Posted on 12/04/2018 11:57:26 AM PST by Mrs. Don-o
Camille Paglia is one of the most interesting and explosive thinkers of our time. She transgresses academic boundaries and blows up media forms. She’s brilliant on politics, art, literature, philosophy, and the culture wars. She’s also very keen on the email Q and A format for interviews. So, after reading her new collection of essays, Provocations, Spectator USA sent her some questions.
You’ve been a sharp political prognosticator over the years. So can I start by asking for a prediction. What will happen in 2020 in America? Will Hillary Clinton run again?
If the economy continues strong, Trump will be reelected. The Democrats (my party) have been in chaos since the 2016 election and have no coherent message except Trump hatred. Despite the vast pack of potential candidates, no one yet seems to have the edge. I had high hopes for Kamala Harris, but she missed a huge opportunity to play a moderating, statesmanlike role and has already imprinted an image of herself as a ruthless inquisitor that will make it hard for her to pull voters across party lines.
Screechy Elizabeth Warren has never had a snowball’s chance in hell to appeal beyond upper-middle-class professionals of her glossy stripe. Kirsten Gillibrand is a wobbly mediocrity. Cory Booker has all the gravitas of a cork. Andrew Cuomo is a yapping puppy with a long, muddy bullyboy tail. Both Bernie Sanders (for whom I voted in the 2016 primaries) and Joe Biden (who would have won the election had Obama not cut him off at the knees) are way too old and creaky.
To win in the nation’s broad midsection, the Democratic nominee will need to project steadiness, substance, and warmth. I’ve been looking at Congresswoman Cheri Bustos of Illinois and Governor Steve Bullock of Montana. As for Hillary, she’s pretty much damaged goods, but her perpetual, sniping, pity-me tour shows no signs of abating. She still has a rabidly loyal following, but it’s hard to imagine her winning the nomination again, with her iron grip on the Democratic National Committee now gone.
Still, it’s in her best interest to keep the speculation fires burning. Given how thoroughly she has already sabotaged the rising candidates by hogging the media spotlight, I suspect she wants Trump to win again. I don’t see our stumbling, hacking, shop-worn Evita yielding the spotlight willingly to any younger gal.
Has Trump governed erratically?
Yes, that’s a fair description. It’s partly because as a non-politician he arrived in Washington without the battalion of allies, advisors, and party flacks that a senator or governor would normally accumulate on the long road to the White House. Trump’s administration is basically a one-man operation, with him relying on gut instinct and sometimes madcap improvisation. There’s often a gonzo humor to it — not that the US president should be slinging barbs at bottom-feeding celebrities or jackass journalists, much as they may deserve it. It’s like a picaresque novel starring a jaunty rogue who takes to Twitter like Tristram Shandy’s asterisk-strewn diary. Trump’s unpredictability might be giving the nation jitters, but it may have put North Korea, at least, on the back foot.
Most Democrats have wildly underestimated Trump from the get-go. I was certainly surprised at how easily he mowed down 17 other candidates in the GOP primaries. He represents widespread popular dissatisfaction with politics as usual. Both major US parties are in turmoil and metamorphosis, as their various factions war and realign.
The mainstream media’s nonstop assault on Trump has certainly backfired by cementing his outsider status. He is basically a pragmatic deal-maker, indifferent to ideology. As with Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump rose because of decades of failure by the political establishment to address urgent systemic problems, including corruption at high levels. Democrats must hammer out their own image and agenda and stop self-destructively insulting half the electorate by treating Trump like Satan.
Does the ‘deep state’ exist? If so, what is it?
The deep state is no myth but a sodden, intertwined mass of bloated, self-replicating bureaucracy that constitutes the real power in Washington and that stubbornly outlasts every administration. As government programs have incrementally multiplied, so has their regulatory apparatus, with its intrusive byzantine minutiae. Recently tagged as a source of anti-Trump conspiracy among embedded Democrats, the deep state is probably equally populated by Republicans and apolitical functionaries of Bartleby the Scrivener blandness. Its spreading sclerotic mass is wasteful, redundant, and ultimately tyrannical.
I have been trying for decades to get my fellow Democrats to realize how unchecked bureaucracy, in government or academe, is inherently authoritarian and illiberal. A persistent characteristic of civilizations in decline throughout history has been their self-strangling by slow, swollen, and stupid bureaucracies.
