Separatism without violence?

The people of Scotland voted yesterday by a 55% to 45% margin to remain in the United Kingdom, defeating a secessionist movement that was clearly popular and widespread. So when does the guerrilla warfare commence? Probably we shouldn't hold our breath. I haven't even heard anyone complain of fraud at the polls. Does this prove anything? If Scottish secessionism doesn't turn violent, does that prove that Scots care less about independence than, say, Russophone Ukrainians? It's probably safer to say the Scots care in a different way, or to a different degree. Obviously, many Scots believe that independence is a good idea, something worth trying. Far fewer, as obviously, feel that their lives or even their sense of identity depend on independence. We shouldn't conclude that some nationalities don't believe in independence as much as others if they don't believe in fighting for it. But it may be true that a place like Scotland will never be independent unless Scots are willing to fight for it, even to the point, probably, of fighting other Scots. That observation is not meant as a reproach against the Scots. The fact is, they don't have to be independent. If anything, by bucking a possible global trend toward separatism and tribalism, the Scots this week may have proven themselves among the world's most progressive people. If those who do deeply believe in independence don't believe in forcing it upon their more reluctant brethren at gunpoint, that would only be further proof. Personally, I was indifferent to whether Scotland seceded or not, and apart from the U.S. government I suspect most Americans felt the same way. The campaign for independence carried no ideological import, or was vested with none by our punditocracy. If only we could see similar conflicts around the world as clearly.

Kerry meets his critics, in front and behind him

This afternoon's Senate hearing of Secretary Kerry was a spectacle displaying American government at something like its best, in character if not in wisdom or efficiency. The thing you noticed immediately were the silent protesters holding antiwar signs behind the Secretary of State, who had come before the committee to advocate for war against the self-styled Islamic State, throughout the hearing. Remarkably, they were not removed and Kerry, long ago an anti-war protester himself, went to the trouble of addressing them. His address was unlikely to convince them -- predictably, he emphasized the IS's systemic misogyny to refute arguments against war from Code Pink, a female-directed protest group. Certainly Kerry must recall that in his youth the warmongers of the time warned of the atrocities to be committed on all freedom-loving people by Communists, and as a soldier in Vietnam he no doubt saw Communist atrocities close up. Yet he turned against the Vietnam War and appeared  before the Senate not merely as a protester or heckler but as a witness to make the case that the war then being waged was not the answer to whatever threat the Viet Cong represented. Does he think the women of Code Pink are ignorant of Islamist misogyny, of reports of rape and enslavement? They are not so clueless, surely, yet as Kerry believed about Vietnam more than forty years ago, they believe now that an air war against ISIS won't solve the problems it feeds upon. That someone must stop the IS as a matter of humane principle no one disputes; how it is to be done, and by whom, are questions that should be asked without presumptions of naivete or cowardice from those being questioned.

With Code Pink waving signs behind him, Kerry was literally in the middle when questioned by Senator McCain, who used an American ambassador to Syria as a kind of human shield while he spouted his characteristic insanity. He relayed (in fact, previewed) the ambassador's report from the Free Syrian Army, i.e. the "good" rebels in that country, that they considered their government, the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, a greater threat than ISIS. McCain then questioned the priorities of Kerry and President Obama; why adopt an "ISIL first" strategy when the real priority, at least as far as McCain is concerned, is to put the Free Syrian Army in power, or at least to replace the Assad government? The Arizonan wants the Obama administration to order airstrikes against Assad in order to prevent the dictator from bombing the "good" rebels, while Kerry struggled to nudge McCain toward a more "confidential" discussion of the nation's Syria strategy. McCain represents those Americans who want no power in Syria except one that'll be friendly toward the U.S., if not also toward America's friends. If anything, it appeared more important to him to topple Assad than to destroy the IS. Fortunately, his position isn't even necessarily representative of Republicans. Sen. Paul noted during his turn with Kerry that had we bombed Assad last year, ISIS might well have taken all Syria by now. On the other hand, many avowed liberals share this dangerous impulse to destroy all dictators. This sort of fanaticism needlessly complicates the crafting of a true international coalition against the IS. There really does seem to be a consensus that ISIS needs to be destroyed; there obviously isn't a consensus that Assad must go. The Iranians, Russians and others will not accept that outcome. We can call them all a bunch of authoritarian poopyheads, or we can make a grown-up decision to do one thing or another -- the thing nearly everyone agrees with or the thing many refuse. Even then, it's one thing to agree with the world about destroying ISIS, and another, just as important, to consult with the Senate and the American people -- with Congress and Code Pink -- before committing resources to that mission. No one wants the IS to win on any front, as far as I know, but we still need to decide what it's worth to us, and to the rest of the world, to stop them.

