The THINK 3 INSTITUTE

Against the Pagans: Santorum's false choice between stewadship and servitude

2012-02-19T19:36:00.002-05:00

It's one of the canards of present-day Republicanism -- I've heard Mr. Right raise the point more than once -- that there's something discreditingly pagan about the environmentalist movement. On the campaign trail this year, Rick Santorum comes closest to expressing this sentiment without necessarily using the p-word. Invited to clarify his position on one of the Sunday interview shows, he attempted to draw a distinction between the "stewardship" of the planet mandated by scripture and an environmentalist ideology that reduces man to a "servant" of the Earth. The Pennsylvanian insists that "The Earth is not the objective. Man is the objective." As if you can choose between the two.

I quickly found a more articulate version of Santorum's critique. The author seems to have a problem with the notion of nature as an "end unto itself" that can't be used simply as a means to someone else's objectives. Somewhere between this sophistry and Santorum's demagoguery, the idea arises that if you regard nature as an end unto itself, you elevate it to divine status -- to serve the Earth is implicitly to worship it. That may well be the belief of some actual pagans, but most environmentalists strike me as having more mundane concerns. I doubt whether they recognize the stark choice Santorum wants to force between stewardship and servitude. It's more likely that they recognize no contradiction between the interests of the planet and those of mankind. At the very least, the planet and its inhabitants have a common interest in survival. For the forseeable future, the survival of man depends on the survival of the planet. That's why most environmentalists I encounter invoke the concept of sustainability. They oppose ecologically questionable projects not because those insult their deity, but because they put humanity's long-term survival into question. To my knowledge, many Christian environmentalists feel the same way, and a similar opposition to similar projects falls comfortably within their definition of "stewardship." But Santorum seems to think that stewardship would never or should never require us to refuse a proposal for technological progress on ecological grounds. As he stated quite clearly today, man's needs -- which might mean our collective need for energy or some people's need for jobs or profits -- come before any concern for environmental well-being, such concerns being suspect on the assumption that you would sacrifice people, even if not with a knife on an altar, to the planet. But the idea that concern for the planet's survival is equivalent to worshipping it is itself equivalent to the widespread monotheist notion that any portrait of a living thing is meant as an object of idolatrous worship. The suspicion of false "worship" is often simply an advanced if not decadent form of superstition and has no place in political discourse. Of course, Santorum could be simply and cynically demagoging a job issue, telling people that Democrats are preventing job creation for superstitiously sinister reasons -- but he strikes me as too much of a true believer for me to give him any credit for lying about this.

Idiot of the Week: Amine el-Khalifi?

2012-02-17T18:22:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post makes the case better than I can:

Amine el-Khalifi, 29, was picked up while carrying an inoperable MAC-10 automatic weapon and a fake suicide vest provided to him by undercover FBI agents posing as al-Qaeda associates, U.S. officials said....Khalifi, “who is illegally present in the United States, was charged today by criminal complaint with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction against property that is owned and used by the United States,” the Justice Department said later in a news release.

* * *

U.S. Attorney Neil H. MacBride said the complaint alleges that Khalifi “sought to blow himself up in the U.S. Capitol Building.” He said Khalifi “allegedly believed he was working with al-Qaeda and devised the plot, the targets and the methods on his own.”

I guess what I don't understand about this entrapment business is why you have to humor the poor mark to the point of allowing him for some few glorious moments to believe he's on the short track to martyrdom. The way these things work, you'd think someone was filming him so they could put the footage on some comedy reality show. Otherwise, what's the point? -- or is letting him make an idiot of himself part of our psychological war on terror?

My advice to future idiot wannabe-terrorists is this: if some nice man gives you a suicide vest for an attack on an American target -- test it first!

Gender and Disposition gaps inside the GOP

2012-02-17T14:52:00.000-05:00

Ladies love Mitt Romney -- or do other Republicans simply scare them? Rick Santorum has replaced Newt Gingrich for the moment as the primary obstacle to Romney's presidential nomination, but the change hasn't really altered the gender dynamics of the Republican campaign observed while Gingrich was surging. Romney still leads his nearest rival by a big margin among GOP women? Are those women really so much less conservative than their male counterparts? One analysis suggests that, as with Romney vs. Gingrich, personality matters. Santorum looks like a buttoned-down guy compared to the blustery Gingrich, but his rhetoric apparently still strikes many Republican women as overly confrontational and belligerent. As Jennifer Rubin writes, " women may see his confidence as strutting and his determination as rigidity." Romney seems less aggressive and less threatening; female Republicans supposedly find his manner calm and comforting. But if this gender gap decides who gets the nomination, can the Republicans really be the "daddy" party they're often thought to be?

Meanwhile, while working my way through some back issues I was referred to a piece written for the American Enterprise Institute last summer by Henry Olsen that seems relevant right now. In weighing the prospects for a dark-horse candidate, Olsen observed that two distinct forms of conservatism coexist within the GOP. "Dispositional conservatives" are the party's pre-1980 base; they are conservative in the most basic sense of the word in their opposition to change for its own sake and their mistrust of any sort of radicalism. As Olsen elaborates:

This type of conservative was cautious and suspicious of change-- someone who trusted the collected wisdom of institutions and the past over the novelties of individual reasoning and innovative philosophies. It was in this sense that British and Scandinavian parties of the right labeled themselves "Conservative"; it was to overcome this definition that Canada's Conservatives changed their name in the 1940s to the oxymoronic Progressive Conservative Party. In America, this sentiment was well expressed in Russell Kirk's 1953 magnum opus, The Conservative Mind. It may be neatly summed up in the conservative adage that when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.

Beginning with the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964, if not with the anti-communist surge starting in 1946, "dispositional conservatives" have had to maintain uneasy relations with "ideological conservatives," the people I label "entrepreneurial Republicans." Olsen describes them thusly:

Ideological conservatives are not, by virtue of disposition, necessarily averse to change. On the contrary: In the mold of Reagan, they are forward-looking. They embrace changes and reforms that advance conservative principles, such as the primacy of freedom and the morality of free markets, the protection of traditional moral structures and practices, and the unapologetic use of American power overseas. Under Reagan, conservatism became associated in the public eye with action, experimentation, and change. Its evolving character was best expressed in a line from Reagan's Republican convention acceptance speech in 1980, quoting Thomas Paine: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

Olsen doesn't take the American Conservative view that "ideological conservative" is an oxymoron. But it's unclear from the above paragraph whether "the primacy of freedom" or "the morality of free markets" are means or ends for this group. If there is an irrepressible conflict between dispositionals and ideologues, it may be exactly over the hierarchy of means and ends. Some of the dispositional conservatives have recognized the contradiction of a conservative embrace of free-market "creative destruction" and have denounced some of the ideologues as "radicals," particularly in the realm of foreign policy. Ronald Reagan himself reportedly expressed the tension between dispositionals and ideologues when he said that "human nature resists change and goes over backward to resist radical change." Olsen's argument is that relative moderates usually win out over ideologues in Republican primaries because enough dispositionals remain in the party to resist any perceived radicalism. In his view that's a good thing, since when ideologues manage to head the ticket, the other side usually has success portraying them to the electorate at large as dangerous radicals. Writing last Summer, when Gov. Perry was poised to enter the race and was feared as an instant front-runner, Olsen was clearly rooting for a "dispositional" candidate to win the nomination just so Democrats would not use the "radical" card against them.

Have the dispositionals and ideologues rallied behind Romney and Santorum respectively? It doesn't seem likely. As the arch-capitalist in the race, Romney ought to be the favorite of the ideologues if we understand them to be concerned primarily with "the morality of free markets." Yet Santorum seems to be the favorite of ideologues, at least outside the South where Gingrich may still have strength. The bailout issue has arguably confused matters for free-market ideologues, but Santorum has gotten his second wind just as the "culture war" has allegedly flared up again over contraception coverage for Catholic-hospital employees. When culture becomes the primary issue, the dispositionals, to the extent that they stand by definition for traditional values, may favor Santorum while the free-market faithful follow Romney -- thought the fanatics may prefer Ron Paul. But that would go against Olsen's notion that the dispositionals are a moderating influence within the GOP due to their distrust of radicalism. The problem may be with the dispositional category itself. We can all agree to a certain extent on the definition of a philosophical conservative as a matter of temperament, but philosophical conservatism is really no more than philosophical caution. Once that caution is acknowledged, any avowal of conservatism still begs the question, "conservative of what?" But Olsen's definition of "dispositional conservatism" is practically value-neutral, reducing an entire worldview or assortment of worldviews to simple resistance to change. It doesn't really tell us anything meaningful about these Republicans if it doesn't tell us what they're for -- what they actually want to conserve. If the category only becomes relevant, is only activated when another Republican is perceived as a "radical" threat, it probably isn't useful even to that minimal extent. I'm not disputing that distrust of radicalism is a real element in Republicanism, but there's probably more opportunistic flexibility to the concept -- more chance that one of many factions can slap the "radical" label on another faction, but later be labeled radical itself -- than Olsen's framework allows for. Some people may be temperamentally averse to extremism in any form, but in most cases radicalism is probably defined in the eye of the beholder on a subjective, selective basis, depending on the kind of change you fear. What we know is that many Republicans consider Romney not radical enough, while some consider Santorum (not to mention Paul) too radical. Whether that's anything more than a matter of rhetoric in either case remains to be seen.

Fear of the future: reactions left and right

2012-02-16T17:03:00.001-05:00

Writing for the Albany Times Union, Karl Felsen considers the similarities between the Tea Party and Occupy movements. Both, in Felsen's opinion, are reactionary phenomena. The Occupiers see themselves, in his description, as "the future victims of our modern economy." They long for the safeguards of the 20th century regulatory state, most of which, Felsen writes, are gone for good in the age of globalization. By comparison, the Tea Partiers suffer from a sense of cultural loss. While Occupiers seem to fear for their standing as individuals in the future economy, TPs no longer recognize the society and culture around them as the one they knew or expected. As with the economy, however, Felsen writes that the culture has changed irreversibly. In their impotence against change, each group scapegoats an imagined oppressor, the "1%" for the Occupiers and the "government" or cultural elite for TPs. Felsen's moral is that each group dwells too much on the perceived injustices of the recent past to act as guides to the future. Because their grievances are selective, both groups miss "the important contributions and messages of true conservatives (smaller government, free enterprise, open markets, and protection of individual freedoms and liberties) and true liberals (regulated capitalism, a living wage, universal health care, progressive taxation, and protection of civil freedoms and liberties)." Each presumably falls back on its preferred ideology as if it could protect them against inevitable further change. They are, perhaps hopelessly, concerned more with "where we have been" than with "where we are going."

Neither group may recognize itself in Felsen's joint portrait. Occupiers certainly think of themselves as "progressive," while Tea Parties certainly believe they could make great progress, economically at least, if unconstrained by regulatory government or a Washington-Wall Street axis. But I suspect that Felsen is at least partially right in recognizing fear of the future at the heart of both movements -- and at the heart of each the fear is probably more similar than Felsen himself acknowledges. Tea Partiers may idealize the past in a way that Occupiers can't or won't, but very probably any individual TP is worried about whether there'll be a place for him in the future, just like the average Occupier. The important difference between the two movements remains that the Tea Parties want individuals to be allowed to find or make their own places, while the Occupiers are probably more concerned with making sure there's a place for everyone, and less concerned with whether "one size fits all" solutions cramp anybody's style. Nevertheless, people in both groups feel that someone is denying them a place in the future, not to mention a place in defining the future. If Felsen is right, then both groups resent that in the recent past leading up to the present, the "future" (that is, the way we live now) was determined without their consent. Whether either group has real cause for complaint depends on how much influence you think democratic will can or should have over history. But each group is driven by a sense of powerlessness in the face of some elite which each characterizes according to its particular fears or hatreds -- as greedy corporations or power-mad politicians. Neither group might fear the future, or change in general, if everyone had more say in shaping the future. Maybe some people wouldn't be so reactionary about everything if they felt empowered to participate in progress, or wouldn't seek refuge in an idealized past if they could actually contribute to the future rather than having it dictated to them. Agree with them or not, many Americans across the ideological spectrum feel that the future is being dictated by elites. If they could ever agree on enmity with a common elite, or trust each other to make the future together, years of protesting might actually amount to something.

Laying Down the Sword -- or the Book

2012-02-15T19:00:00.001-05:00

Philip Jenkins is a historian of and to some extent an apologist for Christianity who has written a bracing critique of his faith's violent heritage. Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can't Ignore the Bible's Violent Verses is aimed at those complacent monotheists who argue that Islam is a uniquely violent religion, and the Qur'an a uniquely violent scripture. Jenkins's response to such assumptions is to warn readers against denouncing the Muslim mote while ignoring the beam in their eyes. To that purpose he spends much of his book contemplating the bloodiest books of the Old Testament -- Deuteronomy and Joshua -- summarizing what is known or believed about their origins and how they fit into evolving perceptions of both Judaism and Christianity. In Jenkins's account, these two books alone are as atrocious as anything or everything deplorable in Islamic scripture. He notes, however, that most Christians probably don't realize what's happening in these books, even though throughout Christian history, including American history, believers have justified massacres and wars of conquest or extermination by drawing analogies with Moses and Joshua's dealings with Amalek and other doomed nations. This book is most eye-opening in its detailing of how many Jews have used Amalek as an equivalent for the forces of Satan in Christian propaganda, so that any enemy -- Nazis, Muslims, Reform or secular Jews -- can be identified with Amalek and theoretically placed under God's extermination order. If anything, Jenkins may overemphasize the relevance of Old Testament violence for Christian extremism. My impression is that most such extremists, today at least, are incited more by what they expect to happen, thanks to the Book of Revelation, than by what they believe happened thousands of years ago. In any event, Jenkins finds extremist readings of violent verses to be exceptional among both Jews and Christians, the majority of both faiths having forgotten both the violence and the alleged imperative to violence. He finds this a mixed blessing, good insofar as he sees no mass constituency for religious violence among those faiths but bad insofar as it makes them unjustifiably judgmental regarding Islam. Ultimately he would prefer that believers not forget the violence of their faiths, nor censor it, but confront it by acknowledging that Joshua, for instance, must mean something different for a 21st century reader -- is presumably intended to mean something different by God -- than it did for its original audience. The urgency of such teaching seems questionable to an atheist, but as I acknowledge that eliminating religion won't eliminate violence, I suppose we should encourage believers who try to discourage others from feeling authorized to kill or make war by scripture. Jenkins himself closes with the sensible observation that religion is rarely a sufficient cause for "religiously-motivated" violence, but I wish he had made the point more forcefully more often in the book, particularly when discussing Islam -- if only to remind readers that, justly or not, most if not all Islamist terrorists believe themselves to be waging a defensive jihad and not the war of aggression Islamophobes claim to perceive. If we get to the bottom of why religious people feel threatened or besieged, we may get closer to suppressing the violent tendencies of all religions than we will by studying how to spin scripture toward peace.

Symbolic sacrifice in Greek

2012-02-15T16:49:00.000-05:00

A quick observation: the President of Greece has announced that he is forfeiting his salary as a "symbolic gesture" of shared suffering as his country bows to the austerity demands of the European Union. Before this gesture impresses anyone, however, we should ask how much the president will actually share the suffering of many fellow Greeks. If the idea is to walk in their shoes, Mr. Papoulias might want to forfeit his savings instead. Again, I don't know how much money he has in the bank, or how much, being Greek money, it's actually worth. But I suspect that many of the Greeks who'll be hit hardest by austerity live from paycheck to paycheck, and that the president's empathy would be more authentic if he did so as well. While he's an old man, he reportedly fought Nazis as a youth in the resistance -- explaining his pique at taking fiscal dictation from Germans among others -- so frugal living shouldn't seem so tough to him. And if I seem hard on him, I should also at least credit him with the minimum of the gesture. There are some whose sacrifices might actually benefit their fellow citizens, but none are forthcoming that I know of from those quarters.

The Social Gospel debate renewed

2012-02-15T15:05:00.003-05:00

For more than a century, American Christians have debated the viability of a so-called "social gospel." The division over this concept arguably anticipates the eventual left-right division of the body politic in general. As Cal Thomas explains in a recent column, the social gospel is "largely a creation of 20^th-century Protestants who believed in applying “Christian principles” to rectify society’s problems." Specifically, social gospelers believe that Christians have an imperative duty to improve the material as well as the spiritual condition of the poor. The most radical among them argue that material aid is a prerequisite for spiritual redemption. Opponents of the social gospel insist on the priority of spiritual salvation. Thomas summarizes their critique:

Deeds quickly supplanted faith, evolving into a “works salvation” theology, which says if you do enough good works, God will be pleased and let you into Heaven when you die. This contradicts biblical teaching that it is by faith and not works that one is saved from judgment (Ephesians 2:8-9). Some verses teach works as an extension of faith, revealing its depth and seriousness, but they equally teach that works without faith in Jesus is not enough. This is traditional Christian theology.

Thomas finds this newly relevant following the President's talk at the last National Prayer Breakfast. He believes that Obama misinterpreted Luke 12:48 -- "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much more will be asked." In Thomas's reading, or that of his pastor, it is God only who will make these demands, not "the people" or the state. To a certain extent, God may be presumed to demand the same thing the state or the people might, that the needy be taken care of. On how they're taken care of, God and man, or church and state, may differ. Thomas believes they should.

True charity has a purpose beyond the satisfaction of physical needs. Its objective is to change hearts so that whatever is making someone poor will help them become less so. Meeting physical needs is the primary work of the church and individuals, not government, which changes no heart and does a poor job of making people self-sustaining. Government should be a last resort, not a first resource.

It may be true that Jesus never recommended dependence upon the state, but it may also be true that he disparaged the very idea of individual independence that underlies adversarial relations with the state. In his mind, probably, everyone was equally dependent upon God and thus equally responsible for fulfilling any divine mandate for justice. Apart from believing in spiritual salvation on the individual level, Jesus most likely did not espouse an "every man for himself" social philosophy. While some believers may say that he performed miracles only to demonstrate his power and prove his divinity, it could be argued that there'd be no point to his feeding the hungry or healing the sick if only the afterlife mattered to him. My own position on poverty and social responsibility has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus, but it's important to remember that the "Christian right" doesn't speak for all Christians on social issues, and that the laissez-faire individualism endorsed by the American Christian right except on sexual matters is not the default Christian position. Cal Thomas presumes that, as a spokesman for a certain kind of Christian tradition, he knows what Jesus meant better than millions of other Christians. The fact that people can't agree on his meaning after 2,000 years probably reflects poorly on Jesus, but if some people understand him to demand a more humane and equitable society, who is anyone to correct them?

Santorum on Intolerance

2012-02-14T15:06:00.002-05:00

The new Republican front-runner, according to some polls, confronted hecklers identified with the Occupy movement in Tacoma WA yesterday. Three people were arrested, two for disrupting Santorum's speech, one for trying to glitter-bomb him. For the Pennsylvanian, this was just a small demonstration of the movement's radical intolerance. The Occupiers, not the religious right or any right, represent "true intolerance" in the former Senator's opinion. Here's why:

What they said was that anybody who disagreed with them [on the subject of same-sex marriage] were irrational and the only reason they could possibly agree [sic?] is they were a hater or a bigot. Now I gotta tell you, I don't agree with these people but I respect their opportunity to be able to have a different point of view and I don't think they're a hater or a bigot because they disagree with me.

Santorum seems to be constructing a sort of syllogism: if you're not a hater for disagreeing with me, then I can't be a hater for disagreeing with you. But I wonder whether Santorum's disagreements are as disinterested as he asserts. I do know that he represents a movement that presumes, as a general rule, that its opponents hate religion, Christianity in particular, and hate their own country, or at leas the ideas that define it. I haven't the time right at the moment, but this would be a good time for somebody to research whether, and if so how often, Santorum has accused his opponents of hate. Some might say he did it right there in Tacoma by calling them intolerant, but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. My hunch is that there's probably more damning evidence out there, but it all depends on how you define hate. My own definition extends to attempting to sanction homophobia, even if you hide behind rationalizations "for the sake of the children." I'm sure they hate it when I say that, but we'll just have to tolerate that.

Is bribery political speech?

2012-02-13T12:41:00.003-05:00

In his latest column, arch-conservative George Will comes to the defense of a Democratic politician. The former governor of Alabama, Don Siegelman, is appealing his conviction for having taken a bribe from a health-care businessman (who was also convicted). As Will explains, the businessman contributed money to the governor's campaign for a state lottery, which failed in a referendum. Siegelman then renewed the businessman's appointment to a state health board. In what was seen widely at the time as a partisan persecution instigated by the Bush Administration, prosecutors convinced a jury that the businessman's donation to the lottery referendum fund constituted a bribe, in return for which he was rewarded with the reappointment. Siegelman has been freed on appeal and wants the conviction overturned because the law in question violates due process by failing to "give due notice of proscribed behavior." At issue is what can be said legally to constitute a bribe in an era when, in Will's words, "seeking [political contributions] is not optional for a politician in America's privately-funded democracy." Since contributions themselves have been recognized as a First Amendment-protected form of political speech since the 1970s, it is argued that a contribution in itself can't be seen as a bribe. The fact that the businessman benefited by being reappointed to that board should not be considered damning, Siegelman contends, because (again in Will's words) "elected officials must undertake official acts [and] some will be pleasing or otherwise beneficial to contributors." By the loosest possible standard, any policy that can be seen as benefiting a contributor could be seen as proof of bribery. Siegelman (and Will) argue for the strictest possible standard, one that has been promulgated in a circuit court by the present Justice Sotomayor of the Supreme Court, that would require proof of an explicit quid-pro-quo arrangement, i.e. a recorded agreement by which a politician agrees to do something in return for (and implicitly only in return for) a campaign contribution. It seems very unlikely that anyone will ever be convicted of bribery should that standard prevail; politicians may often seem stupid when making speeches or "debating," but practically speaking they can't be that dumb.

The case against recognizing political contributions as speech shouldn't really be about the suspicion of bribery. It remains for historians to demonstrate whether the country's rightward turn since the 1960s resulted from a particular infusion of money into politics, and even if that can be proven the "bribery" will have taken place at a macro level at which individual politicians might not be blamed and voters could be just as guilty. Bribery is a tough charge to sell because many of us still think of it as an enticement with money to do something you otherwise wouldn't. We're more likely to believe in bribery if we see money changing minds. Instead, money flows to candidates who already espouse the beliefs and endorse the desires of the contributors. If money has corrupted the political process, the damage is most likely done at the stage which determines whom the rest of us can vote for, and not after an election. The real case against unrestricted contributions is based on the harmful effect of wealth "occupying" the public sphere, so to speak, to the exclusion of disadvantaged voices. As for Alabama, the simple solution to Siegelman's trouble would have been to pass a law excluding campaign contributors from holding appointed offices. On the federal level, this would end the time-honored practice -- still honored by President Obama -- of rewarding big contributors with prestigious diplomatic posts, but who'd mourn the passing of that tradition? Of course, such a regulation would require complete disclosure of contributions -- something Republicans in particular wish to avoid out of an avowed fear that contributors may suffer reprisals for taking political stands. The real heart of the trouble is the admission that soliciting contributions is "not optional." That's virtually an admission that the process itself is corrupt, but a publicly-funded democracy probably isn't a reliable alternative so long as partisanship prevails. You may not agree, but we should agree on a need to discover the roots of this dependency on contributions and to get at the root of it in a literally radical way.

Santorum: Mr. Excitement!

2012-02-10T19:24:00.003-05:00

"We always talk about how are we gonna get the moderates," Rick Santorum told C-PAC today. In his view, you draw moderates with extremism. Here's how it works: "Why would an undecided voter vote for the candidate that the party's not excited about? We need conservatives to rally for a conservative, to pull with that excitement moderate voters, and to defeat Barack Obama in the fall."

Santorum's theory is that moderates respond to "excitement." This supports his premise that he is the most exciting Republican candidate. He supports the theory by citing the 2010 midterms. In his account, the GOP reclaimed the House because the Tea Party movement excited moderates. It's my impression, however, that turnout in 2010 was down dramatically from 2008, and it was the moderates, or swing voters, who stayed home. In any event, Santorum seems to misunderstand moderates. Almost by definition, a moderate isn't swayed by excitement. If anything, ideological excitement of the kind Santorum peddles is likely to "excite" swing voters into voting Democratic. Mitt Romney remains the most viable challenger to Obama because he's the Republican most likely to be perceived as "safe," rather than exciting, should swing voters prove dissatisfied with the incumbent.

At least Santorum has an awareness of a need to reach out to voters who don't necessarily think already as he does. Too many right-wingers talk as if there is a secret majority of pious entrepreneurial reactionaries out there who, like Santorum's moderates, will respond only to the "excitement" of hard-core ideology and rage against liberals. That's the reasoning that blames Senator McCain for his loss to Obama four years ago; he was insufficiently rabid to excite the secret majority who otherwise would surely have rejected the Democrat. That's also the reasoning behind the otherwise inexplicable sentiment that Romney is the weakest possible challenger to Obama. Santorum would no doubt agree with that premise, but not, apparently, because he believes in the secret majority. A Republican victory still depends on right-wing excitement in his scenario, but the excitement itself, if not the ideas that fuel it, will "pull" moderates who'll presumably conclude that pious entrepreneurial reaction is the next cool thing, like a viral video of someone riding a bike off a roof. The Republican base thus becomes the vanguard of excitement, like hucksters handing out free samples at a street fair -- though Santorum himself might concede that excitement in excess may not be a good thing. Otherwise, why not nominate Gingrich? Indeed, the argument for excitement threatens to rule out Santorum himself when you consider his appearance, his manner of speaking, and his past record of exciting voters in his home state when he enjoyed the advantage of incumbency. It may be, too, that the Pennsylvanian misunderstands his own constituents as well as moderates. They are reactionaries, after all, and most likely to be excited into anger rather than enthusiasm. On some level, I suspect that they'd rather rage at Romney or Obama; that way they can still use politicians as scapegoats for their personal failures in business. The idea that some force or simply someone else is to blame for their troubles is what excites them the most. Santorum won't get far by promising to take that away.

The 'pro-life' movement speaks -- against life

2012-02-10T13:58:00.002-05:00

This report from C-PAC just about sums it up:

The battle between Fox News and MSNBC found its way to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, when conservative columnist and Fox News contributor Cal Thomas had this to say about MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: “I think she’s the best argument in favor of her parents using contraception.”

Thomas extended his goodwill to the entire "crowd" at MSNBC -- meaning only the on-air personalities or the behind-the-cameras staff as well? Looking on the bright side, at least he appears to accept the premise of contraception.

Actually, Thomas's position is less inconsistent with his record than one might suspect. Just this morning, I was reading his latest warmongering column on Iran -- so there's another few million people for whom he wishes death if not retroactive nonexistence. Apart from the short-lived "seamless garment" movement of a generation ago which yoked opposition to abortion with opposition to the death penalty, the "pro-life" movement is little different from most radical movements. Instead of sanctifying life, it sets conditions: life on our terms, or death! And now you see that that's not just a notion of mine about them.

Of course, a Thomas apologist appeared almost immediately on the Politico comments page with the usual get-out-of-trouble card. " Mr Thomas was clearly joking and Maddcow [sick]is too sensitive to be the butt of the joke. Liberals are absolutely pathetic and hypocritical!!! I too wish her parents had used contraception!" wrote one "Luis Vasquez." Well, duh. In this case the point is indisputable; Thomas said what he said to get laughs from the C-PAC crowd. But let Mr. Vasquez imagine his response had Maddow said that Thomas, or Vasquez, should never have been born. Would that not seem like more left-wing hatred? After all, lefties have no sense of humor so she must have meant it sincerely, no? Republicans have no business criticizing anyone else's sensitivity, as they have the biggest collective persecution complex on the planet. I don't object to anyone defending any damning remark from a Republican as a joke. In fact, I'm happy to concede that most of their utterances are jokes, intentionally or not. But jokes are revealing, and for someone ostensibly dedicated to the "culture of life," what Thomas revealed wasn't pretty.

Idiot of the Week: the Second Santorum Surge continues

2012-02-09T16:47:00.001-05:00

Without claiming to be an expert on the pros and cons of hydrofracking, I feel entitled to denounce Rick Santorum's Oklahoma City rant in defense of the controversial natural-gas extraction procedure because of the prizeworthy idiotic attitude he expresses toward any questioning of it. For the returning conservative-alternative-to-Romney of the week, any doubts about hydrofracking are not merely uninformed hysteria but a conscious strategy of guilt-tripping waged by control-freak liberals.

“[T]he left is always looking for a way to control you," Santorum said, "They’re always trying to make you feel guilty so you’ll give them power so they can lord it over you. They do it on the environment all the time.” Warnings against pollution and risks to public health are nothing less than a "reign of environmental terror," apparently motivated by nothing more than a lust to dominate. Contesting the common characterization of the GOP as the "anti-science party," the former Senator from Pennsylvania dubbed his "the truth party," contrasting it favorably to those environmental terrorists on the other side who "distort the truth in order to get you to give them authority."

Here is a Republican truth claim:

And they’re preying on the Northeast, saying, ‘Look what’s going to happen. Ooh, all this bad stuff’s going to happen, we don’t know all these chemicals and all this stuff.’ Let me tell you what’s going to happen: Nothing’s going to happen, except they will use this to raise money for the radical environmental groups so they can go out and continue to try to purvey their reign of environmental terror on the United States of America.

Never mind the assertions that something has already happened where hydrofracking was done. Rick Santorum says nothing will happen. I'm willing to entertain the argument that some environmentalists are excessive in their risk-aversion, but the argument that they have no cause for apprehension apart from a craving for power over other people is nothing but an insult. But having said that, Santorum may not have said anything wrong. He may simply have expressed himself incompletely. He may be perfectly convinced that "nothing's going to happen," as long as we understand that to mean nothing's going to happen that matters to him. If this year's elections are a choice between people who want to "control" us and people who don't give a damn about us, then at least we'll have a clearer choice than we usually have.

What is 'Living in Truth?'

