Republican Kitsch

I don't really want to say much about the Republicans right now. I'm bemused by the popularity of Limbaugh, who was just awarded "Defender of the Constitution" at CPAC 2009. And then there's the charge that Congressional Republicans' refusal to play nicely somehow marks a failure on Obama's part to fulfill his promise of bi-partisanship.

John Taplin's comments on Dying Conservative Intellect help clear things up for me. I especially enjoyed--in both the sense of anagnorisis and, frankly, gloating--his comments on how conservatism has degenerated into Kitsch:

When the best selling intellectual tract at the CPAC show is written by Joe the Plumber, one can posit that the intellectual movement called conservatism has evolved into "Kitsch"--"a creative gesture that merely imitates the superficial appearances of thought (via repeated conventions and formula), thus, it is uncreative and unoriginal." The great Milan Kundera described Kitsch this way.

Kitsch functions by excluding from view everything that humans find difficult with which to come to terms, offering instead a sanitized view of the world, in which "all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions".

In its desire to paper over the complexities and contradictions of real life, kitsch, Kundera suggested, is intimately linked with totalitarianism. In a healthy democracy, diverse interest groups compete and negotiate with one another to produce a generally acceptable consensus; by contrast, "everything that infringes on kitsch," including individualism, doubt, and irony, "must be banished for life" in order for kitsch to survive.

Amen.