The New Rome: the factions of the arena and an Idiot of the Week

History tells us that fans of chariot racing in the Byzantine Empire divided into color-coded factions to support the matching-colored racing teams, and that the arena factions became comparable to political parties, loudly and sometimes violently articulating social demands in the presence of the Emperor while battling among themselves. While there were several racing teams, an ancient bipolarchy of Blues and Greens eventually formed to dominate the Hippodrome. I don't know enough about the place and the period to say whether fans grew more politically assertive as they recognized their numerical strength or spectator sports was politicized by pre-existing factions or interest groups otherwise shut out from power by the imperial system. Whatever the cause, the rise and riot of the arena factions were another stage in the decadence of Rome after Rome itself had fallen.

The controversy over Bristol Palin's participation in the Dancing With the Stars game show has gotten me wondering about how close we are to that Byzantine decadence. Arguably, it was already a sign of decadence for the former governor of a state and candidate for the second-highest office in the land to allow her daughter to compete on such a ghastly program, but it was not surprising given that the governor is now a TV star in her own right, and it was not as if precedents had not already been sent. A former member of Congress and a legitimate American hero of the moon landing have debased themselves by playing the same game. It was certainly a further sign of decadence, albeit a predictable one, that Governor Palin's political followers would at least be accused of seeking a symbolic victory, a show of their own strength, by casting votes for Palin's daughter. It will be yet a further sign of decadence if Palin's enemies take the bait, which was probably cast quite consciously by ABC, and boost the show's ratings or revenues by pooling their numbers behind one of Palin's remaining opponents in order to deny the Palinites their symbolic victory and deliver an entirely symbolic rebuke to the former governor. I'm no fan of Sarah Palin or her party, but I don't give a damn whether her daughter wins a TV dance contest or not, and I refuse to interpret the result as any kind of referendum on Miss Palin's mother. If Palinites want to waste their time on such a project, that's their prerogative. Anyone who feels threatened by the prospect of Bristol Palin's victory should find a new hobby or simply get out more often. It takes two to tango before this country goes the way of Rome in this regard, and Democrats and liberals can perform a recognizable duty to their nation by letting this matter drop.

In this context, I can't help but view the deed of Steve Cowan of Vermont, Wisconsin, as possibly the first step on a slippery slope. Cowan reportedly shot his TV set because he was so incensed by Bristol Palin's performance on the most recent episode of the game show. That may sound funny on the first reading, but the fact that Dancing With the Stars can incite such rage, even in a single individual, and probably because of the alleged politicization of the contest, may be cause for modest alarm. Ironically, my understanding is that Dancing is one of the most popular programs on television because, despite the dancers' somewhat risque costumes, it's widely regarded as "clean" entertainment because it lacks violence and sexual subject matter. The irony would be greater if this proved to be the one TV show that directly and indisputably provoked acts of violence among viewers. On this occasion, I think we could do without irony.

Koppel and Olbermann on the bias of objectivity

Keith Olbermann was not long returned from his slap-on-the-wrist two-business-day suspension for violating the NBC code of journalistic ethics (he had donated money to political candidates) before he began a feud with Ted Koppel, the former host and creator of ABC's Nightline show. In an op-ed for last Sunday's Washington Post, Koppel delivered the ultimate insult to Olbermann; he equated the Countdown host with his reactionary counterparts on Fox News, condemning both Fox and MSNBC for abandoning the old TV news ideal of non-partisan objectivity and accusing both networks of telling their audiences only what they wanted to hear. The next night, Olbermann responded with one of those fire-and-brimstone "Special Comments" in which he persists despite the devastating parody Ben Affleck perpetrated on Saturday Night Live some time ago. He denounced Koppel, claiming that his false notion of objectivity failed to prevent the invasion of Iraq because it somehow restrained Koppel from calling lies by name. Koppel riposted during a radio interview yesterday, reiterating his warnings against ratings-driven opinionating disguised as journalism.

As it happens, Koppel was also criticized by Olbermann's nemesis, Bill O'Reilly, who has reportedly promised to retire if Koppel can prove that he has ever lied on the air. As far as I know, however, Koppel never made such a charge against O'Reilly or Olbermann. The issue is bias, the absence of objectivity, the habit of talkers on either cable network to preach to choirs. Koppel's heroes, Murrow and Cronkite, supposedly never did such things, and arguably could not have because TV news in their time wasn't neatly divided into ideological niche markets. Koppel exalts them as models of objectivity, but the entire debate begs a question: is there an objective definition of objectivity?

Murrow's legendary objectivity, after all, was an early form of "liberal bias" as far as the fans of Joe McCarthy were concerned, and the entire movement toward conservative media was based on a perception that Cronkite and his counterparts on the network news shows were all biased against conservative policies and values. Conservatives watched the news and felt excluded; the networks seemed to them unwilling to acknowledge that there was more than one side to certain stories, that certain notions taken for granted were still open to debate. Politics complicates the idea of objectivity, making it not just a matter of "just the facts" but a matter of fairness -- fairness itself being a matter of equal representation for contradictory viewpoints. For some critics, objectivity defined as pluralistic fairness threatens to abdicate its responsibility to judge. A critical account of news reporting in advance of the invasion of Iraq might protest at the equal presentation of administration and opposition positions and a perceived refusal to judge between them. From this perspective, objectivity becomes a matter of bending over backwards to accommodate partisan feelings, placing too much priority on not appearing to take a side and not enough on telling truths and passing judgments. Our bipolarchial political environment exacerbates this tendency, since denouncing one party looks like endorsing the other. Objectivity becomes a matter of neutrality, but neutrality compromises objectivity if we expect it to make judgments, as we should.

Olbermann clearly sees himself as a truth-teller, someone who tells "the powerful" what they don't want to hear, should they happen to listen to his show. He bristles when anyone suggests that he's a cheerleader for the Democratic party, though he routinely makes the same charge against Fox News. His problem isn't that he's a cheerleader -- he routinely criticizes Obama's persistence in waging the War on Terror, for instance, -- but that his entire program is premised on the existence of an enemy -- the Republican party, its reactionary acolytes and their media propagandists. He doesn't say that Democrats are always right, but he very nearly says that Republicans are always wrong. He claims to hold himself to a higher standard of truth than Fox, but I don't watch Fox and won't take an enemy's word for what they do. In any event, I'm sure that O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck make the same claims of veracity for themselves while calling the MSNBC hosts liars. You can't decide between them simply by watching them both any more than you can by watching only one. You'd probably be better off watching neither network.

Apologists for either MSNBC or Fox will quickly note that Olbermann, Maddow, O'Reilly, Hannity et al are commentators. Their job is to offer their opinions, not to report news. They're not a new phenomenon; commentators of their ilk used to be common on the radio before the days of television. Nor have they replaced the nightly news or the straight news reporting on either network. What Koppel resents, presumably, is that the commentators now overshadow the anchors, that people (especially in the blogosphere) seem to care more about what Olbermann or O'Reilly say than what Couric, Sawyer and Williams report. That may be because news reporting is compromised by complicity in the American Bipolarchy and includes no viewpoints from outside the system. Real objectivity may require journalists to at least ask whether the answer is to take one side or the other, or to make a stand against both.

Taking Exception to Exceptionalism

Jonah Goldberg's latest column has alerted me to the latest outbreak of op-ed polemic on the subject of "American exceptionalism." Goldberg goes after two liberal writers, Michael Kinsley and Peter Beinart, who have allegedly challenged the orthodox notion that America, in Goldberg's own words, "has its own way of doing things separate and distinct from Europe." He also takes a retrospective swipe at the President, who while running for office affirmed American exceptionalism yet added that every nation considers itself exceptional. Goldberg's criticism of Obama is relatively mild, but it gets to the point of his column, which is to affirm, contra the columnists, that the U.S. is not only objectively exceptional among nations but is still "the last best hope on Earth."

What did Kinsley and Beinart actually write? Kinsley was guaranteed to offend from the start, since he headlined his column, "U.S is not greatest country ever." Let's make clear that American exceptionalism and American supremacy are two different propositions; Somalia, after all, is arguably as exceptional a nation as the U.S. Kinsley is more concerned with American chauvinism, noting that 75% of Americans polled by Yahoo regard theirs as the greatest country ever. "Does any other electorate demand such constant reassurance about how wonderful it is — and how wise?" he asks. The answer is: probably. He then goes on to challenge a certain idea of American exceptionalism -- not so much that the U.S. is qualitatively different from all other nations, but that America is an exception to the rules governing other countries.

The notion that America and Americans are special, among all the peoples of the earth, is sometimes called “American exceptionalism.” Because of our long history of democracy and freedom, or because we have a special mission to spread these values (or at least to remain a shining example of them), or because of our wealth, or because of our military strength, our nuclear arsenal, our wide-open spaces, our pragmatism, our idealism, or just because, the rules don’t apply to us. There are man-made rules like, “You can’t start a war without the
permission of the United Nations Security Council.” We’ve gotten away with quite a bit of bending or breaking of that kind of rule. This may have given us the impression that we could ignore the other kind of rules —the ones that are imposed by reality and therefore are self-enforcing. These are rules such as, “You can’t have good ice cream without fat” or “You can’t borrow increasing amounts of money indefinitely and never pay it back, because people will eventually stop lending it to you.” No country is special enough to escape these rules.