2012-02-08T19:37:00.002-05:00

Paul Berman just published an interesting essay on Vaclav Havel in The New Republic, though you'll have to take my word for it since the article is available online to subscribers only. The late Czech author and politician is one of the great heroes of the Fall of the Soviet Empire and a role model for resistance to repressive regimes. Havel practiced what he called "living in truth," which meant, in Berman's terms, "simply to stop pretending to believe" in the lies that sustain a regime's legitimacy. He had an odd notion that rock music spoke a form of truth and defended it against censorship on the assumption, writes Berman, that "truth-speaking on any topic whatsoever was sooner or later going to lead to truth-speaking on political themes." I'm not sure about this -- it sounds like the so-far refuted rationalization that free markets must lead to free societies. More interesting and provocative than this was Havel's claim, as described by Berman, that "Truth-telling ... required a belief in something that seemed to you preferable to material things -- a more that was better than a car, therefore something for which you might willingly sacrifice your chance of getting a car." Havel and Berman's implication is that materialism reduces people to a sort of selfishness because it leaves them without any idea or ideal worth sacrificing for. Since Communists were reputedly the arch-materialists of history, "living in truth" in opposition to a Communist regime seemed to require affirming some transcendent value, though not necessarily a faith in God. As Berman emphasizes, "Your own personal dignity was something to consider. But you needed to be able to explain, at least to yourself, what was so great about your own dignity." This was important because dignity became more valuable than life itself, potentially at least, for any dissident against a Bolshevik regime. Havel was imprisoned frequently and sometimes denied medical care for refusing to kowtow; his "living in truth" had a price he was apparently prepared to pay, but it isn't clear from Berman's account whether Havel was conventionally religious. He sometimes spoke of inventing a new, syncretic religion as a necessity to compensate for the inescapable limitations of rationality, on an assumption that no one who claimed to be rational (i.e. Bolsheviks) really was. the idea implies that Havel thought belief in transcendence useful rather than believing in it "religiously" himself. What is it useful for? To facilitate sacrifice, apparently. Berman writes: "If you think there is something more, a Being or transcendental something-or-other that goes beyond your own material existence, your own life is bound to end up seeming, by way of comparison, humbler, therefore easier to put at risk." In Berman's account, Havel's "own continued place on earth was not his highest goal." The question for us is twofold. Can we formulate a concept of transcendence that isn't supernatural yet has the same motivating effect Havel apparently desired? Second, is materialism as hopelessly selfish and implicitly cowardly as Havel and Berman imply? From their own vantage, materialists exemplify "living in truth," but is it a truth that can set anyone free if it can't inspire people to risk their lives? I suspect that materialism here is being identified too closely with a certain complacency cultivated by "totalitarian" societies, and that materialism understood in a progressive context still has considerable motivational potential. After all, the one thing obviously greater than the individual man is humanity itself, while a commitment to the greatest good for the greatest number could oblige conscientious people to both risk and sacrifice for the proper cause. If you take Lenin and his awful legacy out of the equation, the real question may be whether Havel had any real cause for disagreement with materialists at all.

The Second Santorum Surge

2012-02-08T13:22:00.001-05:00

Rick Santorum's three victories over Mitt Romney last night may be mostly symbolic, but symbolism by definition has significance. What does Santorum's sweep signify? If anything, it may be the ultimate defeat of Newt Gingrich, but Gingrich doesn't agree with this reading. It's clear enough that Santorum, not Gingrich (nor Paul) was the anyone-but-Romney candidate in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, but that still won't necessarily be true elsewhere. Although Gingrich hopes for and predicts victory in Ohio, his appeal may be geographically limited to those Old South territories (not counting more cosmopolitan Florida) where his manner is least obnoxious and Santorum may be most suspect for being a yankee. On the other hand, Santorum may have convinced voters in the three states -- with an alleged boost from Rush Limbaugh -- that he is the truest or most consistent conservative, or at least the one with the least "baggage" of questionable votes. Romney disputes the last point. His strategy remains to portray both Santorum and Gingrich as compromised "insiders" by virtue of their time in Congress. In politics, who is "inside" and who is "outside" depends on the eye of the beholder. Romney can claim to be an outsider relative to Congress, though by most standards based on ordinary life he is an ultimate insider. Gingrich can claim outsider status despite his Speakership on the ground, regularly verified by his enemies, that he didn't get along with most of the insiders. Santorum doesn't seem as interested in playing the insider-outsider game -- or at least he's less interested in portraying himself as an outsider than in debunking Romney's claim to that status. He seems the least apologetic about his time in government and the least likely, apart from Paul, to play a populist card. Those are small virtues in the larger scheme of things, but some Republicans may appreciate a candidate who doesn't, at least on one point, insult their intelligence. Still, Santorum's stop-Romney campaign is hopeless so long as Gingrich remains in the race, and the former Speaker has shown no sign yet of deference either to the social-conservative elders who endorsed Santorum last month or to the GOP voters who've rejected Newt in all but one state so far. The social-conservative Tea Party movement, supposedly based on timeless principles, seems likely to fall apart over questions of personal style, while their rage against Romney still seems likely only to help the Man From Bain in the general election. It may be costly to continue fighting these primary and caucus battles, but so long as Romney believes that neither man can knock him out, he may find it in his long-term interest to prop them up and keep them swinging rather than floor them right away. The longer he can delay the day when he is portrayed as the right-wing extremist in the presidential race, the better for him. For that reason at least, I doubt that Romney's sweating today.

Squatters' Rights and Party Lines

2012-02-07T19:30:00.003-05:00

In Rensselaer County, New York, politicians are on trial for forging absentee ballots for a Working Families Party primary. What could the stakes have been, given the limited influence and lesser electoral prospects of the WFP? According to recent testimony, the defendants simply feared the influence of an expert political operator, onetime county legislator Bob Mirch. Known locally as "Three-Job Bob," Mirch's specialty was taking over independent parties that had small local enrollment. He would get stooges to register in sufficient numbers to win primaries and secure ballot lines for candidates presumably of Mirch's choosing. "He would try to get control of third-party lines. He had already taken over the Independence and Conservatives. He would register people in the Working Families Party," said one witness. Mirch's candidates were meant to make mischief, splitting "liberal" voting blocs to make life easier for Republicans or Conservatives. To thwart Mirch, the defendants allegedly forged ballots to keep the local WFP out of his control. Mirch can effectively squat and take over a party, or at least a party line, without having any sympathy for the party's principles or agenda. Something isn't right when the only way to stop that from happening is to break the law. Maybe it was the only option given the limited support for Working Families locally, in which case one wonders whether the WFP was worthy of the ballot line that Mirch presumably wanted to steal. Whatever the case, a curious situation exists when a party can be steered contrary to the founders' purposes simply by recruiting a faithless majority to swamp a primary. New York State supposedly has a remedy for that, allowing parties to de-register voters shown to have betrayed party principles, but the process is elaborate and no doubt costly. The problem may be that partisanship in this country is a matter of registration rather than membership, the only real members in the usual sense of the word being the committee members and other party administrators. A party could de-register someone, but parties can't stop anyone from registering in the first place. The situation gets worse from the perspective of party management when open primaries are the rule and people can vote without even bothering to register. But the only reason people like Mirch play their tricks is because party lines on a ballot are a kind of real estate. He wouldn't concern himself with the WFP, I presume, if they didn't have a guaranteed ballot line based on past performance. It makes you wonder what would happen if we could do without a physical ballot in the current sense. Mischief makers like Mirch might still try to split ideological voting blocs by promoting dummy candidates, but they'd probably have to start from scratch by creating dummy parties rather than possessing and corrupting parties originally dedicated to a particular cause or constituency. Part of the problem for independents under Bipolarchy, paradoxically enough, may be that being a partisan is simply too easy and too meaningless. Before reforming party politics, we may want to think about what it means to belong to a party in the first place.

Is this car ad political propaganda?

2012-02-06T16:33:00.001-05:00

Apparently some people think so, so I'm embedding it for educational purposes only without any implicit endorsement of the Chrysler Corporation.

What have we come to if some Republicans assume that a commercial narrated by arch-"fascist" and professed libertarian Clint Eastwood is some sort of subliminal endorsement of Barack Obama? The issue seems to be the implication of "halftime." The ad appeared during the halftime of the Super Bowl, and the metaphor of "halftime in America" would be just as relevant in any year. But because this is a presidential election year, some people apparently read "halftime" so that it can only mean the campaign between a first and second Obama term. Would people react the same way if Eastwood had appeared in a boxing ring and told us that it was Round Ten in America? Or have some people's consciousnesses become so completely politicized that they see propaganda everywhere? If so, think of this ad as a rohrschach blot. If it looks political to you, you may be paying a little too much attention to the news, or to the wrong kind of news.

The Syrian Question

2012-02-06T13:24:00.003-05:00

To my knowledge, nothing in the United Nations Charter obliges members to have a "republican" form of government, as is guaranteed to states in the United States Constitution. There probably could not have been a United Nations as we know it had such a requirement been insisted upon, just as there probably could not have been a U.S. as we know it had the abolition of slavery been insisted upon in 1787. While the UN is pledged theoretically to a certain range of "human rights," it is not meant to favor any form of government over another. Its object is not to set or impose a standard for national government, but to prevent nations, as far as possible, from making war on one another. An implicit principle of comity obliges national governments not to question each other's sovereignty. On this understanding, to the extent that the resolutions advanced by the Arab League and the United States are openly hostile to the current Syrian government and designed to promote its replacement, Russia and China were right to veto them, however contemptible the Assad regime may be and however contemptible the attitude of the two powers toward resistance to tyranny. Foreign policy cannot be based on contempt; that leads you in the direction of Iran and Israel. Nor should the self-evident tyranny of Assad and the Syrian Baathists blind objective observers to the selectivity of American and Arab outrage, which focuses on Syria chiefly because Assad is an ally of Iran. That selectivity doesn't make Syria unobjectionable, but it does compel us to question the motives of Assad's enemies as well as his friends in the international community. For Americans, it becomes imperative to question the proposal of Sen. Lieberman that the anti-Syrian nations simply go around the UN and continue their regime-change agenda. It's not necessary to question the proposal on the cynical ground that toppling Assad might encourage extremist Islamism. It really boils down to the Golden Rule. America's capitalist regime surely appears wicked from a number of perspectives, but Americans would not consider foreign powers entitled to intervene in American politics on the basis of moral outrage against capitalism or neo-colonialism. Any American who urged a foreign power to aid him in regime change would be deemed a traitor. If treason means anything the concept must be applicable everywhere; it can't be mitigated on the ground that the government betrayed is a tyranny in someone's eyes. That doesn't mean that Syrian rebels should be shot as traitors. I wouldn't shed a tear if they did away with Bashar al-Assad, one of the world's uncrowned and unworthy kings. But toppling Assad and the Baath party is up to the rebels alone unless a nation wants to "man up" and openly declare war on Syria while accepting all the consequences of the declaration. That would be a war of choice, and ideally it would be up to a nation's people to choose. But with the Democratic and Republican establishments apparently united in a desire for regime change, and with all the shortcuts to war available to a President no less enamored than his predecessor with his power to strike from afar, such a declaration, not to mention the necessary debate, is unlikely -- though the people may still have the power to force a discussion in the streets, and a third party may have the chance to amplify the people's opposition at a crucial time.

Newt Gingrich spoke to me in a dream

2012-02-05T17:08:00.001-05:00

Honestly! This is no political fable or joke at the former Speaker's expense. All I can say is that I dreamed last night that I had gone to the cafe across the street from my office because I had a hankering for dessert and I wanted some of their specialty ice cream -- except the place doesn't serve ice cream. In the dream they did, but they were out, so I had to settle for a pastry. I had just sat down when Gingrich came in from the rear entrance. This is not 100% implausible: the cafe's owner is the wife of the former mayor of Troy, New York, a Republican, so it might be the sort of place Gingrich (or any candidate) would go to meet local party leaders. Anyway, he goes up to the counter to place an order, then sits down at the table next to mine with a plateful of bacon. The bacon is stacked like it was pancakes. I can't turn down the opportunity to confront him, but I open with small talk, "How's the fight going, Mr. Gingrich?"

"Well, did you see the news?" he replies.

"I'm not sure which news you mean."

"They won't tell you the whole story."

"Okay, what's the whole story?"

The whole story is told with similar vagueness. The only detail I can recall is that Gingrich wanted it known that two cardinals "were there," wherever there was. I grew impatient to ask him some loaded questions, and I saw that Mr. Right was also in the place, so I would also have the chance to annoy him by humbling his idol. But I came down with a coughing fit, and by the time I drank some water to clear my throat, the coughing had woke me up. Having watched A Dangerous Method the other day, I wondered what Freud or Jung would make of this. I'm not sure what sexual symbolism Freud would find in either Newt Gingrich or a plate of bacon, not to mention my coughing fit, and while Jung would question whether there was any sexual context to it all, I'm even less sure of how he'd interpret these elements. All I know is that if I start dreaming about politicians, perhaps I'm paying too much attention to them. So of course the blog will continue as if nothing had happened, because I question whether dreams mean anything.

Romney: he must be doing something right...

2012-02-02T13:52:00.001-05:00

Whenever some rabidly rightist Republican complains about Mitt Romney being the weakest available challenger to President Obama, I try to tell him that their very own complaints will make Romney the strongest challenger. As I've tried to explain here, extremists' disdain will only make Romney seem safer to the "centrist" swing voters most likely to be dissatisfied with the incumbent. Irrepressible rightist contempt for the Man From Bain will also make it more difficult for Democrats to portray Romney as an extreme rightist. For example: no sooner had liberals had their innings on Romney's "gaffe" from yesterday, when he stated that he wasn't really concerned about the "very poor," then the reactionaries came to his rescue -- with knives drawn for Romney.

Recall that Romney had explained his unconcern in part by noting that the very poor had a safety net that he would consider fixing should he learn that it was inadequate to its purpose. It turns out that the same complacency about the safety net that makes Romney appear callous to liberals makes him appear, yet again, insufficiently conservative to the Republican ideological base. To Rush Limbaugh, Romney's comment proves him indifferent to "one of the biggest cultural problems we've got." Forgetting the distinction usually drawn between the "safety net" of temporary assistance and the alleged "hammock" of permanent dependence, Limbaugh protested that "the safety net is contributing to the destruction of [the very poor's] humanity and their futures." Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal complained that Romney should have concerned himself more with ending dependency than with ending poverty. The editors may complain about my paraphrase, but that's the implication of their critique.

To review: Romney offended kneejerk liberals and kneejerk rightists by affirming the viability of the current social safety net. Paradoxically, both sides are offended for virtually the same reason. Liberals would prefer that a candidate directly empower the "very poor" by giving them jobs rather than depending on the "middle class" to eventually hire them, while rightists would prefer that a candidate tell the very poor to get a job rather than sustaining or fortifying the safety net. Meanwhile, Romney's avowed emphasis on the "middle class" is rhetorically little different from what we have heard and will hear from the President on the subject. A swing voter is likely to review events and conclude that someone who manages to offend base voters at both extremes of the Bipolarchy may well be saying, if not doing, something right. But then again, Romney does like to fire people....

Death by sound bite

2012-02-01T12:08:00.002-05:00

Mitt Romney has done it again. Not just won a primary, that is, but uttered a sentence that will be used against him in the general election, if not sooner, despite its intended context. The last such moment was when he famously stated "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me"
while explaining how his preferred health insurance reforms would make it easier for people to switch providers. Today, fresh from his latest victory over an unconciliatory Newt Gingrich, Romney attempted to explain to a CNN reporter that his campaign was focused on the concerns of the middle class. He did this by saying, "I'm not concerned about the very poor -- we have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it." The remark as a whole may disturb people, depending on their assessment of the state of the "safety net." But reduced to the sound bite, "I'm not concerned about the very poor," it's likely to sound more disturbing. Again, the follow-up somewhat belies the implication of the excerpt, and some angry comments on the page I've linked to show that the usual suspects are already protesting the "liberal media's" unfair habit of taking remarks out of context to stir up class or party hatred. They point out that, in his emphasis on a broadly-defined middle class, Romney also said, "I'm not concerned about the very rich -- they're doing just fine." This is meant to refute the charge that the very rich are precisely the constituency Romney is most concerned with -- but a liberal could still object that the very rich and very poor should never be objects of equal unconcern. They can also contest Romney's core argument that the middle class has been "most badly hurt" by the recession and President Obama's alleged malpractice to reverse it. It may all boil down to how you define classes and your sensitivity to degrees of suffering.

The art of death-by-sound-bite is not exclusive to either major party. A cottage industry within the right-wing media is dedicated to out-of-context citations designed to damn both the President and his wife as resentful subversives hostile to essential American values. Since both sides employ the tactic, we can ask objectively whether it's fair or not. The answer may depend on whether you're willing to see a single sentence within a speech or interview as equivalent to the classic Freudian slip. As far as laymen are concerned, the Freudian slip is a meaningful malapropism, an unconscious substitution of one word for another through which someone says what he is presumed to really mean, rather than what he means to say. To the extent that any conventional subject-verb-object sentence is a coherent thought on its own terms, regardless of its surrounding context, every sentence may be liable to analysis in isolation from the context the speaker intends. On this assumption, when Romney says he likes to be able to fire people who provide services to him, it is further assumed that he means this beyond the immediate context of choosing health-care providers -- that he likes having the power to fire people and the actual act. Some may contend that his newest potential gaffe is even easier to parse -- that his disinterest in the condition of the "very poor" on the assumption (which he admits he hasn't verified) that the "safety net" is adequate for them is deplorable no matter what the context. It must seem self-evident to some observers that the very poor are the ones most in need of immediate attention in a recession. People are free to disagree with that viewpoint, but their disagreement is also subject to judgment. Romney's remarks inevitably will be judged subjectively. For some, the context of their own beliefs will make his words perfectly sensible and reasonable. For others, no context anyone might propose can possibly redeem them. It may be unfair to Romney in the end, but political rhetoric is a kind of art that he ought to study more carefully if he doesn't want to be misjudged so often. Modern rhetoric should be a matter of avoiding the sound bite that bites you, but that would mean admitting more complexity and subtlety of thought into political speeches, and I don't know if many politicians in any party are capable of that.

Update: Romney believes in clarification by reiteration, though his comments to in-flight reporters may have muddled matters further. He said: "The area that I think is the greatest challenge that the country faces right now is not to focus our effort on how we help the poor, as much as to focus our effort on how to help the middle class in America, and get more people in the middle class, and get people out of being poor and becoming middle income.” That is, the challenge is not to focus on helping the poor, but to get people out of being poor, which can only be done, Romney implies, by helping the middle class. Presumably, he means that helping the middle class will mean more jobs for the poor, who'll be hired by the middle class -- but you just might excuse someone for not getting that.

If only dismantling the two-party system were THAT easy!

2012-01-31T12:39:00.002-05:00

Bo Peabody is a venture capitalist and self-styled social-networking pioneer who blogs for the Huffington Post. He has decided that the two-party system is bad for the country. His research has shown him that Bipolarchy was not innately American -- though it failed to point out the existence of a kind of two-party system immediately following the Founding, since his summary of partisan history leaves out the Federalists. In any event, Peabody isn't the first to determine that Bipolarchy isn't doing the nation any favors. He reports that after the Civil War, "waged a war on the influence of the individual voter by instituting election processes and regulations -- the primary system, the winner-take-all philosophy of the Electoral College, and campaign finance regulation -- that build the power of the two-party system at the expense of the individual voter." Other factors like ballot-access rules could also be named, but the result is as Peabody describes: Bipolarchy has become a kind of monolith, a fetish or obstacle to progress, depending on one's perspective. Fortunately, Peabody has found a simple solution to the problem.

We need to re-shape the basic legislative environment to make all politicians more effective. A good start is dismantling the two-party system.
All it takes to accomplish this is one simple act that carries little risk and no expense: become an independent voter. Without the baggage of a party affiliation, you will be free to think independently. And without any members, the Democratic and Republican parties won't exist; and the two-party system will be dismantled.

Peabody has the naive notion that "the power of the two major parties is derived from their memberships." From that observation follows the assumption that merely by changing their registrations to "independent," voters can bring down the Bipolarchy. Yet I found it curious that Peabody, while urging people to become "independent voters," never explicitly recommends voting for independent candidates. Perhaps he takes this idea for granted, but voting for someone other than a Democrat or Republican is by far the more effective subversion of Bipolarchy than merely changing one's registration. Without the commitment to vote for someone else, an "independent" merely reserves the right to choose between what the two major parties offer -- and the process by which the major parties submit their offerings will not change meaningfully simply because of a decline in major-party registration. Consider the situation now. Are the majority of Republican primary voters really happy with their choices this winter? Did they actually have any voice in the selection they've been given? Do Democrats have any say at all on President Obama's renomination? My point is that it's hard to prove that the major parties will have less power if fewer people register with them when those rank-and-file partisans exert no power within the parties now except as consumers selecting from a pre-arranged menu of candidates. The parties' present power depends not on how many people register with them, but on how many people vote for them, and people vote for them for reasons of brand-recognition and risk-aversion that won't necessarily be affected by changing habits of registration. Becoming a truly independent voter isn't as easy, regrettably, as Peabody thinks; otherwise we wouldn't have had a Bipolarchy for more than 150 years. Entrenched power creates an illusion of exclusive expertise. It requires effort to overcome the suspicion that independent candidates are incapable of governing simply because they don't belong to a governing party. It is assumed that the parties themselves, and alone, know how to govern the country -- it may even be assumed that a party on the Democrat/Republican model and scale is itself necessary to govern the country. Changing registration alone won't change those assumptions. Peabody notes that 30% of the electorate today isn't registered as Democrat or Republican, yet independent parties don't get 30% of the vote. Party membership on the rank-and-file level is overrated, at least by Peabody. It isn't the key to but the consequence of Bipolarchy. In any event, registration has never bound anyone to vote for one party or the other, or to voting at all. When voters develop the courage to entrust power to people without major-party credentials, registration statistics will change accordingly. That change will be the result of revolution, not the cause.

Gingrich and the gender gap

2012-01-30T19:07:00.001-05:00

The gender gap dividing the Republican and Democratic parties is well known. Women simply don't go for the Republican party as much as men do. Even if a majority of women defined by race or religion favors Republicans, they do so in smaller numbers than their male counterparts. These facts are blamed on the GOP's perceived hostility to feminism and the patriarchal vibe it often gives off -- the sense that it is the "daddy party" opposed to the Democratic "nanny state." It might be presumed that Republican women would vote like Republican men, but the current presidential primary campaign reveals a gender gap reproducing itself within the party. Predictably enough, Newt Gingrich is the polarizing figure. Two polls have recently been cited, one showing Mitt Romney comfortably ahead of Gingrich among Florida men but way ahead among the state's Republican women, the other showing the two front-runners in a dead-heat among men but Romney once again way ahead with women. On a micro level, you see it among celebrity women. While Sarah Palin favors Gingrich, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin have joined the punditocracy attack on the former Speaker, Coulter on behalf of Romney, Malkin on behalf of Santorum. But that stat can be explained in the now-familiar way: as opinionators or think-tankers, Coulter and Malkin probably had to deal with Gingrich while he had power in Washington, while Palin observed his Speakership, if at all, from the isolation of Alaska. Palin is pushing Gingrich as the outsider, a notion at which Coulter and Malkin rightly scoff -- but do rank-and-file Republican women in Florida care whether Gingrich was or is an insider? The gender gap suggests that something else matters more. Since these women are probably not self-styled feminists, and Gingrich has not, to my knowledge, made a habit of disparaging career women, the simplest explanation is most likely a moral objection among traditionally conservative women to Newt's wanton ways as a husband. Compared to the pious Santorum and the bland Romney, Gingrich must look like a Clintonian demon of lust to the custodians of domesticity and the sanctity of the home. Palin, of course, yields to no one as a moralist, but insists that Gingrich be forgiven his trespasses in our hour of need for a fire-breathing outsider to purge Washington. It looks likely, however, that many women in Florida, and not a few men, are actually behaving consistently. If Bill Clinton's trustworthiness was suspect because of his affairs, so is Gingrich's for his ruined marriages. Gingrich might remind his audiences that, to this day, the only divorcee President in American history was Ronald Reagan, but that hero was elected in the pre-Clinton era, before the "politics of personal destruction," and with his divorce nearly thirty years in the past by 1980. That's not to say that divorce couldn't ruin a politician before Reagan; it may well have kept Nelson Rockefeller from becoming President, or even the Republican nominee, during the 1960s. But to the extent that Reagan's personal history troubled Republicans or swing voters, they overlooked it, either in their eagerness to be rid of Jimmy Carter or because Reagan projected some integrity that transcended his original failure as a spouse. Gingrich probably fancies himself Reagan's truest heir, but the fact that Reagan's divorce is but a footnote to his history, while Gingrich's marital troubles apparently remain a major obstacle to his advancement, should tell Gingrich and us that Reagan, like him or not, had something else going for him that Gingrich clearly doesn't.

Will Gingrich crack up the Tea Parties?

2012-01-30T12:14:00.001-05:00

In his latest Atlantic post Conor Friedersdorf claims to see signs on Sarah Palin's Facebook page of the fulfillment of a prophecy he made last year. He predicted that an embrace of Newt Gingrich would be the ruin of the Tea Party movement because it could not long endure his many contradictions or his polarizing personality. Since Palin endorsed Gingrich in South Carolina, albeit for that primary only and only to keep the "vetting" process open, many of her "friends" have protested her decision. A more recent post, in which the former governor attempts to turn the tables by accusing Romney supporters of attacking Gingrich from the left, seems to have been a breaking point for many more friends. Palin's argument was flimsy; the attack from the left seems to have consisted of no more than the "politics of personal destruction," which as I recall was a phrase coined by President Clinton to describe attacks on him from the right. She also takes umbrage at charges that Gingrich is un-conservative. In her eyes, and for good reason, Gingrich is the bridge from the Reagan era to the Tea Party era. There's a case to be made that the continuities Gingrich expresses outweigh those quirks of attitude that seem to disqualify him in many eyes from the conservative canon. But insofar as no one in the Romney, Paul or Santorum camps is claiming that Gingrich is "too" conservative, Palin has no basis for claiming that anyone in the dreaded "Republican establishment" is attacking Gingrich from the left.

Meanwhile, many in Palin's Facebook constituency balk at her embrace of an admittedly "imperfect" Gingrich. As might be expected, her "friends" are the sort for whom Gingrich's multiple marriages are damning -- they prove him a "serial adulterer." At the same time, not just in the Palin camp but in Florida as a whole, Gingrich's yearning for a moon colony seems to have revealed the "visionary" as something more like a crackpot. There's a long streak of reactionary contempt for such ambitions dating back at least to the mockery of John Quincy Adams for his advocacy of "lighthouses in the sky" in the 1820s. Gingrich's space vision, to the extent that it's actually admirable, probably damns him as a "progressive" with many reactionaries who can only see such a project as a folly or a boondoggle. For the most part, however, people simply aren't buying Palin's pitch of the former Speaker of the House of Representatives as an "outsider." Like my frequent correspondent Crhymethinc, they draw the reasonable conclusion that, once an insider, always an insider. That doesn't mean that there aren't multiple conflicting factions of insiders with sharply differing views, but it also doesn't mean that the minority of insiders gets to call themselves outsiders.

For people like Palin, the real problem with Mitt Romney seems to be that he doesn't strike fear into the right people. If he doesn't strike fear, they assume, then the establishment recognizes Romney as a "safe" candidate and the grass-roots should recognize him as an inadequate if not treacherous candidate. The fact that Gingrich does seem to scare many people is probably his strongest recommendation for reactionary populists like Palin who want "sudden and relentless reform in Washington to defend our republic." The fact that Romney seems to scare the likes of Palin, who continues to call for nonstop vetting until his weak point is found, will probably prove his strongest recommendation for moderate Republicans and swing voters outside the GOP. The Palins and Limbaughs continue to argue that Romney is the weakest-possible challenger against Obama, for reasons that remain mysterious outside the innermost gnosis of the elect, but they themselves through their protests most likely make him the strongest challenger. He may end up owing them the White House, without needing to show them any gratitude.

Gingrich vs. the Establishment

2012-01-26T15:46:00.000-05:00

The former Speaker of the House is in Florida today, running as an "outsider" to the chagrin of those who take for granted that, once an insider, one can never be an outsider again. The former governor of Massachusetts had wanted to run as "the outsider" on the premise that he had spent most of his life in the private sector, though it was quickly noted that he has spent nearly a generation now running for one office or another. Gingrich has been out of political power for more than thirteen years. He has been portrayed as a lobbyist since then, though he rejects the label, but depending on your audience merely being called a lobbyist begs the question of whom you lobby for. In any event, Gingrich seems to have grown some Teflon, since the "insider" charge has not stuck sufficiently so far to alienate his most ardent supporters. On the offensive, Gingrich portrays himself as a permanent outsider, implying that his short tenure as Speaker might be traced to his incompatibility with Washington insiders. His imperative for the moment is to tap into the original current of populism that energized the Tea Party movement. This means risking the wrath of orthodox Republicans and conservatives by reawakening TP anger at Wall Street as well as Washington, as long as Wall Street is identified exclusively with Mitt Romney and his supporters. Thus the candidate in Mount Dora today:

Remember: The Republican establishment is just as much as an establishment as the Democratic establishment, and they are just as determined to stop us. Make no bones about it. This is a campaign for the very nature of the Republican Party and the very opportunity for a citizen conservatism to defeat the power of money and to prove that people matter more than Wall Street and that people matter more than all the big companies that are pouring the cash in to run the ads that are false.

Based on the limited number of results for "citizen conservatism" from a Google search, Gingrich may well have coined a slogan or a movement name today. What will it mean, though, if Gingrich gets the nomination and has to run as the de facto Wall Street candidate? Will he jettison his typical critique of President Obama's socialism and adopt Ron Paul's critique of the incumbent's "corporatism?" Will he run against crony capitalism, or will capitalism be off limits once the demagogue has conquered the capitalist? All I know is that, leaving out that reference to the "very nature of the Republican Party," this could well have been a rallying call for a third party, and not necessarily one from the right. In this struggle between Goldilocks and the Baby Bear, bedfellows make for strange politics. And no, I don't know who's who; I just like the sound of it.

The Gingrich Immunity?

2012-01-26T14:03:00.000-05:00

So far, Newt Gingrich has survived numerous anathemas and excommunications from arbiters of conservatism to stand as the "social conservative" alternative to Mitt Romney. Gingrich has been accused of waging "class warfare" and betraying capitalism, yet he is still perceived as the favorite of the most reactionary elements of the Republican base electorate. As I've written recently, the Gingrich challenge throws into question what exactly conservatism means to the GOP base. Conor Friedersdorf, an Atlantic Monthly blogger, believes that Gingrich's appeal to the base transcends ideology. Friedersdorf is no fan of the former Speaker; his latest post rips Gingrich for asserting on a Spanish-language news program that Romney is anti-immigration. However, every new offense against presumed orthodoxy appears to confirm Gingrich's ability to get away with saying seemingly un-conservative things, at least in the South. Friedersdorf attributes this to Gingrich's "expert[ise] at signalling tribal identification with conservatives." Again, the writer really means southern conservatives, or so we must insist until Gingrich wins something elsewhere. How does Gingrich do this? Friedersdorf explains: "[W]hat people like about him is his ability to lash out at the mainstream media, the cultural elite, and President Obama." As Friedersdorf explained earlier: "Gingrich '12 is modeled after the successful tactics of movement conservatism's demagogues. Is there any candidate in memory whose persona so closely resembles an egomaniacal talk-radio host? The rank-and-file in South Carolina accept a would-be president behaving that way because they're used to their "thought leaders" talking like that." His conclusion is that Gingrich would be a triumph of demagogic style over conservative substance, but that judgment assumes a distinction between style and substance, or character and conduct, that Gingrich's supporters may reject. Whether Friedersdorf likes it or not, tribalism may be the essence of "conservatism" for many base Republicans. We needn't call it racism given the base's continued admiration for Herman Cain, but it is an ultimately intolerant idea of what makes a "real" American and has more to do with matters of style and "character" than with policies or philosophies. Gingrich may seem unorthodox to many Republicans, but that may not bother many other Republicans so long as they don't see his heterodoxy as subversive. As long as Gingrich is perceived as "one of us," he'll be cut slack on faith, while someone supposedly "other," whether Romney or Obama, would be suspected of trying to turn us into someone like him.