A disagreement among Christians

One reason Republicans have gotten especially worked up over the rise of the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is the understanding that the Sunni takfiris are persecuting local Christians along with other non-Sunni groups. I'm sure many Americans feel that this country, as a "Christian nation" has a special responsibility to protect Christians around the world. Senator Cruz of Texas apparently felt that way when he addressed the "In Defense of Christians" group last night. That organization is dedicated to the defense in particular of Christians in the Middle East from attacks by Muslim extremists. Cruz apparently went in thinking that "Christian" trumped "Middle Eastern" as far as these people were concerned. He may also have assumed that the enemy of their enemy must or should be their friend. In any event, he went on the podium before these Middle Eastern Christians and told them that "Christians have no greater ally than Israel." As reported on this Christian news site (with video) he was practically booed off the stage, but not before chastising his audience. It was un-Christian to hate Israel or the Jews, he said, forgetting or at least regretting centuries of history that testifies otherwise. He hoped to impress upon his hearers that all the groups persecuted or hated by the IS should stand together. They weren't buying it, and in a climax that was actually impressive in a way, Cruz basically told them to drop dead. If you won't stand with Israel, he said, I won't stand with you. I don't think this means he'll no longer protest the persecution of Christians by the Islamic State. More likely he'll simply prefer to deal with the Middle Eastern Christians of his conservative Republican imagination, much as most American politicians support the Syrian rebels of their imagination while ignoring the real ones.

It's interesting that most of the people posting comments on the Christian news site, seeing evidence that could be interpreted to show that Cruz cares more about Israelis than Christians, support Cruz's stand, seeing him of a man of principle. So do Republican Christians in the U.S. care more for Israelis than Christians in the Middle East when forced to choose? I suspect so, for a variety of reasons, ranging from an apocalyptic belief in Israel's role in prophecy to a suspicion that believers in Syria and Iraq aren't "real" Christians by some doctrinal or denominational standard. Most likely, I suspect, right-wing Christians are likely to see their beleaguered fellow believers, met face to face, as Arabs (if not dirty Arabs) first, and Christians second at best. Meanwhile, it should be remembered that Christians had it relatively good under the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria. At the very least, neither Saddam Hussein nor the Assads ever forced Christians in their countries to convert or die. A lingering loyalty to Baathism, if not a sense of "Arab" identity, may explain their persistent hostility toward Israel. But it may also have been simple resentment that Cruz saw fit to bring up Israel on an occasion intended to spotlight the persecution of Christians. Cruz and his supporters go away feeling that their Middle Eastern co-religionists are un-Christian in some important respect, and the feeling may be mutual. Get two or more Christians in a room together -- outside of a church, that is -- and that's likely to happen.

Picking winners in Syria

While making his case for further American military action against the self-styled Islamic State tonight, the President is expected to call for further American support for "vetted" or "moderate" rebels against the Syrian government. Neither Obama nor the Republicans seem reconciled to the idea that Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship may be Syria's best defense against an IS takeover. In fact, you're likely to read or hear that Assad is somehow to blame for ISIS's ascendancy in his own country -- that's "Islamic State in Syria," after all, if only through his refusal to capitulate and abdicate. You also hear from Republicans (and some hawkish Democrats) that Obama is to blame for the spread of ISIS because he hasn't heretofore given adequate support to the moderates who are somehow to defeat both ISIS and Assad. If they were capable they'd be winning -- but this argument won't work with those idealists who feel that there has to be a moderate force, a Syrian constituency for liberal, pluralist democracy. Such a force would automatically deserve to win and therefore should be supported with all available resources. If they don't win, if Syria remains a Baathist dictatorship (if not an Alawite monarchy) or becomes part of a jihadist caliphate, it has to be Obama's fault in particular and the U.S.'s fault in general because liberal pluralist democrats have to win everywhere, and liberal pluralist democrats everywhere have to support their comrades in Syria.