After quoting Obama's remarks on exceptionalism, Kinsley identifies the wrong kind of exceptionalism with Newt Gingrich, who still identifies America with "the frontier [and] the sturdy independent farmers." To espouse this kind of exceptionalism, Kinsley writes, is to live in a fantasyland. Worse, exceptionalism combined with faith in American's intrinsic supremacy blinds people to the necessity of change and hard choices. "If people believe it's true [already]," he states, "they won't do what's necessary to make it true."

As if anticipating Goldberg's criticism, Kinsley closes:

Every time I strike this note, which I guess I do a lot, I hear from people calling me elitist or unpatriotic. Here is my answer: If you think a friend is talking nonsense or behaving in a way that damages both of your long-term interests, it is not elitist to say so. To the contrary, it is treating him or her like an adult and an equal. As for patriotism, if you think your country is in danger, how is it unpatriotic to say so?

Kinsley's piece appeared before Election Day. Beinart's came after, and was provoked by Senator-elect Rubio of Florida's affirmation that America is "the single greatest nation in all of human history. A place without equal in the history of all mankind." For Beinart this expresses a particularly "lunatic" strain of exceptionalism, founded on the idea that "America is the only truly free and successful country in the world." To the contrary, just as Kinsley notes that BMW is opening more car plants here because it can pay American workers less than their European counterparts, Beinart observes that "From China to India to Brazil, hundreds of millions of people are rising economically in ways their parents could scarcely have imagined, in part because their governments are investing in infrastructure in the way the United States did in the late nineteenth century. The American dream of upward mobility is alive and well, just not in America." Exceptionalism, Beinart argues, not only blinds Americans from the lessons to be learned from other countries, but blinds them to the useful lessons of their own history while bedazzling them with an ideological mythos of "sturdy independent farmers."

Rather than answer either writer's substantive arguments -- Kinsley in favor of austerity on the new British model, Beinart if favor of Keynesian stimulus spending -- Goldberg denounces them as if they had denied any kind of American exceptionalism. It makes him look intellectual to point out, correctly, that American exceptionalism has been a subject of historical and sociological inquiry since the time of Tocqueville, and that even leftists have had to account for America's exceptional lack, among industrialized nations, of a strong socialist movement. But neither Kinsley nor Beinart deny that the U.S. has had an exceptional history. Nor did either writer assert, as Goldberg charges, that "the idea of American exceptionalism is an artifact of right-wing jingoism, xenophobia or ignorance." It might have been more fair to write that they blame the persistence of the worst sort of exceptionalism in the face of hard facts on right-wing jingoism, etc.

Goldberg insists that declaring the U.S. "the greatest country in the world ... doesn't mean it's perfect." In recent years he's been quite critical of an American crony-capitalist culture that culminated in the Bailouts of 2008-9, though he can think of no alternative to idealized "real" capitalism as the remedy for it. I suppose Goldberg deserves credit for acknowledging American imperfection, but insisting on both exceptionalism and supremacy implies that the U.S. has nothing whatsoever to learn from other countries or new ideas, and that today's problems can most likely be solved by looking backward to our presumably more perfect past. As a nation born from revolution, Americans have naturally seen themselves as an exceptional people. As revolution recedes further into the past, however, exceptionalism can acquire an increasingly reactionary, fundamentalist aspect that could retard necessary evolution. If exceptionalism becomes entirely a matter of what Americans should not do, or should not have to do, we may find ourselves less exceptional among the ranks of failed empires and powers than we want to think.

Poetry Corner: 'It is the soldier...'

Maybe it isn't a poem, but it looks like one when printed in centered italic verses in the letters page of The Saratogian. It's a request from reader Bill Nevitt of Corinth, who wanted it to run "in honor of Veterans Day." It appeared three days later. Some of you may have seen it elsewhere. It goes like this"

It is the soldier, not the president, who gives us democracy.

It is the soldier, not the Congress, who takes care of us.

It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to demonstrate.

Clearly, Nevitt is asking for it. He trips up right out of the gate, I learn, by making a common misattribution of this litany to "Father Dennis O'Brien, Chaplain, USMC." O'Brien is credited with it all over the internet, though he never took credit for it himself. It turns out that the thing was written by someone named Charles Michael Province back in 1970. O'Brien was mistakenly credited as the author when he forwarded a copy for publication in the "Dear Abby" column.

Discredit, then, to whom it's due. Let's take this point by point.

Province is correct that the President of the United States did not and does not "give us democracy." As some strict constructionists will argue, no one has given us democracy, since the U.S. is only a democratic republic. It is an independent nation as a result of a war, but the soldiers themselves did not determine its future as a constitutional republic -- the Constitution did. Soldiers had no role in the drafting or ratification of that document.

What it means for either the soldier or Congress to "take care of us" is, of course, a matter of ongoing debate. Let's dismiss this line as hopelessly vague.

As for freedom of press and speech, it's unclear how the soldier can "give" these to anyone when he doesn't enjoy them himself as a matter of military discipline. To be literal about it, Americans were given these particular freedoms by the congressional authors of the First Amendment to the Constitution, and soldiers had no special role in drafting or ratifying the amendment.

To be honest, I understand what Province and Nevitt are trying to say. They want us to understand that we retain all of the above freedoms because "the soldier" protects the nation from foreign powers that might otherwise conquer and thus enslave Americans. But what if the soldier fails in his mission? What if the country were occupied by a foreign power actually bent on enslaving us? Should we concede that, by virtue of foreign occupation alone, we are slaves, and act accordingly? Without "the soldier," we might lose the "rights" that encourage us to speak, publish or demonstrate without fear of reprisal, but would we lose the ability to do these things? Does our freedom as Americans consist of nothing more than impunity, an assurance (or promise)that we won't suffer for what we say? From what I infer, many Americans think that way. But real freedom should come with a disregard for consequences, except when they impede other people's freedoms. Who is more free, after all: the person who denounces a tyrant in public, fully expecting to be arrested, or the person who has every right to think independently, never does, but acts as if he has? Freedom isn't simply a matter of guarantees and immunities. On some fundamental level, it depends on courage, and not only the armed courage of the soldier, but also, and perhaps most importantly, the readiness and willingness of people to do the right thing and say what needs to be said whether it's safe to do so or not. If only the soldier's courage counts, what's his sacrifice for the rest of us actually worth? It's actually the rest of us who give the soldier something to fight for. Remembering our responsibilities as free people would be the best way to honor Veterans' Day in the future.

The moral issues of health care reform

According to Eugene Robinson, progressives "wonder how health care reform came to be defined not as a moral issue...but as a 'big government takeover,' complete with 'death panels.'" While he doesn't elaborate, perhaps because he takes it for granted, on the moral case for reform, Robinson, or the progressives he writes for, mistake their opposition if they assume that resistance to the alleged "takeover" isn't also a moral issue. Health care itself is an issue that reveals two competing moral systems in play.

Let's assume that the moral case for reform is that no one should go without needed or even helpful medical treatments simply because they can't afford them, or are uninsured. The moral case is usually stated most succinctly as an assertion of a human right to health care. The Heartland Institute, publisher of The Patriot's Toolbox, challenges that assertion in its policy paper on health care, in terms that are moral in their own right.

A right is a claim to be treated in a certain way by others, which places an obligation on others to act in certain ways. Negative rights -- such as the rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence -- are rights to be free from interference and coercion by others. Positive rights -- such as a claim to free or subsidized health care -- are claims to the service, involuntary if necessary, of others. Positive rights therefore bring the risk of contradicting the freedom rights of others.

A 'right to health care' does not appear in the U.S. Constitution or its Bill of Rights, or in any state constitution, or in the writings of the Founding Fathers or the British intellectual tradition from which they drew their inspiration. This was not an oversight. Positive rights may require that goods and services be produced involuntarily, under the penalty of law. Historically, this has not been an efficient or just way to produce goods and services.

From the Heartland perspective, it is for all intents and purposes immoral to coerce someone into providing or subsidizing services for someone else. A different moral code, however, might recognize a general and individual obligation to assist in providing needed or helpful services to everyone within a polity, or to the entire human race. If perpetuating life for everyone is a compelling public good, it can't be immoral or unjust to require each person to contribute to securing services for all. There's an answer to this argument, though, which Heartland, to their credit, doesn't express: some people should go without health care because they don't deserve it. The Toolbox actually asserts that "The Uninsured Typically Get Good Health Care" when they need it, but the fundamental denial of a right to health care, it could be said, should make whether they get good care or not a matter of indifference to the principled opponent of implicitly coercive positive rights. That position assumes a moral imperative on each person to make arrangements for his or her own care without imposing on other people. If you can't manage it, you can hope for charity, but you shouldn't take it for granted, and you ought to be ashamed of your own inadequacy if you have to ask.