It arguably boils down to the distinction I like to draw between populists and progressives. The two tendencies may agree on many issues and share plenty of common enemies, but populism is always the utopianism of the here-and-now; its agenda is to perfect the world by the standards of today, while progressivism always seems implicitly to expect people to change, to adopt new standards, before utopia can be achieved. To the reactionary populist, progressivism threatens one's sense of self or self-worth in an intolerable way. Of course, Mitt Romney isn't a progressive, nor am I claiming that Gingrich supporters or Romney detractors see him that way. But he is seen as "other" by many people, either because of his religion or because of his inherited and accumulated wealth. He and Gingrich probably agree on more than they disagree on, but Gingrich will be able to get away with more in many quarters, even when he agrees with Romney. In other quarters, where Gingrich's southern heritage will work against him, the reverse may be true. Friedersdorf appears concerned about the rise of a nationwide tribalism of talk-radio listeners superimposed on the country's traditional geographic or demographic tribal divides. But it may well be tribalism that defeats Gingrich and even Romney in the long run -- not to mention the country. Until no American is seen as "other" and his suggestions as innately subversive, the danger is always there.

Thomas Frank's PITY THE BILLIONAIRE; or, What's the matter with liberals?

2012-01-25T14:57:00.002-05:00

For someone who once ran a magazine called The Baffler, Thomas Frank is good at affecting bafflement. His great theme since publishing What's the Matter With Kansas? has been his dismay at why working-class Americans don't vote according to what he considers their rational class interests. His approach infuriates Republicans and even discomfits some Democrats, since Frank seems, perhaps arrogantly, to tell voters what should matter to them, and why what seems to matter shouldn't. For some, he seems to peddle another version of the Marxist concept of "false consciousness," but everything he writes really follows from his discovery in The Conquest of Cool of capitalism's ability to co-opt any seemingly adversarial mindset so long as that mentality is capable of expression through buying things. Frank's lifework is an expose of how the Establishment, which for him is always the rich first, commodifies dissent and rallies it to the Establishment's defense. Pity the Billionaire is Frank's latest chapter, his attempt to explain why the 2008 economic crash resulted not in a populist crackdown on capitalism, as did the 1929 crash, but in yet another revival of the Republican party and an even more fanatical embrace of a free-enterprise ideology that should have been discredited for a generation.

Frank is determined to attribute the unlikely events of 2010 to people's attitudes about the economy. He rejects out of hand explanations that focus on the alleged bigotry of Tea Partiers. From his own encounters with TPs and visits to TP events, Frank finds little evidence of overt racism or other hatreds. He considers Democrats' focus on isolated obvious expressions of bigotry a comfortable tactic to avoid engagement with the uncomfortably legitimate concerns of populists who, through Democratic neglect, turn to the TPs and the GOP to express their anger. But if Frank dismisses bigotry as a major factor in the current reaction, he seems to concede that Americans in general are more comprehensively hateful than they were eighty years ago, during the last great economic slump. That is, he sees little of the humane solidarity that emerged during the Great Depression and more individual indifference to the failures and suffering of other people, regardless of their race, religion or sexual preference. From Frank's perspective, the Tea Parties are not a movement of Angry White Men, but Angry Small Businessmen and those who identify with that class, though they may be far wealthier. The typical Frankian paradox in play here is that the party and lobbies of Big Business have reversed a mass anger originally directed at that same party and those same lobbies by rebranding themselves as the champions of Small Business while blaming the crash and slump on Big Government. Pity the Billionaire attempts to explain how this strategy managed to work. After running through the contradictions and absurdities of Tea Party rhetoric, thus demonstrating why 2010 is so hard to explain, Frank leaves himself with two potential explanations, one far less plausible than the other.

Frank devotes a chapter of his slim volume -- 187 pages of text plus some substantial endnotes -- to his apparent belief that large numbers of Americans have actually been corrupted by reading Atlas Shrugged. He sees Ayn Rand as a kind of precursor of his conquest of cool, claiming that she used the format and style of a leftist 1930s protest novel to reverse its moral poles, portraying the genius entrepreneurs as the truly exploited working class and salt of the earth. He also appears to trace the country's current compassion deficit, as measured by Republican success, to Rand's assertion of working-class utter dependence upon entrepreneurial genius and her insinuation that the masses deserve death for their lack of gratitude to free enterprise and their incompetence in the absence of entrepreneurial guidance. I'm not claiming that Frank considers Rand a necessary or sufficient cause of the current national mood, but I do wonder, despite the millions of sales for Atlas Shrugged, whether Americans need to learn lack of compassion or contempt for the poor from any novel, as Frank suggests that many did.

A more interesting claim is that Democrats have themselves to blame for losing their moment. After expressing moral horror at the GOP-TP ideology of merciless "pure" capitalism, Frank opens his penultimate chapter by noting that, however horrible that ideology, it's "better than nothing" (emphasis in the original). After indicting the idea of ideology itself, and comparing today's free-market fanatics with the spellbound acolytes of Bolshevism, Frank appears to indict Democrats for a lack of ideology. They suffer instead from a technocratic idealism, the notorious liberal tendency to wish for reasoned and reasonable solutions that don't really hurt or even annoy anyone. That tendency is exacerbated, Frank suggests -- taking as his most damning evidence a passage from one of President Obama's memoirs -- as liberal politicians grow more dependent on campaign donations from Big Business and Wall Street and more understanding of those entities' viewpoints. Taking their lead from Obama, Democrats have refused to be angry when there's plenty, in Frank's view, to be angry at. Frank even goes so far as to concede that small businessmen have some cause for complaint against regulations -- he makes this point to note that Big Business doesn't really have the same causes for complaint, yet pretends to. Just about everyone, Frank assumes, has a right to be angry at Wall Street for driving our economy off a cliff, but Democrats seem more uncomfortable with anger today than they were 80 years ago -- perhaps because, as liberals, they have trouble distinguishing anger from hate. Perhaps they're too legalistic as well, unwilling to see the impressionistic difference between a criminal and a "crook." My guess is that Frank wanted Democrats to call capitalists crooks, if not criminals. By not doing so, he argues, they allowed Republicans to identify a different class of crooks as the true culprits in the crash. People in crisis times crave ideology or something like it, a Frankian fact that helps explain the Marxism of many in the 1930s. That something like it may be something as simple as a moral sense, the certitude that what Wall Street did was wrong or crooked, that Democrats can't seem to articulate properly, despite their articulate President.

The decline of the Democrats into dull technocracy is a subject that requires more detailed analysis than Frank can provide in one chapter, or possibly at any length. It clearly leaves him demoralized, since he closes without calling for a populist takeover or a third party but with a doomsday scenario of social disintegration and fanatical war of "all against all." He may have convinced himself by now of the conquest-of-cool's invincibility, of capital's ability to co-opt everything in its own defense. As he sees it, the pursuit of idealized "true" capitalism has become something like a Freudian death-drive, indifferent to consequences in its ruthless fidelity to the event -- to borrow terminology Frank himself doesn't use. Someone like Slavoj Zizek, who combines Marxism and psychoanalysis, may be a necessary supplement to Frank's hermeneutics. I get the sense that Zizek and Frank might not get along, given Frank's disdain for "cultural studies" and related academic disciplines, but if the stakes are as dire as Frank portrays them, it's also true that he doesn't have all the pieces to put the puzzle of American civilizational decline together. There may never be enough pieces, or even a puzzle. Our challenge may not be to figure out why things went wrong, but how to put things right -- and it's not clear how much Frank's book, which will most likely be read as a left-Menckenesque satire on rightist stupidity, will actually help matters.

The secret of Gingrich's success?

2012-01-24T16:11:00.000-05:00

Like Tinker Bell or a professional wrestler, Newt Gingrich is energized by applause. In the Peter Pan play, the friendly fairy's life depends on the audience clapping their hands. In the squared circle, your husky hero can power out of a submission hold and become a house afire if the marks clap and chant loud enough. So it was for Gingrich in South Carolina, as we can infer from the candidate's protest against the decision before the latest debate to discourage applause. The moderating networks routinely do this because more ovations mean less sound bites. A snarky Republican might suspect that the request for silence is made more sternly now because the "lamestream media" mavens don't want candidates like Gingrich to egg audiences on against the media, as he did last week when challenged about his ex-wife's accusation that the former Speaker had wanted an "open marriage." Gingrich and his supporters now seem to see that as his Reaganesque "I paid for this microphone" moment, an inspiring refusal of deference to newsmongers. Gingrich himself goes so far as to threaten to withdraw from future debates if moderators won't let people applaud. That's like taking yourself as a hostage. Gingrich is understood to have won the last two South Carolina debates, so a rational person would wonder why he'd sacrifice his forensic advantage for any reason. There are two likely reasons. First, Gingrich scores some easy populist points by rising to the defense of an audience's free-speech rights. Second, he actually seems to believe that he won the debates and the primary because people applauded him. He may actually think that he feeds on mass enthusiasm -- and he may be right. There's a word for that type of politician: demagogue.

Tony Kushner on Citizenship and Partisanship

2012-01-23T16:57:00.002-05:00

The playwright Tony Kushner received the Nation Institute's $100,000 Puffin Prize for "Creative Citizenship" last month. His acceptance speech appears in the current Nation, and you can see and hear him deliver it at the Nation website. After an opening act of standup whimsy, the author of Angels in America and Steven Spielberg's upcoming Lincoln movie gets to the meat of his subject.

The whole point of citizenship, that second vocation incumbent upon all of us, upon all people fortunate enough to be enfranchised, or semi-, demi- or quasi-enfranchised, upon all of us who are fortunate enough to live our lives in a still-functioning, if extremely imperfectly functioning, democracy, in which the notion of citizen, the word “citizen,” still has meaning, power and value—the whole point of citizenship is that one admits to a personal stake, and to the potential derivation of benefit, in giving to and sacrificing for the community. One recognizes one’s self in the community, one identifies an important part of the self, a part that deserves tending and nurturing and attention, even therapeutic attention, as much as does the selfish self, which of course receives infinite attention, tending, caring, nurturance. When we step into our citizen selves, we step into that part of our lives, our souls, that exists only in relationship to others. As a citizen, one occupies that part of one’s life, soul, self that is at least as communal, collective, social and contractual as it is monadic, individual, replete.
Citizenship, in other words, is not simply a duty, though of course it is that, nor is it merely a privilege, though it’s that too. It’s a blessing, by which I guess I mean that there is beauty, grace, magic, charisma, charm in citizenship; it’s a gift handed down to us from generations of forebears who thought and fought and struggled and died to create this thing we inherit and advance, this recent, numinous evolutionary phase of humanity.

As Kushner went on, it became more apparent that he was more interested in indicting a certain intellectual selfishness he perceived among progressives than in denouncing the material selfishness that he probably took for granted among Republicans and conservatives. He equates citizenship with artistry, predictably enough, noting that "your fantasies of writing the perfect play, the play that's gonna be better than Hamlet, fall to choices, compromises, fall to action taken, to the admission of limitations, of possibility, of scarcity and community." Creating art for public consumption or scrutiny "is a step out of one's immaculate solitude, one's solitary purity, toward the fertile, febrile dishevelment of community, of democracy." Having embraced this process as a writer, Kushner as a citizen regrets "being disdainful of compromise, disdainful of impurity, disdainful of strategy; luxuriating in a fantasy politics that's an expression of purity, of self, of my own pure self; failing to recognize the egoism in disdain; being impatient rather than patient; plumping my critic-self with comfortable kvetching rather than tempering my political soul with discipline;...living not with hope but with fantasies bred out of revolutionary romance."

The contrasting of "hope," the Obama keyword, with "fantasies bred out of revolutionary romance," determined the direction of the remaining speech. Leaving out the grandiloquence, it may be summed up as "quit your whining and support the Democratic party." That's barely a paraphrase; here are Kushner's actual words:

All of which is to say—and this is what my whole speech was going to be about, but instead maybe I’ll write an essay and submit it to The Nation: In the upcoming election, we must must must hang on to the Senate, we must must must recapture the House, we must must must must must must must re-elect Barack Obama President of the United States of the Reality-Based Community! And a goddamned great president—yes, I said it, I said it out loud!—a great president he is!

(A great president, by the way, is not the same as a great progressive. A great president is a plausible progressive who achieves significant and useful and recognizably progressive things, which is very, very hard to do in a democracy, and which President Obama has inarguably done. We can argue about that later.)

Someone recently said to me—in fact a number of people have told me or have written this—that Barack Obama cares only about getting re-elected. I think that’s transparent nonsense, but even if it’s true, ... Does anything matter more to you than re-electing Barack Obama? Whatever that thing is, if it’s a worthy thing, if you really and truly care about it, you’ll make sure that Barack Obama gets re-elected.

I've left out his riff on the great auk; you can thank me later. Predictable enough, as I said, and it's Kushner's prerogative to make the case. But let's remember that Kushner, like any good adherent of Bipolarchy, is asking people to settle instead of demanding the best, though for a largely-unspoken reason. That reason, of course, is the mortal menace of the Republican and Tea parties. People are free to argue for voting from fear, or to assert that reactionary voting -- as a vote for the Democrats almost always is -- is necessary for the public good. But when Kushner does it after those clever comments about the unselfishness of compromise, I can't help but realize that he doesn't really mean what he'd just said. After all, for him, however successful he feels Obama has been, the real reason to vote for him instead of demanding something better is that there can be no compromise with Republicanism or conservatism or whatever else he fears. My point isn't that there should be no limit to compromise, but to point out that Kushner has chosen his limit, whether he admits it or not. Is there egoism in the choice? A fantasy, perhaps? He might concede both charges while insisting on the principled nature of his stand. If so, then let him concede that principle co-exists with ego among those who insist that the Democratic party is not good enough and that no fear of another party justifies always having to settle. Or would that be too much of a compromise?

South Carolina proved something

2012-01-22T16:49:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's Republican primary proved that Newt Gingrich is resilient. Along among the "flavor-of-the-month" candidates who've risen and fallen over the past year, Gingrich has risen again. That fact arguably proves something else: Rick Santorum doesn't have what it takes. A week after his anointing by the Texas conclave of "social conservative" leaders, he has crashed and burned. He appears to have been repudiated by the rank-and-fire for whom the leaders in Texas presumed to speak. I'll suggest two reasons for this. First, Santorum clearly lacks the fire in his belly that Gingrich just as clearly possesses. He's missing something that would allow him to connect with his would-be base the way Gingrich does. In simplest terms, the Tea Party element seems to have rejected him for one of the same reasons they've rejected Mitt Romney. However rabidly reactionary Santorum may be, he simply doesn't project the same kind of charismatic rage that Gingrich can generate without effort. It does seem clear that self-identified TPs have rejected Santorum for Gingrich, and this is probably related to the nature of the schism I described within the social-conservative movement last week. Though Gingrich is as much of a former insider as Santorum, -- much more, actually -- the fact that so many insiders clearly despise the former Speaker has most likely endeared him to those who, while calling themselves "conservatives," despise the whole idea of "insiders," so long as they don't see themselves inside. The thunderous anathemas cast at Gingrich questioning his conservatism have probably thrown the conservatism of the denouncers into question in some quarters. Just as Gingrich is said disparagingly to be an idiot's idea of a genius -- the important thing is that he's also the sort of "genius" they admire rather than distrust -- he also seems to be the rank-and-file's idea of a conservative leader, if not a "conservative visionary," in some parts of the country. Again, this seems to be a matter of temperament as much as anything else. Gingrich's personal style disqualifies him with many, but endears him or signifies his authenticity to many others. Santorum has none of this, and that dooms his candidacy.

The other thing the primary proves is that South Carolinians are self-deluding. This comes out in a study of exit polls that shows that the Republican primary voters of that state believed Gingrich more electable than Romney in a general election. I continue to hear complaints from the most rabid Republicans that Romney is somehow their least electable candidate. I heard this again from Mr. Right in the office as late as last Friday. I tried to put him straight: as I've written here, the mere fact that people like him are open contemptuous toward Romney will only make him seem like a safer bet for swing voters should he make it into the general election. But like Mr. Right, the Gingrich voters appear to believe that there is a great silent majority of Americans who think as they do, but will only be drawn out to vote by the most hardcore, confrontational conservative candidate. Unfortunately, we already know that many Republicans don't believe that Gingrich is the most conservative candidate, and that some don't consider him conservative at all. I think it's safe to say that hostility toward Gingrich is so great in some quarters that more Republicans are likely to stay home in November if he is nominated than if Romney is. Fortunately for Republicans, such an outcome remains unlikely. The news media want to heighten the drama by saying that Romney's on the ropes right now, but South Carolina ultimately proves no more about Republicans nationwide than Iowa or New Hampshire did. It does prove, I suppose, that Romney hasn't sealed the deal, as he seemed poised to do a week ago -- but it doesn't prove that he won't. The vetting continues....

What is 'third-party speech?'

2012-01-20T12:52:00.001-05:00

In The Atlantic, Wendy Kaminer comments on negotiations between Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown and his presumptive Democratic challenger, Elizabeth Warren, to discourage "third parties" from advertising during their upcoming contest. It's not what you might think: they're not scheming to suppress the Green or Libertarian or any other independent party. By "third party," Kaminer means issue-advocacy groups who presumably support Brown or Warren already. They are "third parties" in the sense that they aren't officially subordinated to the Republican or Democratic party, but they are aligned along Bipolarchy lines. Kaminer also refers to these entities as "independent advocacy" groups. She ought to look for a better term, since both "third party" and "independent," in this context, are insults to the intelligence.

Still, Kaminer is right to condemn Brown and Warren, though their scheme is still subject to further negotiation. As she notes, the contenders don't actually have any power to prevent advocacy groups from running ads; all they're proposing, apparently, is penalizing themselves should such ads appear. While the idea of them contributing some proportion of the cost of those ads to charity is a charming notion, it would do nothing to deter the advocacy groups, though Warren is reportedly making sinister noises about getting media outlets to refuse their advertising.

Some observers might want to cheer the candidates on, however, if they see this as a bipartisan campaign of principle against the influence of irresponsible money in politics. Of course, both candidates will still be able to spend as much money as they please, i.e. as much as wealthy people can give them, on their own ads. And here's where Kaminer is right from a historical perspective. From a civil-libertarian standpoint, she sees these negotiations as another attempt by political elites to suppress "independent" speech, but I think we can leave the "elite" label out of it. The current idea that only the candidates, or their parties, should advertise their causes is a complete reversal of how political campaigning once worked or was supposed to work. In the distant past, the idea that a candidate for office would advertise himself was abhorrent; it would have betrayed vainglorious ambition on the candidate's part. The ideal of the past was that, were there any advertising at all -- make that an issue for another time, -- it would all be "third party" advertising in Kaminer's sense of the word. The ideal, admittedly, was mostly mythical; ambitious men found ways to arrange for people to "spontaneously" nominate those worthies who reluctantly put their careers aside to answer the call. But at least this fiction kept alive some sense that true agency rested with the people, who could in theory select anyone rather than choosing from a limited menu of party lines. The current concern among party leaders for what Kaminer calls "controlling the narrative" seems contemptuous toward any idealistic notion of spontaneous popular agency. Not only will the major parties tell you who you can vote for, but they will dictate the terms of the discussion before the election. They want to make sure that you vote for them for their reasons, not yours. That's why they seem as hostile to "third party" advertising, at least in Massachusetts, as they are to actual third parties. Maybe that will drive the one "third party" group into the arms of the other some day.

Santorum vs. Everyone

2012-01-19T21:50:00.001-05:00

Campaigning in South Carolina today, Rick Santorum for all intents and purposes questioned Newt Gingrich's sanity while admitting that he had no positive case to make for himself either during the primary season or in the general election. First Gingrich: without naming the former Speaker, Santorum argued that Republicans "can't have a candidate that, every day when you open the newspaper, it's an 'Oh my -- oh, what did he say today?' moment. We need someone who is stable." Mee-ow!

Stability becomes an issue for the GOP, in Santorum's account, because “If we are going to be successful in this race, we have to nominate someone who is going to make Barack Obama the issue in this race, not be the issue himself in the race.” In other words, let's face it: neither Rick Santorum nor any of his remaining rivals really has anything positive to offer the nation -- not that the incumbent has much, either -- so the Republicans need someone who will not be distracted from slandering his opponent by having to answer for his own faults. This may be true, but the truth of it presents an obvious difficulty: who in the current Republican field is so faultless? Are we to believe that it's the man who in his last general election, running as an incumbent, was defeated in a landslide? The man who now flaunts an endorsement from Focus on the Family, which should be the opposite of an endorsement for any rational person? The nearest thing to a theocrat in the field? By his own statement, Santorum only disqualifies himself, if not his entire party. It isn't partisan of me to say so. All I'm saying is if a candidate can't lead with a positive agenda, he has no business running, and Santorum has just said that he won't. He can't even make a positive case for the Republican nomination, instead calling Gingrich unstable and Romney a Tweedledee to Obama's Tweedledum, and not deigning to notice Paul. With that attitude, I can see why Santorum isn't exactly setting conservative hearts on fire. Even they actually want to believe in something -- besides God, I mean -- and Santorum promises only negativity. I suspect that he'll go next.

Perry takes one for the team

2012-01-19T13:13:00.000-05:00

Sarah Palin had a point the other day when she insisted on the necessity of a lengthy primary process for vetting candidates. For instance, less than a year ago, Gov. Perry of Texas was considered an invincible campaigner and feared as an unstoppable juggernaut were he to seek the Republican presidential nomination. He exits the campaign today as something close to a national joke. By the already-low standard set by the likes of Palin herself, Perry was a disaster of a candidate, veering wildly from the intemperate to the incompetent. His failure to remember the third Cabinet department he had earlier proposed to eliminate will go into the record books as one of the most catastrophic gaffes of modern electoral history, but he was already in decline by then. There had been nothing like it since Ted Kennedy's damning loss for words when Roger Mudd asked him why he wanted to be President back in 1980. Perry's blundering left one questioning the standards of Texans who had elevated the man to responsible offices many times over. It may handicap the credibility of Texas politicians on the national scene for a generation to come.

Perry's last act of the national campaign was to assist the suicide of the social-conservative anti-Romney coalition. Joining in the defiance of the conclave that met in his own state last weekend, the governor has endorsed Gingrich rather than Santorum, describing the former speaker as a "conservative visionary." Depending on your perspective, that's a perfect closing note -- that is, if you regard "conservative visionary" as an oxymoron. The schism within the social-conservative movement seems to divide "Washington" or "the Beltway," -- those who had to deal with Gingrich as a leader -- from those who know him only as a "visionary." One one side, against Gingrich, are current and former congressmen, Capitol pundits, and maybe also the people in charge of issue lobbies. On the other side, for him, may be anyone who sees himself or herself, or Gingrich, as an "outsider" or "anti-establishment" figure, for whom the complaints of establishment figures are meaningless, and to whom an otherwise unoffensive Santorum seems just too dull and plodding. This schism might not have emerged if not for Gingrich himself, who could end up blamed for either a Romney presidency or another Obama term, depending on how unsatisfactory the outcome proves. At least there won't be a Gingrich presidency to worry about. I feel fairly certain about this, despite Perry's sacrifice to the former Speaker, because it now seems more likely for an anti-Gingrich coalition than an anti-Romney coalition to gain traction. All Romney might need to do is promise Santorum the Vice-Presidency for Gingrich to be destroyed. If so many self-styled conservatives despise the "conservative visionary," it probably won't take much for them to vote for Romney, holding their noses or not, just to spite Gingrich. That would mean, of course, that Perry had backed the wrong horse, just to keep his record consistent.

Sarah Palin's Riddle of Steel

2012-01-18T13:06:00.001-05:00

In South Carolina, the land of nullification and secession, there is a civil war within the Republican party -- emphasis on civil so far -- and a war within the war as the anti-Romney candidates battle hopelessly to be the sole alternative. The battle is hopeless because there can't be a sole alternative to Romney as long as Ron Paul remains in the race, unless Paul himself becomes the sole alternative -- an unacceptable option for jingoist Republicans. Into the confusion wades Sarah Palin as if confusion were her natural element. She told Sean Hannity yesterday that, were she a South Carolina Republican, she would vote for Newt Gingrich in Saturday's primary. This was not the same as endorsing Gingrich for the presidential nomination. The former governor made clear that she simply wants someone other than Romney to win the state because "I want this thing to continue." This thing is, in one sense, a refinement of each candidate's arguments, and in another, the ever-hopeful "vetting" of Mitt Romney.

[I]ron sharpens iron, steel sharpens steel. These guys are getting better in their debates, they are getting more concise, they are get more grounded in what their beliefs are and articulating what their ideas are to get the country back on the right track and getting Americans working again. If I had to vote in South Carolina in order to keep this thing going, I would vote for Newt, and I would want it this to continue more debates, more vetting of candidates because we know the mistake made in our country four years ago was having a candidate that was not vetted, to the degree that he should have been so that we knew what his associations and his pals represented and what went into his thinking, the shaping of who our president today is. That vetting did not take place. I want to see that taking place this time because America is on that precipice, it's that important. We need this process to continue.

Reading this excerpt, it takes a while before you realize that Palin is not talking about herself when she talks about four years ago. It's more clear that, when she talks about "more vetting," she isn't talking about more vetting of Gingrich or Santorum. Hers is a desperate hope that somehow, before it's too late, Romney will be exposed, either through some investigative discovery or a gaffe of his own, as unworthy of the GOP nod. Palin denies the inevitability of Romney, whether attributed to his money, his SuperPACs or his supposed moderation. But she does realize that some of the "more conservative candidates" will have to "take one for the team" by stepping aside in favor of the strongest among them. Despite the verdict of the Texas conclave, Palin assumes that Gingrich, not Santorum, should be the last "more conservative" standing.

Palin reassured Hannity that she remained committed to "anyone but Obama" and would support Romney should he be nominated -- but until then "anyone but Romney" is clearly her preference -- though she would face an intriguing dilemma if it came down to Romney vs. Paul. Her great fear is that an "unvetted" Republican candidate could be brought down by an "October or early November surprise." To prevent that, she would appear to want as much of all the candidates' dirty laundry to be aired now. It'd seem that the candidates are doing a pretty good job of that so far, but Palin plainly hopes that the silver bullet from the smoking gun can be found in time to stop Romney before it's too late for the Republican party. Her deeper hope is that the secret weapon, the antidote, call it what you will, actually does exist. In the end, however, Republican lesser-evilism will probably compel her to hold her nose and vote for Romney. In the American system, a candidate is unacceptable until he becomes your only choice, but that's because you limit your own choices. In a better system Sarah Palin wouldn't have to settle for Mitt Romney -- she might even screw up the courage to run against him -- but fear and nothing else will force her to give him her vote. Her own remarks practically confess that there are more than two directions for the country to go in: Obama's, Romney's and the "more conservative" way. But under the American Bipolarchy she surrenders her prerogative to push for the "right" direction because she assumes that one way will take us off a cliff.

In John Milius's Conan the Barbarian, the villain explains that he had long pondered the "riddle of steel" until he realized that flesh was really more powerful than steel. He demonstrated this by calling one of his followers, perched on a cliff, to join him by leaping off and crashing through a wooden platform into a pit. Sarah Palin can ramble on about steel tempering steel, but in the end she and many like her will jump off that cliff, no matter who wields the sword.

A social conservative schism?

2012-01-17T21:50:00.001-05:00

From all appearances, the Republican presidential nomination is assured for Mitt Romney following the predictable failure of the social-conservative anti-Romney unity campaign. Newt Gingrich has refused to accept the outcome of last weekend's conclave favoring Rick Santorum, and his supporters now claim that the Pennsylvanian didn't fairly earn the conclave's endorsement. Meanwhile, Gingrich brazenly calls on Santorum to quit despite the conclave, insisting shamelessly that "we have got to bring conservatives together," arguing for all intents and purposes that Santorum is too incompetent to run a national election campaign. The former Speaker hopes to convince conservative Republicans that his success in getting a Republican House of Representatives elected in 1994 means that he can get the entire nation to vote for him personally. Santorum understandably scoffs at Gingrich's bluster and the claim that Santorum's candidacy hurts Gingrich's chance to rally the conservatives. "I'm [not] hurting him, I'm beating him," Santorum says. Conservatives are supposed to be hierarchical by nature and convinced of the wisdom of deference. Republican conservatives have too many people trying to be king, and too many saying, "you're not the king of me." They're supposed to believe in ideas and values, but nothing comes before ego for Gingrich, Santorum and Perry. I'm not exactly sad that the social conservatives are having trouble advancing their agenda, but for the sake of objectivity, and with the benefit of hindsight, I can tell them that they should have voted for "None of the Above" last weekend.

Occupied Washington: 1932 and 2011

2012-01-17T18:55:00.002-05:00

In what Reuters calls "a sign of renewed vigor," as many as "several hundred" people, including members of a persistent Occupation and sympathizers from across the country, carried out roving demonstrations and confrontations in the nation's capital today. While I credit the D.C. Occupiers for holding out for so long, thanks largely to an indulgent National Park Service, I hope I'm not setting an impossible standard by questioning whether "several hundred" people for a national event is a sign of any vigor. We're not exactly talking about the Bonus Army here, although Sally Benson's new pop history volume The Plots Against the President practically invites readers to see the 1932 occupiers as precursors to the movement of 2011-12. Benson's book is historical cheerleading for liberal Democrats, with a heroic FDR in the starring role, though the Bonus Army was not a plot against that or any other President. That episode seems to have been included for the suggestive parallel to present-day Occupations, though for all I know Benson had already finished proofing the thing before Occupy Wall Street broke out. Unlike the Occupiers, whose demands are many yet nebulous, the Bonus Army had a very specific demand: as World War I veterans, they wanted the government to pay out the bonuses originally promised for 1945 as an emergency relief measure. Reactionaries claimed alternately that the marchers were communist impostors or simply dupes manipulated by communist infiltrators. As Benson notes, Communists were involved in the movement, but the march and encampment hardly qualify as a communist conspiracy. Nevertheless, just as some congressmen would like to see happen today, the U.S. Army drove the protesters out of their encampments with horses, tanks, bayonets, swords and guns. Despite apparently widespread public support for the Bonus Army, both President Hoover and Roosevelt opposed an early bonus payment. Congress had to override an FDR veto to finally release the money in 1936. Roosevelt preferred to put the veterans to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps. At least he gave them jobs. That option would be unacceptable to the majority in the House of Representatives now. Of course, I don't suppose people yelled "Get a job!" at the Bonus marchers eighty years ago. Less than three years after the Crash of 1929, most Americans probably knew the score. What about now? I get the feeling, despite Reuters, that "Occupy" is already becoming last year's news. In Albany they have a lovely storefront that used to be an art gallery, in a far less conspicuous location than they had last fall. They can be ignored pretty easily. Is it that things today aren't as bad as in 1932, or does the average American simply care less for his fellow average Americans? You can probably answer both ways -- but for how much longer?

Newt Gingrich's pursuit of happiness for kids

2012-01-17T15:00:00.003-05:00

Maybe now Republicans will stop trying to label Gingrich a leftist. Fox News is claiming that the former Speaker won last night's South Carolina debate -- I suppose that as a media entity they have a stake in keeping the race going as long as possible -- and this report cites numerous pearls of Gingrich wisdom as proof of his success. I like best his invocation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence as justification for his advocacy of child labor.

He also won strong support from the audience when he was asked whether it was belittling to minorities to suggest that poor children work as janitors to build a work ethic.
Gingrich replied, "No, I don't see that." He said dozens of people have reached out to him recalling jobs they got when they were "11, 12, 13 years of age," and defended the idea of paying kids to work in school.
"They'd be getting money, which is a good thing if you're poor. Only the elites despise earning money," he said, later adding: "I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their creator with the right to pursue happiness. And if that makes liberals unhappy, I'm going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job and learn some day to own the job."

