Village People The reactionary longings of the progressive left. By JAMES TARANTO Jan. 5, 2015 3:31 p.m. ET 248 COMMENTS Mario Cuomo, who served three terms as governor of New York, died Thursday, coincidentally the anniversary of his first day both in and out of office, respectively in 1983 and 1995. Like the young Barack Obama, Cuomo was best known as a promising and inspiring liberal politician, largely on the strength of a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. Cuomo delivered his in 1984, two decades earlier than Obama. In both 1988 and 1992 Cuomo was thought to be a formidable contender for the presidency, but he forwent campaigns in both years, leaving him in the curious position of being eulogized for his potential after dying an octogenarian. One headline in particular got our attention, from an obituary in City & State by Village Voice veteran Wayne Barrett: “If New York Is a Family, Mario Cuomo Was Its Soul.” We must observe that this is a terribly sloppy metaphor. Only individuals, not families or other groups of people, have souls (cc: Renee Trudeau). Further, souls don’t die. Perhaps Barrett, or whoever wrote the headline, meant that Cuomo has gone to heaven or some such place. But that would imply that New York is dead. (Note that we are merely employing the definition of “soul” to analyze the metaphor. The metaphysical question whether souls exist is beyond the scope of today’s column, though we’re sure we’ll resolve it in due course.) Barrett seems to think souls and hearts are the same thing; at one point in the text he refers to the soul as “Mario’s lifeblood organ.” But let’s stipulate that Cuomo had (metaphorically) a big heart and a great soul. There is a more substantive problem with the metaphor of a polity as “a family”—a metaphor Cuomo himself used, and one that points to the central contradiction of contemporary progressive liberalism. “Family” is a particularly inapposite metaphor for the U.S. (or for an American state, city or other large subdivision), for it calls to mind Old World blood-and-soil nationalism. A country that defines citizenship on the basis of common ethnic heritage is literally a family, albeit a very large extended one. America is a nation of immigrants whose national identity depends not on sanguinary particularity but on universally applicable (even if at times inconsistently applied) ideals about the rights of individuals. The longing for a nationalism based on kinship ties is a deeply reactionary one. To be sure, Cuomo’s own use of the metaphor hearkened back not to the Old World but to the early days of the New World. From that 1984 convention speech: The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail. “The strong”—“The strong,” they tell us, “will inherit the land.” We Democrats believe in something else. We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees—wagon train after wagon train—to new frontiers of education, housing, peace; the whole family aboard, constantly reaching out to extend and enlarge that family; lifting them up into the wagon on the way; blacks and Hispanics, and people of every ethnic group, and Native Americans—all those struggling to build their families and claim some small share of America. We’ll pass over the tendentious characterization of the Republican worldview except to note it proves that truculent and polarizing rhetoric is unique neither to the present day nor to the right. Our concern here is with the family metaphor. By citing all those racial and ethnic groups, Cuomo acknowledges that the American people, taken as a whole, lack the central characteristic of a family, namely kinship relations. So what’s left of the metaphor? He drops it after that paragraph. Much of the rest of the speech is a call for unity—party unity.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 02:53:45 +0000
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