The question of rights, their sources and their authority, raises questions about the essence of morality. I've been pondering the meaning of morality for a while in an attempt to distinguish morality from ethics. One of my ideas is that morality is a general condition or state of being rather than a code of rules, so that the crucial moral question, at least according to one moral system, is whether you deserve something -- life or death, reward or punishment, etc. Consider the wounded Little Bill's protest in that essential moral text, the movie Unforgiven, when William Munny prepares to finish him off. "I don't deserve this," the sheriff insists, "I was building a house!" Many in the audience will think differently, because they know that Little Bill had tortured Munny's friend Ned to death. In their view, Little Bill deserves death for that act. Little Bill thinks differently in part because he knew Ned to be one of a band of assassins killing cowboys for money. From his perspective, Ned deserves death, though we know that Ned never actually shot a cowboy, and therefore Little Bill himself doesn't deserve to be shot. Munny himself expresses a third viewpoint. A sympathetic audience might want him to answer that Little Bill deserves death for what he did to Ned, and Munny has already said that he would kill the sheriff for that reason. However, when challenged by Little Bill, Munny answers, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it." He has asserted an amoral position, admitting that he has acted purely for personal revenge. Unforgiven is mainly concerned with the entanglement of morality, justice and revenge -- the assassins are avenging a prostitute disfigured by a cowboy, but by raising the question of "deserve" it may point us toward the essence of morality, or at least the essence of one moral code. For some advocates of universal health care and single-payer provision, asserting a right to health care may be the same as saying we deserve it simply by virtue of being human or at least citizens of a civilized nation. For others, deserve's got nothing to do with it, and a person can never disqualify himself from entitlement to health care. But for those for whom deserve's got everything to do with everything, the simple assertion of a universal human right to health care, not to mention a maximized lifespan, sounds like an amoral if not immoral claim by the undeserving on the deserving. For such people, just as the beginning of wisdom is the fear of Hell and the realization that a sinner belongs there, the beginning of virtue is the recognition that you don't deserve to live, or at least don't deserve a good life, unless you earn your own way. Some others might agree with the proposition while questioning whether some who think they deserve a good life actually do so, while a hedonist or utilitarian for whom the only bad thing is suffering would grow impatient with the whole deserve question. Because the health care issue throws the question of suffering into the balance, the moral stakes are nearly as high as you could ask for short of war. In the long view, the crucial question is whether compromise is possible among the conflicting moralities in play, or whether some large faction of Americans will remain convinced, whatever the outcome, that the country has gone in an immoral, unforgivable direction.

New York State of Mind: Presidential Fantasies of 2012

No New Yorker has headed a major party presidential ticket since Thomas Dewey lost for the second election in a row in 1948. Governors of the Empire State are still considered presidential papabili, however. Nelson Rockefeller tried twice for the Republican nomination, while Democrats practically begged Mario Cuomo, in vain, to run for President. The mayor of New York City is also considered presidential timber if he keeps a high enough profile, though Rudolph Giuliani proved a profound disappointment as an actual aspirant for the nomination. Now, in the aftermath of the 2010 midterms, three New Yorkers have been touted as possible Presidents. There's one each for Republicans, Democrats and independents.

On the GOP side, George Pataki has looked promising ever since he toppled Mario Cuomo in the Republican wave of 1994. A Republican who can win New York is assumed to have national appeal, and though Pataki has been out of public life since 2007, after serving three terms as governor, he's still considered capable of making a run for the Republican presidential nomination, and the man himself has said recently that he won't rule out an attempt.

For the Democrats, the hero of the moment is Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo, Mario's son, who bucked the Republican wave of 2010 by crushing his tea-boosted Republican opponent. Andrew has national executive experience as the head of HUD during the Clinton Administration, as well as the glamour of having once been married to a Kennedy. Talk of his presidential ambitions began almost immediately after his victory, though it's not clear when commentators expect him to try.

Perhaps the most likely New Yorker to try for the White House, according to recent speculation, is Mayor Michael Bloomberg of the big city, a Republican-turned independent whose most important asset is his assets. A recent speculative article in New York magazine raised the possibility that Bloomberg, now serving his third term as mayor, could spend at least $1,000,000,000 of his personal fortune on an independent presidential campaign.

Not one of these men has a chance in my opinion. Pataki is old news at home and was never the sort of Republican who could hope to go national. That's more true than ever in today's tea-swamped GOP, with many hardcore reactionaries likely to echo the opinion (later recanted) of Carl Paladino, Andrew Cuomo's Republican opponent this year, that Pataki is a "degenerate." Reactionaries in New York itself barely acknowledge Pataki as a "real" Republican, and outsiders are bound to be even more skeptical. As for Cuomo, beating a dysfunctional, largely self-financed Republican in a state as blue as New York is hardly proof that he can take on the national Tea Party movement and whichever candidate it favors. Worse, Cuomo, as the former HUD secretary, is a key figure in the reactionary conspiracy theory of the recent economic collapse, since he is considered complicit in the allegedly coerced sale of mortgages to improvident poor folk -- the necessary and sufficient cause of the housing bubble and its bursting as far as Republicans are concerned. Finally, Bloomberg is a profoundly problematic figure for independents nationwide to rally around. His independence is based almost entirely on his wealth, and it comes with an authoritarian streak. Bloomberg bulldozed the city legislature into abolishing mayoral term limits so he could run and win a third time, something not even the infamously authoritarian Giuliani did. That suggests both that Bloomberg sees himself as the sort of indispensable man that American politics prefers to do without, and that he hasn't managed to build a movement to assure continuity with his policies after he moves on. Bloomberg will be further handicapped as a national candidate by his reputation as a regulatory busybody on such matters as the fat in the food we eat. That impulse clearly goes against the anti-"elitist" mood of the moment, since it makes the mayor almost the archetype of the self-appointed know-it-all who presumes to tell us how to live.

New York remains the financial and cultural center of the country, but its leaders no longer enjoy automatic prestige in the rest of the country. Like California at the other end of the continent, New York is thought by many to be isolated if not deliberately aloof from "mainstream" or "flyover" America. There's always been some resentment of New York among Americans, whether they saw it as the capital of capitalism or a ghetto of decadence. I'm not sure whether that phobia is stronger now than ever, but I suspect that it's strong enough to disqualify anyone but the most miraculously successful reactionary (and there were no miracles for Paladino) from occupying the White House anytime soon.

Earmarks: GOP vs GOP

The new Congress hasn't even taken office, but seams are emerging on the strengthened Republican front. A test of wills seems imminent within the GOP senatorial caucus, for instance, over the symbolic issue of earmarks. For Tea Partiers, earmarks exemplify pork-barrel spending. They are thought to fund projects of questionable national worth and are presumed to be motivated primarily by politicians' desire for re-election, designed to be trotted out as proof that your representative brings home the bacon. Responding to this perception, several Republican senators-elect, inspired by incumbent Senator DeMint (one aspirant to leadership of the TP movement) want the GOP caucus to set a rule for itself forbidding Republican senators from including earmarks in spending bills. DeMint is opposed by Minority Leader McConnell and some other senior Republicans who dismiss the earmark issue as purely symbolic at best, and at worst a threat to the separation of powers. These so-called "old bulls" point out that earmarks add up only to a minute percentage of government spending. They warn, however, that eschewing earmarks would by default transfer discretion over the allocation of budget money from the legislative branch, where they claim it belongs, to the executive branch. If earmarks are as small a deal as they protest, however, the surrender of discretion they warn against should be of little concern. Tea Partiers might fairly ask why they should worry about the distribution of a discretionary power that they reject in general.

Democrats have no dog in this fight (except maybe for a blue one) because they're probably as conflicted over earmarks as Republicans are. Earmarks aren't a partisan or even an ideological issue, but a populist one -- an instance when common sense seems to identify an obvious abuse of power. Today's reactionary populists in the Tea Party movements have risked a bargain with the Republican party as a shortcut to getting the power to reform politics. The intraparty dispute over earmarks may be an early indicator for TPs of the extent to which the Republican establishment actually intends to accommodate their populist demands. The TPs have said that they won't take Republican fidelity for granted, so let their vigilance begin here.

Austerity and Rioting: Britain's Turn

Until the 1990s, students in Great Britain could go to college for free. A Labor government instituted fees, and now the Tory-Liberal Democratic coalition government proposes to triple those fees -- raising the annual bill to the equivalent of $14,000 a year -- as an austerity measure to close the budget deficit. Thousands of students have responded with demonstrations and building occupations. The protesters complain that the government is pricing college education out of the range of the poor, however modest the fees may seem from an American standpoint. Protest leaders talk of recalling LibDem parliamentarians who renege on a campaign promise not to raise fees. Beyond that, today's actions are another tantrum of impotence along the lines of French demonstrations against raising the age of pension eligibility. As long as governments have been legally elected, and no one contemplates a coup d'etat, no amount of public anger will dissuade "conservative" regimes from austerity measures. The most the students and their friends can hope for, I suppose, would be to persuade enough LibDems to repudiate the coalition and force a vote of confidence on Tory prime minister Cameron. I have no idea of how likely that is, and there's no guarantee that the election that would follow a no-confidence vote in parliament would go the students' way. Britain as a whole may be in as much of a "no free rides" mood as America is. The most likely result of the Cameron plan will be a boom in the student-loan business.