Admittedly, children probably did work in many cases in Jefferson's time, but I still don't think that's what he had in mind when writing of unalienable rights, and it's definitely not what most people see as an 11-year old's pursuit of happiness. But maybe they think differently in South Carolina, where lines like those above reportedly earned Gingrich thunderous ovations. Of course, South Carolina also started the Civil War, so standards clearly differ there, and maybe Gingrich has a chance.

How not to exploit the GOP debate on capitalism

2012-01-16T14:42:00.003-05:00

E. J. Dionne has some fun in a recent column describing Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich as "well-known socialist intellectuals" for their comments on Bain Capital and Mitt Romney. In all seriousness, he welcomes their criticisms, and the criticism of their criticisms, for opening "the debate on the nature of modern capitalism that should have started in 2008....[focusing on] whether some kinds of capitalism are bad for the system as a whole." For Dionne, the debate is a little one-sided. He quotes Gingrich and Perry favorably at their most scathing, without presenting the Romney side of the debate, which would presumably explain the necessity or ultimate benefit of Bain's more controversial practices. To be fair, Romney's supporters have done little such explaining, preferring to condemn his rivals for heresies against the capitalist faith. Speaking for himself, Dionne intervenes on another front, attacking Romney on ground different from that taken by the other Republicans. While Perry and Gingrich have spoken, probably with more accuracy than sincerity, about the suffering inflicted by Bain on working-class Americans, Dionne wants to engage the front-runner on the subject of free enterprise, not from the workers' perspective, but from the perspective of the state.

Romney’s defense of his work as a venture capitalist is one of the truly authentic parts of an otherwise heavily scripted campaign. He speaks with genuine passion when he accuses his conservative opponents of putting “free enterprise on trial.” But that goes to the heart of the matter: “Free” for whom and under what circumstances? Capitalists of Romney’s sort never want to acknowledge how much their ability to make money depends on what government does. How does it structure the laws related to property, taxation and debt? What rules does it write on how companies can be acquired and how power within firms is apportioned among shareholders, employees, managers and other stakeholders? These are not natural laws. They are the work of politicians and the lobbyists who influence them.

Dionne's position is intellectually sound yet tone deaf in the typical liberal Democrat manner. If GOP leaders fear that this issue will hurt them in the general election, it's not because they think Gingrich or Perry exposed any vulnerability of Romney's on the subject of capital's dependence on the state. If the two bomb-throwers have gained any traction at all, it is because theirs has been an appeal to the working class. Perry and Gingrich obviously still believe in free enterprise, and they want working-class Republicans to believe that they'll benefit from it except when a "vulture capitalist" like Romney preys on businesses. What a Democrat or anyone to the left of the Republican party should add at this point requires a little tweaking of Dionne's paragraph, or cutting it down to one crucial sentence: "Capitalists of Romney's sort never want to acknowledge how much their ability to make money depends on the working class." That's the point Gingrich and Perry can't quite make, despite their rhetorical implication that companies like Bain are betraying American workers. Because of their own dogmatic commitment to free enterprise, the two Republicans will ultimately find themselves hard pressed in Republican company to explain why layoffs as perpetrated by Bain are wrong. That's when someone like Dionne should step in, instead of opining on the majesty of the state. It's not an irrelevant subject, but if he wants to bring it up, he should also open a debate on who gets to make those rules. His own complacent answer to the question isn't necessarily the right one.

The conservative conclave's toothless endorsement

2012-01-15T21:57:00.000-05:00

It took three ballots before the social-conservative magnates gathered in Texas this weekend settled upon Rick Santorum as their preference for the Republican presidential nomination. It's a milestone of interdenominational harmony, I suppose, for a group most likely dominated by evangelicals to throw their influence behind a Catholic, but how influential are they, really? The Washington Post notes that the conclave has not asked, and apparently will not ask Gingrich and Perry to step aside. It's unclear whether even those who voted for the other men this weekend will renounce them formally. Whether their flocks will follow their shepherds is even more questionable. But if the leaders can disavow any intention to drive any candidate out of the race, they clearly expect their congregations to do that for them in their capacity as voters. If they're not going to put any actual pressure on Perry and Gingrich this weekend's spectacle was practically meaningless, but it's unclear what pressure they could legitimately press upon those two apart from a promise of humiliation at the polls. But Gingrich is probably shameless in that respect, while Perry may still imagine himself invincible until Romney has a majority of delegates. The only real result of the conclave is that now the social conservatives can blame Gingrich and Perry, not to mention Paul and Huntsman, rather than themselves if Romney is nominated. If the race were reduced to Romney and Santorum, which it won't be while Paul lives, Romney's victory would be damning evidence that the conclaves' "social" conservatism is not conservatism as far as the Republican party, if not the larger "conservative" movement, is concerned, just as anyone's conservatism ceases to be that, in the eyes of the Republican establishment, if he questions Romney's conduct of his businesses. This is the state of movement madness in January 2012: conservatives are desperate to stop Romney but are told that their sharpest criticisms of him -- and let's not even start on the subject of religion this post -- are not conservative. There is a conservatism in America that sees Mitt Romney as its ideal candidate. Is that the conservatism of every conservative? If the usual lesser-evil impulses prevail, conservatives will have no choice but to let Republicans once more tell them what their movement stands for. In effect, there won't be a conservative movement at all -- just a self-conscious, self-righteous, self-pitying and self-defeating constituency of the Republican party.

Virginia court to Perry: You didn't say 'unconstitutional' in time.

2012-01-13T19:24:00.006-05:00

By March 6, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul may be the only candidates left for the Republican presidential nomination. In that case, a Virginia court's decision upholding that state's ballot-access law and keeping Messrs. Gingrich, Huntsman, Perry and Santorum off the ballot won't make any difference. Readers may recall that Perry had challenged the law, which required him to collect several thousands of signatures throughout the state without the assistance of out-of-state campaign workers. A federal judge has now bitch-slapped Perry by telling him that, had the Texan filed his protest earlier, before the deadline date for the signatures, he would have overturned the law. But because Perry waited until after the deadline had passed and he'd fallen short of the requirements, the judge concludes that he and the other complainants "played the game, ... lost, and then ... complained about the rules."

Wait a minute. Presuming that the judge would have struck the law down because he deemed it unconstitutional, did that law somehow become less unconstitutional after the deadline, or because Perry tried to abide by it? Maybe the judge reasoned that Perry thought the law unconstitutional only after he failed to meet its requirements. But you don't decide a constitutional question on the ground that the petitioner is a spoilsport -- especially if you, the judge, have just said you would have otherwise overturned the law. Perry's team has every right to be pissed, and to appeal. I haven't made any Idiot nominations this week, but I have a feeling this would be one week when Perry would not win.

'The problem with capitalism is capitalists.'

2012-01-13T13:19:00.002-05:00

Milton Friedman, a defender of capitalism if ever there was one, once said: "the problem with socialism is socialism; the problem with capitalism is capitalists." He meant, I presume, that the ideal of socialism was inherently flawed, while the ideal of capitalism is a good one that few practitioners actually live up to. That may seem to leave us little to choose from, but it looks like a relevant point in light of the Republican inquisition over certain candidates' criticism of Bain Capital and Mitt Romney. There are indications that the attacks made by Newt Gingrich and Gov. Perry are backfiring and provoking the conservative constituencies they considered theirs by right to circle the wagons around Romney. Even Ron Paul -- though I'm not sure why I wrote "even" in this context -- is defending Romney, and Bain by extension, and criticizing Gingrich and Perry for crossing a red line. The two offenders are unrepentant. Gingrich in particular rightly contests the charge that to criticize any capitalist is to criticize capitalism itself.

I do think it's kind of absurd that there has been this general response, mostly by Romney supporters, that to question his record is to be opposed to capitalism. Mitt Romney said he had two criteria for being president. One was his record as governor, which he now doesn't want to discuss because it's too liberal for South Carolina. The other was that he claimed he created 100,000 jobs. Well, the Washington Post yesterday gave him three Pinocchios on that jobs claim. They pointed out that in 1994, running for the Senate, he claimed to have created 10,000 jobs. And then he wasn't at Bain Capital in a management role after that. And they said they couldn't find any evidence that he created 100,000 jobs....So I have asked questions about let's look at the record. Let's see the details. Don't just give us the claim. Show us what actually happened. That somehow got turned into questioning capitalism, which is baloney. This guy is running for president. He is making a set of claims. He bases a lot of it on his career. If you ask about his career, it's because he is running for president. I think he owes the country a much more detailed answer about what his career was like, what decisions they made. Because we're looking at the judgment, the values of a particular person, not of a system, but of one guy, Mitt Romney, who wants to be president.

Gingrich and Perry argue that Romney is a bad capitalist who took shortcuts to profits by laying people off. It's their prerogative to argue that Romney's alleged practices don't reflect on capitalism as a system, but as I've been arguing this week, the debate over Bain Capital raises provocative and potentially destabilizing questions about what Republicans or conservatives mean when they invoke capitalism as their ideal or use the word as a synonym for free enterprise. The truly dangerous subject broached by Perry and Gingrich is the propriety of layoffs. Their critics would presumably have us all except the necessity of layoffs for the survival of companies and as the breaks of the game for working people. Romney's critics have dared suggest that there are circumstances when layoffs are unfair or just plain wrong. We probably shouldn't give Gingrich or Perry too much credit for insights that probably wouldn't occur to or resonate with them were they not running against (not to mention behind) an alleged corporate raider. But even broken clocks are correct twice a day and approximately correct slightly more often, and it's the other Republicans who seem out of sync with the times. The GOP establishment thinks that Perry and Gingrich are giving the Democrats ammunition to use in the general election, but if the establishment means to argue that capitalist practices can never be criticized and that layoffs are never wrong -- only "tragic" -- that sounds like ammo enough for anyone willing to use it.

The Republican debate on capitalism continues

2012-01-12T17:14:00.001-05:00

On the principle that "only Nixon can go to China," perhaps it was only within the Republican party that candidates could actually debate the merits of different modes of capitalism. Desperate and uncowed by a chiding commentariat, Gov. Perry insists that Mitt Romney's practices can and presumably should be criticized without betraying the party's commitment to free enterprise. Perry isn't opposed to "venture capitalists," -- he claims to want to bring more to Texas -- but he doesn't want "private equity firms" coming in to "take companies apart so they can make quick profits." He claims to have seen proof in South Carolina of how Bain Capital would "destruct" communities through mass layoffs. Such practices make Romney a "vulture capitalist," a label Perry won't apologize for using. Newt Gingrich apparently carries on the attack elsewhere, while ex-Gov. Palin has reportedly weighed in with an opinion that criticism of Bain is "fair."

None of this changes any Republican's opinion on the public sector -- they still distrust it for their various obscure or pathological reasons. But the populist turn against Romney and the establishment reaction against that turn seems to be forcing Republicans to think over their idealization of the private sector. For too long there's been an unthinking equation of capitalism with "free enterprise" and the work ethic itself. For the moment, however, Republicans appear to be asking themselves exactly what it is they've been defending unconditionally for so long. I don't think people are buying the argument that the likes of Perry and Gingrich have suddenly turned "left" because they criticize the way a particular capitalist did business. It may have been the party line that Republicans shouldn't question such things, and it may be that Gingrich and Perry are simply abandoning principle out of anger and frustration. But who's to say the principle in question shouldn't be abandoned? Is it really an unalterable principle of the Republican right that no profit-seeking practice should be criticized, no matter what the consequences for working-class Americans? It may prove to be if Romney is nominated, but there may be fewer Republicans if that happens.

The important thing at this moment is that Republicans are hearing the sort of arguments they would automatically ignore if they came from Democrats. Coming from Republicans, these arguments can't be ignored so easily, and that fact enrages some people who would clearly prefer not to hear this discussion. These people protest that the debate could hurt Romney in the general election, but that's short-term thinking. The future of the Republican party and what it'll stand for may be at stake.

George Will makes a case for socialism

2012-01-12T13:38:00.000-05:00

Perhaps despairing at last of the Republican primaries, George Will turns in a recent column to first principles, submitting what he takes to be a decisive case against the liberal regulatory state and its redistributionist agenda. There's a little bit of self-delusion in this essay, most apparent when he writes: "A puzzling aspect of our politically contentious era is how little contention there is about the ethics of coercive redistribution by progressive taxation and other government “corrections” of social outcomes it considers unethical or unaesthetic." I had thought that such contention was the basis of the entire modern conservative movement, but Will's attitude may reflect an unconsciously arrogant belief, given his recent anathemas against Newt Gingrich, that Will himself is the only conservative who actually thinks conservatively. In any event, Will supposes that "government rarely explains, or perhaps even recognizes, the reasoning by which it decides why particular outcomes of consensual market activities are incorrect." I suppose that someone in government would first have to concede that all market activities are consensual before satisfying Will, but I think it more obvious that the progressive liberal (the ventriloquist behind "government" in Will's mind) is less concerned in detailing the incorrectness of outcomes than in fulfilling the liberal's defining imperative that everyone must live, preferably in a humane minimum of comfort, and with easy access to the means of extending life. If redistribution alone secures that access for all, progressive liberals will support it without having to argue whether certain market activities are right or wrong. The burden of proof rightly sits on Republicans who consider both the redistributionist program and its motivation incorrect. But since none of this resembles a case made by George Will for socialism, I had better get to my point.

Will thinks it a compelling argument against redistribution as practiced by the liberal welfare state that "such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself." He elaborates on the point in his next paragraph: "Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage." As a practical example, he cites how "a small cohort" of sugar producers benefit from lobbying for preferential sugar import quotas while the majority of consumers pay higher prices. In short, Will's argument is that a government committed to regulating vested interests is susceptible to influence by those interests when drafting regulations, which often end up benefiting those interests, and perhaps the regulators as well, rather than the general public. For Will, this follows from government's inevitable tendency to self-aggrandizement. For another observer, the problem is more obviously the vested interests. If regulators are vulnerable to manipulation by vested interests, the reasonable alternative for a government dedicated to correcting market outcomes is to abandon the futile project (on Will's account) of regulating vested interests in favor of socializing production. Will would object to that, of course, as a further aggrandizement of government with no greater justification for rejecting market outcomes. But he has arguably pointed out to progressives an inherent flaw in their own approach. Conservatives are fond of showing liberals how their plans won't work, and they can actually prove useful in that role. As long as progressives ignore the related argument that certain plans shouldn't work, or shouldn't be tried on "ethical" grounds, they should be open to any practical critique of their programs. When a conservative makes an objectively practical case against liberal regulation, progressives might take that as a cue to try something more radical.

The Primary Problem and the case for the smoke-filled room

2012-01-11T12:05:00.002-05:00

Douglas Turner, whose op-ed for the Buffalo News has been reprinted in papers around the country this week, is disgusted by the low quality of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. He specifically cites Rick Santorum as a "flawed nobody" who has gotten more attention this month than he deserves. Turner blames that fact on the current system of choosing candidates through binding primary elections. He contends that an "open" party convention would not give Santorum or Newt Gingrich, another loser in Turner's opinion, a second look. By an "open convention" Turner means a genuinely deliberative event in which delegates are not bound by the wishes of the voters who appointed them. He argues that the democratization of the nomination process through the vehicle of primaries, which he traces on the Republican side back to 1968 -- though the struggle to establish the primacy of primaries dates back at least a century -- has been at best a mixed blessing, but increasingly a curse.

These so-called reforms are no longer about democracy. The primary process has become the plaything of media conglomerates, and of super PACs triggered by the Supreme Court’s unleashing of corporate money. For the sake of the country, both parties should make their conventions meaningful again by ruling that state primaries and caucuses are advisory only; and end this parade of showboating nonentities.

Turner may be right that party primaries are "no longer about democracy," but he leaves hanging whether they should be. His desire for "open conventions" implicitly removes the choice of candidates from the party rank and file and elevates convention delegates to the status of legislators within the party, entitled to act according to their own wisdom and to ignore instructions from their constituents. Turner may denounce the influences of money and media, but his implicit conclusion is that the rank and file can't be trusted to select an electable candidate. Indeed, he blames the democratized system for compelling otherwise intelligent people like the late Jack Kemp to pander to ignorance by promoting the teaching of creation science in public schools on the campaign trail. Of course, democracy has always been and always will be accused of promoting pandering to ignorance by critics who mistakenly blame democracy as a political principle for the ignorance of the masses. That point aside, Turner's diatribe raises the question of whether political parties themselves are or should be democracies. That's a question Turner himself doesn't quite seem prepared to answer.

In the list of comments below the article, reader Don Nowak warns against a return, through the "open convention" principle, to "the smoke-filled rooms of yore, when party and regional powers brokered a deal in a back room." Responding to Nowak, Turner insists that he doesn't like "smoke-filled rooms," either. He goes on to claim that "relatively open" conventions picked some pretty good Presidents. And lest he seem partisan in his attacks on Santorum and Gingrich, he argues that an open convention would not have picked an untested figure with a controversial background like the current President, either. On the other hand, he concedes that a "relatively open" 1964 Republican convention nominated an equally "unprepared" and arguably more irresponsible Barry Goldwater. He also claims again that the democratic principle behind direct, binding primaries has been compromised by the power of money in politics, and that the current system should be set aside until the Citizens United decision is overturned. A look back at his own analysis, however, leads one to ask what Super-PACs and media conglomerates have to do with the grass-roots ignorance he initially identified as the problem with primaries.

An "open convention" is not the same thing as a "smoke-filled room." The latter term entered the political lexicon in 1920, when party bosses compromised behind the scenes of the 1920 Republican convention on Warren G. Harding as their eventually victorious presidential nominee. These bosses presumably had the power to tell delegates under their control to vote for Harding. A truly open convention would be one without smoke-filled rooms and dictation by bosses -- but what makes Turner think that an open convention today would be more immune to the influence of PACs and media than ordinary primary voters? Congress itself, the deliberative model for an open convention of elected delegates, has demonstrated no such immunity. Turner's error is his belief that the right system can avoid the taint of ignorance and irresponsibility that is actually pandemic in our political culture. It may be impossible to reform politics in order to immunize it from corrupt culture. It may yet be possible to save politics by reforming culture, but that starts with us and not the people we vote for.

New Hampshire proves nothing?

2012-01-10T21:46:00.000-05:00

The former governor of Massachusetts appears to have won a primary in a New England state -- how shocking? But Mitt Romney's win will confirm his standing as an unassailable front-runner for many observers, at least until the tournament moves to a southern state. If New Hampshire proves anything, it may be that Ron Paul is assured of at least 20% of the vote anywhere he goes -- but that depends on the South as well. It's said his anti-interventionism won't play in that jingoist, militarist part of the country, but we'll find out soon enough. The only things New Hampshire proves indisuputably are facts about itself, the primary fact being that the traditionalist social conservatives aren't welcome there. Consider this: according to the latest returns as I write, which are sufficient for Romney to claim victory and Paul to concede the state to him, those two candidates and the apparent third-place finisher, Huntsman, have combined to win 78% of the Republican vote. The three traditionalists -- Gingrich, Perry and Santorum -- combined for barely 20%, the Texan getting not even 1%. That would seem to prove that there was no point, after all, in the social-conservative cabal picking one from the three last weekend, since that chosen one would have gotten clobbered, anyway. Better to wait for South Carolina, where the verdict of the coming conclave might mean something, unless all of those three are thought to have sinned too much against the holy dollar to merit the votes of the righteous. One thing seems certain regardless of New Hampshire: things can still get crazier in the Republican race, and probably will.

'Conservatives' vs. Capitalism: a Republican crack-up?

2012-01-10T16:59:00.002-05:00

Rare is the day when I can say "Rush Limbaugh is absolutely right," but that's pretty much the case when he takes fellow Republicans to task for criticizing Mitt Romney's business practices and complaining about his wealth. His dismay at the spectacle seems refreshingly sincere and he seems honestly at a loss to account for the apparent hypocrisy from the party of capitalism. He turns to a National Review Online columnist, Jay Nordlinger, to help figure it all out. Nordlinger notes, and Limbaugh seems inclined to agree, that only Romney among the Republicans, the one who seems the least Republican to other Republicans, has the guts to defend capitalism as an economic system. Limbaugh seems to think that Romney himself is overrated as a capitalist, but he appears to concede Nordlinger's point. This alone is unlikely to reconcile Limbaugh to Romney, but today's observations raise a question neither Limbaugh nor Nordlinger may care to confront: how strong is conservatism's commitment to capitalism? The alliance of the two phenomena is relatively recent. In the 19th century, self-styled conservatives often opposed laissez-faire capitalism because the conservative position then was statist and upheld the state's prerogative to regulate trade. That battle was lost, but self-styled conservatives in many countries took the lead in introducing social-welfare provisions -- Germany under Bismarck is the noteworthy case -- on the assumption that it was better for society for some people to be dependent on the state than for them to join a revolutionary mob. In the U.S. in the 20th century, anti-communist conservatives rallied to capitalism because it was part of an entire socio-cultural order that communism threatened -- but how essential is capitalism to that order? How many people became conservative primarily because they thought communism would confiscate their houses or demolish their churches? You don't have to endorse capitalism in all its splendor to believe in private property, after all, just as you don't have to be a communist to criticize capitalism. If most self-style conservatives in America today see themselves as defenders of a moral order, as seems to be the case, how essential is capitalism to that order? As Thomas Frank and others, on both left and right, have noted, capitalism as a system of perpetual "creative destruction" is in many ways inherently corrosive of traditional order and traditional morality. Frank has noted for years that moral conservatives' alliance with capitalism has been consistently self-defeating, yet right-wingers have persisted in it on the assumption that the baby of traditional order would go out with the bathwater of laissez-faire if the left took over. Meanwhile, Nordlinger and Limbaugh cite the wisdom of Phil Gramm, the former Texas senator who advised Republicans never to defend free trade on the stump because those who benefit from it don't realize how they benefit, while those who suffer no exactly why they suffer. If we enlarge the scope from free trade to free enterprise, a time comes inevitably when more people suffer than benefit -- Limbaugh himself cites the 2008 crash as an example. Is the majority to be consoled with the usual warnings against envy and the familiar reminders that life's not fair? What is conservative, exactly, about those opinions? Envy is on the loose in the primary field among people who are not otherwise unconservative -- depending on your perception of Newt Gingrich, of course -- and the bulwark against envy is the man normally regarded as the least conservative Republican, and whose likely victory is increasingly perceived by his rivals as unfair. We've been led to believe that a true conservative would not complain about the triumph of a Romney, in business or in politics. So are Gingrich, Perry et al not true conservatives, or are they not true Republicans? The distinction may matter more than people think somewhere down the line.

Class warfare in the Republican primaries

2012-01-09T17:00:00.003-05:00

Newt Gingrich has been condemned by many self-styled conservatives for questioning Mitt Romney's business practices and complaining about the influence of wealth in politics. Now, it seems, Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman are joining the class-warfare chorus from the party supposedly opposed on principle to class warfare. They seem to have forgotten all the reassurances from the apologists for corporate donors, all the comforting recollections of elections when the richest candidate didn't win. Romney is unconsciously goading them with supracontextually provocative remarks like his admission today that he likes "being able to fire people." The context was from a consumerist perspective, though admittedly "fire" is not quite the right word. He was expressing his preference for a system where individuals could switch health insurers more easily -- "firing" those that provided poor service -- but the sound bite is sure to resonate, as reporters are predicting, from now until November. The quote seems unobjectionable to a Republican, but Romney himself remains objectionable to many in the GOP, and the resentment expressed on the campaign trail is nakedly hypocritical. Envy does not appear to be exclusive to liberals and Democrats, and maybe what they've been accused of feeling, and what some Republicans feel now, isn't really as simple as envy after all. More to the point, not only the poor envy the rich; hence the confusion regarding Wall Street within the Tea Party movement. Historically, Republicans have been inconsistent in a consistent way. They don't want to be dragged down by the poor or the politicians, but they don't like it any better when accumulated wealth and privilege stand in the way of their own advance. They are the people most fond today of quoting John F. Kennedy's dictum that life is unfair, but what Republicans seem to mean, regardless of Kennedy's meaning, is that everyone but me cheats -- and that entitles me to do what I have to do. Party primaries are sometimes educational; it's when people of one party confront each other, rather than presenting a united front against the enemy, that the people and the party show their true faces to the world.

The Stop-Romney Movement: personality, principle, pragmatism, and the lack thereof

2012-01-09T11:27:00.001-05:00

I seem to have misdated the upcoming conclave of social conservatives in Texas, which will take place this coming weekend, but you can hardly blame me. It would have made sense for these people to come together behind a candidate on the weekend before the New Hampshire primary, but according to this Washington Times piece the sorting out might not take place until the end of the month, which might well be too late. The problem seems to be that supporters of the three most likely coalition candidates -- Gingrich, Perry and Santorum -- still want to try their strength in the South Carolina and Florida primaries, and want to defer negotiations until they can bargain from positions of presumably greater strength. Of course, if Romney wins these states, no one will be in a position of strength, compared to where any stand now. The "bain" of the movement could by then have unstoppable momentum. It would seem, then, that personal ambitions and personal animosities have compromised the solidarity of the social-conservative anti-Romney movement if none of the three papabili is willing to step aside now. Perry and Santorum are no less ego-driven, from this perspective, than the reputed egomaniac Gingrich. Nor are their backers' calculations grounded entirely on ideological urgency. Santorum would seem the most satisfactory to evangelicals in many respects, but the Times article notes some skepticism of his ability to raise money at the same time that a Las Vegas mogul has just donated $5,000,000 to a pro-Gingrich "Super-PAC." But if the evangelicals and social-conservatives got behind Santorum and said he was the only alternative to Romney, wouldn't a lot of the money going elsewhere not have to go his way? Are there social-conservative Republicans and donors who hate Santorum for some reason, the way so many seem to hate Gingrich? It's more likely that the selfish ambitions of his rivals are keeping the money from the Pennsylvanian -- which isn't to say that Santorum's own ambitions aren't selfish. But selfish ambitions are all the movement is stuck with so long as the grass roots play the consumer role, allowing different advertisers to pitch candidates to them, instead of generating a candidate from their own ranks. If the movement doesn't want Romney, but ends up stuck with him, it has only its own passive dependence on the Republican party to blame. Social and religious conservatives may imagine that they control the GOP, but it seems almost certain that they'll once again be proved wrong.

The 'social conservative' caucus

2012-01-06T18:55:00.001-05:00

This weekend a conclave of self-described "social conservative" movement leaders will gather in Texas. Their purpose is to unite the movement behind a single candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. While the meeting will convene on Gov. Perry's home turf, statements from several of the expected participants indicate that the Santorum Surge will prevail among them. For the sake of arguments, this group has three candidates to choose from: Santorum, Perry and Gingrich. Perry's campaign is in its death throes. I'm already seeing conspiracymongers suggest that the governor remains in the race only at the behest of the hated Romney, who would presumably reward the imagined Texas quisling with a cabinet post if not the Vice Presidency. Huntsman and Paul are beyond the pale. Between Gingrich and Santorum the latter seems certain to prevail; the former Speaker's marital record could well disqualify him among these elders.

While the movement leaders are probably capable of coming to a consensus, it's far from clear whether their decision will influence either of the men they won't choose. Presuming that the conclave endorses Santorum, will that decision compel Gingrich or Perry to step aside? The demand could prove a defining moment. If the Republicans see themselves as servants of the conservative movement, should they not defer to the men from the metaphorical smoke-filled room in Texas? If those men speak for the social-conservative multitude, should Gingrich and Perry not assume that the base has spoken in an unadulterated voice? On the other hand, should they make that assumption? For that matter, should they identify the Republican party and its causes so closely with the movement as it manifests in Texas? Defying the social-conservative cardinals would give them a chance to explain to the nation how and why the GOP differs from the theocratic tendency while remaining essentially "conservative." At the same time, how forcefully will the movement demand the two expected losers to withdraw? That depends on how strongly they believe that no alternative to their preferred candidate is acceptable. Republicans already worry that the movement hates Romney so much, considers him so little better than the incumbent President, that they might sit out the general election, perhaps in the radicals' typical expectation that the worst-case scenario will speed the day of the necessary reformation. Some may calculate, however, that Romney as the nominee might make up in centrists who've given up on Obama what he'd lose in alienated social conservatives. This might be the moment for the movement to raise the stakes. If they expect any of the candidates to step aside in favor of the man chosen this weekend, perhaps they should make clear that, if the Republicans fail to endorse that man now, -- if not only Gingrich and Perry but Romney steps aside -- that man will be the candidate of an independent social-conservative party in the November election. Of course, such an ultimatum depends on the preferred candidate's willingness to bolt the party, but this brings us back to whether the party or the movement comes first for the contenders. For the past thirty years or so, the chief justification for the Republican party's existence has been that it represents the country's conservative tendency against the statist progressivism allegedly embodied by the Democratic party. Arguably, however, the GOP has given social conservatives little more over that time than the satisfaction of seeing liberals lose elections. Is this the time for the movement to demand more, starting with their preferred candidate? Or is this the year when the illusion of unity of purpose finally dissipates, with consequences yet to be determined? The next few weeks may start to tell the story.

Rick Santorum: Idiot of the week?

2012-01-06T12:00:00.000-05:00

Reporters presumably have known who Rick Santorum is and what he believes for months if not years, dating back to his tenure in the U.S. Senate. None of it was of interest, presumably, so long as the Pennsylvanian was one of the laggards in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. After Iowa, Santorum is a front runner and under fresh scrutiny from the media and the public. The candidate got into a testy dispute with New Hampshire college students yesterday over the boundaries of marriage, and today he finds himself accused of racism for comments made about "dependency" back in Iowa.

Read the accompanying article to understand why the original statement was idiotic enough in Iowa, but Santorum's real claim to the crown comes when he denies the evidence of our ears. He claims that he checked himself and didn't actually speak the damning word "black." To be fair, he does seem to be saying something more like "bligh," whatever that might mean. All this means, however, is that he caught himself at practically the last instant in a Freudian slip, at the point of saying what he really means but shouldn't say. The stupidity of it is his insistence on denying that he spoke the incriminating syllables while admitting the impulse to do so.

I was going to write a post about Santorum's adventure in New Hampshire, since "where do you draw the line?" is a fair question that gay-rights advocates shouldn't dismiss out of hand. But his Iowa utterance really highlights what's wrong with Santorum's Republican worldview. He assumes that politicians provide social-welfare programs only to reduce Americans to dependent clientage -- to get their votes, as the candidate says. He deems "opportunity" preferable to "dependence," which only leaves him unobliged to all those to whom no one answers when their opportunity knocks. His emphasis on "opportunity" makes no guarantees to the needy, nor can he guarantee that they'll get the voluntarily charity on which he'd have them depend in the last resort. It may not have occurred to the former senator -- and always remember that he was repudiated by his constituents in convincing fashion -- that it might, and might well should be a nation's business to keep all its citizens healthy, educated, or at least alive, regardless of whether one faction or another of bureaucrats benefit from doing so. There is an argument to be made against dependency, but it's an argument for separating yourself from society and living off the land as a farmer or hunter. If dependence on the state is suspect, so is dependence on an employer (who is himself dependent), or dependence on society's charitable instincts, or dependence on God. Stigmatizing "dependence," as American politicians have done from the Founding, is to blind oneself to how society actually works, and to deny one's own obligations to everyone else. That Santorum denies those fundamental obligations is clear from his crack about helping people with other people's money, regardless of the color of any of those people. And this is the Christian candidate in the race? Maybe he goes out of his way to pick fights with homosexuals because that's the only way he can prove it.

