The rise of Santorum in recent Republican primaries shows continuing conservative discontent with Romney. The Right mistrusts chameleons and corporate placeholders. Oddly enough they seem to recognize the threat to their passions that the virtual real constitutes better than the Left recognizes it. Maybe this is because the Right aspires to stand outside of modernity and from that vantage can better recognize modern oddities of simulation and dissuasion. I am tempted to say that perhaps the Left has become a simulation and so no longer recognizes the phenomenon that now constitutes it. But nothing could be clearer than the fact that both movements, Right and Left, are now simulations of history and ideology and self-interest politics in the context of the loss of real history and real ideology and real self-interest. Real self interest vanished when the real self vanished. Real ideology vanished when real thought vanished. Real history vanished when memory vanished.
Some Democrats claim to be elated that the Right is given to rejectionism and extremism. They believe this ensures Obama’s re-election, and legitimizes their own tendencies toward facile compromise. But the Left’s satisfaction with a shell-game president such as Obama only betrays its lack of passion and conviction and the bad faith of its constant retreat to one degree left of zero when its values are challenged.
The function of this placeholder presidency is clear. It feels pressure only from the Right and so moves to the right in a flourish of self-congratulations. It seems that the Left is grateful to be dead—guilt-ridden, symptomatic, knowing little, believing in less.
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