Capitalists can be depended upon to argue in favor of higher fees on the ground that college education is not a right. In the abstract that may be so, but in a competitive global economy it might be considered a duty to one's nation to get the higher education necessary for technological and entrepreneurial innovation. If that's so, you could argue that a citizen should no more have to pay for higher education from public universities than he should have to pay a fee to join the army. On the other hand, I suppose you could say that, as the soldier risks his life, so the student should make some smaller risk of his savings, or a sacrifice of whatever spending allowance he's accustomed to, since there is more chance for actual personal gain from education than there is in soldiering. If governments must economize, they ought to prioritize as well. If they can't afford free college for everyone who wants it, they should at least subsidize the most gifted who are most likely to benefit the nation with enhanced knowledge and skills. If the state has an interest in a skilled population, it should facilitate the acquisition of skills. Relying only on market incentives is unreliable in an imperfect marketplace of limited options. But if the Cameron government believes that Britons can afford the increased fees, I'd like to see them make their case. Until then, any aversion of rioting aside, it seems like Cameron is asking the wrong people to tighten their belts.

Will the Republicans punish success?

Under the chairmanship of Michael Steele, the Republican party has rebounded from two consecutive thumpings at the polls to reclaim control of the House of Representatives. Over the past week, however, I've seen little inclination him to credit him with his party's success, and now I read that some Republicans want him to step down when his term expires and will challenge him if he seeks another.

The sort of turnover these Republicans demand is actually fairly routine. Howard Dean, who presided over the Democrats' recapture of Congress in 2006, and whose "50-state strategy" was emulated by Steele, wasn't exactly encouraged to stay on by a grateful party. Within the major parties themselves, rotation in office is deemed more desirable than it is in legislatures.

So far, no clear challenger has emerged in the event that Steele desires to stay. That should be no surprise, since the job of party chairman seems to come with no guarantee of gratitude for a job well done. At the same time, Steele's uncertainty on the throne reflects confusion among Republicans themselves over the cause of their success this year. To the extent that the Tea Party movement was not an actual creation of the Republican party -- leaving aside the extent to which it's been subsidized by GOP sympathizers in the private sector -- it's not unreasonable to question how much credit Steele should actually get for Tea-fueled victories. Given Americans' bipolar political consciousness, once a sufficient number of them had gotten themselves scared of the Obama administration and its policies, Republican success was assured regardless of who chaired the national committee.

It's probably telling that, at their moment of triumph, owed in large part to the more-or-less free support of the Tea Partiers, some Republicans have grown impatient with Steele, not just because of alleged deviations from radio-controlled ideological orthodoxy, but also if not primarily because they think he hasn't done enough as a fundraiser. Many Republicans probably consider fundraising the chairman's primary job, the party itself by implication being no more than a fundraising institution. In the wake of the Citizens United decision, however, money that might otherwise have gone to the GOP is going to sympathetic but unaffiliated groups who can offer donors the benefit of anonymity, if not more. While Republican candidates rarely have viable opponents to their right, the party itself has rivals for the free-speech dollar of reactionaries all over the country. Under such circumstances, success for Republican candidates doesn't translate exactly into success for the party as a fundraising entity. Shouldn't Steele get some credit, though, for helping ensure that the TPs didn't go off the grid and get behind independent candidates. If so, shouldn't he get more credit for easing the fundraising burden on Republicans? It looks as if some Republicans would rather have shouldered that burden, as long as it brought them more money. That should make you wonder what their true priorities are.

From the 'Heartland'

Newspaper offices around the country are receiving copies of The Patriot's Toolbox, a publication of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute. The self-described "free-market think tank" intends the book, a compilation of public-policy pamphlets, as "a guide to public policy for patriot-activists in the Tea Party movement as well as for candidates for public office, incumbent office holders, civic and business leaders, and journalists assigned to cover the movement." That's a neat trick. If I read that quote correctly, Heartland intends to tell Tea Partiers what to think on public policy, and to tell journalists what Tea Partiers think.



While that blurb begs the question of whether Heartland speaks for the Tea Partiers or to them, institute president Joseph Bast and chairman Herbert J. Walberg feel a need to explain what they mean by patriot. "The word 'patriot' appears in the title because the principles we recommend would return the country to government based on the ideals of the Founders who led the American Revolution: liberty, limited taxation, and limited government." Oppose those, a reader might infer, and you're the opposite of a patriot -- a traitor???



"Tea Party patriots," Bast and Walberg continue, "recognize that basic American ideals and historical practice are under attack. Their views are radical but only in the original sense of the term, that is, reaching to the roots, foundation, or ultimate sources and principles. They are echoing the ideas of the American Founders including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington." In this case radicalism is in order, since once the foundation was laid, the ideas of these Founders grew quite contradictory. Hamilton and Madison speak as one in The Federalist, but rarely afterward. Invoking all these Founders implies a mixed message unless you assume a state of affairs so alien to all of them that they'd forget their eventual differences. But our state of affairs arguably derives from their fundamental disagreements, so echoing their ideals is of limited use. But the Heartland authors press on.

The Tea Party patriots remind us that the Founders' Declaration of Independence refused to accept 'taxation without representation,' British Parliamentary supremacy, and the rulings of King George III that violated civil and economic liberties. They call forth memories of events that led up to the Declaration, in particular of the citizens who threw British tea into Boston
harbor as a protest against new taxes.

It's one of history's oddities that an anti-tax movement has named itself for an event that had relatively little to do with taxation. The Boston Tea Party took place when it did because a new British policy that lowered the price of imported tea was felt to give an unfair advantage to the British East India Company over colonial smugglers who got their tea outside legal channels. The Tea Party was less a tax revolt than a protest against economic regulation -- in which case today's TPs can still take inspiration from it -- or the threat of monopoly in the tea trade. It's unclear to me whether the prospect of monopoly in any trade troubles the dreams of the WalMart shopping multitudes in and out of the TP movement. The bulk of the Patriot's Toolbox is, at first glance, a relatively sober discussion of the benefits and admitted risks of wholesale deregulation and privatization, so perhaps we should restrain ourselves from judging this collection of economists and academics by their shortcomings as historians.



"Although apparently abandoned by politicians and most of the media, the Founders' ideals still prevail in America," the institute claims. Leaving aside the still-questionable definition of Founding ideals, proof for the assertion is found in polls expressing a continued sense of "American exceptionalism." Americans remain exceptional in the world, the Toolbox claims, in their distrust of government, which they find wasteful, inefficient and unresponsive to "what people like me think." This reality, the editors insist, is obscured by misrepresentation of the Tea Partiers by the "liberal-biased traditional media," despite a claim made in the same paragraph that said media are rapidly losing influence.



I'll do Heartland the courtesy of reading at least a couple of their position papers and skimming the rest. While their ideological bias is self-evident, they at least refrained from wild charges of "socialism" in their introduction and assigned George W. Bush his fair share of blame for current problems. The Toolbox is of interest, not because it represents genuine Tea Party opinion as advertised, but because it shows an ongoing effort to shape the minds and options for Tea Partiers at their moment of supposed triumph.

Time for a New Narrative?

A letter in the latest Nation caught my eye this morning. Tracy Kosman wrote:

President Obama has failed to use his silver tongue to the advantage of his program and his party. He should have started, on January 21, 2009, to weave a Democratic narrative; who we are, what we've done in the past, what we stand for. If he had done that, framed the issues to our advantage, it would have been much more difficult for the other side to get credence for its distortions. Now the Republicans are telling the stories, and their versions are prevailing.

This is by no means a novel observation. We've been hearing it from Democrats since at least 1994, when the latest Republican narrative was first tried out successfully. The perpetuity of complaint over an apparent "narrative gap" between the two parties should have compelled some liberal loyalists to start accounting for the gap instead of wishing it away. The narrative gap is persistent, the instances of Democrats overcoming it exceptional. It may be based in the differing narratives within each major party and its base.

Since Bill Clinton's election as President, Republicans have recognized the need to construct a narrative to convert voters to their point of view. They felt the need because their own internal narrative told them that the public, despite electing Republicans in three consecutive presidential elections, was in some way brainwashed by the "liberal bias" Republicans perceived in the mainstream news media. That bias and the resulting brainwashing of the electorate explained why Democrats held Congress despite GOP success in presidential races. It provoked Republicans and the rising voices of the radio to construct a critical narrative that challenged a supposed liberal consensus while disputing the authority and objectivity of the mainstream media.

By contrast, while Democrats and liberals are happy to make conservative media the scapegoat for every electoral setback, I suspect that they lack the same urgent sense that the public has been brainwashed. You might find some liberals who will make that claim, but they most likely believe that whatever conditioning has been accomplished by right-wing propaganda is essentially shallow. My hunch is that liberals believe man to be essentially good, and that at heart, or by instinct, most Americans think (or feel) as liberals do. By comparison, many conservatives come from traditions that emphasize innate human depravity and the need for a "born again" conversion experience in order for someone to be a good person. If so, then a critical narrative of the sort that shakes or breaks a consensus may come more easily to conservatives than it does to liberals, who are less likely to feel that anyone is damned who disagrees with them.