Is Ron Paul's foreign policy 'just as troubling' as his racist newsletters?

2012-01-05T19:55:00.002-05:00

Ron Paul is a uniquely polarizing figure in American politics. People of very diverse political views all find themselves diametrically opposed to him for one reason or another. For some, his libertarian economic policies are quite bad enough. For others, his mysteriously (literally?) ghostwritten newsletters disqualify him from consideration. Richard Cohen, a Washington Post op-ed columnist, is understandably disgusted both by the newsletters and Paul's weaselly disavowals. Cohen, perhaps best described as a centrist Democrat, also represents those in both major parties who find Paul unacceptable because of his foreign policy. Paul's international positions are "just as troubling" to Cohen as the newsletters' paranoid racism. As most people know, Paul is a non-interventionist, though Cohen prefers the pejorative "isolationist" since he can then link Paul to those opponents of war with Hitler whose reticence was allegedly grounded in anti-Semitism and other prejudices. According to Cohen, Paul's presumed intention to withdraw from treaties, cut foreign aid and abolish the CIA proves his wish to "turn his back on the world," as if a libertarian has no intention of trading with the rest of the world. But just as the commercial mentality is often presumed to lack conscience, so Cohen accuses Paul of "total indifference to what happens overseas." To the columnist, Paul fails to appreciate that "America remains a mighty nation, capable of doing good in the world [rather than] expanding an empire or making the world safe for McDonalds."

Cohen is careful to make clear that the invasion of Iraq isn't the sort of thing he has in mind -- that war "had no real purpose," he writes. But the air intervention against Libya "ain't a bad days work," and the Clinton administration's air war against Serbia was just as commendable. So is a good war one waged by Democratic presidents, or simply one in which American troops keep out of range of IEDs? Cohen's distinctions are unclear. He justifies the Libyan adventure because it resulted in Gaddafi's overthrow, but the overthrow of a comparable tyrant is probably the one remaining justification for the invasion of Iraq among its remaining apologists. If the overthrow of Saddam Hussein "had no real purpose," what purpose has Gaddafi's overthrow, since Cohen himself concedes that "the Libyan bombings will not bring democracy to that country?" If Cohen's distinctions are vague, his associations are worse. He tries to portray Paul's anti-interventionism as morally equivalent to his disagreements with civil rights legislation; both show that Paul "cannot for the life of him summon government's authority or military might to have the right thing done." That's question-begging. Who gets to say whether aiding the overthrow of a dictator, or initiating the overthrow by invading his country, is the right thing? The rightness of it may not be as self-evident to everyone as it is to Cohen -- and the rightness of it from any subjective standpoint still may not conform to right as defined by international law. I suspect that Cohen has no more basis for his sense of rightness than his conviction that good people like President Obama and the Clintons can be trusted when they intervene abroad, while Republicans can't. As Paul seems to prove, Cohen doesn't even trust Republicans when they don't want to intervene. Paul's principled reticence only seems to prove to Cohen how mean-spirited and ungenerous Republicans are.

The purpose of Cohen's column is to counter people "on both the left and the right [who] have praised Paul on this score, as if his antiwar position can be extracted from his general nuttiness to make a rational candidate." Cohen's answer to this aspiration is "No such luck," but this is exactly what needs to happen. The antiwar constituency that coalesces around Ron Paul must have an existence beyond Paul's rapidly-expiring political shelf life. It must be extracted not just from Paul's overall nuttiness, but from Paul's personality cult. It has to become bigger than Ron Paul if the position is not to be damned by association with his or anyone's eccentricities. If anti-interventionism has any chance of becoming the core of a new, transpartisan, post-ideological American politics -- and I'm not sure if it has -- two things have to happen. First, advocates have to show how an interventionist foreign policy hurts the American economy. Second, anti-interventionism has to be seen as a principled position in its own right and not as the extension of any particular domestic policy or social ideology. There are probably plenty of people who are supporting Paul more than he deserves just to keep the anti-interventionist idea alive as a force in politics -- but Ron Paul is nearly eighty years old. What is to be done when he's no longer alive? If anti-interventionism defines the Ron Paul movement, it's time for them to redefine themselves on their own terms and come out of his shadow. It should be up to them to repudiate Paul for his various failings and find another standard bearer for the anti-interventionist movement. But they shouldn't have to repudiate him for his bravest and most principled stand.

Republican whiners, losers sue for ballot access

2012-01-04T16:57:00.000-05:00

A presidential candidate is arguing that one state's ballot-access laws unconstitutionally violate his First Amendment rights. The candidate in question is not an independent, but the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, who is suing the state of Virginia after he failed to submit the number of petitions required by local law for a line on a statewide ballot. Perry's petitions haven't been challenged; they were too few to challenge. He fell approximately 4,000 short of the 10,000 Virginia requires, but he claims to have been unfairly handicapped by a provision requiring that petitions be solicited and collected only by residents of the state. Perry regards this as an absurdity, since it would forbid him from going door-to-door in Virginia to solicit signatures on his own behalf, as well as an unjustifiable restriction on the number of "message carriers."

Perry's case is complicated by the fact that Virginia's rules did not prevent the governor's fellow Texan, Ron Paul, nor the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, from collecting the signatures needed to get on the primary ballot. That difficulty has not deterred Perry's other rivals, Messrs. Gingrich, Huntsman and Santorum, from joining the suit, despite the fact that neither Huntsman nor Santorum even bothered to submit petitions. Their claim, as far as I can tell, is based on the proposition that they are entitled as announced candidates for the GOP nomination to appear on the same ballot as Romney (not to mention Paul) wherever he runs. Against this proposition, the governor of the state, their fellow Republican, says that anyone who expects to become President ought to be able to scare up 10,000 Virginia signatures relying on Virginia resources alone. While the governor is open to revising ballot-access rules in the future, he doesn't believe they should be changed during the primary season. He adds: "If you dilute those standards too much you could have multiple candidates on the ballot that really aren't serious and could potentially confuse voters,"

Poor Rick Perry: treated like a third-party candidate. Some people will only acknowledge that a system's unfair when it's unfair to them. The usual Republican response to such complaints, I presume, is to affirm the fairness of the system -- if not the fairness of life itself -- and call the complainant a loser. But for me to do that here would be too much like shooting a dead horse in a barrel to be any fun.

Iowa Proves Nothing

2012-01-04T12:13:00.002-05:00

It's rather pathetic to see Mitt Romney claim victory after winning just eight more votes in Iowa than Rick Santorum did last night. Fourth-place finisher Newt Gingrich seems more justified when he observes that three-quarters of caucus participants repudiated Romney by choosing another candidate. What has Romney won, after all? For all that modern news media make Iowa an instant judgment on candidates' viability, the caucuses are a very old-fashioned process that only begins the selection of Iowa's delegates to the national convention. Iowa is a survival of the process that direct primaries were designed to replace more than a century ago. The caucuses, however, are perceived to be more democratic now, even among Republicans, because it's no longer presumed that local party bosses are dictating the preferences of the caucusers. In any event, they give Romney no objective reason to rejoice, nor did they really give Rep. Bachmann any objective reason to quit the race, as she has done this morning. Her decision amounts to a concession that her hoped-for constituency of evangelicals has abandoned her for Santorum. It also reflects the media consensus that makes Iowa a decisive test of "retail politics" even as the caucuses do nothing to prove any candidate truly presidential.

The rest of the crew carries on, though Gov. Perry seems to be wobbling after his invincibility was crushingly refuted last night. There may already be impatience among the media to reduce the race to Romney vs. Santorum. It's a storyline hostile observers probably relish: the religious exotic against the religious extremist, the corporate man against the lately-minted heartland populist. It's the storyline reporters hoped for four years ago, when it would have been Romney vs. Huckabee but for the now-mysterious rise of Sen. McCain, who has just endorsed Romney, a man for whom McCain expressed virtually unveiled contempt in 2008. Santorum actually welcomes McCain's decision as a clarifying moment absent from the last campaign, since now the two most prominent "moderates" are on the same side. Santorum would probably like things clarified further by Gingrich's exit, but the former Speaker has no real reason to quit just yet, and may prove stronger in New Hampshire, a state where Santorum's style is probably less welcome. Meanwhile, Rep. Paul will probably get his 20% or so wherever he goes. That should tell him that his only real influence this year will be as a threat to bolt. His job should be to play chicken with the front-runners with an eye to the convention platform -- to make clear to the rest of the Republicans that they must accommodate him and his movement or suffer the consequences in November. I doubt whether he'd be deterred by the prospect of being blamed for President Obama's second term -- but some of his supporters might, including his own son. But he'll need to show that he can draw a consistent turnout that'll follow him out of the party if necessary. Iowa alone doesn't prove that, but as I said, Iowa proves nothing. It just gives us all something to write about.

The Gingrich-Romney Duel: If Only...

2012-01-03T18:19:00.000-05:00

I don't mean the Iowa caucuses; those aren't mano-a-mano anyway. I'm thinking speculatively, actually, of what would have happened had a candidate of 200 years ago said about another what Gingrich says about Romney here:

The fact that this is a news story even today tells you that the charge still has weight. It's as if the news media has some sort of species-memory of the consequences that should follow, but won't. Instead, the story will probably be along the lines of this being Newt's last desperate outburst, further if not ultimate proof of his intemperate impulsiveness. On one hand, it may be proof of our progress as a culture if a Romney simply shrugs off this sort of personal attack and takes the attitude that it only proves the attacker's wretchedness. On the other, a Gingrich gets to make the attack without facing any consequences, except perhaps at the polls where he now seems likely to lose anyway. Our modern standard of civil liberty requires speech, and political speech especially, to be risk-free. By that standard, were Romney to demand satisfaction from Gingrich, or were he to sue his rival for libel, it would be seen as Romney suppressing Gingrich and as such suppressing dissent (presuming Romney to be in a position of power) and chilling everyone else's freedom of speech. But are we really better off when politicians can lie about each other -- I make no judgment of Gingrich's charge -- with impunity apart from the inferred judgment of an election? Is truth served? If not, how about the public good? Lest you think me bloodthirsty, all I'm really asking is for politicians to be compelled to admit error and apologize when caught in lies. Is that too much to ask?

At last: the Santorum Surge?

2012-01-03T13:17:00.000-05:00

Six months ago it was a joke to suggest that Rick Santorum, the former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, would get his turn among the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination. The joke was funny because the idea was both absurd and logical; Tea Partiers were burning through all the available alternatives to Mitt Romney, but even Herman Cain got his turn before Santorum did. In fact, reactionaries had to rush through a forgetful flirtation with Newt Gingrich before they finally turned to the Pennsylvanian, who seemed even more of a non-starter than most because he'd been humiliated in his last campaign. Now, however, he appears to be peaking just in time for tonight's caucuses in Iowa, and David Brooks has taken it upon himself to explain why to readers of the New York Times.

In short, Brooks sees Santorum as this year's Mike Huckabee, an economic reactionary who yet seems capable of empathy with the white working class. As Brooks observes, "The Republican Party is the party of the white working class," -- not, of course, in the sense that it serves that class's interests, but on the evidence that, for whatever reason, that demographic element prefers to vote for Republicans. If the white working class seems dissatisfied with Mitt Romney, Brooks explains that Romney is self-evidently not one of them, as a matter of class, not religion. Santorum, the columnist explains, is "the grandson of a coal miner and the son of an Italian immigrant" and unafraid to make populist-seeming arguments against "Goldwater-style conservatism" and supply-side economics. He speaks, Brooks claims, for all the Republicans who don't read Ayn Rand and who see moral and economic decline as related phenomena. In fact, that linkage seems to be what makes these members of the white working class -- the majority, apparently -- Republican.

It’s a diverse group, obviously, but its members generally share certain beliefs and experiences. The economy has been moving away from them. The ethnic makeup of the country is shifting away from them. They sense that the nation has gone astray: marriage is in crisis; the work ethic is eroding; living standards are in danger; the elites have failed; the news media sends out messages that make it harder to raise decent kids. They face greater challenges, and they’re on their own. The Republicans harvest their votes but have done a poor job responding to their needs....

[Santorum] is not a representative of the corporate or financial wing of the party. Santorum certainly wants to reduce government spending (faster even than Representative Paul Ryan). He certainly wants tax reform. But he goes out of his way in his speeches to pick fights with the “supply-siders.” He scorns the Wall Street bailouts. His economic arguments are couched as values arguments: If you want to enhance long-term competitiveness, you need to strengthen families. If companies want productive workers, they need to be embedded in wholesome communities.

As some critics have already pointed out, Brooks has overstated Santorum's working-class status a little. The ex-Senator's immigrant father was a clinical psychologist, it turns out, and Santorum himself sports an MBA as well as a law degree, albeit not with Ivy League vintage. Brooks is correct, apparently, about Santorum distancing himself from supply-side economics, according to this report. At least one observer from the conservative media notes a similar trend. A less-sympathetic reporter, however, heard Santorum recently talk of "incentivizing" the economy with "supply-side principles," so the candidate hasn't exactly repudiated the doctrine, though he may now be less dogmatic about it than some of his rivals.

Whatever his current economic policy, it appears inextricably linked to Santorum's family-values moralism. Brooks's paraphrase above says as much. The candidate has observed that single-parent families are suffering more from the sluggish economy, and that encouraging marriage would bolster everyone's resilience -- but on that principle we might all fare better if we pooled our resources and lived on a barracks plan. That's not part of God's Plan, however, so it isn't part of Santorum's, either. His plan envisions "Judeo-Christian morality" (sexual category) as an essential element to a healthily functioning economy, and his rhetoric caters to the suspicion of some in the white working class that economic decline has followed from moral decline -- from America's falling away from God. Some of Santorum's pieties even give Brooks the creeps, but he seems to feel that religion shouldn't be a deal-breaker for the Santorum campaign. It shouldn't be -- as long as the candidate can defend any position he takes with an argument besides "God says so," and does not expect every American to submit to the bedroom rules of ancient nomads and a deity whose authority need not be recognized. The real question is whether those requirements are deal-breakers for Santorum, but that question is probably moot, since Brooks himself expects Santorum to lose in the long run, spent into oblivion (should he survive Iowa) by the Romney machine. In that case, maybe the question Santorum should ask himself is whether his doom would be less inevitable if he shelved the revival act and emphasized the empathy without passing judgment on poor people's living arrangements. Even then, his foreign policy, like that of all Republicans except Ron Paul, disqualifies him from serious consideration outside the GOP base, but he might at least have a better chance of asking for consideration outside the base if more of his opinions weren't ... well ... so base.

Resolutions: looking back and looking forward

2012-01-02T17:23:00.002-05:00

Welcome to 2012. The crying need for a viable independent presidential candidate -- or the need for ordinary Americans to recruit one -- is likely to grow more obvious as we move forward from tomorrow's caucuses in Iowa. While it may not prove very helpful, I propose to repeat this year what I did here four years ago and present profiles of the various people running for President in 2012. Some if not most of these people will be hopeless eccentrics, but my hope is that their examples will clarify our sense of what we really want in and from a President. One of the morals of my 2008 survey was that self-nomination is nearly always suspect, but we will certainly encounter candidates of small parties who've been chosen by people besides themselves. That's the beginning of real independence: not simply choosing an unfamiliar brand but actually contributing to the creation of an alternate product. Americans need to trade their consumerist notion of politics for a producerist one; if they don't like the existing choices they ought to be able to give themselves more. At the same time, this blog will look back periodically one hundred years to 1912, when the country had two potent and starkly different examples of independent campaigns: Theodore Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" campaign, which depended upon his celebrity and credibility as a former President, and Eugene Debs's Socialist campaign, which came at a moment when the Socialists appeared poised for a national breakthrough to major-party status. It should prove instructive to the present to see what options were available for Roosevelt and Debs that may not be available now. On the other hand, communications technology should give any 2012 independent a tremendous advantage over any insurgent of 100 years ago. One way or another, we should figure out whether it is easier or more difficult now for an independent, famous or not, to challenge the American Bipolarchy. I hope to make it all equally informative and entertaining, but as always, it'll be up to all of you to figure this year out for yourselves. Be sure to come back soon.

Occupiers, hecklers and the tragedy of the speech commons

2011-12-30T19:31:00.000-05:00

Embittered erstwhile Occupiers in Albany continue to make their presence felt more than one week after the city evicted them from Academy Park. While continuing their legal challenge to the injunction that enabled their eviction, they've come in for criticism for one person's posting on Facebook of a "wanted poster" with personal information about the mounted policeman who pepper-sprayed Occupiers on Dec. 22. Yesterday, some members of the media turned on them, as the Times Union reports, when some Occupiers heckled Mayor Jerry Jennings.

Protesters began to shout "shame" until being chastised by a gaggle of news photographers, who noted the occupiers had not been interrupted — except perhaps by the sound of power tools somewhere in the building — during their lengthy press conference, which included a slide show of police moving in to capture their final tent.

The incident reminds me of the time a local Republican leader showed up at Academy Park for a photo op and complained that he couldn't have an actual discussion with the Occupiers, so intent were they on chanting slogans and heckling him. I've always found the resort to chanting among leftist demonstrators annoying, especially when the chanting is employed to drown out a speaker. But I can also understand the frustration that drives them. This nation is dedicated on paper to free speech. It can be argued that Citizens United and other Supreme Court decisions dating back to Buckley v. Valeo have effectively commodified political speech, but I want to make a separate point. Many of our American ideas of freedom are based on a premise of infinite resources. Many self-styled libertarians (civil or otherwise) explicitly repudiate a "zero-sum" mentality that links one person's excess to another's deprivation. The realm of public discourse might seem to be one where zero-sum reasoning should not apply; everyone in this country can rant as he or she pleases, unless the ranting threatens the President or persuades theatergoers that the house is on fire. But while all of us can talk, or write, who gets heard or read? Not everyone, obviously --it's physically impossible. Inequality has to be taken into account. Some people can obviously get themselves heard more than others. In some cases, those people are entitled to some degree of precedence because they're elected officials. Others are not elected, but claim entitlement to precedence due to wealth or fame. They have resources for capturing our attention that most people lack. In theory, they have no more freedom of speech than anyone else, but in practice the facts differ. Because everyone's time is limited, the ease with which some people claim our attention causes us to neglect others whose opinions are equally if not more worthy of a hearing. Those who are ignored are presumed to have failed to sell themselves in the marketplace of ideas, while each individual's right to ignore any other individual is upheld as a matter of personal liberty. The situation is not fair and can never be made perfectly fair. Unless we were to absolutely reduce government to the village level, it would be impossible for every citizen in a polity to have equal time and equal attention from every other citizen. Inevitably, some people will earn an entitlement to a respectful hearing, ideally by establishing a reputation for sagacity. But our current social order tends toward the monopolization of attention by elites who have no such reputation, or else flaunt a spurious one.

Dissidents might be forgiven for believing that some people, including elected officials, take up too much of our time while other opinions, not to mention other facts, need to be heard. A claque of chanting hecklers is unlikely to believe that those who disagree should never be heard; their opinion is more likely that the other side has already been heard from more than enough. That doesn't mean that heckling isn't rude, or that the Albany photographers were wrong to take offense at those who heckled the mayor. Each person has the prerogative to choose between conflicting claims on his attention. A right to be heard may be postulated, and it may even be deemed essential to democracy, but no one can presume a right to succeed in persuading listeners. My point isn't that we all must listen to the Occupiers and heed their advice or do as they demand. But democracy must allow them some leeway to assert the necessity of our listening to them, and when the time that might require seems to be monopolized by the establishment, the assertion -- the conflicting assertions in many cases -- will get messy. Ideally, it gets no more messy than heckling, which is not the same as permanently silencing anybody. A mayor can find another time to be heard easily enough. In any event, such messiness is inevitable wherever and whenever it becomes evident that people are not hearing the whole story about their polity or all sides of the most meaningful issues. It can seem sometimes as if we're not hearing all the choices, or even the original question. In such cases, free speech hasn't been free enough, or it's been too free. Freedom of discourse is what we really want in a democratic republic -- but do we have it when some can expect to be heard all the time and others can expect never to be heard? Democracy may depend on your answer.

American History needs Bipolarchy Studies

2011-12-29T19:36:00.002-05:00

The December Journal of American History features a round-table discussion on the historiography of modern American conservatism. Kim Phillips-Fein leads the discussion with a survey of writing and thinking on conservatism since the 1960s, when the movement was seen as an aberration requiring psychological explanations about "status anxiety" and so on. Over the last 20 years, approximately, historians have felt challenged to account for the late-century success of conservatism, which challenged liberal complacency about historical "progress." Some have gone so far as to argue that, rather than conservatism being an aberration, liberal success from the 1930s through the 1980s may have been the exceptional moment in American history, with deeply ingrained conservative habits of thinking slowly reasserting themselves beginning in the 1960s. Students of conservatism attempt to explain several things: why conservatives believe what they believe, how they organized to overcome apparent marginalization, and how they managed to become the dominant force in American politics from 1980 forward. The questions should raise corollary questions about liberalism: how did they lose the popular mandate, and what did they do, if anything, to alienate electoral majorities?

There have been intellectual and sociological studies of the great change in American politics between 1964 and 1980, and the contributors to the JAH round table cite a variety of different approaches and attitudes toward the subject. Few, however, consider the possibility that structural forces in the political order, most obviously the dominant two-party paradigm, influenced the ideological and demographic evolution of both conservatism and liberalism. Wilfred M. McClay suggestively describes the "symbiotic relationship" of conservatism and liberalism, calling for more attention to the "dialectical element in that relationship," but his comments seem restricted to the realm of ideas. Lisa McGirr comes closer to the mark when she argues that "more attention might be paid to the role of traditional political parties as powerful institutions in American life." She adds:

Central to the story of the Right's policy successes, after all, has been the transformation of loosely structured parties into our contemporary, highly organized, ideologically disciplined national parties. Of course, any understanding of continuity on the Right should look far more closely at strongholds of antiliberal sentiments in Congress within both the Democratic and Republican parties throughout the post-New Deal years.

Today's ideological discipline, however, might be overrated. It may be true that everyone seems eager to enforce ideological discipline within a party, but a perpetual hunt for heretics, decentralized to the point of chaos, isn't really the same thing as discipline. The Republican party in particular looks increasingly like a coalition of components increasingly uncomfortable with one another, united only in autumn by hostility to the liberal strawman. The GOP coalition always appears on the verge of flying apart, and in our recent past a Democratic coalition did fall apart -- the crack-up resulted not in a new party but in mass defections to the Republicans. Why did that happen, and why might the Republicans suffer a similar fate? Bipolarchy may provide part of the answer. Under Bipolarchy, each of the two major parties inevitably becomes an uneasy coalition, though each appears in the other's eyes, and is portrayed in the other's propaganda, as a monolithic negative. This coalition building is a two-way street. The major parties are always out to attract new interest groups, if only to prevent them from forming third parties. New interest groups seek influence within the major parties because they see no chance of success as independents. But as each party adds to its coalition, it risks alienating older coalition members. This seems to have happened to the Democrats, where New Deal progressives once worked with segregationist Southerners, but lost their support while pursuing black votes nationwide. In pursuing the counterculture vote in the Seventies, they alienated older working-class people who had been economically liberal but had always upheld traditional morality and had not questioned America's role abroad. Those older Democrats occasionally turned to third parties, but finally became "Reagan Republicans," or had gone GOP sooner thanks to Nixon's "Southern strategy." Historians ought to ask how much Bipolarchy had to do with that fateful shift, whether under different circumstances alienated Dixiecrats might have remained a third force, one potentially capable of controlling the balance of power in Congress if not capturing the Presidency, instead of throwing their lot with the Republican party. Historians with a broader view might ask how much of our political history since 1860 has been shaped decisively by the pathological imperative to have only two "real" choices. Others should be asking how that pathological imperative came to dominate our thinking, looking back to Martin Van Buren's revulsion at the four-way 1824 election and his insistence that American voters always be given the starkest two-way choice possible. It may be that historians will never be able to answer the questions they ask now about conservative ascendancy unless they understand better how Bipolarchy shapes not only our electoral structure but the attitudes of citizens. For those historians with progressive biases, the possibility that Bipolarchy makes conservative hegemony possible should make it a promising field of study. Conservatives should be interested in the subject to the extent that a conservative party may be the defining feature of Bipolarchy, and to the extent that conservative party building inevitably compromises conservative principles. A commitment from any quarter to Bipolarchy Studies would be a welcome sign, because that would mean that someone, for once, is not taking Bipolarchy for granted.

The Gingrich Advantage?

2011-12-28T18:03:00.002-05:00

For nearly a week it's been the new fad to declare the Gingrich boom over. The candidate's failure to secure a spot on the ballot for the Virginia Republican primary has been portrayed as a major setback and a reflection on his organizational skills, which had been the subject of much criticism earlier this year. The spotlight has shifted to a perceived late boom for Ron Paul and the effort to drag him down by association with his (to say the least) ill-supervised newsletter of the Eighties and Nineties. Meanwhile, a modest statistic appears that seems to distinguish Gingrich from the rest of the Republican pack. The Gallup polling organization has released its annual list of Most Admired Americans, in male and female categories, as determined by respondents to a four day poll conducted with USA Today. As is customary, the President of the United States is the most admired man in the country. That is, 17% of respondents named Barack Obama, compared to only 3% for the runner-up male, who happens to be the previous President. Gingrich places sixth on the current list, albeit with approximately 1% of respondents naming him. That places him just behind Warren Buffett and just ahead of Donald Trump. This may not look impressive, except for the fact that no other male aspirant for the GOP nomination appears on the top-ten list. Despite everything, it seems, more people admire Gingrich than admire Mitt Romney or even Ron Paul -- whose standing may have been undermined by the poll's old-school phone-survey methodology. For the record, Rep. Bachmann placed tenth among Most Admired Women, with 2% of respondents naming her, well behind Secretary Clinton, the Most Admired by a wide margin, and non-candidate Sarah Palin, whose standing fell drastically from last year.

As with any poll measuring nationwide popularity, the benefits for someone who needs geographically concentrated support are limited. But Gingrich and his supporters ought to take heart from this news, however modest it may look. It would appear that he can depend upon a foundation of mass admiration that doesn't seem to exist for any of his male rivals. Meanwhile, and by the same standard, Democrats might take heart from the massive admiration gap separating the President from his most popular challengers. Of course, this isn't the same as asking people whom they'll vote for, but you never can tell....

Was Albany's Christmas Occupied?

2011-12-27T12:37:00.001-05:00

"Just do the math," a middle-aged Albany woman explained to her fellow bus passengers yesterday, "On December 22 the city evicted those protesters from the park. The next night, somebody vandalizes the holiday lights. Just do the math."

The facts are these. Someone sneaked into Washington Park after hours on the night of December 23-4 and destroyed or defaced a number of the light displays erected there for the holiday season. It's been a holiday tradition for the park to be lit up and carloads of people to pay so they can drive through and see the colorful displays, many of them corporate-sponsored. The money goes to youth programs sponsored by the Police Athletic League. The vandals left behind signs and graffiti with anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist slogans. You can see one of the signs here; it reads "The commons are not for sale ... Stop shopping." To my knowledge, none of these tags identified the vandals with the Occupy Albany movement, yet people are drawing "mathematically" obvious conclusions, for the most part. Many people assume that the vandalism is revenge for the eviction of Occupy Albany from Academy Park, while a much smaller number make the equally predictable case against an agent provocateur seeking to further discredit the movement. The perpetrators remain at large, repairs have been made, and people can continue to visit the lights through the end of the year.

I haven't found any evidence of anti-Christmas vandalism anyplace else where an Occupation has taken place or been evicted, though some incidents of generic vandalism, usually graffiti, have been blamed on Occupiers. Vandalism doesn't seem to be part of the m.o. of the Occupy movement, but the Occupations have been a movement of movements, inevitably including people of an anti-consumerist bent. Anti-consumerism is the party line, if you'll excuse the phrase, of Adbusters magazine, the publication that allegedly inspired the original Wall Street Occupation. But not everyone who participated in an Occupation responded specifically to a call from Adbusters. Anti-consumerist vandalism predates the Occupations of 2011 by quite a while, most notoriously taking the form of arson against car lots. Vandalism in Washington Park also has an apolitical history of its own, past miscreants having massacred the flowers for which Albany's annual Tulip Festival is named on at least one occasion. This incident, however, strikes me as more than mindless vandalism. Whoever did it either sympathizes with the anti-consumerist movement or is familiar enough with it to imitate its rhetoric. I can't really see anyone feeling motivated enough to perpetrate this vandalism just to blame it on someone else, i.e. the Albany Occupiers, now that the Occupation has been dispersed. I doubt that anyone in authority in Albany feels sufficiently threatened by the movement. My guess is that an Occupier or group of Occupiers did this -- but blaming the Occupiers or the Occupy movement as a whole is probably way off base. The movement's component members are no longer bound by general-assembly discipline, as far as I know, to require each other's approval before taking fresh action. In fact, I'm actually somewhat surprised that nothing like this has happened in an Occupied city previously, and that a counterattack hasn't taken an even more drastic form like pulling or cutting down an official Christmas tree.

If an Occupier did the Albany job, he or she probably won't win any applause from the rest of the movement. The vandalism only confirms the worst impressions people have had about the Occupations -- which is why some people would like to see the episode as a frame-up. The Capital Lights were a lousy target because they entertain children for the benefit of a children's charity, no matter how infuriating those corporate logos may have been to some people. I'm tempted to close with a warning about the anger provoked by municipal repression in the perceived service of corporate domination, but I'm still not entirely convinced that the Washington Park vandalism is much more than a vicious prank, and that even the slogans were written in a pranking spirit. If a warning would prove useful, however, then be warned by all means.

Will vs. Gingrich: the third assault

2011-12-23T13:48:00.000-05:00

In his rage against Newt Gingrich George Will seems to have forgotten that the establishment's task this week is to attack Ron Paul as an anti-American appeasing bigot. In three philippics so far, Will has tried to demonstrate that the former Speaker is the "least conservative" of the aspirants for the Republican presidential nomination. In past columns, Will's evidence for that claim has been that Gingrich has: 1) ideas he wants to implement as policy to improve the national economy; and 2) criticized Mitt Romney for running a business that laid off people. Satisfied with that evidence, Will now amplifies his claim, condemning Gingrich as the "anti-conservative" candidate. That still may not be true, but at least this time Will has a potentially substantive case against the Georgian, though he comes late to it. One week ago, when Will was deploring Gingrich's supposed disrespect for the creative destruction that fuels capitalism, other writers were pointing to a white paper the candidate had published rejecting executive deference to the judicial branch of government. Gingrich's position is that the doctrine of judicial supremacy, according to which the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution and the constitutionality of laws, has encouraged an unchecked expansion of judicial power and an inevitable usurpation of legislative and executive prerogatives. He believes that the other branches have been provided with checks against the judiciary, but have been intimidated into submission since the 1950s. He does not believe that it should be necessary to draft and ratify a constitutional amendment for anyone other than the Supreme Court to reverse a Court decision.

[A] Gingrich administration will reject the theory of judicial supremacy and will reject passivity as a response to Supreme Court rulings that ignore executive and legislative concerns and which seek to institute policy changes that more properly rest with Congress. A Gingrich administration will use any appropriate executive branch powers, by itself and acting in coordination with the legislative branch, to check and balance any Supreme Court decision it believes to be fundamentally unconstitutional and to rein in any federal judge(s) whose rulings exhibit a disregard for the Constitution.

