Alan Keyes' Baroque Period

I remember hearing in the hours just before the last Republican debate in Iowa that Alan Keyes, who had (to be fair to him) participated in the NAACP-sponsored forum that most of the top Republicans skipped, had somehow crossed the 1% barrier in a Des Moines Register poll, and so qualified for a podium (or as Keyes' website puts it, "[f]or the first time, all nine major candidates will share the stage.")

Turns out things aren't so simple as that. In what is on so many levels the most compelling bit of campaign-trail reportage to come out of this election cycle so far, Byron York notes that in addition to the 1% hurdle and a couple of other conditions that the Keyes campaign has met, there is a further condition for candidates to take part in the DMR debate --- that they have at least one paid staffer in Iowa --- and it's not at all clear from Keyes' protestations to York that he has even one staffer. (On the other hand, he could be pulling a reverse Saddam Hussein --- acting like he doesn't have the goods when he really does, the better to stoke his resentment of the media and non-followers of his generally.) Check out this exchange among York, Keyes, and an unnamed reporter, below the fold.

“You have a couple hundred paid staff in Iowa?” a reporter asked.

“No, it’s not paid staff,” Keyes said. “Are you listening or not?”

“It’s a question. How many paid staff in Iowa?”

Keyes had had enough of such details. “You are working, I guess, for the elites who want us to believe that campaigns are about money,” he told the reporter.

“Do you not wish to answer the question?”

“No, I want you to understand that you don’t have the right to dictate our political process. It belongs to the people, not to you. And money doesn’t buy votes.”

I jumped in again. “Ambassador, I’m going to ask you one more time. Have you personally been doing campaign events here in Iowa in the last few months?”

“I have had several campaign events here in Iowa, but I will not define those events as you do,” he said.

“In the last few months?”

“I don’t define those events as you do. And I don’t think you have any right whatsoever to establish yourselves as the arbiter of what constitutes an event. I will do that in a way that reflects the best needs and purposes of the people who are working with me. Because as I see it, every time somebody comes forward and takes the pledge [a pledge of support for Keyes you can access through his website], that’s an Iowa event.”

Now, granted, Keyes isn't hiding his substantive beliefs --- he's really, really opposed to abortion for example, and will let you know. But by expending so much of the media exposure he's lucky to have gotten bickering with spin-alley reporters, a hapless debate moderator, and other candidates over his arcane interpretations of procedural questions (and metaphysical ones, viz., "what is an event?"), Keyes has finally and decisively broken with the standard practice of politics --- remember, Bill Kristol managed his 1988 senate run; he pulled 14% in the Iowa caucus in 2000 --- in favor of some sublimely meta crusade. Some people find him a comedic figure. I find him, a Straussian Harvard Ph.D who was tutored by Allan Bloom and served as Jeane Kirkpatrick's apprentice, only to have become entranced by his own mythology and assumed the leadership of a fringe religio-philosophical cult (whose members literally number in the dozens), an endlessly fascinating case of an elevation and fall.

To get a sense of what I'm talking about, head to alankeyes.com and look around. You won't be disappointed. On the front page, there's a clip of Keyes addressing some kind of revival meeting. He begins in calm tones discussing what perception is. "Touch, hearing, sight, taste, understanding...Perception is a creature function. If perception is reality, then the creature makes reality... If perception is reality, it can only be because there is no god."

Maybe this is just Keyes' extraordinarily oblique way of telling supporters not to worry that he is perceived as a hopeless candidate. Maybe he's really trying to make some deep metaphysical point. (In which case he's wrong on a number of fronts: Kant takes great pains to show that understanding and perception are completely distinct, and complementary faculties. As for the conditional, "if perception is reality, there is no god," well, Bishop Berkeley --- for whom Berkeley, CA, Berkeley College at Yale, and lots of other Berkeleys I'm unaware of are named --- held that "to be is to be perceived." He argues that all that exists are sensible qualities, with no substance underlying them; and God is essential to his metaphysics, as the force that coordinates sensory perceptions, so that (except for people hallucinating) we all perceive the same things. I.e., there are no objects of perception, just perceptions themselves, the minds perceiving them, and God holding it all together. So perception could be reality and there could still be a god.)

In any case, Keyes makes a seamless transition to screaming at the audience not to be "manipulated by these masters of deception and perception, and start creating once again the reality of that liberty that must be made with our hands...or it will not exist at all [I thought 'creature-made' reality implies godlessness--ed.]."

Then there's what Keyes calls the "Declarationist" interpretation of the Constitution. The idea is that, taken on its own terms, the Constitution is subject to hopeless disagreement over subjective interpretation, and therefore the only way to read it is as a codification of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Needless to say, this is bonkers. But along with his, shall we say, idiosyncratic metaphysics, and half a dozen other tenets of faith --- "our country's most urgent problems are ultimately moral — not material — and that unless we as a nation address our moral challenges first and foremost, no physical or economic might will save us," his pledge declares --- Keyes has created, if not a vibrant, then at least a strenuously internally coherent little intellectual microcosm to inhabit.

An outsider who doesn't have access to Keyes' urim and thummim is unlikely to get much of any interpretive grasp of what's going in the mind of Keyes and his followers. Still, if Mitt Romney could come up with anything like this, he wouldn't be so completely useless.