At the same time, liberals are limited in their ability to construct a critical narrative -- assuming that that's the sort of narrative they need now -- by their investment in the Democratic party and its investment in the corporate establishment that is the necessary target of any meaningful critical narrative. Any critical narrative designed to engage the "left" ought to be more sweeping than the Democrats' desired demonization of media meanies and select corporate scapegoats, but performing such a narrative could compromise the Democrats' fundraising capacity. Democrats may feel that they can get away with a purely affirmative narrative, a liberal equivalent of Reagan's "morning in America" rhetoric, but they'll be kidding themselves if they think they can go further now without forcefully telling people that they're wrong and they've been duped. Look at how Republican commentators have raged and sneered preemptively at any hint of such an approach -- they call it more proof of liberal elitist intellectual snobbery -- to measure its potential.

It's not only the Democratic party that needs a new narrative. Its need is almost beside the point. The nation (and not just The Nation) needs a new narrative that looks beyond the Republicans and doesn't mistake them for the sole sufficient and necessary cause of our national troubles. That's probably more of a critical narrative than the Democrats need, and that's why we don't need a new narrative from Democrats alone. Tracy Kosman seems to think that the President can still turn things around with oratory, when his loquaciousness is already something of a national joke. But she closes by quoting an earlier letter-writer who said, "We must fight the right by shouting out what the left has won for us all." I like the emphasis on "we" rather than dependence on Obama's silver tongue, but Kosman is still wrong. She should leave "left" and "right" out of it and shout out what the real elite is doing to us now on a bipartisan basis, and what we should do about it.

Idiots of the Week: Video Version

If a picture's worth a thousand words, I could spend days describing why I recognize the makers of the following commercial. Let's see if you can figure out for yourselves why people should find this advert highly offensive.

Countdown for Olbermann?

NBC has suspended Keith Olbermann, the host of MSNBC's prime-time Countdown show, for putting his money where his mouth is. Olbermann donated money to three Democratic congressional candidates, two in Arizona and one in Kentucky, in violation of the parent network's code of journalistic ethics. I was not aware that Olbermann was a journalist, however. Countdown is an opinion show, and despite Olbermann's protests to the contrary, it is daily propaganda for the Democratic party, even if only in the negative form of anti-Republican fearmongering. Bias is the entire point of his program, and even when he participates on Election Night panels, as he did Tuesday night, I presume that he's on to offer his personal opinions, not objective news reports. Not knowing the policy of Fox News in this regard for comparison purposes, I can only question NBC's decision -- not out of sympathy for Olbermann, whose act grew tiresome for me some time ago, but on the basis of common sense. He should have just as much right to give money to candidates as he does to advocate for them on his program. If Olbermann has breached a code of journalistic ethics, he did it long before any money changed hands. Removing him from the air may be the appropriate punishment in that case, since it would render the network itself consistent in its apparent opposition to bias, but I expect some kind of petition campaign for his reinstatement any moment now, and from a business standpoint it makes sense to keep him -- and to be honest about the actual business of MSNBC.

The American Conservative Returns

One piece of good news this week, to me at least, was the arrival of a new issue of The American Conservative in my mailbox. The anti-war "paleocon" monthly has returned from several months' hiatus, now reportedly funded enough to be published "for years to come" after its future had hung in doubt for much of this year. This is good news for anyone interested in genuine, substantive political discussion, because the Conservative offers a unique perspective on the current scene. The smug self-righteousness of most conservative media (and most opinion media in general) is almost entirely absent here, perhaps because the magazine's primary purpose has been to criticize conservatism itself, which in America has degenerated into a radical, ideological "movement," in the magazine's collective opinion, that has abandoned much of the country's true conservative tradition. Stigmatized as "isolationist" by their neocon antagonists, the paleocons of the Conservative are perhaps the most formidable anti-war critics writing today because their opinions can't be written off as stereotypical leftism.

The new issue announces that the Conservative intends to maintain its anti-war, anti-interventionist purpose, and intends to judge the new Republican congress, as well as the Obama administration, by that standard. The cover story, written in advance of the election, blames the Democrats' expected fate in this year's voting to Obama's betrayal of the anti-war left. Justin Raimondo argues that anti-war sentiment made the difference during Obama's primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, though he also notes that Obama's rhetoric about Afghanistan during the campaign itself should have been a warning sign to his supporters. The new President's perpetuation of the War on Terror demoralized his base more than anything else he did, Raimondo claims. Had he acted differently, the writer hints, he might have retained much of his popularity with angry independents despite the controversies over health care and the economy.

The antiwar Left defeated itself by electing a Democrat little different from Bush. And now Barack Obama is dismantling his own party by repudiating the causes that animated his base -- the opposition to war and fear of the imperial presidency. In the run-up to the midterm elections, Obama tried instead to mobilize his party around the weakest items on his agenda: big government and cultural issues. No wonder Democrats and the progressive Left are demoralized: is the party's antiwar base really supposed to get excited about gays in the military?

Raimondo warns, however, that "in the years to come the GOP may yet save the Obama administration by pursuing its own version of electoral suicide." Republicans will do that, he continues, if they try to revive the GWBush "Freedom Agenda," which Raimondo describes as "simply incompatible with the Tea Partiers' commitment to cutting spending and reducing the scope of the federal government." Whether the TPs themselves realize this remains to be seen. Raimondo remains convinced that "key segments of [TP] activists are antiwar as well as anti-spending," but notes that they're "primarily concerned with Obama's domestic programs." He thinks that they'll turn on Republicans again, and immediately, if the GOP pushes for more war and the deficit spending it requires.

The same point is taken up by W. James Antle, who argues that defense spending must be on the table if anyone intends seriously to reduce deficits. He goes further, arguing that meaningful defense cuts require a reconsideration of American strategic priorities as well as the usual scolding of $700 toilets and other waste. He looks forward to collaboration between Ron Paul and Barney Frank on the Sustainable Defense Task Force, which promotes "realistic goals [and] sustainable strategy," but sees Republicans as the biggest threat to this bipartisan agenda.

While Antle notes that "conservative reluctance to cut military spending is somewhat understandable [since] national defense is a legitimate function of government," but he stresses that "defense is by far the biggest discretionary spending program, vastly larger than the combined price tag of those earmarks Republicans so frequently rail against." He advises conservatives to "stop thinking of the military as if it's an honorary member of the private sector rather than a government program [exempt] from cost-benefit analysis and other reasonable standards they would impose on the rest of the federal budget." He also urges them not to panic about all the supposed threats simmering around the world. "[A]dvocates of the status quo assume a military involved in all the world's hot spots in order to eliminate any conceivable threat," Antle writes, "Of course, such a view of the military's role applies the precautionary principle that conservatives wisely [?] reject when it comes to environmental policy."

For Antle, our bloated military establishment is a constant temptation to intervene in other countries' affairs. While "many traditional conservatives favor a strong military that is used sparingly," he writes, "the military's size encourages politicians to use force as a first resort. According to this view, rethinking what constitutes defense is not the same as issuing some pie-in-the-sky pacifist manifesto; rather, it is the only way to control the Pentagon's budget....Ultimately, budget-cutters will find that the republic-versus-empire debate cannot be avoided."

It might seem like the Conservative is further marginalizing itself by emphasizing its anti-war stance at a time when everyone seems focused on domestic issues, but the editors most likely believe that it's exactly while everyone obsesses over health care and other easily-demagogued issues that the military-industrial establishment will be least challenged without someone sounding the alarm. The magazine gives instant credibility to anti-war opinion because its stance can't be smeared as Marxist or anti-American -- though it comes in for smears of its own given its critical view of Israel. Some writers on the anti-war Left have been welcomed in the Conservative's pages, and it remains a potential seedbed of a truly dissident, anti-Bipolarchy movement.

On some issues, the magazine's opinions are just as obnoxious as you might expect, but as a rule there's more effort to offer reasoned objections to liberal or progressive demands, and less recourse to ad hominem "anti-elitist" arguments. The regrettable thing about The American Conservative is that, while it wants to bill itself as the voice of authentic conservatism as opposed to radio-controlled movement Republicanism, its name will always make newstand browsers assume that there's nothing but standard Republican propaganda inside. In our Bipolarchy "conservatism" means the Republican party, and that makes some people unwilling to read or listen when thoughtful critics raise issues on philosophical rather than partisan grounds. As a persistent internal critic within the conservative community, the Conservative is an invaluable resource and worthy of attention even from those who don't call themselves conservative. With Republicans rising to power again, it's a good thing that the Conservative is back in action.

A Call for More Rage

If Chris Hedges published "The Phantom Left" back on Sunday, I can only imagine how he feels, or what he might write, after Tuesday's elections. Hedges, an antiwar writer who has also found time to swipe at atheists in a busy publishing career, seems to have been provoked by last weekend's Comedy Central rally in Washington. John Stewart's pleas for moderate politics and moderate rhetoric only inspired disgust in Hedges.

