Random Reflections: The Evil Thatcherites and Reaganites
Keir Starmer, the latest in a string of mealy-mouthed and/or self-aggrandizing party men to occupy 10 Downing Street in the shadow of a giant whom they all knew before entering the place that they could never live up to, has decided, in true socialist fashion, to wear his insecurity on his sleeve more overtly than his predecessors. Specifically, Starmer has chosen to remove a large portrait of Margaret Thatcher, painted by a well-known British portrait artist, from its location in a study in the official residence known as the Thatcher Room, where it has hung since 2009.
Perhaps what bothered him about the portrait’s presence was its location in a room that, as his biographer suggests, he wishes to use as a place for private conversation. Imagine the kind of things a progressive apparatchik and political hack will wish to say in private. And imagine how such a person would feel about Margaret Thatcher sitting silently in the room during such conversations, as though witnessing it all. The Tell-Tale Heart comes to mind. Or, as I take a moment to examine Prime Minister Starmer’s photograph, perhaps it is something else that disconcerts him. For I cannot rub from my eyes a certain impression of facial similarity between these two PMs, great and small. It would surely bother Starmer to be reminded every day that Thatcher, whom he somewhat resembles, was a far bigger man than he will ever be. There will never be a “Starmer Room” at 10 Downing Street, and he surely knows that as well as all his post-Thatcher predecessors knew it of themselves, and as everyone knows it of him.
I was listening the other day to a mediocre popular lecture on Heidegger by the late Rick Roderick, preserved on YouTube from some years ago. After a necessarily simplifying whirlwind tour of Heidegger’s view of the self as Dasein, the themes of Being and Time, and the importance of living “authentically,” the lecturer offers a cautionary note about the perspective he has outlined, in relation to Heidegger’s infamous dalliance with Nazism.
The trouble with leaving the account of being human this abstract — you know, “we come from a culture, we flee from conformity, try to get authentic” — the trouble with leaving it that abstract, is that you can be an authentic anything. Follow me? It turns out that you can be authentically a member of the Third Reich, authentically a member of the Reagan administration [pregnant pause] — just leave those two together for a while in your minds — authentically a friend of Richard Nixon — no wait a minute, that’s logically absurd…no it isn’t, I guess that’s possible.
Popularism in a philosophy lecture might have its place — I said “might.” But popularism reduced to bad stand-up comedy of the “we all know about those evil right-wingers, wink-wink” variety, the kind of lame non-humor that passes for funny among the witless and politically tribal, undermines any pretense at being philosophical. To note that Heidegger’s theory of authenticity and his decisive lean into Nazism are not inherently inconsistent, but in fact the former might run very neatly into the latter when the true implications of “authenticity” are broken down carefully, is a fair and reasonable comment on the most influential German philosopher of the twentieth century. The flippant addendum-cum-analogy about “members of the Reagan administration” is just another iteration of the standard “Hitler” bogeyman that left-liberals throw at every conservative or quasi-conservative politician, as though in doing so they were not belittling the realities of fascist totalitarianism and demeaning the millions who died at the hands of the party to which Heidegger lent his (mostly passive or tacit) support.
Such political triviality, whether played for laughs or not, merely puts a most conspicuous stamp across one’s own forehead: “Not A Philosopher” — along with, perhaps, a second equally conspicuous stamp: “Not A Teacher.” To put this another way, it reduces one’s attempts to be a philosophical educator to the same kind of anomalous abomination that Heidegger committed by selling his soul to the Third Reich — only without the mitigating circumstance of the soul that has been sold also being the soul that produced Being and Time and the Nietzsche lectures.
