Democracies Don’t Try to Make Everyone Agree
“I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a Communist.”
— General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaking to the House Armed Services Committee last Thursday
“He’s not just a pig—he’s stupid.”
— Tucker Carlson, Fox News television host, describing Milley
Back in the 1980s, comparative-literature majors at my university had to take a required course in literary theory. This course—Lit 130, if memory serves—offered prospective scholars a series of frames and theories that could be applied to the reading of books. This was the heyday of deconstructionism—essentially a form of highly pretentious close reading, imported from France—and so we read quite a few texts looking for things that interested deconstructionists. But we also read Freudians, Marxists, feminists, and others.
We suffered through a lot of turgid academic writing, but the class had its uses. I learned, among other things, that one can read the same text from multiple points of view and therefore see, for example, he might become interested in the way in which wealth, power, and the determination to have both shapes the lives of all of the characters. When a feminist reads the same book, she might discover that patriarchal attitudes toward women, who are judged and valued for their marriageability, shape the lives of the characters too. The Freudians, as you might surmise, would notice a whole different set of motifs.