The current atrocity of crippling student debt in the US is a direct product of an unholy alliance between college administrations and federal bureaucrats — a scandal that ballooned over two decades with barely a word of protest from our putative academic leftists, lost in their post-structuralist fantasies. Political correctness was not created by administrators, but it is ever-expanding campus bureaucracies that have constructed and currently enforce the oppressively rule-ridden regime of college life.
In the modern world, so wondrously but perilously interconnected, a principle of periodic reduction of bureaucracy should be built into every social organism. Freedom cannot survive otherwise.
What is true multiculturalism?
As I repeatedly argue in Provocations, comparative religion is the true multiculturalism and should be installed as the core curriculum in every undergraduate program. From my perspective as an atheist as well as a career college teacher, secular humanism has been a disastrous failure. Too many young people raised in affluent liberal homes are arriving at elite colleges and universities with skittish, unformed personalities and shockingly narrow views of human existence, confined to inflammatory and divisive identity politics.
Interest in Hinduism and Buddhism was everywhere in the 1960s counterculture, but it gradually dissipated partly because those most drawn to ‘cosmic consciousness’ either disabled themselves by excess drug use or shunned the academic ladder of graduate school. I contend that every educated person should be conversant with the sacred texts, rituals, and symbol systems of the great world religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Islam — and that true global understanding is impossible without such knowledge.
Not least, the juxtaposition of historically evolving spiritual codes tutors the young in ethical reasoning and the creation of meaning. Right now, the campus religion remains nihilist, meaning-destroying post-structuralism, whose pilfering god, the one-note Foucault, had near-zero scholarly knowledge of anything before or beyond the European Enlightenment. (His sparse writing on classical antiquity is risible.) Out with the false idols and in with the true!
There’s a lot of buzz about the ‘intellectual dark web’. One of its leading figures is Jordan Peterson, who is in some ways like you — he provokes, he works in an array of disciplines, he encourages individual responsibility. I saw your podcast with him. What did you make of him? Why is he so popular?
There are astounding parallels between Jordan Peterson’s work and mine. In its anti-ideological, trans-historical view of sex and nature, my first book, Sexual Personae (1990), can be viewed as a companion to Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999). Peterson and I took different routes up the mountain — he via clinical psychology and I via literature and art — but we arrived at exactly the same place.
Amazingly, over our decades of copious research, we were drawn to the same book by the same thinker — The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949), by the Jungian analyst Erich Neumann. (My 2005 lecture on Neumann at New York University is reprinted in Provocations.) Peterson’s immense international popularity demonstrates the hunger for meaning among young people today. Defrauded of a genuine humanistic education, they are recognizing the spiritual impoverishment of their crudely politicized culture, choked with jargon, propaganda, and lies.
I met Peterson and his wife Tammy a year ago when they flew to Philadelphia with a Toronto camera crew for our private dialogue at the University of the Arts. (The YouTube video has had to date over a million and a half views.) Peterson was incontrovertibly one of the most brilliant minds I have ever encountered, starting with the British philosopher Stuart Hampshire, whom I heard speak impromptu for a dazzling hour after a lecture in college. In turning psychosocial discourse back toward the syncretistic, multicultural Jung, Peterson is recovering and restoring a peak period in North American thought, when Canada was renowned for pioneering, speculative thinkers like the media analyst Marshall McLuhan and the myth critic Northrop Frye. I have yet to see a single profile of Peterson, even from sympathetic journalists, that accurately portrays the vast scope, tenor, and importance of his work.
Is humanity losing its sense of humor?
As a bumptious adolescent in upstate New York, I stumbled on a British collection of Oscar Wilde’s epigrams in a secondhand bookstore. It was an electrifying revelation, a text that I studied like the bible. What bold, scathing wit, cutting through the sentimental fog of those still rigidly conformist early 1960s, when good girls were expected to simper and defer.
But I never fully understood Wilde’s caustic satire of Victorian philanthropists and humanitarians until the present sludgy tide of political correctness began flooding government, education, and media over the past two decades. Wilde saw the insufferable arrogance and preening sanctimony in his era’s self-appointed guardians of morality.
We’re back to the hypocrisy sweepstakes, where gestures of virtue are as formalized as kabuki. Humor has been assassinated. An off word at work or school will get you booted to the gallows. This is the graveyard of liberalism, whose once noble ideals have turned spectral and vampiric.