The rally delivered a political message devoid of reality or content. The corruption of electoral politics by corporate funds and lobbyists ... was ignored for emotional catharsis. The right hates. The liberals laugh. And the country is taken hostage. The Rally to Restore Sanity, held in Washington’s National Mall, was yet another sad footnote to the death of the liberal class. It was as innocuous as a Boy Scout jamboree.

Hedges is annoyed by Stewart's attempted delegitimization of anger as a force in politics. His view is that Americans have every right and ample cause to be angry -- including the Tea Partiers. Stewart "ridiculed followers of the tea party without acknowledging that the pain and suffering expressed by many who support the movement are not only real but legitimate," Hedges writes. "Fox News’ Beck and his allies on the far right can use hatred as a mobilizing force because there are tens of millions of Americans who have very good reason to hate."

The only problem with TP anger, Hedges suggests, is that people like Beck steer it in the wrong directions. If anything, he argues, more Americans should be angry across the political spectrum. He complains that there's only a "phantom left" in the country, something little more than a figment of the center-right imagination, because those labeled as leftists by the center and the right have done next to nothing to articulate the people's grievances against corporate power in the angry langauge they deserve. Liberals themselves, the "phantom left" of reactionary fantasy, preach moderation, accommodation, compromise and acquiescence instead of resistance.

As long as the liberal class speaks in the dead voice of moderation it will continue to fuel the right-wing backlash. Only when it appropriates this rage as its own, only when it stands up to established systems of power, including the Democratic Party, will we have any hope of holding off the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party.

To Hedges, this is no time for moderation. He envisions the onset of corporate-ruled "neofeudalism" in the aftermath of the "internal collapse" of a debt-ridden republic. In the face of such a threat, "Being nice and moderate will not help," nor will "funny signs, comics dressed up as Captain America or nice words." What, then, does he recommend?

If the liberal class concedes that power has been wrested from us it will be forced, if it wants to act, to build movements outside the political system. This would require the liberal class to demand acts of resistance, including civil disobedience, to attempt to salvage what is left of our anemic democratic state. But this type of political activity, as costly as it is difficult, is too unpalatable to a bankrupt liberal establishment that has sold its soul to corporate interests.

Hedges, presumably, will go on promoting his new book, The Death of the Liberal Class, no doubt summoning the masses to the barricades at every stop on the tour. If that sounds harsh from me, it's because I see it as one thing for someone like Hedges to "demand acts of resistance," and another for him to perform them. Writing a book or a column doesn't cut it, any more than posting to a blog does. For the moment, he seems more likely to profit from his outrage than to risk and costs. Again, I don't mean to say that I think he's wrong about the state of affairs in this country. I just think that if he's going to be that judgmental toward John Stewart and all the media, he ought to reflect on the extent to which he is a creature of the same media. He can go all situationist on us and speak out against the society of the spectacle, but he's part of it -- perhaps he should consult Marcuse rather than Debord, says the smartass -- until I see proof to the contrary. That proof won't be in an opinion column.

NY23: The Fault is Still Shifting

Last year, New York's 23rd Congressional district captured the nation's attention briefly when its representative's appointment to the Defense Department forced a special election. In what was arguably the first real test of tea-partry power, local conservatives repudiated the Republican candidate selected by county party bosses, the allegedly too-liberal Dede Scozzafava, and rallied behind Conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman. Despite nationwide publicity from the right-wing media, Hoffman's independent campaign fell short, and Democrat Bill Owens won the formerly Republican district.

Defying the national trend, Owens was re-elected to a full term yesterday after a campaign that may have revealed NY23 as the epicenter of conservative dysfunction. The trouble began before the primaries, when the Conservatives again endorsed Hoffman, but Republican county leaders again rejected him, this time in favor of Matt Doheny. Hoffman duly challenged Doheny in the Republican primary (there was no time for a primary the year before), but despite his celebrity in conservative circles, he reportedly waged a surprisingly weak campaign. In September, Doheny won the primary. Hoffman had the Conservative line and could not be taken off; unlike onetime Conservative gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio, Hoffman had no judgeship to run for as a consolation prize, so under New York rules the Conservatives were stuck with him, even after Hoffman endorsed Doheny in October.

Despite publicly disavowing his campaign and endorsing the Republican, Hoffman received more than 7,000 votes yesterday, more than the margin separating Doheny from Owens. In the aftermath of this local disaster, Doheny has accused Hoffman of supporting him too little and too late, while Hoffman blames the GOP leadership for again rejecting him way back in January. In his view, once the Republicans realized that Hoffman would have the Conservative line, they should have played ball and given him their endorsement before the primary. That reasoning didn't work for Rick Lazio's supporters and it didn't work for Hoffman. Now, the disappointed Conservative for all intents and purposes repudiates independent politics, calling on Conservatives and Republicans to work together when there's no automatic reason for them to do so.

My understanding when I learned of Hoffman's withdrawal last month was that Doheny was considered at least a more conservative Republican than the accursed Scozzafava. He may still have been insufficiently conservative for Hoffman's die-hard fans, but their votes yesterday may also have been a protest against the local GOP establishment, who obviously hold some kind of grudge against Hoffman. Many Hoffman voters may have decided that representation by a Democrat who's reportedly a personal friend of Bill O'Reilly (and whom O'Reilly reportedly said he'd vote for if he lived in the district) was less obnoxious than dictation from an unrepresentative Republican leadership.

As we see Republicans and conservatives maneuvering for position in the race for a presidential nomination, we'll want to keep an eye on personal rivalries as well as ideological disagreements, as well as the ways they feed each other. The personal apparently was political in the 23rd district, and it put the local right wing at the back of the class of 2010 when they seemed to be the vanguard in 2009.

Second Chance?

Republican party chairman Steele, Speaker-presumptive Boehner, Majority Whip-presumptive Cantor and Senator-elect Rubio from Florida have all described the result of yesterday's elections as a "second chance" for the Republican party to earn the lasting trust of American voters. These leaders apparently lack any consciousness of their own party's history.

The first Republican Speaker of the House acquired the gavel in 1860. Republicans controlled the House through the Civil War and for most of the Reconstruction era, until the 1874 congressional elections. The Republicans' second chance actually came way back in 1880, when they regained control of the House. That second chance lasted for one congressional term. Republicans' third chance arrived following the 1888 elections. That also lasted for a single term. Their fourth chance lasted somewhat longer, from 1895 through the 1910 elections. By 1918 voters were ready to give the GOP its fifth chance, which lasted until the Great Depression. After World War II, New Deal-fatigue and the first stirrings of anti-commie hysteria resulted in Republicans getting a sixth chance. During those two years they won the reputation of a do-nothing Congress. Before long, riding the coattails of Dwight Eisenhower, the Republicans got their seventh chance in 1952. Two years later, their long exile began, ending only when voters gave the Gingrich-led GOP its eighth chance in 1994. Burned by Bush, the electorate ended Republican control in 2006, only to give the party its ninth chance yesterday. To be fair, however, I should note that the Democrats, having existed longer than the Republicans, have had several more chances. It makes my point just as well.

Do Steele, Boehner, Cantor and Rubio want us to believe -- do they believe themselves -- that the Republican party only came into existence in 1994? If so, what party did Ronald Reagan belong to? Judging by presidential elections alone, Republicans in 2012 will be asking for their third chance to earn Americans' trust if we start counting only from the Reagan-Bush period. While it's true that Republican ideological evolution has been erratic, and that the party can hardly claim to have upheld any principle consistently from its founding to the present, it's historically dishonest even to imply that today's GOP is somehow not the same institution that's been hogging one end of the political tug-of-war rope for the past 150 years or so. Of course, none of the above leaders may have meant to say that. They might say "Republican" but they probably mean the radio-controlled reactionary movement that did come of age in 1994. But that movement chose to link its destiny with the contradictory heritage of the Republican party and can't shake off that heritage so easily. As for their audience, Americans need to understand that both major parties have been given more chances than they deserve. How many more chances do we give ourselves -- how many more do we have -- to get this right?

Congratulations to Howie Hawkins

Third place means nothing in an American election, and 1% of the vote usually means even less, but as of 11:18 this morning, with most of New York's districts having reported, Green Party gubernatorial candidate Howie Hawkins has accumulated 56,633 votes. To be more exact, that's 1.38% of the votes counted so far, but as long as it's more than 50,000, Hawkins has earned the Green Party an automatic line on the state ballot until the next gubernatorial election. In 2014 the Greens will not have to run obstacle course of petition collection and will be free to concentrate such resources as they'll have on seeking votes rather than signatures. Objectively speaking, the result is still shamefully low and reflects poorly on New Yorkers' capacity for independent political thought, but by Empire State standards Hawkins's performance is still a victory and ought to be celebrated as such.