Gingrich believes that judicial supremacy can be refuted simply by having the executive and legislature repudiate it and, more practically speaking, by reclaiming their constitutional powers to check and balance the courts. Among these, according to Alexander Hamilton (writing as "Publius" in Federalist No. 81) is Congress's power to impeach judges. Hamilton appears to give Gingrich a mandate for using impeachments as a check on judicial usurpation, or on judges making unconstitutional decisions. Presidents from Jefferson to FDR have disputed the finality of Court decisions -- and Will would certainly deem "anti-conservative" Gingrich's apparent endorsement of FDR's failed scheme to pack the Court, as well as the scheme's success in intimidating Justices into compliance with the New Deal.

It becomes clear once you read the white paper that Gingrich argues for checks against the judiciary in the name of a conservative principle, whether Will recognizes it as such or not. Gingrich works from the premise that the Constitution is not simply what the current Court majority says it is, and that there can be such a thing as an unconstitutional Supreme Court decision. While Will accuses Gingrich of practicing "majoritarianism," and desiring that legislative majorities should trump judicial majorities, he fails to acknowledge that the white paper explicitly avows originalism as the basis for Gingrich's proposals. Gingrich can claim that a Court decision is unconstitutional because he believes in an analytical method that reliably determines the constitutionality of any law. That method is originalism, a reference to and reliance on the stated intentions of the Framers -- and, presumably, the intentions of the Amenders. If a President, Representative or Senator is satisfied that a Justice has ruled against the Framers' original intent, he or she has grounds for action against the Court, from impeachment to simply ignoring a decision.

Originalism is itself a conservative principle, usually asserted in opposition to the notion of a "living constitution" that should be interpreted in light of current conditions and evolving standards. Why doesn't Will acknowledge Gingrich's position as conservative? Why does he characterize Gingrich's position as "sinister radicalism" instead? Will may simply be blinded by his distaste for the candidate's "protean" mentality and supposed egomania -- if not by vicarious loyalty to his wife's employer, Gov. Perry. Despite all Gingrich's avowals of fidelity to original intent, Will clearly doesn't trust him not to interpret the Constitution according to a momentary whim. For Will, the "central conservative virtue" is "prudence," the opposite of which is impatience. For him, a Supreme Court decision striking down a law should occasion a national time-out, during which a Constitutional amendment might be proposed and thoroughly deliberated. Anything else would be an impatient, imprudent "anti-conservative" backlash against the "least dangerous" branch of government. Of course, Will may also dispute Gingrich's idea of original intent, as might be inferred from the columnist's sneer at the candidate's overheated reaction to a ruling against the Pledge of Allegiance. Gingrich's originalism is obnoxiously traditionalist and pietistic, but those qualities certainly don't make it "anti-conservative." A liberal might say "quite the opposite!" But Will's serial denunciation of Gingrich repeatedly illustrates how much conservatism in America is a matter of attitude rather than principle, and that may help explain why so many self-styled conservatives are so hard to deal with. If they can't even trust each other, where does that leave the rest of us?

For Christmas, no room at the park for Occupy Albany

2011-12-22T19:35:00.000-05:00

For the past two weeks, Academy Park has had a vaguely ironic look to it as the city's holiday decorations glowed at night next to the diminished tent city that was Occupy Albany. The occupiers had been on borrowed time since the city had extended their permit to an absolute deadline of today. Negotiations had reportedly been ongoing over continuing the encampment -- the city has never disputed the right to hold daytime protests there -- but the Occupation's fate was probably sealed by the report from last weekend of someone sneaking into one of the tents and attacking its occupant. Given the presence of homeless people and the constant possibility of a sudden crackdown, the apparent absence of any sort of voluntary security, of even people assigned to watch in shifts, was distressing. It came out today that there had been two similar attacks recently. The city may well be making more of these incidents than they justified, but these were the circumstances under which Mayor Jerry Jennings' patience was finally exhausted.

Walking up Lark Street this morning I saw the streetlamps and telephone poles tagged with postcards and xeroxes urging people to defend Academy Park. These bore the familiar image identified either with failed historical terrorist Guy Fawkes or fictionally successful terrorist "V." I know that for many people "V" stands for generic resistance, but he was a poor mascot for people who were presumably outraged when Tea Partiers spoke of "Second Amendment remedies" for alleged misgovernment. In any event, these signs hinted that, if the showdown came today, Occupy Albany would not go down without a fight. And it didn't -- but it did go down.

So now we've had one more round of street theater and one more lesson in the parameters of "free speech," and we have a new year on the way. You can look here for a more complete story, but the moral of the story remains to be determined. Some parts are easy, and always have been. There was yet another guy on the news this evening saying the First Amendment doesn't extend to pitching a tent, but I say that if money is speech, so is a tent. If there is no limit to how much a person can spend to make his point, there's no rightful limit to how much time a person wants to spend making a point. In the U. S. Senate, there is the right to filibuster. Some people deplore this fact, but they should concede that as long as politicians have it, ordinary people should as well. Perhaps the clearest lesson learned from all the Occupations nationwide is about Americans' patience for protest in this so-called Year of the Protester. At a certain point, and quite early in many cases, protest became obnoxious to many of us, and not simply because we thought the Occupiers had no agenda or direction. It became offensive for these people to declare a crisis of democracy, to claim that the vast majority had been marginalized. Yet even if they were wrong to blame the crisis collectively and exclusively on 1% of the population, their own fate proved their point about their own marginalization. They were not allowed to claim more than an implicit ration of speech while the highest court of the land recognizes no meaningful limit on the speech money can buy. That fact alone makes further protest imperative -- but I wonder whether I'll actually see anyone exercising the privilege promised them by the city tomorrow morning. I hope I do, but that can't be the end of it. 2012 is nearly upon us, and now is the time for resolution.

Post-Norquist Conservatism: Higher Taxes, Less Government?

2011-12-20T19:19:00.002-05:00

As the Gingrich-Paul-Romney demolition derby in Iowa warns of another meltdown of "movement" conservatism, David Brooks calls our attention in his latest New York Times column to a conservative thinker who actually seems to be looking forward and beyond today's taxophobia. Steven F. Hayward writes for the Breakthrough Journal, where his piece on "Modernizing Conservatism" caught Brooks's attention. In some respects, there's nothing new about Hayward's article. As has been done for nearly sixty years, Hayward asks Republicans to concede that the New Deal welfare state is here to stay. What's different is Hayward's conclusion that the latest right-wing attempt to destroy it, the "starve the beast" strategy of denying funds by lowering taxes, has failed, that despite tax cuts government has continued to grow. The reason for this, he suggests, is that Republicans ever since Ronald Reagan have cut taxes without actually cutting government substantially, preferring to fund programs through borrowing instead of taxation. This was a matter of political pragmatism; Hayward concedes that Reagan would not have been as popular as he was in the Eighties had he actually cut programs as deeply as some Republican ideologues wanted. It was also highly irresponsible, hiding the real cost of entitlement programs from the taxpayer. "[T]he starve-the-beast strategy currently allows Americans to receive a dollar in government services while only having to pay 60 cents for it," he notes. We might expect a Republican to say that the solution is to actually cut the programs -- that seems to be the view of Tea Partiers, for instance. Hayward, however, argues that the only way to control the growth of entitlement spending -- he doesn't really even suggest rolling it back -- is to "Serve the Check," to raise taxes in order to impress upon taxpayers the real cost of entitlement programs. He believes that conservatives and liberals could agree to shield middle-class families from the increase by increasing the per-child tax credit while reducing other deductions for corporations and individuals. Raising taxes is bound to create a backlash, but Hayward expects the end result to be not a rollback of entitlements but an overdue institution of means-testing for many entitlements.

While Hayward's tax proposals are the highlight of his article for Brooks, he goes on to argue for stronger Republican commitment to infrastructure and environmental protection. Hayward exposes what he calls a "non sequitur" of the Right: "the environment has mostly become a cause of the Left, therefore environmental problems are either phony or are not worth considering" While still holding out for "free-market" solutions to environmental problems, he insists primarily that conservatives can't yield a major area of public concern completely to the other side.

Hayward displays a modesty of ambition that seems genuinely conservative, repudiating the ideologue's zeal for total victory and admitting that collaboration and compromise between parties is necessary for government to function effectively. While affirming that "the divisions between Left and Right are fundamental and unbridgeable," and that "Left and Right have conflicting modes of moral reasoning that cannot be easily synthesized or bridged," he regards the following as the more important point.

There are three dominant political facts of our age that conservative thinkers (and also liberals) need to acknowledge. The first is the plain fact that neither ideological camp will ever defeat the other so decisively as to be able to govern without the consent of the other side. This is not merely my political judgment; it is sewn into the nature of America's basic institutions and political culture.

The unbridgeable divisions are the second fact, while the permanence of the "entitlement state" is the third. Returning to the first point at the end of his essay, Hayward makes his strongest argument for compromise:

Achieving policy compromise and the reconstruction of a "vital center" requires an end to the view of practical politics as a zero-sum game, in which compromise is regarded as a defeat by both sides....Consent does not require surrender. Liberals and conservatives do not agree about the principle of equality in American life and probably never will. Conservatives emphasize equal opportunity while accepting or even celebrating unequal outcomes. Conservatives see nothing inherently unjust about large disparities in the distribution of income or wealth, and also offer practical reasons why unequal rewards make for a more dynamic, creative, and ultimately wealthier society. Liberals strongly prefer more equal results, with many viewing disparities in income or wealth as random (Richard Gephardt once referred to the structure of America's wealth and income distribution as a "lottery"), and, as a result, favor egalitarian policies and entitlement programs. Even so, most liberals are not pure redistributionists, and generally support policies that broaden opportunity for individual advancement, while few conservatives are entirely indifferent to the importance of income mobility and social opportunity....While liberals and conservatives may disagree on the very notion of equality, they can agree on certain points -- for example, that stagnating incomes are problematic -- and can achieve policy agreement in certain key areas.

Hayward closes by addressing the challenge of ideology. "It may be that internal ideological reformation must precede bipartisan political compromise," he writes, hoping that his own call for a conservative reformation will be echoed by a liberal reformation. "[N]either movement has properly adapted to the changing fabric of modern society," he concludes, which is why pragmatic compromise leaves ideologues dissatisfied. Finally, "[B]efore the two camps can agree to an agenda truly in the national interest, liberals and conservatives must first reform themselves." Of course, it may not be necessary to wait. If the national interest is self-evident enough to non-ideologues, voters ought to be able to purge government of unreformed conservatives and liberals. It should not be up to the ideologues themselves to reform, however desirable it'd be for them to do so, if elections allow us to replace them with pragmatists and moderates. If they do not, Hayward may be compelled to reconsider whether partisanship itself, rather than raw ideology, is what Americans need to reform.

Limbaugh on Ron Paul and "real conservatives"

2011-12-19T15:25:00.001-05:00

The only reason I found myself looking at Rush Limbaugh's website today was that Mr. Peepers, who makes a masochistic habit of listening to the Limbaugh show, had told me that Rush was complaining that the Republican establishment was trying to shut him up. Since Limbaugh most likely remains the nation's leading cheerleader for Republicans, or what Republicans call conservatism, I was curious about the complaint. This excerpt from today's transcript seems to have something to do with it. It represents Limbaugh's conspiracy-theory analysis of the campaign to date for the GOP presidential nomination.

If the Republican Party weren't so afraid of conservatism and having a conservative nominee, Ron Paul wouldn't be anywhere near winning the Hawkeye Cauci. It's just that simple...[B]ecause the Republican Party insists on insider moderates or at least gives the impression that's who they support, then it opens the door for all kinds of people to make headway because the Republican primary base is not interested in who the establishment is interested in. It's just that simple. I'll tell you something I've been saying here for the last couple, three weeks, maybe even longer than that, that Mitt Romney can't get higher than 30% anywhere. Other than New Hampshire, he gets 35. But in truth no other Republican does, either. When you get right down to it, no other Republican is, either. Now, the reason for that is primarily this. The Republican establishment is trying to split the conservative vote among all the other conservative candidates, the Gingriches, Bachmann, Perry, Santorum, I don't mean to leave anybody out here, but they're dividing that vote in the hopes of securing the nomination for Romney.

If I understand this correctly, Limbaugh is arguing that the sheer number of "conservative" candidates is proof that the GOP "establishment" doesn't really want a conservative nominee. If that was their actual desire, I infer, they would winnow the field so that there could be only one challenger to Romney. For that matter, I suppose they could just as easily persuade Romney not to run, if that's what the problem is. But because they allow (Rush might say encourage or entice) several credible conservatives to run, their strategy stands revealed in the spotlight of Limbaugh's intellect as a divide-and-conquer plan. Wouldn't some of these reputed conservatives, however presumably acceptable to Limbaugh as individuals, have to be complicit in the conspiracy? And wouldn't that throw their conservative credibility into question? If they share an obligation to clear the playing field so that primary voters have a clear choice of Romney, a conservative, and whatever Ron Paul is, and none of the four conservatives named has done so, does that mean that no true conservative is in the running? But that should have been obvious, since otherwise the dreaded establishment probably wouldn't have let any of them run in the first place -- right, Rush?

As for Rep. Paul, Limbaugh has taken to photoshopping tinfoil hats on the Texan's head and trying to impersonate Paul's voice. Limbaugh mocks him not for any suspicions Paul has about the Federal Reserve, but because the candidate dares suggest linkage between American foreign policy, Middle Eastern hostility, and terrorist attacks on this country. In other words, for the most nearly sane part of Paul's platform, Limbaugh dubs him a nut and a non-conservative. To be a "conservative," as far as Limbaugh and some others are concerned, is to affirm the exceptional right of the U.S. to attack other countries and dominate the globe. I bet even Mitt Romney believes that, but somehow Romney isn't conservative enough for Limbaugh. It's hard to tell who would be, but I suppose it's part of Limbaugh's job never to be satisfied and always to be a gadfly denouncing any deviation from ideological purity. At the same time, growing numbers of Republicans and conservatives in general resent his presumption of doctrinal dictatorship. He may revel in their resentment, but the really scary thing for him, I suspect, is the possibility that Republican leaders might simply ignore him. What can he threaten, after all? As far as I know, nothing more than a refusal to motivate his listeners to vote. But how much extra motivation will Republicans really need next year, given the hate for the President that Limbaugh has lit up as much as anyone? Yet Limbaugh already seems to be looking ahead and positioning himself to cast blame for another Republican loss. Maybe this is inherent conservative pessimism at work, but Limbaugh also seems interested in spinning 2012, as he's spun 2008, as a repudiation of something other than his own style of conservatism. It's easy not to see yourself repudiated when you never put your own neck out -- and that may be what professional Republicans resent the most about Limbaugh. Could you blame them?

Dear Leaders

2011-12-19T13:01:00.000-05:00

Kim Jong Il was the reductio ad absurdam of Bolshevism, the realization of the monarchic principle at the heart of vanguard partyism. If the people need an enlightened clique to guide them to communism, after all, why wouldn't it follow that a super-enlightened genius would be necessary to guide the clique? Concede that point and you may as well concede that the genius's gifts are hereditary, and that blood is the best qualification for ruling a People's Democratic Republic. To be fair, the Kims remain exceptional among Bolshevik leaders. Neither Mao nor Stalin reserved power for his children, nor is there a second generation of Castros waiting to take over Cuba once Fidel and Raul are finally gone. For that reason, some write off the Kims' eccentricity as some aspect of Korean culture, but there's a constant counter-example to the south to debunk the notion that Koreans somehow did this to themselves. At the same time, we might give Marxism in general some credit for inhibiting the Kims' ambitions. If not for Marx, I imagine, Kim Il Sung might have crowned himself king or emperor long ago -- and then, I imagine, fewer people would deplore the present transfer of power from the second Kim to his "Great Successor."

In more liberal quarters around the globe, the mourning for Vaclav Havel is supposed to be more sincere than the official outpourings of grief for the Dear Leader. Havel was a liberal's wet dream: a playwright and poet who rose to power pretty much through popular acclamation during Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution," the ideal champion of "civil society" against totalitarianism. He has died a hero, if not an inspiration to many during this so-called year of the protester. On the global left, however, he is remembered somewhat less warmly -- not because he helped overthrow a Warsaw Pact puppet, but because with the Velvet Revolution came neoliberalism -- civil society hardened into an ideology -- and an oh-so-principled commitment to humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect. Havel was never the obnoxious polemicist Christopher Hitchens was, but both authors were arguably warped by their moral conviction that there was nothing else worth fighting against besides political tyranny, so that Havel, too, could encourage and applaud the invasion of Iraq. In their world, the choice was between electing a Havel and being enslaved by a Kim -- eliminate the Kims of the world and the Havels will rise inevitably. The real choices weren't quite as stark, and it remains unclear whether the people win with the Havels (or Obamas) of the world, or whenever they trust in the character of a leader rather than setting an agenda themselves. It certainly makes a difference whether you're governed by a Havel or a Kim, but reverence for leaders -- even for liberal saints -- is no substitute for a principled commitment to true rule by the people.

A Divided Center?

2011-12-16T19:23:00.000-05:00

For those who despair of Bipolarchy, the people who blame the failure of government to address the economic crisis effectively on base-driven polarization, the great hope is the "center," the place in the imaginary political spectrum where the "moderates" dwell and not just compromise but reconciliation is possible. The moderate or centrist (some writers have suggested a meaningful difference between the two) is usually understood to be someone who has already achieved a compromise or synthesis of opposing ideological claims. It is assumed that the center is where consensus exists or can be achieved easily. But what if it isn't so easy? What if the center itself is divided? That's the possibility raised by Dallas Morning News columnist William McKenzie in a column that was picked up by one of my local papers this week. "The truth is, the center is not a monolithic community," McKenzie writes, "When we hear about candidates appealing to the middle, which often happens in general elections when campaigns worry about voters not aligned with either party, it’s important to understand the competing players."

According to McKenzie, two significantly different groups occupy the supposed political center. For our purposes, we can label these groups the "centrists," described by McKenzie as socially-liberal economic conservatives, and the "populists," described by the columnist as mostly cultural conservatives but driven primarily by distrust of elites. For generations, McKenzie notes, the populists followed Democrats, but have gone Republican for at least the last forty years, not counting occasional experiments with third parties. Now, however, the Occupy movements have reawakened latent hostility to economic elitism alongside recent animosity toward political and cultural elites. McKenzie believes that populists of all ideological persuasions, galvanized by the Occupations, are likely to demand that government take their side against the economic and other elites. To win the populists, Republicans may have to "lose their disdain for government." Even if they fail to do so, Democrats presumably can't depend upon the populist-center vote to the extent that they are still perceived as elitists in their own right. Whether this creates a promising opening than normal for a third party McKenzie doesn't say, though he notes that the populists have embraced George Wallace and Ross Perot in the past.

McKenzie has probably described two potential voting blocs fairly accurately, but is it accurate to say that both blocs belong to the center? What makes the populists centrist, for instance? For McKenzie, it's presumably their readiness to embrace big government as a shield or sword against elites while remaining culturally conservative. They're centrists if you plot a grid based on attitudes about government rather than culture, just as the socially-liberal economic conservatives who supposedly share the center with them might be polar opposites culturally but willing to compromise ideologically on the role of government and political action in general. If these two somewhat disparate groups comprise the political center, however, shouldn't we be able to imagine a center of the center, a position synthesizing the views and demands of both groups? Since their cultural attitudes are irrelevant to their placement on the political grid, compromise on cultural issues may not be necessary -- which is probably a good thing. McKenzie tentatively breaks the non-populist centrists down along presumed party lines as "strong-government conservatives" and "reinventing-government liberals." In general, McKenzie presumes these groups to be "comfortable both with equal rights and spending reforms." An image begins to form somewhat resembling Andrew Cuomo, the culturally-liberal austerity Democrat who governs New York State. Would Cuomo be palatable to the populists? More to the point, if Cuomo is even close to the ideal McKenzian centrist, why should we assume that McKenzie has described the actual center of American political opinion? Has he really done anything more than describe two blocs of swing voters? And should we assume that anyone who swings between voting Democrat and voting Republican is by default a centrist, much less a moderate? For all we know, the true center of American opinion might well lie to the left or right of both major parties -- or it may be impossible to plot on any conventional left-right grid. Attempting to define the center according to the choices Democrats and Republicans, or liberals and conservatives, force on us may be a fundamental mistake. We may only know when the true center has spoken, and the true moderates have arrived, when they ask their own questions and pose their own choices. When that moment comes, maybe no other label will be necessary.

Hitchens and His Era

2011-12-16T12:08:00.001-05:00

One day after the United States formally closed its occupation of Iraq, word arrives that Christopher Hitchens has lost his characteristically well-publicized battle with cancer. It's a fateful coincidence, since Hitchens was perhaps the most formidable cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, to the extent that he could not be dismissed as a mere right-winger. Hitchens had been a fierce leftist and anti-imperialist as well as being one of this generation's "new" or "militant" atheists. He was known for his insistence that Henry Kissinger be prosecuted for war crimes and his scandalous skepticism toward the sainthood claims of and for Mother Theresa. But something began to change with the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and with the September 2001 terror attacks on the U.S. the change was complete. Having never believed in the Communist menace, having instead cheered on Marxists in many places, Hitchens was now convinced that "Islamofascism" was the great enemy of mankind, a menace that could be ignored or denied only out of cowardice or intellectual dishonesty. He cut ties with most of the left, rejecting all "anti-imperialist" arguments against taking the war to the tyrants of the Middle East. It no longer mattered to him whether Americans or corporations benefited from the wars, so long as he could take it for granted that the people of the region would benefit when dictators were toppled and mujaheddin killed. For him, Islamofascism, and for all intents and purposes Islam itself, was such an evil that it should have mattered to no one who liberated Arabs, Afghans, etc. from its influence. If anyone questioned this, that only indicated that they put ideology before the global good.

It was never clear to me how completely Hitchens repudiated the left. To my knowledge, he never apologized for his leftist past, but he did develop a personal libertarian streak not inconsistent with his hostility toward religions of commandments. This never expressed itself in tirades against "big government." Instead, he sniped occasionally at "nanny-state" type regulations like the laws against smoking in restaurants. His was perhaps a typical decline for a self-conscious rebel. He remained eager to replace old orders with new, but behind it all, ever more obviously, was the petty protest of a permanent adolescent against being told what to do. It might be argued that he was never truly part of the left, if you accept as essentially leftist the imperative that we the people, and not just our governing institutions, must evolve -- that we must learn "what to do," even if we have to figure it out ourselves without an all-powerful instructor. What was left by the end was a still-admirable resistance to religion everywhere -- he was probably the closest thing our age had to H. L. Mencken, down to the political incorrectness -- and a hatred for tyranny that's hard to argue with in the abstract. Hitchens's folly was his faith that anything, apparently, was justified for the sake of toppling tyrants, his assumption that no greater problem faced the world than the existence of political or religious tyranny in various nations. To criticize Hitchens is not to defend tyranny. Everyone should hate a tyrant, but Hitchens seemed to forget over time that tyranny wasn't all we should protest against, and that avowed enmity to tyranny doesn't make anyone automatically a force for good. Now that I think of it, that last observation could stand as his epitaph.

The Gingrich Heresy

2011-12-15T15:05:00.000-05:00

If George Will was already writing two weeks ago that Newt Gingrich was the "least conservative" candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, it's easy to imagine how he'd react when Gingrich dared criticize Mitt Romney's business practices. It's so easy, in fact, that Will has written an entire new column on the subject.

Will, of course, is no fan of Romney, but he is a fan of capitalism, and like Romney, he sees Gingrich's comments on Bain Capital as a confession of economic ignorance. What terrible thing did Gingrich say? Told that Romney had (in Will's word) "mischievously" called on him to return the money Freddie Mac had paid him as a consultant, Gingrich riposted that "if Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he's earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain Capital, ... I would be glad to listen to him."

Knowing that Gingrich is, by almost any standard but Will's, a conservative, I might assume that the former Speaker was simply calling the former governor a poor businessman. Will reads more into it. Working from the assumption that Gingrich is only minimally conservative, if that, the columnist interprets the above snark as an indictment of finance capital of the sort Ted Kennedy presumably used against Romney in the 1994 senatorial election. That reading, and his apparent detection of heresy, provides Will an opportunity to preach the capitalist truth.

The Kennedy-Gingrich doctrine is this: What the economist Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s “creative destruction” is not really creative. Rather, it is lamentable and, when facilitated by capitalists, reprehensible. For Kennedy, this made sense: Reactionary liberalism holds that whatever is, from Social Security to farm subsidies to the Chrysler Corp., should forever be. But Gingrich is supposedly our infallible guide to the sunny uplands of a dynamic future.

* * *

Romney, while at Bain, performed the essential social function of connecting investment resources with opportunities. Firms such as Bain are indispensable for wealth creation, which often involves taking over badly run companies, shedding dead weight and thereby liberating remaining elements that add value. The process, like surgery, can be lifesaving. And like surgery, society would rather benefit from it than watch it.

For Will, Romney's faults have nothing to do with his business practices; it's only when he turns politician that he displeases the pundit. Will still resents an implicit swipe at Businessman Romney Mike Huckabee took back in 2008. Huckabee had said, "I want to be a president who reminds you of the guy you work with, not the guy who laid you off." Will seems to consider this distinction a vicious one; no good American should resent layoffs, he implies. Rather, they should celebrate the "animal spirits" embodied by Romney and his Bain buddies in a photo Will expects to be used against Romney by Democrats. The photo shows the Bainites "feeling their oats, with paper currency protruding from their dark suits," Will writes, adding, "We should welcome such spirits and should hope for political leadership that will hasten the day when American conditions are again receptive to them. Until then, economic dynamism will not return." As far as I can tell, Will still doesn't trust Romney himself to hasten that day (Mrs. Will advises Rick Perry), but he seems certain that Gingrich will delay it. The fact that Gingrich sees himself as a sort of futurist envisioning fundamental transformations of the economy -- with perhaps some creative political destruction thrown in -- only leaves Will more certain of his unfitness for power. Indeed, the headline over Will's column, "Newt Gingrich commits a capital crime," almost openly suggests, punning aside, that the new front-runner is worthy of death. Will's ongoing polemic against Gingrich leaves me more certain that the Republican race has crossed another threshold on the road from mere stupidity to outright madness.

The Gingrich Mania

2011-12-14T13:35:00.000-05:00

Newt Gingrich is the raw nerve of the Republican party, if not for the entire conservative movement. His emergence as a front-runner reveals a stark difference between the mere lack of enthusiasm felt for Mitt Romney and the visceral hatred many Republicans feel for Gingrich. He embodies a kind of schizophrenia on the American right-wing. As the latest anti-Romney, he is presumed to be the "conservative" candidate of the moment, on the premise that Romney is still perceived by many to be insufficiently conservative. At the same time, Gingrich is being violently denounced by much of the Republican punditocracy, including some who are no fans of Romney. I've already noted George Will's argument that Gingrich is the "least conservative" Republican candidate; now Charles Krauthammer calls Gingrich a rhetorical "socialist" for daring to criticize the way Romney ran his businesses. In Newsweek this week, former congressional colleagues condemn him for his domineering ways as Speaker of the House, Joe Scarboroguh bluntly calling Gingrich a "bad person."

The odd thing about all this is that the base is embracing Gingrich, while the pundits are lambasting him, when the reverse ought to be the case. After all, the pundits are attacking him for being an intellectual -- or perhaps a pseudo-intellectual -- the sort of character the base is supposed to despise and distrust. In Newsweek, Gingrich doesn't hide this side of himself. "If you want to smear people who are trying to think, fine," he tells his critics. He describes himself as "an eclectic person of deeply conservative philosophy, who is dedicated to being effective," and commits himself to experimentation in public policy.

“So, we’re gonna help the poor?” he asks. “Truth is, we don’t know how to help the poor. We’re gonna experiment and experiment and experiment until we break through.”

This commitment to experimentation, and Gingrich's often overboard promotion of new ideas, clearly annoy many avowedly conservative opinionators -- but it should be annoying the base as well, on the widely-held assumption that the base is essentially anti-intellectual, and so far it isn't. The discrepancy makes me wonder whether the alleged "anti-intellectualism" of the Republican base has all along been merely a matter of attitude. It's clear that the pundits don't like Gingrich's attitude; they see him, in Newsweek's words, as "a voluble narcissist, given to grandiosity, and prone to intellectual faddism." They perceive a lack of intellectual modesty, an absence of the politician's appropriate deference to the private sector and the divine workings of the Market. Much is made of Gingrich's current enthusiasm for the "management-efficiency doctrine" known as "Lean Six Sigma," and the assumption implicit in the contemptuous commentary is that a politician should not act like a manager, should not assume that he can steer the economy or society in any chosen direction. It may be, however, that when the base hears the same Gingrich rhetoric they hear the voice of entrepreneurship, salesmanship, boosterism. The base has been looking for someone, it seems, who'll treat the Presidency like a radio talk show, as a bully pulpit to refute liberalism and pull no punches doing so. Gingrich would probably do that, and his gift of gab may sound little different to the base from the non-stop opining of their favorite radio talkers. I don't doubt that the Republican base is full of ideas -- most of them hare-brained, probably, -- and their supposed anti-intellectualism is probably no more than a resentment of suspect experts telling them they can't do this or shouldn't do that. Gingrich is their kind of intellectual, -- he even writes novels! -- and that fact infuriates the self-appointed intellectuals of the print punditocracy. Because he proposes to shape the country's future through policy, they call him a "big government conservative" if they consider him a conservative at all. By that peculiar standard, maybe he is the least conservative Republican -- but that would only mean that the GOP and the country could still do worse.

In Europe: Amoklauf or Terror?

2011-12-13T13:48:00.003-05:00

Here's a quick quiz. There have been two multiple-shooting incidents in Europe today. In Liege, Belgium, a man with an Arabic-sounding name and a criminal record involving marijuana and guns attacked a Christmas market with bullets and grenades, killing three people and injuring dozens more before dying himself. In Florence, Italy, a reputed neo-fascist with a hatred for immigrants opened fire on Senegalese street vendors, killing two and wounding more before dying himself. The question is: which of these stories will we see more about in the U.S. news media? Here's another: which of the two killers is more likely to be called a terrorist? How about one more? A decade ago, Americans asked whether terrorists hated us for who we are or what we do -- but what if we define terrorists exactly by who they are rather than what they do? Won't that be the impulse behind every accusation that the Belgians are "covering up" something by denying that the Liege shooter was a terrorist? Won't some people claim that any discussion of what happened in Florence is a distraction or an evasion of the real issue?

What is the real issue, anyway? As always when we notice these stories, the base issue is the fact that too many people in the world have guns, and the base problem is that too few people can think of any solution besides letting more people have guns. It could be argued that a deeper moral issue underlies the gun question -- why do so many people feel entitled to kill? -- but the question becomes less grave as it becomes lethal. Some may claim that moral reformation should take priority over curtailing people's rights, but how long would we have to wait for the moral reformation to kick in? I'd rather not be shot before then, by a would-be killer or a would-be defender -- nor do I wish to entrust my safety to my own skill with a firearm. A moral reformation is desirable, but every practical step to ensure public safety will also help. And if that idea makes you feel helpless before the leviathan of government, you're part of the problem.