Class, discuss.
plain talk was six minutes quicker
Booker has the gravitas of a cork.
still laughing!
she’s the best EV-AH!
Rather see Trump win again then allow some other woman to de-throne her as Queen of the Democrat Party?
I can see that.
Also if Trump becomes a popular two-term POTUS her loss does not look so bad in hindsight.
Down with your idols, Camille. It is written, "You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve." His Advent is at hand.
She has always been an interesting one. She understands that civilization needs males and maleness, unlike the vast majority of radical feminists. Her thinking is much smarter than theirs. Her discussion with JBP is very interesting, very high level, but fun to watch nonetheless.
Modern Times: Camille Paglia & Jordan B Peterson
https://youtu.be/v-hIVnmUdXM
She accurately nails the nature of the higher educational establishment - it is Nihilistic, my contention for the last decade see “Chaos and Mayhem.”
And calls out the Fraudulent Foucault.
Why? What has Kamala Harris accomplished thus far that would cause Ms. Paglia to believe her last few years of life would be enriched (literally or figuratively) by a Kamala Harris Presidency?
I still find Camille unstable, but damn... she can write.
Last summer I attended a Peterson lecture in Seattle in which he discussed how we develop our ideas of truth and beauty, and how we create stories to embody these ideals, and how this all relates to religion. When I mentioned this to my son and his girlfriend, she looked at me like I’d said I’d gone to a Hitler rally.
Besides the Federal agencies , to me that "stubbornly outlasting" comment applies also to the senate and congress where some politicians are there for life, as are the people in the other federal agencies. - Tom
This kind of notion, reflected in the title, is hardly new. If your football team was doing well one season you would prefer that the team that wins the super bowl was the one team that sort of dashed their hopes. That as opposed to the team that dashed your team’s hopes getting humiliated in the final showdown.
What are so many Leftwits saying about Clinton: thatshe was a poor candidate. Well, arguably that’s just the reimagining their drooling fanboy and fangirl worship of Hillary during the erection, er, election. That’s them now saying oh, we weren’t wrong, we were just supporting the flawed candidate the party gave us.
Ah, the ever convenient me,pry of Leftists....
But in light of that new post election revised mythos about Clinton if Trump wins again it’s not really Hillary’s fault for the first time, is it?
Unless he beats her again in which case....
We see this Trump as the manipulator, Trump as the Jar Jar Binks to be revealed as the ultimate big bad Sith, is already a growing part of the Leftist mythos about him. From Russian collusion to the new new thing where Russians are making hyper life like fake videos (that wasn’t me raping that ten year old girl, it was a Russian hit piece in video ... some Democrat in two year’s time) Trump is already someone the Left loves to pat themselves on the back that THEY arent being fooled (unlike all us rubes on the Right).
And that from folks that once early ‘17 inspired me to write the DC Monks ...
Shhhh ... listen, the DNC flagellant monks approach issuing their mournful lament...
“Mena, Rose Law, Pay for Play! *thwack!* We’d still vote for Hillary....
Mena, Rose Law, Pay for Play! *thwack!* We’d still vote for Hillary....
Mena, Rose Law, Pay for Play! *thwack!* We’d still vote for Hillary....”
Love Camille! I would have paid real cash to see Christopher Hitchens, Camille and Mark Steyn chat. Still would for Camille and Mark.
Yes that was AWESOME .
But it is extremely mystifying that with her towering intellect she continues to adhere to the intellectually bankrupt Democrat lie.
Who’s going to dethrone Hitlery? Alexandria occasionally-Coherent?
CC
BFL
the deep state is probably equally populated by Republicans....
She’s right.
She’s an atheist but sees that secular humanism has destroyed the country.
She’s actually pretty smart, except for not realizing there’s a God.
It’s actually a little vexing too.
Her wisdom and wit and knowledge is wasted in a party where no one will listen to what she says.
I don’t believe she really believes she’s an atheist.
Great article.
Confusing and contrasting and conflicted person.
Enjoyed this.
I still find Camille unstable, but damn... she can write.
+++++
Pretty much my take as well. She is brilliant, superbly educated, well spoken in the extreme, and mostly wrong.
But she is fun and occasionally on our side. But just occasionally.
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