Meanwhile, it's still uncertain whether Warren Redlich will bring the Libertarian Party across the same finish line. He had 44,537 votes at the last count, good enough for fourth place and 1.09% of the total. Redlich may have suffered from a split libertarian vote. Assuming that the 22,705 people known so far to have voted for Anti-Prohibition candidate Kristin Davis are libertarians by orientation rather than protest or joke voters, the overall libertarian constituency in New York appears to outnumber the independent progressives who voted Green. Had libertarians united behind one candidate, they would have earned an automatic line easily, but it may be characteristic of the species to fall short of unity in political action.

Approximately 4.5% of New York voters opted for independent gubernatorial candidates this year, including 39,740 votes counted so far for Rent is 2 Damn High candidate James McMillan and 20,707 votes for Freedom Party candidate Charles Barron. The independent constituency is as ideologically diverse, at least, as the Bipolarchy electorate that favored Democrat Andrew Cuomo over Republican Carl Paladino. No candidate or cause can hope to unite all 184,322 (and counting) independents. But if there's potential strength in these numbers, it will consist of their capacity to inspire or encourage more New Yorkers to emulate them. The more people vote independently, the less weird or contemptible independent voting will seem to everyone else. What's the threshold number in this case? The state can't set an arbitrary standard here, and we can't identify the objective magic number that will mark a tipping point until we actually pass it. All independents can do is stay independent and set examples for everyone else.

Citizens United or Citizens Incorporated?

Reason magazine's December cover story is illustrated with pictures of two protesters: on the right, a presumed Tea Partier equating the Democratic leadership with Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and on the left, a woman whose sign reads, "Capitalism is failing. Socialism is the alternative." The cover headline declares, "You Are Now Free to Speak About Politics," then asks, "Why do some people fear a less restricted debate?" The implication from the onset is that the Supreme Court's controversial decision in the Citizens United case should be unobjectionable because it empowers both the bald, surly right-wing crank and the cute commie chick.

But as Jacob Sullum notes inside the magazine, in a reasonably fair-minded story that consults both advocates and enemies of campaign-finance regulation, Citizens United is reviled by the Democratic establishment, if not by the left as a whole, as a license for corporations to buy elections and politicians. Interestingly, Sullum never takes up the line of argument usually inferred as the basis of the Court's decision, that corporations have the right to political speech as a matter of legal "personhood." Instead, he adopts the broadest possible definition of "corporation" to argue, as one law professor puts it, that "everything is incorporated."

The over-the-top reactions to Citizens United reflect a view of corporations as giant, soulless automatons that are fine for producing goods and services in a regulated environment but bound to wreak havoc if let loose in the halls of political power. That view obscures the fact that corporations, no matter how large or profit-driven, are by definition associations of individuals who have joined together for a common purpose. It also misleadingly suggests that behemoths such as Wal-Mart and Exxon Mobil are typical corporations, when in fact the vast majority of the 6 million or so corporations registered in the United States are small businesses or nonprofits....Contrary to all the rhetoric about corporations drowning out the voice of the people, corporations are the voice of the people. [emphasis in original]

Sullum's article traces the evolution of law regarding campaign donations from 1947, when Congress banned spending "in connection with" federal elections by unions and corporations, to Citizens United. The major precedent standing in the way of the Roberts Court, Sullum explains, was the 1990 Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce decision, which affirmed a ban on corporate-funded candidate advertising as a check on "the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth." During oral arguments in Citizens United, inconsistencies in Austin's reasoning were exposed, since there were no restrictions on spending by super-rich individuals who could spend far more than the allegedly dangerous corporations. The oral arguments, as reported by Sullum, were a dismal performance on the part of the Obama administration's lawyers, who seemed to endorse a government power to ban "express advocacy" propaganda from all media, including books or pamphlets, depending on who addressed the Court. Throughout Sullum's account, Democrats and their agents are open to charges of unfairness and bias against business. Their attempt to trump Citizens United with the DISCLOSE Act seems self-evidently unfair, since the bill, as described by Sullum, restricts corporations with foreign investors but not unions that are avowedly international, and restricts corporations with government contracts but not public employee unions. If you can support the regulation of political advertising without supporting the Democratic party, you should be able to criticize Democratic legislation without repudiating the ideal of levelling the playing field.

Sullum interviews the head of Common Cause, who tells him that without restrictions "rogue corporations" could intimidate legislators merely by threatening to finance an opponent. That idea is challenged by representatives of the Center for Competitive Politics, one of whom tells Sullum that a politician so threatened could "score points with voters" simply by publicizing the threat. The Common Cause man scoffs at that notion -- and he may be right to do so. He doesn't explain why he scoffs, but we might assume that the theoretical politician is not just interested in fending off the corporate threat, but also wants that corporate money for himself.

In any event, Sullum downplays the likelihood of corporate intimidation. The Center for Competitive Politics asserts that the Fortune 500 would "much rather spend their money lobbying" than on buying risky political ads. Target got into trouble recently, for instance, for donating money to a Minnesota organization that ran ads against gay marriage. Threats of boycotts, presumably, cowed the Target CEO into apologizing for its donation. Emphasizing the risk to big companies underscores one of Sullum's larger points, that most "corporate" political spending is done by small businesses, not the "too big to fail" crowd whom many people suspect. This example seems to confirm the CCP's point that publicity deters intimidation, but it doesn't address an important concern ignored by Sullum. The problem of the moment isn't so much politicians' dependence on any clique of large corporations or billionaires, but their dependence upon fundraising itself. Almost unconsciously, however, Sullum invites readers to consider the influx of corporate-funded political advertising as an alternative to party-funded advertising, not to mention the state-funded advertising option which Sullum, as a libertarian, distrusts. Perhaps the ideal under the new conditions is a state of affairs in which the political parties don't have to spend so much time fundraising as long as they can trust sympathizers to buy ads for them. That would leave elected officials free to do the work we hired them for. But to the extent that the major parties have become fundraising machines, they may be jealous of their prerogatives. Partisans may oppose unrestricted corporate spending because it sends money through other channels that might otherwise go to them.

Sullum shows his libertarian colors towards the end, when he challenges the idea that regulations on campaign spending are necessary to "restore trust in government." That object, he writes, "is not as uncontroversial a proposition" as its proponents think, "Surely there is such a thing as too much faith in government, and people of different political persuasions are bound to draw that line in different places." The CCP observes that "there's a problem with the basic idea that people should really trust their government. Our country was founded on people not trusting the government." While you wrestle with that paradox, just accept that libertarians will always err on the side of dissent, even if the business class isn't usually identified with dissent in the public mind.

While the fundraising racket requires reform, our opinions about spending are probably skewed by Bipolarchy thinking. Citizens United, after all, is a group that made a film against Hillary Clinton but was barred from making it available for on-demand viewing on cable TV. It seems to me that people have as much right to denounce Clinton as they would to denounce anyone they deem a public menace, in print, on film or in whatever medium they choose. That right should extend to urging people not to vote for her, but it becomes problematic once people presume that voting against Clinton means voting for someone -- whether a conservative Republican, as Citizens United would have preferred, or Barack Obama, who was the immediate option during the time in question. Denunciation shouldn't be equated automatically with electioneering. I can say, "Don't vote for Republicans today" without being accused of advocating for Democrats, as long as other options exist. In any event, even if Democrats are the only other option I should be able to speak out against Republicans as a matter of conscience in whatever medium I please without being accused of compromising the electoral process. On the same ground, I should be able to argue that fundraising plays too large a role in elections without being accused of favoring the unquestioned rule of a Democratic-liberal nomenklatura. Because we imagine the political scales evenly balanced between two great parties, we're tempted to see any intervention as disrupting a balance wrongly seen as both natural and necessary. To the extent that libertarians in America suffer from bipolarchy consciousness (state vs. "freedom") they're no more likely to view the donation-fundraising question objectively than anyone else. Nevertheless, Sullum has made a good stab at a substantial, informative and challenging account that's worth reading to anyone interested in the question.

Nostalgia and Utopia at the Polls

Maybe it's just me, but there's a cheapness to voting, a sense of diminished grandeur, now that New York State has replaced the good old voting machines with paper ballots and computerized scanners. The dingus that reads your inking of circles may well be more expensive than the old lever machines, but everything else about the new process has a hard-times feeling of retrenchment to it that may well suit the national mood. Once you're recognized and sign in, an election worker gives you your paper ballot inside a folder and directs you to what passes now for a voting booth. This stall has the same basic relation to the old curtained booth as today's few remaining public pay phones have with Clark Kent's archetypal phone booth. There was something inimitable to the voting-booth experience as you yanked the lever to close the curtains; it was like nothing else you did during the year, while the filling in of ovals now is all-too reminiscent of standardized tests in school, and the overall experience is more reminiscent of completing an application for services than of exercising one's sovereign franchise. The only real benefit I saw in the new experience was the certain knowledge from the scanner's screen that I was the 47th person to vote at my polling place this morning.