Jefferson, Chomsky and corporations: a history lesson

2011-12-12T16:57:00.003-05:00

Defending the right of corporate entities to political speech in a letter to the Albany Times Union, Malcolm Sherman disputes a previous writer's citation of Thomas Jefferson's warning against the rise of "moneyed corporations." Jefferson was quoted writing that the U.S. should "crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations." Sherman claims that Jefferson never wrote this. These "violent sentiments," he claims, are a distorted paraphrase of Jefferson by Noam Chomsky.

In the past I've explored the historic record to prove that famous people had not said the words attributed to them, in most cases, by right wing bloggers and letter-writers. Some right-wingers have a hard time keeping the record straight; on this occasion, Sherman denies an actual statement of Thomas Jefferson. It can be found online on the website of the Liberty Fund, a libertarian publishing house unlikely to sympathize with Noam Chomsky's worldview. Jefferson wrote the letter to George Logan in November 1816. Here's the key section with introductory context:

England exhibits the most remarkable phaenomenon in the universe in the contrast between the profligacy of it’s government and the probity of it’s citizens. And accordingly it is now exhibiting an example of the truth of the maxim that virtue & interest are inseparable. It ends, as might have been expected, in the ruin of it’s people, but this ruin will fall heaviest, as it ought to fall on that hereditary aristocracy which has for generations been preparing the catastrophe. I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

Jefferson's opinion, of course, doesn't refute the Citizens United decision, but it was his opinion. Where does Chomsky come into it? Sherman seems to have confused a questionable attribution to Jefferson by Chomsky with the Logan letter. In a 1994 book of interviews, Chomsky apparently amplified an authentic Jefferson letter from 1825, and subsequent writers have sometimes mixed Chomsky's words with Jefferson's. The details can be found here, and Jefferson's own sentiments are not irrelevant.

In the last year of his life, Jefferson warned of a decadent younger generation of ambitious men who, "having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of '76, now look to a single and splendid government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions, and monied incorporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures, commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry." Those are Jefferson's words, not Chomsky's. If Malcolm Sherman would like to characterize the author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States as a "far-leftist" like Chomsky -- well, it's a free country.

My secular fatwa against the Florida Family Association

2011-12-11T19:59:00.001-05:00

So a cable channel makes an effort to show Americans something resembling the real life of this nation's Muslims -- or so I'll assume, not having watched the show -- and for this sponsors are reportedly getting boycotted by some charming outfit called the Florida Family Association, with one of them, the Lowe's department store chain, actually pulling their ads as a result. The FFA boasts on its own website that Lowe's is just the latest advertiser to pull out under their pressure, though only that chain's capitulation has captured the news media's attention. The Association's main complaint seems to be that any show about American Muslims must interrogate its subjects about sharia law. To show American Muslims who don't obsess over sharia, the Floridians contend, makes the program "propaganda clearly designed to counter legitimate and present-day concerns about many Muslims who are advancing Islamic fundamentalism and Sharia law." The TLC channel, however, is under no obligation to pander to Islamophobic paranoia. The All-American Muslim show is not an investigative report, nor need it be. Advertisers should not punish TLC for failing to fuel the Florida fanatics' hatred. Nor should those sponsors be punished who support other programs deemed immoral by the FFA vigilantes. Executive director David Caton's raving against "secular progressives" pretty conclusively brands him and his organization a greater threat to this country than all but the furthest fringe of American Muslims. Any member of FFA is more obviously un-American in his or her intolerance than the average U.S. Muslim. A Christian theocrat is self-evidently a greater threat to the United States than a Muslim theocrat, especially when he doesn't have to resort to bombs or guns to advance his agenda. Like terrorism, boycotting is a form of asymmetrical warfare, waged by people who aren't as vulnerable to the market than the institutions they attack. Pushing back in a proportionate manner against unjust boycotters is difficult, but entities like the FFA should not be immune when they can do such damage. Caton and his acolytes should be just as vulnerable, just as accountable in their pocketbooks, for such presumably dangerous opinions as the groups he boycotts. Threatening violence, as some Muslim idiots may well have done already, would only stroke these people's persecution fantasies. A way should be found to make them suffer in the way they make others suffer, through loss of trade or measures that would make it financially unfeasible for them to continue operations. Ideally, this sort of warfare shouldn't happen in a democratic republic, but until these Christians learn the Golden Rule someone should teach them a lesson.

Idiot of the Week: Mitch McConell and the NPV

2011-12-09T13:28:00.001-05:00

Minority Leader McConnell has virtually declared a constitutional crisis by denouncing the National Popular Vote campaign this week. The leader of the Senate Republicans goes against some members of his own party in opposing the plan, which frequent readers will remember as a compact among states to award all their Electoral Votes to the nationwide winner of the popular vote in a presidential election. McConnell scores his first idiot points by describing this compact as "eliminating the Electoral College." Actually, there can be no NPV plan without an Electoral College, since the plan depends on each state's right to determine how it selects Electors. Indeed, the plan, whatever its other merits or flaws, is entirely about choosing Electors. If McConnell is concerned about the autonomy of Electors, then he should question the winner-take-all rules that prevail in most states, where Republican districts end up represented by Democratic Electors, or vice versa, depending on statewide popular vote totals.

McConnell brought up a common argument against NPV during his talk at the Heritage Foundation: critics of the plan fear that it will increase litigation over recount demands across the country and delay scheduled transfers of power. This is no argument against NPV, however, but a complaint against partisan litigiousness. Having made his point, McConnell yielded the idiot podium to Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, who warned that NPV would encourage conspiracies of fraud on a national scale. Kobach envisions Democrats shipping disreputable voters en masse to the states with the fewest safeguards against fraud in order to run up their totals their and tip the balance in a close national race. While Kobach arguably deserves to share our idiot citation with the Senator, his speculations are more delusional than stupid.

The Heritage alarmists may deserve extra idiot credit for going against what some Republicans regard as their party's best interest in the NPV. How Republicans feel about the plan may depend on whether they're a minority or majority in their home states. In California, for instance, many Republicans support NPV because it creates an incentive for greater turnout despite consistent Democratic majorities in that state. While Democrats may take the state again next year, and still win any statewide prizes available, the prospect of helping tip the balance nationally could draw many Republicans to the polls who may have thought voting pointless without NPV. Democrats in the "reddest" states may feel the same way. My own complaint against NPV remains the same: it would make things even harder for third-party presidential candidates than they already are. I admit, however, that that doesn't rise to the level of a constitutional challenge, unless you regard Bipolarchy itself as a subversion of Founding intentions. I would sympathize more with NPV advocates if they'd acknowledge that the Electoral College isn't really the worst threat to democracy in America. But when idiots like McConnell and lunatics like Kobach attack the plan, the friends of NPV have all my sympathies.

Occupy Albany: Slavery advocates get reprieve

2011-12-08T18:46:00.001-05:00

The ultimate showdown between the city of Albany and the Occupiers of Academy Park has been deferred to December 22 after the city granted the Occupiers a permit to continue their 24-hour encampment until the start of winter. The authorities had threatened to close the encampment if the Occupiers failed to correct health and safety violations discovered in an inspection last week. A reduced and consolidated encampment sporting fewer but in some cases bigger tents passed a new inspection to earn the permit -- which Occupiers continue to regard as superfluous. After the 22nd, Mayor Jennings promises that daily protests will be allowed to continue, but that an encampment would be too great a health risk to the Occupiers themselves due to wintry conditions. The question will then become whether that's one of the risks the Occupiers will be willing to take.

Meanwhile, the local paper continues to print occasional outbursts of reactionary anger, aimed either at the district attorney for failing to prosecute the Occupiers or at the Occupiers directly. In today's Times Union, Albany paranoid William Thomas takes issue with the espousal by Occupiers of Michael Albert's "Parecon" or "participatory economics." To be specific, two economics students gave a presentation on Parecon at Academy Park back on Nov. 27. As described in reporter Bryan Fitzgerald's article, under Parecon rules "Citizens would gather for consensus decisions to be made as to how much of any given product will be consumed and produced and how resources will be allocated....[W]ages should be determined by how much time, health and well-being an employee sacrifices." To these suggestions, William Thomas responds as follows:

"Participatory economics" is nothing but a dressed-up communism in which each of us will own nothing and have no real say over what we get paid or what we may buy. Your time belongs completely to your neighbors. The products you may buy are rationed by "the voters." Your pay is set by a council. That's not freedom: it is total slavery. Who will produce the goods in such a system? Who will invent? Who will work hard? And who should work, anyway, when nothing they do is under their own control?

To review: "Consensus decisions" = "each of us...will have no real say." In effect, as far as Thomas is concerned, he has "no real say" if anyone else has any say on economic matters pertaining to him. Democracy itself, as should be obvious, is incompatible with Thomas's apparent pursuit of personal autarky. Perhaps he feels less free the more people have a say. As things stand now, presuming that Thomas is an employee, his employer has the real say over what Thomas gets paid, though Thomas retains the drop-dead option of quitting his job. As a consumer, he has "real say" only to the extent that retailers offer competing prices for him to choose from -- yet if more people than the retailers had some say in the matter, Thomas would apparently presume himself less free. Nothing is under his control, he seems to believe, unless it is under his exclusive control. Whether he so exclusively controls anything at the present time remains to be verified; nevertheless, he obviously considers himself more free today than he would be under Parecon. As for the rest of his rhetorical questions, they're just plain asinine. It's just possible, after all, that if we the people set the conditions for our labor we might be motivated to work harder, or at least with more enthusiasm and perhaps even more intelligence, than many do now. In sum, Thomas's reaction against Parecon is disproportionate to the report, reflecting more than anything else his existential alarm -- hell is other people, after all -- at the thought of a more democratic society. The Times Union editorial page dignified this pathological outburst with the headline, "Occupy members preach slavery," as if someone had raised the Stars and Bars over Academy Park. I'd call that Orwellian if I thought Thomas were that literate. Instead, let's settle for insane.

The New Republic: Let's have third parties as long as Democrats benefit

2011-12-07T14:41:00.001-05:00

Sincere third-party advocates will find little real encouragement from Timothy Noah's TRB column in the December 15 New Republic (the full article is for subscribers only, but check out the comments). Noah is the latest Democratic stooge to dispute the need for a "moderate" third party, claiming that "polarization hasn't infected the two major parties." While the GOP "has been hijacked by its extreme wing," the Democrats have "struggled, unsuccessfully, to coax it back toward the center." The problem with this particular sentence is its uncertainty about "it." Does Noah mean that Democrats are struggling to coax Republicans or their own "extreme wing" back toward the center? That mystery aside, Noah is satisfied on the negative evidence that Democrats "aren't even asked to sign a ... pledge never, ever to cut entitlements," and are tepidly supportive of Obamacare, that they are not as extreme as Republicans and the two-party system, therefore, is not polarized. This could be a valid point if you accept that no Democratic primary voter plans to punish an incumbent for his or her efforts to compromise, and that the prospect of primaries or other forms of pressure creates no resistance to moderation whatsoever among congressional Democrats or inside the Obama administration. In any event, every self-described moderate is free to conclude that Democrats are insufficiently moderate, no matter what Democratic propagandists claim.

Noah isn't against third parties; he's just opposed to a "moderate" third party that might take votes from Obama. The more urgent need, he thinks, is for "an extremist conservative third party to accommodate the wingnuts who can't abide their likeliest nominee," i.e. the anti-Romney Republicans. Noah admits immediately that "my motive for saying so is of course impure," since "Obama could use all the help he can get." He predicts, however, that a conservative independent will emerge without Democratic encouragement behind the scenes. While he claims that no third-party candidate has statistically decided an election for one of the major parties since Teddy Roosevelt outpolled President Taft in 1912, he observes that a modern third-party campaign could do considerable damage to the major-party campaign it seeks to spoil. An independent "can divert organizing talent and, to some extent, the flow of campaign contributions. He can force a major candidate to devote scarce resources to shore up support in a particular state or region. And he can sow dissatisfaction."

To give his editors a funny headline for the front cover, Noah proposes that disgruntled Republicans draft Sarah Palin as an independent candidate if they can't stand Romney. With a bit of actual wit he suggests that Palin would see "the certainty of failure" as an incentive to run, "given her demonstrated scant interest in office-holding." But the proposal reconfirms the frivolity and cynicism of Noah's piece. It's not the business of an honest third-party advocate to say that "we" need an extreme-right spoiler candidate but not a "moderate, centrist third party," especially when the idea of a progressive, leftist or socialist campaign never comes up for consideration. As I wrote a few weeks ago, the argument that Democratic moderation renders a moderate third party unnecessary is actually an argument for the necessity of a leftist third party. Such a party might hurt Obama's chances, though Noah himself notes that Harry Truman survived Democratic insurgencies to his left and right in 1948. In any event, I doubt whether Noah would want to take any chances with even a partial repeat of 1948. On the other hand, he fails to consider the possibility that a stridently rightist third party might make Romney more palatable to swing voters, since he would then look like the default moderate, in the absence of any high-profile candidate to Obama's left. When you think of third parties only as pawns to advance the black or white king, you might end up checkmating yourself. And if you're going to call for a third party without calling for that party to win, or without accepting the need for a multitude of parties, you may as well shut up.

From Lincoln to Marx?

2011-12-06T18:18:00.001-05:00

Ever since the "Popular Front" asserted in the 1930s the "Communism is 20th Century Americanism," and probably well before that, Marxists have tried to win Americans over by emphasizing a presumed affinity between Marx's analysis and the highest values in the American political tradition. The December 2011 Monthly Review reminds us of the continuing effort by noting two recent volumes, Robin Blackburn's An Unfinished Revolution and John Nichols's The "S" Word, that strive to draw closer intellectual connections between Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln. Blackburn's book overstates its claim to have discovered correspondence between the two men, the actual letters being one to Lincoln and a reply on the President's behalf by an American diplomat presumably reflecting Lincoln's own vaguely favorable response. Nichols notes that the two men had, in Monthly Review's words, "a number of key acquaintances in common." The magazine quotes Nichols's determination that Lincoln "found truth in notions about the superiority of labor to capital," while noting quite correctly that Old Abe never became a Marxist.

In these writings, one senses a wishful thinking, a belief that, among the other tasks Lincoln might have accomplished had he not been killed, the Great Emancipator might have rallied the Republican party to a stronger stand on behalf of the working class than the GOP took after the Civil War. It's tempting to believe that today's plutocratic Republicans have betrayed Lincoln's legacy (not to mention Teddy Roosevelt's), but my suspicion is that, at its core, the GOP still reflects Lincoln's attitudes toward labor, if not toward capital. Lincoln's definitive statement on the subject seems to be a speech he gave in Milwaukee on September 30, 1859. It was there that he made the oft-quoted comment that "labor is the superior -- greatly the superior -- of capital," a remark that continues to inspire American leftists.

Lincoln was defending the northern labor system as a whole against the charge made by southern slaveholders that "wage slavery" was no better than chattel slavery, and the insinuation that Northern "wage slaves" might actually be better off as chattel slaves of a master responsible for their health and security than as the dispensable hirelings of an indifferent employer. Lincoln's vindication of labor is part of his defense of the Northern labor system. The quote above is meant to refute the slander Lincoln inferred from southern commentary that " all laborers are naturally either hired laborers or slaves." The slander follows from the idea that "nobody labors, unless somebody else owning capital, somehow, by the use of it, induces him to do it." If this view meant that capital was "prior" to labor, Lincoln's view was the reverse; labor was prior to capital, which could not exist without labor.

The issue between the slaveholders and free-labor Republicanism went beyond the "priority" of labor and capital, however. Lincoln wanted to refute above all the idea that slaveholders shared with Marxists: that there was a permanent working class -- Marx's proletariat, the slaveholders' "mud-sills." Lincoln saw it as the slaveholders' belief that "whoever is once a hired laborer, is fatally fixed in that condition for life; and thence again, that his condition is as bad as, or worse than, that of a slave" Lincoln's own belief was that the northern laborer's condition was better because it need not be permanent. They were not "wage slaves" because they needn't be employees for life. Here is another oft-quoted passage from the speech:

[T]he opponents of the "mud-sill" theory insist that there is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. There is demonstration for saying this. Many independent men in this assembly doubtless a few years ago were hired laborers. And their case is almost, if not quite, the general rule. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor – the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all, gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.

If this sort of mobility were not possible, it would seem that Lincoln would have to concede the point about wage slavery. Instead, he sets the tone for Republicans to the present day by arguing that anyone in the North who ends up a wage laborer for life probably has only himself to blame. In his own words, "If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune." This is just about the opposite of the Marxist proposition that capitalism forces working people into the position of a permanent proletariat -- not to mention the idea that the industrial system of production that requires a proletariat was the predictable consequence of large historical trends.

Marxists still have a fair right to ask whether Lincoln would have refined his views after 1865. Even in the Milwaukee speech, after all, he notes a cultural shift of potential significance in the fact of a more highly educated workforce. In the past, Lincoln observes, educated people would not expect and would probably not need to do manual labor, but the spread of public education and the needs of the economy made that expectation untenable by Lincoln's time. Would he acknowledge other sociological changes, and would he admit that they threw his free-labor ideology into question? It makes an intriguing "What If?" exercise, but I'm not sure of its usefulness to the 21st century left.

Columnist tells Americans: Don't wake up!

2011-12-06T13:06:00.001-05:00

To be fair, the point Kelly Candaele was trying to make in a Los Angeles Times column that was picked up over the weekend by a local paper was that, contrary to the diatribes of political malcontents across the ideological spectrum, Americans are already quite wide awake. Candaele has apparently grown sick and tired of agitators and ideologues insisting that most Americans are "asleep," -- unaware or willfully ignorant of the control exerted over their lives by manipulative, exploitative elites, be they control-freak politicians or insatiably ruthless corporations. Writing on behalf of the great majority, Candaele, a former movie producer and present professor of communications, takes offense at the notion that most people are "essentially passive recipients of elite manipulation." He finds the notion patronizing, since it "assumes that most of us are simply unable to perceive and thereby act on our own self-interest." The assumption itself is elitist, Candaele claims, since it carries the "paranoid" implication that " only those with access to esoteric knowledge can know 'what's really going on.'"

Candaele touches on a point I've made in the past about conspiracy theorists whose sense of oppression reflects their difficulty coping with complex systems and their desire to be rid of them. Candaele's distinct point, however, is that while complexity is a fact, system is not. The very complexity we all seem to struggle with, he suggests, proves the absence of any system out of the paranoid imagination. The people who seem to be asleep from the vantage point of the paranoid or the conspiracy-monger, he contends, are actually just " liv[ing] their lives as best they can, sorting through the complex claims on their time, their values and their obligations to families and communities. We weigh the costs of action in the political world against the satisfactions and disappointments of working through the dynamics of everyday life"

The problem with Candaele's attitude becomes clear when we see the sweep of his dismissal of anti-"system" thought. He reaches back in time to chide Henry David Thoreau and Eugene V. Debs, while deploring the metaphorically similar rhetoric of Karl Rove, on the right, and Cornel West, on the left. Candaele's implication is that no critique of a "system" is valid, but an even worse implication from the overall tone of the article is that those who question the "complex claims" made on them, those who dare ask who made the claims, or for what purpose, are all paranoid. Whether you're conservative or liberal, libertarian or socialist, you'll get on Candaele's bad side, it seems, the moment you ask why things are the way they are, or why they can't be different. Since the answer to such inquiries could well indict people who benefit from the status quo when things could be changed for the better, that would render you a paranoid elitist in Candaele's eyes. Even doing away with the metaphor that so offends him and saying merely that Americans take too much for granted probably wouldn't change the professor's diagnosis.

I honestly can't tell from his column what Candaele's own political beliefs are, or if he has any, but his attitude is similar to the anti-political conservatism I noted yesterday in George Will's writing. Candaele appears to object to any attempt to think politically about society, to any raising of the possibility that today's "complex claims" aren't all simply historical accidents or unconsciously inevitable trends, to any suggestion that people do more than deal with their own problems. An absolute refusal to question our conditions is really no better than the truly paranoid assumption that every "complex claim" results from a vast systemic conspiracy to make my life miserable. But the sorting out of what may be inescapable from what could be changed requires a willingness to question that is not paranoid but is opposed to the sort of complacency that could be compared fairly, or at least artistically, to slumber. Maybe Candaele wouldn't disagree with this, but only objects to the metaphor -- but if he expects his protest to still anyone's tongue, he's definitely dreaming.

If Gingrich isn't conservative, who is?

2011-12-05T12:24:00.001-05:00

Just as Herman Cain's ignominious departure from the race for the Republican presidential nomination appeared to clarify the picture into a two-man battle between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, George Will's weekend column threw a grenade into the ring. Defying the conventional analysis that makes Gingrich the new Tea Party darling, following Bachmann, Perry and Cain, Will bluntly labels the former Speaker the "least conservative candidate" among the Republicans. Of course, the charge can only tell us more about Will's conservatism than Gingrich's.

So why isn't the man who retook Congress for the Republicans after decades in the wilderness, the great promoter of the Contract With America, not a conservative. For Will, it's Gingrich's personality that seems to disqualify him.

Gingrich, however, embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. And there is his anti-conservative confidence that he has a comprehensive explanation of, and plan to perfect, everything....His temperament — intellectual hubris distilled — makes him blown about by gusts of enthusiasm for intellectual fads, from 1990s futurism to “Lean Six Sigma” today.... Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how.

There's no need to infer George Will's conservatism from this. The columnist gives us an explicit definition: "Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order. Conservatism inoculates against the hubristic volatility that Gingrich exemplifies and Genesis deplores: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.”

In other words, Will follows the prescriptions of that Dr. Pangloss of the 20th century, Friedrich von Hayek, who argued, in effect, that the Market (i.e. "spontaneous order") was the best of all possible worlds, if only because politics could only ever make things worse. By this standard, even Mitt Romney's "conservatism as managerialism," as Will describes it, would be preferable to Gingrich's pseudo-intellectualism.

Will makes some fair hits on Gingrich's many hare-brained notion, specifically citing that embrace of Dinesh D'Souza's indictment of President Obama's apparently hereditary "anti-colonial" mentality that earned Gingrich an Idiot of the Week nod from this blog. But leaving Gingrich out of it for a moment, we're left with a peculiar anti-intellectualism emanating from a writer still widely regarded as a leading intellectual among conservatives. It isn't as much anti-intellectualism in general, however, as it is anti-politics: a rejection of the premise that politics is an intellectual discipline or field of knowledge in its own right. At a minimum, Will rejects the idea that political intervention of any kind, however motivated, can have a positive effect on the Market. In effect, he's accusing Gingrich of the same offense Gingrich himself accused Rep. Ryan of earlier this year: "right-wing social engineering." If people like Gingrich (or Ryan) believe that politics is a machine that can be manipulated to produce positive economic outcomes, Will appears to believe that the economy would be better off were the machine smashed entirely.

While Romney might be preferable to Gingrich or to "today's bewildered liberalism," Will still thinks the Republicans can do better. Given his dissociation between politics and intellect, it may be no surprise that Will asks Republicans to reconsider Gov. Perry -- whom he admits is advised by Mrs. Will. Perry's various misstatements are "not important to presidential duties," he writes, while Perry's "Southwestern zest for disliking Washington and Wall Street simultaneously" still recommends him to anti-ideologues like Will. Finally, the columnist still waits patiently for the Huntsman boom, reminding us in advance that, his moderate demeanor notwithstanding, the man from Utah has the "most conservative" program of the GOP aspirants, including a middling foreign policy poised between Rep. Paul's "isolationism" and the others' "bellicosity." If Perry and Huntsman are his favorites, then Will's conservatism still covers a lot of territory. It's the territory it doesn't cover that's the problem.

Occupy Albany: Winter is coming

2011-12-02T22:02:00.001-05:00

At long last, the City of Albany has put the Academy Park Occupation on notice: overnight encampments must end with the coming of winter, no later than December 22 but sooner if the Occupiers fail to remedy "serious health and safety" violations cited following an inspection of the park yesterday. While the local newspaper report doesn't detail the alleged violations, it quotes Mayor Jerry Jennings's concern for the Occupiers' own health as the weather grows colder and snow becomes more likely. The Occupation will be shut down for the Occupiers' own good, you see. As in New York, the mayor affirms a right of protesters to stage daily demonstrators. They may perform like good little dissidents and sit down so that everyone else can return to their complacency or private worries. The thought of dissent that does not go away is for some reason anathema to elected officials of both major parties in this country. It is an imposition on the rest of us somehow. It is obviously offensive to many. So let what will happen happen. It is probably as inevitable as the season. All the people who have supposedly been doing nothing will find something else to do, and all the people who've scoffed and shrugged will keep on doing nothing.

Is there a libertarian foreign policy?

2011-12-01T15:44:00.001-05:00

Leon Hadar once served as the Libertarian Party's "shadow secretary of state," warning against American intervention in Somalia during the Clinton administration but generally having little impact on either Democratic or Republican foreign policy. Writing in The American Conservative, Hadar recalls being consoled by a fellow Libertarian with the shrugging assumption that "Libertarians in general are not interested in, and don't put a damn on foreign policy." Hadar thinks that there's more to the problem than that. He asks why libertarians haven't had the same influence over Republicans in foreign affairs that they've supposedly exerted in the economic realm. Part of his own answer is an admission that there seems to be no definitively libertarian foreign policy. While Hadar himself sympathizes with Ron Paul's non-interventionism, he concedes that some libertarians took the opposite stance, supporting the George W. Bush "Freedom Agenda" and neocon interventionism. He tries to account for this contradiction on the intellectual and the institutional level.

The war, after all, was orchestrated by a Republican administration that was also committed to free-market policies like cutting taxes and privatizing Social Security. And the same businesses that helped fund President Bush and other Republican politicians also provided financial backing to the leading libertarian think tanks.

Hadar writes on the assumption of a "cognitive dissonance" between libertarians' domestic opposition to Washington imposing its will on the rest of the country and the insistence of many libertarians that Washington ought to be able to impose its will on the rest of the world. He clearly believes that any advocate of limited government should be opposed to the sort of hegemonic interventionism the U.S. practices. He's probably right to attribute the contradiction to intellectual confusion, if not to a certain laziness about foreign policy. But what if he himself, as well as his fellow libertarians, are even more fundamentally confused?

Writing about pro-war libertarians, Hadar speculates that they "rationalized the U.S. drive toward global hegemony in political-economic terms, arguing that creating an international system based on classical-liberal principles required a global power that had the diplomatic influence and military means to establish governing rules and institutions." In other words, the assumption may have been that a global free market required global hegemony for an entity capable of using power and reserving it for itself. Hadar's mistake may be his assumption that domestic politics somehow works differently. Libertarians idealize the reign of the free market as the absence, or at least the minimization or marginalization of political power. But what if the free market in any country -- what Hadar calls (in a strange imitation of Stalin) "Classical Liberalism in One Country" -- also depends on the existence of a hegemonic political power, an entity that holds the preponderance of power if only not to use it the way some other entity might? What if the libertarian utopia requires a political entity with absolute power, solely so no one else can have power to mess with the sacred Market? Wouldn't such an absolute power, practicing absolute reticence -- at least when it comes to the Market -- appear not to exist in the minds of its own acolytes? But wouldn't only an absolute government be able to maintain the appearance of no government, by virtue of its ability to deny power to anyone else? Yet wouldn't it also appear to be no government only to those who benefit from its reticence, while appearing absolutely imperial to those who demand a share of power but are denied by every means at power's disposal? My implication is that those libertarians who didn't share Hadar's belief in non-interventionism as a good unto itself and endorsed neocon interventionism instead may have seen plainly on a global scale what they could not recognize, or couldn't bring themselves to acknowledge, in the domestic sphere: that to insure that the state does not interfere with the Market, the state (like the empire abroad) must monopolize power so that no one untrustworthy can use it. For them to be free, that is, the state must have absolute power, so that oppression, as they see it, cannot happen.

Meanwhile, I don't doubt Hadar's commitment to non-interventionism, nor the sincerity of his advice that anti-interventionist libertarians work with antiwar groups across the ideological spectrum, from paleocons to Naderite progressives. He may be right that doing so is the only way that libertarians can "do foreign policy," except for the possibility that libertarians and anti-interventionist libertarians may actually be two different things, and the possibility that the more one commits consistently to non-interventionism, at home as well as abroad, the less libertarian one may become.

'Civil disobedience isn't meant to be tolerated'

2011-11-30T12:50:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago in Albany, a local Republican party chief staged a photo op in front of the Occupy Albany encampment in Academy Park. He was there to denounce the Albany County district attorney for refusing to prosecute trespassers and curfew violators and to demand that Governor Cuomo appoint a special prosecutor to overrule the DA's inaction. During his appearance he was heckled by Occupiers, whom he called "hypocrites" for being unwilling to tolerate his opinion or engage in meaningful dialogue with him. I remembered that sound bite when one of the local papers recommended a Wendy Kaminer blog for the Atlantic Monthly that also denounced Occupiers across the country as hypocrites. Kaminer is a "civil libertarian" who appears to belong to the "you're not accomplishing anything" school of critics of the Occupations. She finds the emphasis on occupying public space a self-defeating distraction from the more appropriate purpose of forging "an effective, left leaning counter movement to the Tea Party." Perhaps strangely for a civil libertarian, she's completely unwilling to entertain the Occupiers' assertion that the public's right to use public space for political expression trumps any state or municipal regulatory power -- in short, she seems to dismiss the possibility that parks may belong to the people rather than to governments. Instead, she affirms in an October post that "cities may impose reasonable time, place and manner restrictions on mass protests." What makes restrictions reasonable, at least in her opinion, isn't so much public health or safety as a general principle of equal accessibility that has been violated, in her view, by all the Occupiers.

In both the October article and the subsequent November piece cited by the Albany paper, Kaminer takes for granted that an indefinite occupation on the Zuccotti Park model is inherently exclusionary and therefore more a violation of the First Amendment rights of other people than a legitimate expression of the Occupiers' own rights. This critique depends on an assumption that the Occupiers would not permit dissenting viewpoints or counter-demonstrations wherever they make camp.

What if a group of Tea Partiers seek to establish camp in the same space [Dewey Square in Boston] in order to demonstrate a contrary vision of community or communicate a contrary view of economic justice? What if the Tea Partiers also argue that camping in Dewey Square is "a core component of their message" because of its location in the financial district? Private associations have First Amendment rights to formulate and control their own messages. So would Occupy Boston have the right to exclude the Tea Partiers, in order to prevent them from muddying its message, simply because they got there first?

Kaminer's charge of hypocrisy is largely speculative. She repeats a suspicion that Occupiers would not tolerate any imitation of their example by politically-opposed entities, be they Tea Parties, "Christian nationalists," or white supremacists. Even were they not as intolerant emotionally as she suspects, the mere fact of their occupation of parks sufficiently denies other groups their equal right to assembly to earn Kaminer's "hypocrite" label. Unless the Occupiers are prepared to yield so others can have a turn, even if no one else has demanded a turn, their encampments violate Kaminer's understanding of the First Amendment as a guarantee of everyone's turn at political expression.

Reading Kaminer's pieces, you get the impression that she regards the Occupiers as so many spoiled brats -- not because of their political demands but because they don't seem, to her, to take civil disobedience seriously. She singles out one Boston Occupier's lament that "civil disobedience won't be tolerated" by the city's mayor, and replies that "Civil disobedience isn't meant to be tolerated; it's meant to expose official intolerance and injustice. Civil disobedience includes both a commitment to violating arguably unjust laws and a willingness to submit to lawful arrests."

