Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial

Rating:
Summary: Surviving Austerity
Review: In "DON'T THINK, SMILE: Notes on a Decade of Denial," Ellen Willis offers penetrating insights into the "new austerity," the anti-democratic, anti-radical ethos that has come to be the prevailing and controlling ideology of American life. From her perspective as a left libertarian, she offers a compelling critique of social conservatives on both sides of the aisle: on the right the neoliberal economists and right-wing libertarians (Bennett, Boaz Murray), and on the left, those who seek to revive the mass politics of the era of the liberal consensus (Rorty, Gitlin) by stifling as politically inastute the "balkanizing" multiculturalist thrust of the post-60s cultural left.

Willis makes a good case for cultural politics as the more successful of the two strands leftist practice. She notes that no American has been untouched by the changes in "sexual mores, male female relations, the breakdown or taboos on public experession, the demand for a cleaner environment and a healthy diet, the new centrality of paid work to women's lives, the icreasing racial and ethnic heterogeneity of mainstream American life" ---- all of which grew out of 60s cultural radicalism -- and which has "after three decades and more of ferocious backlash, actively supported by the federal government, accomplished the social equivalent of the putting the toothpaste back in the tube."

She suggests that Americans lack of interest in the agenda of the traditional left may be due to the fact that it is a pale echo of the conservative social agenda of work, more work, family values and upright "Christian" living. That is certainly at least partially true, but it could also be argued that the relative popularity among the mainstream of the messages of cultural radicals can also be traced to their support by advertisers who found, starting in the 60s, that wild, sexy, carnivalesque, forever young, and alternative lifestyle advertising appeals worked, reviving a flagging economy whose plodding, adult-directed mass market 50s sales techniques no longer worked. Willis tends to discount as too neat the theory that the rise of the "consumer republic" as instituted by corporate marketers depoliticized many Americans in the deft substitution of the rights and responsibilities of consumership for those of citizenship. This argument does, however, more than hold its own in explaining the lack of engagement among many Americans with the traditional liberal goals of economic equality as a quasi-material version of this goals can be instantly achieved through the use of credit cards.

Willis is at her best perhaps when she personalizes her politics in stories about her own life. For instance, her reaction to no parking signs in New York which tell drivers, quote: "Don't Even Think of Parking Here" make her want to plaster a bumpersicker over them that reads: "Don't Even Think About Telling Me What to Think." She notes that such signs are emblematic of the "one-way coversations carried on by driveway guards who call themselves journalists: "Don't even think about questioning the need to balance the federal budget. Don't even think about workers getting a fair share of the wealth they produce. Don't even think about the problems with the institution of marriage that punishing unmarried mothers won't solve."

As the subtitle says, Willis takes on the issues that defined the 90s: "The Majoritarian Fallacy" (traditional liberals who believe the average American will sign up for redistrubitive tax policies because it is, after all, in their own best interests -- a bloodless theory shorn of any animating cultural values), "The Decade of Denial (Don't Even Think About, etc.), "Race and Ordeal of Liberal Optimism" (the belief by even liberals that no alternative to the mystical power of capitalism can ever be imagined in the amelioration of racism), "Beyond Good and Evil (views on the runaway criminal justice state and the inculcation of fear), "Freedom, Power and Speech (the wrong-headed philosophical formulations of anti-porn feminists, and their subsequent colonization by the right wing values crowd), "Intellectual Work in the Culture of Austerity" (the imposition of the discipline of the market into every aspect of intellectuals, and everyone else's lives), and, finally, "Their Libertarianism -- and Ours" (a discussion of the bizarre justifications of reactionary social policy under the philosophical heading of libertarianism by Charles Murray and David Boaz, executive president of the Cato Institute).

Willis' discussion of her intellectual journey and the economic hurdles placed in her path from the 70s on by the imposition of the neo-liberal economic regime is particularly engaging. She tells of a 60s New York where jobs were easy to come by, where a person could support themselves on a small salary and had plenty of time left of social and cultural events. Then, New York, which had been the experimental site of liberal, faintly socialistic programs -- free education at City College, subsidized housing -- was told to "Drop Dead" by President Ford. The city's leaders buckled to demands for fiscal "austerity," and within ten years New York became a place where artists and writers, the city's lifeblood, could not afford to live.

Willis's perspective might be seen to be an artifact of that earlier period when radicalism was possible, socialism was almost acceptable, where radical left-wing intellectuals ruled the roost in New York. After all, how many liberals actually have the nerve to think, must less to say these days, that workers should get a fair share of the wealth they produce? Emerson, aphoristically observing the anti-human outcome of the early industrial revolution in America, said: "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." Willis, in her radical left libertarianism, her refusal to accept either the halter of the "free-enterprise" system or the saddle of the liberal left's majoritarian fallacy, is indispensible in this right wing age of compassionate conservatism, and left-wing conservative compassionism.

Rating:
Summary: "Radical truthtelling" is like a blast to the brain.
Review: Willis's style is challenging--she refuses to condescend to the reader--and utterly invigorating. On topics as varied as race relations, the work ethic, Monica Lewinsky, and class wars she manages to cut through the dross. What she says is both exquisitely painful in its candor, and paradoxically optimistic.

Rating:
Summary: "Radical truthtelling" is like a blast to the brain.
Review: Willis's style is challenging--she refuses to condescend to the reader--and utterly invigorating. On topics as varied as race relations, the work ethic, Monica Lewinsky, and class wars she manages to cut through the dross. What she says is both exquisitely painful in its candor, and paradoxically optimistic.