My nostalgia for the old voting machines, which have been replaced mainly to enrich the scanner manufacturers, is tempered by my reservations about any ballot format that limits your choice of candidates. Seven candidates for governor appear on this year's paper ballot, but five of them had to cross an arbitrary petition threshold in order to be recognized as even theoretical equals to the major-party candidates. Any official ballot, despite its mandate to list all candidates, must limit the number of viable candidates for space reasons, consigning those who don't meet the petition quota to the quasi-anonymity of write-in status. The new system returns us to something like an earlier system of paper ballots, but because they're official ballots and have similar space limitations, there remains an imperative to limit the number of candidates by setting a threshold of viability. At an earlier period of history people could make up their own ballots, simply listing the candidates of their choice, or political parties could print their own straight-ticket ballots for distribution to the faithful. It may have been thought more fair or objective to make the official ballot a list of all candidates, but the maximum range of electoral choices requires a liberation of voters from the tyranny of space restrictions, while playing fields might be levelled somewhat in voters' minds if they didn't always seen Democrats and Republicans on the top lines of ballots. While ballots and lines might be defended as necessary to inform voters of choices they might not know about otherwise, we ought to work toward a time when voice-recognition software would enable people to speak (while accommodating the handicapped) the names of candidates without identifying them with parties or requiring them to jump petition hurdles beforehand.

How did I vote? I see no reason to conceal that I voted straight Green wherever possible, with the exception of the Libertarian candidate for Attorney General, since that strikes me as a good match of job and ideology. Since there was no independent challenger to Paul Tonko, my incumbent Democratic representative, I voted for him. Reflexive hostility to incumbents is no excuse for voting Republican. Tonko will probably be the only person I voted for who wins tonight, unless an upset is in the offing. Whether any of my selections wins is a secondary consideration, however, since my first duty to my fellow citizens is to vote according to my own conscience. This small gesture of publicizing my choices may do more than the votes themselves if it inspires others to vote independently, today or next time.

The Obama Syndrome

Move far enough to Barack Obama's left and the view begins to resemble that from the President's right. Tariq Ali, for instance, agrees with at least one detail of the ad hominem portrait of the current Chief Executive. As the Pakistani Marxist sees it from his base in Britain, Obama is nothing more than the archetypal Chicago machine politician on the make. In his brief hatchet job, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad, which he promises to expand in time for the 2012 campaign, Ali compares Obama unfavorably with the likes of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, who are more to the radical author's liking. By comparison, the President is an egotistical opportunist and a toady to the powerful, a willing servant of the American Empire. Ali recounts an unflattering episode from Obama's Illinois legislature days, when he was one of four Democrats to vote for Republican spending cuts in order to look Senatorial, only to threaten to kick the ass of another Democrat when cuts that affected Obama's own constituency, and were opposed by him, were approved. There are plenty of bitter reminiscences from more radical black pols, who for Ali are the uncompromised voice of the poor, resenting Obama's rise to power, and there are plenty of quotes from the man himself for Ali to damn him with. The author is particularly disgusted with Obama's boasting of his friendship with corporate bigwigs and his perpetuation of Bush's wars. He claims to have been skeptical from the beginning, not only about Obama as a person but about the transformative potential of his election. In Ali's opinion, no important social change is possible without mass mobilization to pressure the establishment from below, and electing a black man is no substitute for a radical mass movement -- especially when the man is such as Obama.

As a foreigner, Ali has enough distance to see through the bipolarchy illusion to the reality of an establishment that is not much altered by the tilt of elections from one big party to the other. "The Obama Effect," he writes, "was enhanced by the fact that both Obama's person and his ultramoderate views were anathema to the repellent anchors on Fox TV and the crazed bigots of radio talk shows. If they hated him, he must be fine." American liberals might presume that Fox is the voice of the establishment, and that its opposition proved not only how "fine" Obama was but the threat he presented to that illusory power. Ali doesn't deny that disputes between the major parties are often bitter and vicious, but he finds them ultimately irrelevant to the direction taken by the establishment and the empire in the absence of that necessary pressure from below -- the mass movements to whom he assigns the real credit for the New Deal of the 1930s and the Civil Rights successes of the 1960s.

"Until the emergence of a political movement with a viable sociopolitical and economic alternative perceived by a majority as such, there will be no final crisis of capitalism except in the dreams of those who desire something better," Ali writes. He warns that we can't assume that a movement will form when things get bad enough; "Even the most severe economic crisis does not automatically produce a radical shift in mass consciousness that challenges the dominant view." With "neither external nor internal pressures" currently challenging the "American ruling elite," Ali's small tome is likely to inspire a sense of helplessness, especially since he holds back from urging an all-out revival of Marxism. The most he can do is point to the past or the success of "social movements" in South America, though he has no suggestions for starting such movements here or for adapting them to American distrust of strong men like Hugo Chavez. One can guess Ali's own preferences from his unstinting praise for the Cuban health care system, and it's bracing to read an author who holds the profit motive in such low regard. Since Ali has admitted that The Obama Syndrome is essentially incomplete, we should treat it as a work in progress that might be improved over the next two years by some positive recommendations for mobilizing Americans for social justice. For now, the project seems just a bit cynical on the part of Ali's publisher, Verso, if not on his own part. It strikes me as a counterpart of their anti-Clinton books by the since-apostate Christopher Hitchens, an obvious attempt by an avowed left-wing company to make money from progressive discontent with a Democratic regime. They owe us something more substantial between now and 2012.

The Stewart Doctrine:does democracy take itself too seriously?

Having just read a book about the Founding Fathers, I couldn't help feeling a little scandalized while reading Kathleen Parker's weekend critique of the President's appearance on Comedy Central's Daily Show. While from a Founding perspective Obama had already debased himself almost beyond recover by appearing on John Stewart's talk show, Parker complained that the President was still taking himself too seriously during his appearance. After an admittedly embarrassing (if not telling) moment when Obama used the exact same awful phrase that his predecessor used to praise his FEMA chief -- "heckuva job" -- to describe Larry Summers' work for him, his recovery to Stewart's chiding -- "pun intended," -- seemed hopelessly lame to Parker. She felt that the President should have gone for a broader punch line to admit that he'd made a rhetorical goof (if not a Freudian slip). For Parker, this was another failure of Obama to connect on a gut level with the American public.

[I]t is imperative that leaders not take themselves too seriously. What should Obama have done instead? How about saying: "I can't believe I just said that"? Or, "Oy!"? Whatever. Anything to signal to the audience that, "Oh, well, I'm human." But Obama isn't very good at human.

To the Founders, the idea that a President should make a fool of himself to win public favor would have seemed insane. On the other hand, many Americans of minimal historical literacy may assume that Lincoln would have gone out there and topped Stewart with one-liners without really trying. American notions of political dignity and popularity have evolved -- if that's the right word -- over time. For many observers, casual or not, we've reached a point when taking politics and politicians less seriously is an imperative, regardless of what the politicians themselves think.

Parker's column appeared on the morning of John Stewart's big rally in Washington DC. Stewart is the man of the moment for people who want a de-escalation of partisan and ideological invective. That he has the potential to sway multitudes was acknowledged by the President's visit to his show, but he is an unusual demagogue in his apparently passionate advocacy of political dispassion. If I understand him correctly (and I've only seen second-hand reports of Saturday's rally) he actually has the right attitude for a liberal democratic republic. As I've been writing recently, representative democracy flourishes in an environment of reasoned indifference to the outcome of elections. Under ideal conditions, each person votes for whomever seems best qualified for an office, but no one assumes any candidate to be so unqualified that his or her election would be an intolerable threat to the republic. There can be least favorite candidates, but not "worst" ones. Once some candidate or party is perceived as a threat to the republic, there's a dangerous tendency toward a Bipolarchy as demagogues declare themselves the sole bulwark against the threat. Our present Bipolarchy evolved as the Republican party emerged as the sole bulwark against the "slave power" that remained identified with the Democratic party for decades after the Civil War ended. Twenty years after the fact, Republicans still warned that Democratic victories would put Confederates in charge of the Union. The same attitude prevails today among Republicans who cry "socialism" against Democrats and Democrats who cry "racism," etc. against Republicans. Stewart counsels, in satirical fashion, against since bipolarizing invective, and for his trouble he's been criticized by the right-wing talkers of Fox News and the liberal talkers of MSNBC alike. For Stewart's fans, that may be the most persuasive proof that he's onto something. They claim to share his view that these are "hard times" but not "the End Times," -- but what follows practically from that viewpoint?

While Stewart's anti-ideological stance may be the appropriate attitude for representative democracy, the discussion can't end there. It still doesn't follow that liberal democracy is the answer for the present socio-economic crisis, or the global crises that loom on the horizon. In crisis times it may not be a matter of indifference who wins elections, while from a more challenging perspective the crises may be so grave that resolving them should not be left up to popular deliberation. To say that "freedom" solves all problems could well be wishful thinking. If so, who wins elections and who holds power should be a matter of severe importance to everyone. For some Americans, that sense of crisis is only exacerbated if neither of the officially "viable" choices available seems suitable to the tasks at hand. In that case, Stewart may be perfectly right to dissuade people from taking the feuds of Republicans and Democrats as seriously as partisans themselves insist. But it would not follow that politics itself should not be taken most seriously or debated with the urgency of the times. Some of us feel it necessary to attack the two-party system as a whole with as much vehemence as the two parties aim at each other; would Stewart say that we are wrong? His answer could determine the usefulness of whatever movement he calls into being.