Bradley Russell of Occupy Albany might come closer to Kaminer's ideal of civil-disobedience for his willingness to provoke arrests by crossing the border from city-run Academy Park, where Occupy Albany is tolerated and a curfew ignored, and state-run Lafayette Park, where nightly trespasses and arrests occurred until the lack of courtroom drama apparently bored the Occupiers. In any event, there probably is a confusion over the meaning of "civil disobedience" that explains Kaminer's impatience with the Occupiers. As she notes, "civil disobedience" is not the same thing as constitutionally-protected free speech. The term usually denotes a conscious violation of an unjust law, and the civility of it comes not from any presumed immunity from arrest but from peaceful submission (if not "passive resistance") to it as a consciousness-raising exercise. If the Occupiers are hypocritical, it may be because they seem to seek shelter under the Constitution at the same time that they assert a more fundamental, primal democracy, if not a "higher law," that would put them at odds with the rule of law and at personal risk. Their democratic imperative requires them to occupy public spaces and call people's attention to their grievances until those grievances are redressed or they are evicted from their encampments. In such a situation they can assert their rightful immunity from eviction but they can't take it for granted. Raw democracy, which admittedly often fell short of the ideal, was a matter of who showed up. While I have no evidence of any Occupier vowing to throw out counterdemonstrators, any confrontation between Occupiers and hostile groups in raw democratic conditions would be a test of will and numbers. Neither side might seek to drive out the other, but they might well seek to shout each other down or drown each other out. Whoever breaks would lose. It wouldn't be truly democratic or even representative, since each group would be self-appointed, but it would come down to who showed up. Under such conditions, Occupiers can be faulted for assuming that they should win or can't lose, but that attitude is more self-righteous than hypocritical. It might clarify things further to view the Occupations not as "civil disobedience," which apparently requires a willingness to submit to arrest, but as a nonviolent insurrection, with an implicit refusal to submit. If even a self-styled civil libertarian takes for granted that public parks belong to government and not to the people, the Occupiers' assertion to the contrary is inevitably insurrectionist in its implication. It is more obviously raw democracy in action -- at least until governments shut it all down.

E. J. Dionne: Moderates don't need a third party

2011-11-29T13:34:00.001-05:00

As a Washington Post columnist, E. J. Dionne shares space with Matt Miller, one of the most prominent proponents of a third-party "moderate" option for the 2012 elections. As a loyal Democrat, it's up to Dionne to convince "some of my middle-of-the-road columnist friends" that a third party would be a bad idea next year. In his latest column, Dionne rejects the entire idea of Bipolarchy (admittedly a word he's never heard, but you know what I mean) as a structural factor in legislative gridlock. As a polemicist for Bipolarchy, he's obliged to argue that only one party is ever to blame for the country's troubles.

[T]he problem we face isn’t about structures or the party system. It’s about ideology — specifically a right-wing ideology that has temporarily taken over the Republican Party and needs to be defeated before we can have a reasonable debate between moderate conservatives and moderate progressives about our country’s future. A centrist third party would divide the opposition to the right wing and ease its triumph. That’s the last thing authentic moderates should want.

Dionne's argument depends on the premise that the Democratic party is sufficiently moderate by "middle-of-the-road" standards, and would be effectively moderate if allowed to govern unimpeded by Republican extremism. His proof is that Democrats and "progressives" are committed to "substantial entitlement cuts" in the name of deficit reduction. Why don't the moderates see this? Dionne can't explain it any more than Eric Alterman could, without allowing that moderates might demand more cuts than Democrats can really countenance, while demanding more taxes than Republicans can stomach.

There are two competing narratives attempting to explain gridlock -- the Republicans have their own version of the same scenario that has less to do with gridlock than with principled (or delusional) opposition to bad measures. Leaving them out of it, we're left with the moderate or "radical center" version that blames both major parties, without necessarily blaming them equally, and the Democratic version that blames Republicans exclusively. The crux of the disagreement between Democrats and dissident moderates is partly a matter of perception. Democrats and their cheerleaders insist that they're ready and willing to make the compromises or "grand bargains" the moderates desire. The moderates express a range of skepticism, but seem united in the suspicion that partisanship puts an inherent limit on Democratic capacity for compromise. It's fair to ask, as irritated Democrats like Dionne and Alterman have been asking, how justified moderate suspicions are. The moderate assumption is that a Democratic "base" of intractable welfare-statists will inevitably limit that party's ability to conceive or carry out a "grand bargain" to reduce deficits. Democratic propagandists would have us believe that this intractable base is a figment of the disgruntled moderate imagination -- at least that's the party line right now. Democrats desperately want moderates to believe that the party can be as moderate as anyone could desire. But are there no lines Democrats would cross to please moderates like Miller or Thomas Friedman? Is there no point of moderation at which some "base" constituency would rebel? The answer depends on the actual nature of the Democratic party.

Dionne may actually be exactly right about the Democrats. They may be the ideal vehicle for the sort of grand "radical center" bargaining that moderate-party advocates want. It may be exactly the right thing for Miller and Friedman to join forces with Democrats to "confront" Republican obstructionism as Dionne wants them to -- whatever "confront" really means in this liberal context. The moderate columnists haven't exactly been giving Republicans a free pass during this crisis, but they just may owe one to the Democrats. After all, how accountable are the Democrats, really, to any leftist base? How much has the "left" really been to blame for congressional gridlock? The moderate-party promoters may be unfair to the Democrats exactly to the extent that they assume that the party's capacity for compromise is in any way impeded by leftism. Why not grant that the Democrats are already a moderate or centrist party, and already answerable to an essentially centrist base? That would alter our perception of gridlock considerably. It suits some observers to imagine a tug-of-war between two equal and opposite forces, a "left" and "right," as the cause of our trouble. But what if it's actually an irreconcilable conflict between "right" and "center," and as such an utter failure of the "establishment" to put its house in order? If so, then Dionne would be right about centrists making a mistake by opposing the Democrats. His sort of moderates may indeed have a party of their own. It may be the left, or else everyone who feels left out of the right-vs-center debate, who needs a new party -- not to confront Republicans alone, but to confront everyone standing in the way of recovery and progress.

Antiparty sentiment in Houston (and Albany?)

2011-11-28T18:35:00.001-05:00

The Albany Times Union has picked up for its op-ed page an opinion column Bill King wrote for the Houston Chronicle damning the American party system for failing either to compromise on deficit reduction or enact the presumed will of the American majority. The majority, King claims, wants deficit reduction through some tax increases and many budget cuts. We don't get that, he contends, because "The minority of Americans who believe that the deficit should be solved either by solely cutting expenses or raising taxes are the voters who dominate the primaries of the Democratic and Republican parties. It is these voters who continue to give us nothing but ideologues, incapable of compromise, from which to choose in the November elections."

While King appears to blame the current primary system and the resulting dependence of the major parties on "base" voters, he goes further to damn the entire party system and the very concept of partisanship. He goes all the way back to George Washington's Farewell Address to give his new viewpoint a historic pedigree, while ignoring the reservations of Sean Wilentz and other historians who see the address as a partisan document in its own right. King goes somewhat too far in describing an infamy that once supposedly attached itself to party affiliation. Once upon a time, he writes, "Any hint that a candidate was associated with a political party could cause that candidate to lose an election." But he seems to be confusing the stigma that was long attached to active campaigning by a candidate with a presumed stigma of partisanship. If anything, the party stood in for the man, its spokesmen and "spellbinders" making speeches when it would have seemed unbecoming for a candidate to do so. Antipartyism is an enduring strain in American history, but it was usually exploited best by partisan candidates who pretended not to be something they were.

Whatever the flaws of King's compact history lesson, it's harder to dispute his diagnosis of the present.

It is past time for the American people to rise up and end this tyranny of the politically extreme minorities. We need reform that breaks the political parties' hold on the election process. We need to make it easier for candidates to run for office without being affiliated with a political party and we need more people who are willing to stand up and run as independent candidates. We need office-holders to show us they love this country more than they love their political party and if not, we need to be prepared to fire them....To get any meaningful change in the current system, we are going to have to return to the founders' view of political parties and start thinking differently about them. Instead of being proud to be associated with a political party, it should be an embarrassment.

All I can add is a necessary clarification: ordinary Americans will have to feel far more embarrassed about their own partisanship before politicians start feeling that way.

'Obama or Hitler': a theme and variations

2011-11-28T14:46:00.001-05:00

From the lead editorial of the December American Conservative:

Partisan discontent will fall by the wayside once the election season gets going, as always. If the GOP's base could convince itself that John McCain was America's last, best hope against socialism, it should have no trouble turning out for the former Massachusetts governor who believes that individual mandates are fine policy as long as they originate with state governments.And while the exiguous principled left might have qualms about Obama's Bush-like ways, the mass of his party is ready to snap into line. It's Obama or Hitler, after all.

The editor's comment on Democrats is no caricature. Here are letters from the Dec. 5 issue of The Nation.

...To the writer who wrote, 'I have no clue what [Obama] stands for, what he believes in': he obviously stands for and believes in a multitude of things the Republican/Tea Party doesn't. For me, that is good enough....My question to all Nation readers is, What hopes and dreams does the alternative bring?

I'm so astonished and infuriated by the whingeing tone of those who are 'disappointed' in President Obama....What is wrong with you people? You'll stay home and let the Perrys and the Romneys and the Cains run our nation? Please, don't do this.

So Obama can't walk on water. Boo-hoo. Are we going to vote for whichever clown the GOP chooses to oppose him? Or not at all (which will have the same effect)?

Many liberals are so irate, they won't vote for Obama in 2012. So, from the rest of us: many thanks for President Romney and his neocon foreign policy loons, his right-wing Supreme Court picks, Medicare vouchers, Social Security cuts, a terrified Hispanic community and so much more.

To be fair, none of them equated any Republican candidate with Hitler, but you get the general idea. The only imaginable alternative to Obama is Republican rule, and Republican rule may as well be the fate worse than death. Whether or not these writers feel that Obama has really accomplished anything -- the best any of them can say is that "this president is a model of decency, composure and intelligence in a country that still loves to hate" -- all are prepared to settle for whatever Obama and the Democrats can or will dish out, as convinced as Margaret Thatcher ever was that "there is no alternative," at least to Bipolarchy and dependence upon the Democratic party if not to capitalism. To refute Thatcher, the slogan "Another world is possible" was coined. It's quite possible that some of these same Nation readers have spoken those very words in different settings. No other world is possible, however, without risk, and in American politics real reformers must be prepared to risk Republican rule and not fear it if they want a real alternative that expresses something closer to the will of the vaunted 99%. If our only choices are the Democratic party or national doom, then we don't really have a choice -- we are doomed. That's true for conservatives, too: if there's no choice but Republicans or doom, we're doomed. If one man or one party can destroy the country in four years, then the country is already beyond saving before that man or party takes power. If the Conservative is right in its sad prediction, and if Nation readers represent the general public, than no matter which party wins next November, the politics of fear will have won in a landslide.

A 'conservative' argument against the National Popular Vote

2011-11-25T18:46:00.001-05:00

The National Popular Vote plan -- the idea of a compact of state legislatures through which all contracting states would award their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes nationwide -- has been discussed several times over the past year on this blog, but as far as Gary L. Gregg is concerned the NPV is being advanced by a stealth campaign, "without a national discussion and largely without serious debate at the state level." Gregg, the author of a defense of the Electoral College, sounds a warning against NPV in the December issue of The American Conservative. He's troubled by the NPV compact's potential to get around the Constitution without amending the document, though he concedes that the national charter gives the states the prerogative to distribute their electoral votes however they please. Nevertheless, he believes that the Framers meant for the President to be chosen in a certain manner, and that NPV violates that original intent with radical intentions. Like a good originalist, Gregg explains that the Framers briefly considered a popular election of the President at the Philadelphia Convention, only to dismiss the idea. As an honest historian, he also admits that "By 1800, the development of political parties undermined the deliberative nature of the [Electoral] college, with discussion replaced by party loyalty as the basis for electoral voting." It would seem, then, that we've been living under an unconstitutional electoral regime, from the perspective of the Framers' intentions rather than their ratified words, for more than 200 years. How much more "unconstitutional" can the National Popular Vote be?

Gregg appears to believe that the corruption of the Electoral College by partisanship has been a good thing in the long term. Once the nation accommodated partisanship by ratifying the Twelfth Amendment and mandating the mating of presidential and vice-presidential candidates, the College, especially after most states adopted a winner-take-all strategy instead of awarding electoral votes on a district basis, retained two important benefits, in Gregg's opinion. First, "it funnels votes into two candidates with relatively broad bases of support and exaggerates the margin of victory for the winner, no matter how close the popular contest." For example, Bill Clinton received 68% of the 1992 electoral vote despite winning only 43% of the popular vote. Since NPV does not require any candidate to receive a majority of the popular vote in order to receive the electoral votes of the contracting states, Gregg worries that any winner of an NPV election will have a less impressive numerical mandate than Clinton supposedly enjoyed. His worry is related to his almost counterfactual assumption that NPV would lead to more independent presidential candidacies.

Under the prevailing system of winner-take-all [on the state level], a candidate whose support is not localized within particular states has no incentive to run. Without this moderating system, the extremes of each party would be empowered to blackmail more prudent candidates: 'Make me director of the EPA or I run and siphon enough votes to cost you the presidency!' In a [evenly] divided nation, one candidate with the power to draw just a few percentage points of the vote nationally could completely change the outcome of the election. Corrupt bargains would be routine.

Gregg here underestimates the power of lesser-evil thinking among the leaders of the Bipolarchy. It seems unlikely, as things stand, that any powerful Democrat or Republican would consciously launch a quixotic campaign that would most likely throw the election to the enemy party out of thwarted ambition, or even threaten to do so in an attempt at blackmail. Gregg may think differently, but in any event this isn't his main argument against NPV.

Gregg has an ideological bias that his article expresses more crudely than is typical of The American Conservative. His great fear is that NPV would empower a radical, urban-based left while marginalizing small, rural states and rendering their concerns irrelevant to national politics. The current electoral regime "compel[s] candidates to mingle at state fairs, speak with coal miners, throw bowling balls, and visit small-town churches," Gregg writes. That "gives candidates some appreciation of the great diversity of this nation." Despite the initial corruption of the Electoral College by partisanship, the system still "fits the spirit of [the Framers'] decentralized system, which treats states as more than just administrative arms of a national majority." Meanwhile, the vast internal diversity of cities vanishes in Gregg's imagination, transformed into a monolithic "urban" vote organized and radicalized by ACORN-like entities. He sees dire consequences if the urban vote becomes so decisive that "small states like West Virginia or Colorado would never see a presidential candidate again." This is a familiar fear, but perhaps not a fear the Framers shared with Gregg. It's interesting, if not telling, that the authority he cites in defense of the Electoral College is not a Framer but a U.S. Senator from the late 20th century, Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. Defending the College in the 1970s, Moynihan argued that it expressed the crucial principle that "power is never installed, save when it is consented to by more than one majority." On this evidence, Gregg recruits Moynihan into the sinister tradition of John C. Calhoun, who first propounded the concept of "concurrent majorities" in order to justify a slaveholders' liberum veto on all national issues. It's probably unfair of me to drag slavery into this, but I invoke Calhoun to remind readers that concurrent-majority interpretations of the Constitution have been refuted fairly decisively for nearly 200 years. Even if we leave Calhoun and his baggage out of it, Gregg has nerve invoking Moynihan against single-majority rule when he's already acquiesced to single-majority rule in its most notorious, counter-Framing form, the two-party system. I'm often tempted to wish the country back to the original Electoral College format, with each elector chosen solely by the voters of his or her district, on the assumption that independent candidates would benefit. That probably makes me more of an originalist than Gregg, despite his history lessons. He's happy to see the Framers' intent compromised so long as the Bipolarchy serves his ideological agenda by thwarting some vaguely threatening radicalism. Maybe originalists accept that because they see the Framers changing their own minds about partisanship. If so, real radicalism might require us to be more true to the Framers' original intentions than the Framers were themselves.

American anti-intellectualism wasn't born yesterday

2011-11-23T18:39:00.001-05:00

When a Democrat like Paul Begala calls the Republicans "the stupid party," it can be dismissed as a partisan smear. When a Republican like Kathleen Parker grudgingly agrees with Begala, then it becomes worth discussing. The two pundits have something else in common: short-term historical memory. Lamenting what she calls the "Palinization" of the GOP, Parker idealizes a time when William F. Buckley supposedly set an intellectual standard and enforced it by reading the John Birch Society out of the conservative establishment. Begala looks back to roughly the same period, and notes that, while the self-conscious intellectual Democrat Adlai Stevenson lost two presidential elections, his purported pedantry "didn't cause conservatives in the '50s and '60s to spurn ideas and denigrate intellect." Both writers choose to see Buckley, who held no political office, as the face of the Republican party in his time -- and both may or may not have chosen to forget that, during the peak of Buckley's influence, a nearly-equally influential book was written by the historian Richard Hofstadter describing Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and identifying it in the present day with right-wing Republicanism. Hofstadter recognized that a degree of anti-intellectualism was inherent in populist movements, since populism suspects all elites. Unconsciously or not, Begala channels Hofstadter by blaming modern GOP stupidity on "populist anti-intellectualism." But Begala doesn't seem to realize, or at least doesn't acknowledge in his Newsweek column, that the trend he decries is not a new thing. But if anti-intellectualism seems louder and more strident now, the climate-change debates, as Parker acknowledges, are probably to blame. On that issue, at least, Parker finds her fellow Republicans most embarrassing. She's less inclined to trace this to populist tendencies, however, than to blame it on religion. "The big tent fashioned by Ronald Reagan has become bilious with the hot air of religious fervor," she writes, "Scientific skepticism, the engine that propels intellectual inquiry, has morphed into skepticism of science fueled by religious certitude," -- what she describes as a belief that "only God controls climate." I'm inclined to believe that capitalist ideology fuels climate-change denialism more than religion, but I'll concede that religious fervor and entrepreneurialism are somewhat alike in emphasis and effect. Both are essentially faith-based, as has been proven about entrepreneurialism by the collapse of faith in debt around the world. If a historian can prove a dumbing-down of capitalism over the last fifty years, or a retreat from analysis in favor of faith -- and I suspect that it wouldn't be hard -- Begala and Parker might be vindicated in their belief that stupidity in America is stronger than ever.

Umberto Eco on conspiracy theory

2011-11-23T14:22:00.001-05:00

From his new novel, The Prague Cemetery, translated by Richard Dixon: the reminiscence of a forger and agent provocateur, and a riff on Alexander Dumas's novel about Cagliostro, Joseph Balsamo.

Dumas had a truly clear understanding of the human mind. What does everyone desire, and desire more fervently the more wretched and unfortunate they are? To earn money easily, to have power (the enormous pleasure in commanding and humiliating your fellow man) and to avenge every wrong suffered (everyone in life has suffered at least one wrong, no matter how small it might be). And that is why in Monte Cristo he shows how to amass great wealth, enough to give you superhuman power, and how to make your enemies pay back every debt. But why, everybody asks, am I not blessed by fortune (or at least not as blessed as I would like to be)? Why have I not been favored like others who are less deserving? No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit. Dumas offers to the frustration of everyone (individuals as well as countries) the explanation for their failure. It was someone else, on Thunder Mountain, who planned your ruin.

On reflection, Dumas had invented nothing. He had merely put into story form what ... Abbe Barruel had already shown. This led me to think, even then, that if I wanted to sell the story of a conspiracy, I didn't have to offer the buyer anything original, but simply something he already knew or could have found out more easily in other ways. People believe only what they already know, and this is the beauty of the Universal Form of Conspiracy.

The solar theory of bipolarchy

2011-11-22T18:41:00.001-05:00

In his latest New York Times column, David Brooks describes the current American political situation as a universe out of order. His model of cosmic order was first proposed in the 1950s by one Samuel Lubell, who argued that, in a two-party system, one party is the "sun," the other the "moon." For Brooks's purpose it's enough for Lubell to have argued that one party must dominate. As earlier writers have noted, Lubell made the further point that the "sun" party sets the national agenda on its own. "It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period are fought out," he wrote. In his day, or at the time he wrote, that was the Democratic party. As Brooks observes, it was the Republican Party from the election of President Reagan through the 2006 congressional elections. What worries Brooks now is that we seem not to have a sun. Neither major party has the power or public support to set the national agenda in the dominant way of the New Deal Democrats or the Reagan Republicans. Worse, from Brooks's perspective, each of the major parties behaves like a minority or "moon" party, not in Lubell's sense of reflecting a sun's radiance, but by cultivating a "minority mentality."

The Republicans feel oppressed by the cultural establishment, and Democrats feel oppressed by the corporate establishment. They embrace the mental habits that have always been adopted by those who feel themselves resisting the onslaught of a dominant culture. Their main fear is that they will lose their identity and cohesion if their members compromise with the larger world. They erect clear and rigid boundaries separating themselves from their enemies. In a hostile world, they erect rules and pledges and become hypervigilant about deviationism. They are more interested in protecting their special interests than converting outsiders. They slowly encase themselves in an epistemic cocoon.

Lubell's solar model, with its implicit gravitational principle, is a provocative metaphor for the codependency or symbiosis of bipolarchy, but the metaphor also suggests an illusory natural two-party order. To his credit, Brooks invokes Lubell not to demand a restoration of his fallacious model, but to suggest that our universe might need a new sun altogether. He needn't have used Lubell's metaphors to indict the reactionary "minority mentality" plaguing each major party, nor could Lubell have explained how that mentality broke up his solar model. At least I can't tell from the minimal evidence within easy reach whether Lubell anticipated how the primary process would enthrall each party to a base increasingly alienated from the majority of the population. However it arose, the minority mentality has prevented the normal dialectical relationship of the major parties, in which, in Brooks's account, a defeated party "modernizes" to become competitive again and take its turn as the sun. Instead, the base of each party digs in and becomes more intractable, and stagnation results.

Brooks sees a possible solution in a "third force" -- he can't bring himself to say "third party" -- and another in the "brutal cleansing flood" of a "devastating financial crisis." Metaphors aside, he deems it imperative that some party or "force" take the initiative previously reserved for the Lubellian sun. One would assume, however, that in a democracy or democratic republic the people are always the sun, and the parties satellites. The Lubell model can only encourage people to misplace themselves in the political cosmos. Instead of waiting for a third force -- or, worse, the cataclysm -- the American people should play the role intended for them all along.

Occupy Obama? Round One in New Hampshire

2011-11-22T13:54:00.001-05:00

In a democracy, in theory, everyone gets to be heard. In practice, it's all about who shows up and who gets heard. Public space and public time are inevitably contested, and dissidents may be excused for feeling that some are heard too often and others not enough. That feeling seems to have motivated the "mic check" outburst in Manchester NH today when Occupation sympathizers attempted to collectively challenge (or heckle) the President. Loyal Democrats eventually drowned out the protesters with their own more mindless chanting of campaign slogans, while the President told the mic-checkers that they had made their point, when they clearly had not. In his comments, Obama seemed to think that their point had been made at the Occupations, where people had expressed, as he heard it, frustration over how the American dream had seemed to slip away from many working people. That's not exactly a misinterpretation, but in the wake of evictions across the country, the frustration has gone beyond economic worries. This is what the demonstrators meant to say:

Mr. President, over 4000 peaceful protesters have been arrested while bankers continue to destroy the American economy. You must stop the assault on our 1st Amendment rights. Your silence sends a message that police brutality is acceptable. Banks got bailed out. We got sold out.

It may not be in Obama's power, even had he the will, to stay the hands of city and state cops across the land. The President may not accept police brutality, or he may not accept that the evictions constitute brutality. For their part, the occupiers and their sympathizers do not accept that their time has expired, that they've said their piece and should yield the ground to business as usual. Their test of democratic principles may go beyond any appeal to the First Amendment, and go all the way to first principles. They are determined, it seems, not to yield until their concerns are recognized and addressed, and it also seems that they recognize no obligation to accommodate others by standing down after having their turn at the center of attention. For them, this is not about whose turn it is to speak. If democracy is really about who shows up and who gets heard, then it's their prerogative to stand their ground until the people (or their representatives) respond, either by accepting their demands or by driving them from the field. The occupiers have no obligation to quit until they're ready, or until they're silenced. Democracy doesn't guarantee them victory, but it doesn't require them to give up when others demand that they do so.

Spain Votes: an omen for the U.S.?

2011-11-21T13:02:00.001-05:00

After giving the international movement against austerity the nearest thing it has to a common name (the "indignados"), Spain may have surprised the world this weekend when it reacted to severe unemployment and debt by giving an absolute majority in its parliamentary elections to the conservative People's Party. The ruling socialist government was soundly repudiated, while some leftist parties increased their representation in the national legislature, presumably at the former ruling party's expense. It might be argued that the Spanish people have voted for austerity, but they were probably going to get austerity no matter whom they chose. What more did they get, then, by making a two-time loser their next prime minister? The new leader is described as a "social conservative" and an "economic liberal," though in that context liberal probably means "neo-liberal" as in laissez-faire and free trade. The People's Party has an "Atlanticist" orientation that looks to the U.S. for global leadership, but unlike American Republicans, the PP has little tolerance for secessionist sentiments or rhetoric -- they're nationalists opposed to greater autonomy for the Basque and Catalan regions of the country. As a rule, we should expect European conservatives to eschew the anti-statist attitudes of their presumed American counterparts, since they tap into older political traditions in which conservatives above all upheld the power and dignity of the state. While they may be expected to uphold free markets as well, they should be less likely to assume the incompatibility of market and state than the more pathological American rightists. Nevertheless, presuming that the winning party's name fooled no one, Spanish voters have not turned left, and it's unclear to what extent they've turned at all. To the extent that Spain is an effective bipolarchy, with only two major parties realistically capable of forming a government, voters there may have done just as Americans tend to do, which is to blame the ruling party for national failure and endorse the strongest opposition party for no better reason than convenience. The existence of an "official" opposition requires little imagination of voters, since the someone else who can presumably do the job better than the incumbent, it also being presumed that no one can do worse, is always readily at hand. The complacent assurance that there's always the Republicans in the U.S., or always the People's Party in Spain -- though that party actually dates back only to 1989 -- may limit a republic's (or a parliamentary monarch's) capacity for political innovation, and may prove a self-reinforcing handicap, since the most likely response to PP or GOP failure will be recourse to each country's official opposition. The one thing that can be said with certainty about Spain is that Spanish voters failed to think outside the box despite their economic crisis. Sadly, Americans seem no more likely to do so next year.

Mayor Bloomberg and the voice of the people

2011-11-18T11:14:00.001-05:00

The Mayor of New York City went on the radio today to claim vindication for his decision to evict the Wall Street Occupiers from Zuccotti Park. Unruffled by yesterday's protests, Michael Bloomberg described them as "an opportunity for a bunch of unions to complain or protest or whatever they want to do." If the protests appeared relatively civil, the mayor seemed to suggest, that was because unions, not occupiers, led them. At the same time, he credited himself with considerable magnanimity, noting that he had allowed the occupiers two months to have their say. "You have to give people time to express themselves," he said, or else a judge might complain about your hasty action. It's clear to him now, however, that the right time had come to clear the park. How does he know this? Here's how:

One of the surest signs we did the right thing is that no one in city, as far as I know, is calling for the return of the tarps, tents and encampment of Zuccotti Park.... Now, there are protestors that are probably calling for it, but I don't know of any elected officials who have stood up.

Bloomberg's math is simple: no elected officials = no one in the city. Whether you believe that a majority of the people supports his action or not, that equation ought to be slightly chilling.

George Will: What is truth, and who cares?

2011-11-17T14:44:00.001-05:00

George Will has a provocative non-partisan column in circulation this week in which he discusses two laws currently facing judicial. In California, water district board member Xavier Alvarez is challenging a federal "Stolen Valor" law that criminalizes his false claim, made while campaigning, that he had served 25 years in the Marine Corps and had won the Congressional Medal of Honor. In Ohio, the Susan B. Anthony List political action committee is challenging a state law that allows a former congressman to sue them for claiming that he'd voted for taxpayer-funded abortions. Will notes that Alvarez's claims were "rubbish," while the Ohio case hinges on a disputed interpretation of the "Obamacare" legislation. He also points out that Supreme Court precedent extends First Amendment protection to many kinds of untruthful speech. Will quotes (but doesn't cite) the 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan case, in which the Warren Court, overruling a libel conviction against the newspaper, established "malice" as the determinant of libel or defamation. In the majority opinion, as quoted by Will, the Court stated that "constitutional protection does not turn upon the truth, popularity or social utility of the ideas and beliefs which are offered." In a section unquoted by Will, but consistent with his reading, the Court affirms that "erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate."

Will believes that Alvarez shouldn't be culpable for his lies because they were, self-evidently, not defamatory. But he leaves an opening for the Court to uphold the law, whether he meant to or not, by including among the "four traditional categories of unprotected speech" the category of fraud. Unless Will defines fraud differently from the rest of us, he would seem to agree that Alvarez's statement is fraudulent. But the context of the legal category of "fraud" may not extend to a person making false claims about his past.

In Ohio, Will seems satisfied that the case against the Anthony List is a matter of "he said, they said," incapable of objective resolution. He assumes the List's right to dispute whether the President's executive order "purportedly limiting the funding of abortions" is no more than the "symbolic gesture" it was dubbed by Planned Parenthood. The courts' concern should not be whether the List's charge is true, but whether it is "sincere." Will himself (in this column, at least) draws no conclusions about the order, nor does he seem to think that he needs to. Whether anyone can definitively say that the order excludes abortion from funding under "Obamacare" is irrelevant. Skeptics are free under the First Amendment always to question whether the order is effective or sincere, according to Will's reasoning. They are, by implication, always free to question the sincerity of any political speech or act, or to infer from such acts any conspiratorial agenda they sincerely perceive. It would make no difference to Will, if not to Ohio, if the List's charge could be proved as fraudulent as Alvarez's claims about himself.

All of this is disturbing, and the most disturbing part is the way Will's opinions seem to follow from his understanding of democracy. "For weeks before the election," he writes, "voters heard [the congressman's] dispute with the Susan B. Anthony List, then voted against him. Isn't that how political arguments should be settled?" George Will isn't usually the most vocal champion of democracy -- he's on record having written that the nation would be better off if fewer people voted -- but here he endorses an extreme form of democracy that should be abhorrent to a conservative. He says, in effect, that the people have an inalienable right to resolve a dispute without regard for the truth. Even more disturbing is the kernel of truth in that opinion. Democracy in its purest form presumes an utter indifference to results; it makes no difference what the people choose, only that they choose for themselves. But if democracy, like any political form, is a means to the end of human survival, is democratic indifference really acceptable? I grant that certain questions of "values" will never have a definitive, objectively truthful answer, but I reject the postmodernist insinuation that no meaningful question has an objective answer based on something more than someone's will to power. Society has to be committed to truth, and democracy should be capable of dedication to truth without compromising anybody's civic freedom. Lying about your past should disqualify you from political office. Disputes over the meaning of law should be capable of objective and definitive resolution. "Who gets to judge political truth?" asks the headline over Will's column in a local paper. If the question is sincerely asked, the answer may be everybody, or somebody, but the heart of the answer is that the judgment has to be made.