social roles played
by bank/corporate lawyers (regardless of their charms as private
individuals), but the social worker thing is a bit more problematic. I
think social workers represent the liberal version of the carceral state, a
point that was brought home to me in a conversation yesterday with a friend
of mine who also hated Cockburn's column, when he said, in HRC's defense,
that the alternative to social workers are cops and jails. Well, not
really; both versions of the carceral state assume that there will be a
vast population of poor folks to be managed; the liberal calls them a
"dysfunctional" population, and the right, which at least has the courage
of its convictions, calls them "pathological."

Liberals disguise their authoritarian impulses behind a therapeutic
rhetoric, but its real intention is to force people to conform to the kinds
of personality required by modern capitalism. Russell Jacoby made this
point well when he showed how psychoanalysis, originally a radical critique
of bourgeois norms, became a branch of mental hygiene emphasizing
"adjustment" when it came to America.

I see the modern social worker crowd - which we could broaden to include
the drug warriors and feminist moralists (from the bourgeois Ms. to the
quasi-radical Andrea Dworkin) - as heirs to the upper middle class ladies
of the 19th century, whose aim was to improve the morals of the poor - but
who, of course, assumed that the poor we have always with us.

Marxists should have no tolerance for this shit. Especially when it comes
from the mouth of HRC, husband to the man who promised to end welfare as we
know it. Actually it didn't come from Hillary's mouth; it came from a
ghostwriter's, whom Hillary has given no credit. At least Newt is gracious
enough to acknowledge the actual author of the books appearing under his
name.

Doug

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Doug Henwood
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