There's been an uprising in Syria because the country is a dictatorship and quite a few Syrians can't stand it. Bashar al-Assad may as well be King Bashar; his dynastic succession is as much an insult to the modernist ideals of the Baath party as Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un's reigns have been to Marxism and Leninism. Plenty of Syrians presumably have plenty of reasons to be rid of Assad and the Baathists, if not of the Alawite clique over which Bashar presides. But what do these disgruntled Syrians want in Assad's place? Americans suppose that they know what the Syrians should want, but it doesn't follow that that's what the people who actually first took up arms against Assad wanted. The sad fact is that there seems to be no consensus among the Syrian rebels themselves, who seem to fight amongst themselves as often as they fight the government. There are relative liberals among the rebels, but all accounts portray them as weak -- that may come with the liberalism -- and there's no reason to believe that American money and material support will make them any more formidable than the Iraqi army has been in the face of the IS assault. There's no evidence I know of to indicate that a majority of rebel supporters, much less a majority of Syrians, seek the sort of liberal pluralist democracy we think they should want. Perhaps the best proof against any Assad complaint that the entire uprising is an American plot is the fact that our favorites aren't in command right now. But a sudden ascendancy of liberal pluralist fighters, without a proportionate expansion of their popular base, would allow Assad to say that the U.S. has co-opted the uprising as much as the jihadis have. Leaving that aside, doesn't it simply seem unfair for us, who didn't start this rebellion, to dictate how it should turn out, or to say this particular group should win regardless of their share of fighting or organization? Offensive as it may be to our liberal sensibilities, the best option may be to let Assad win, if he can, if not to help him win. But Assad is too friendly with Iran and Russia, and too unfriendly with Israel, for most Americans to support him even for the sake of regional stability. Yet he may be the Stalin we must work with, clothespins on noses if necessary, to defeat the caliphists we deem the Hitlers of our time. But I fear that too many of today's Americans, transplanted to World War II, would root for moderates to win the battle of Stalingrad.

Corruption in an Ideological Age

Today is Primary Day in New York State. Governor Andrew Cuomo is being challenged for the Democratic and Working Families party lines by Zephyr Teachout, a law professor who has just published a book on Corruption in America through Harvard University Press. Teachout's challenge to Cuomo, amid claims that the governor behaved corruptly by constraining a committee he created to investigate legislative corruption, has drawn considerable attention to her book. Her main argument appears to be that the Supreme Court today fails to take seriously the corrupting potential of money in politics by defining corruption too narrowly. The Roberts Court has ruled that large campaign donations do not by themselves corrupt recipients, on the understanding that "corruption" means an explicit quid-pro-quo exchange of money for policy. In other words, the Roberts majority will recognize corruption only if a politician can be proved to have solicited money, or had been promised money, in return for a specific vote on legislation.

As Teachout acknowledges, it is easier to presume corruption than to prove it, and much easier to make the charge during a campaign than to make it stick in court. But she remains convinced that corruption is a fact traceable to the role of money in politics and the inequality of influence that inevitably results as campaigns grow ever more dependent on money in our multimedia age.

So what is corruption in relation to campaign donations? Our first impression, almost certainly, is that money in politics corrupts a politician if it changes his or her mind. We would have no problem presuming corruption, even if a quid-pro-quo couldn't be proven, if a Democratic legislator with a "progressive" reputation started voting to abolish regulations on industry after receiving donations from the Koch brothers. Yet the Kochs are understood to reserve their donations primarily for Republicans, and Republicans, for the most part, are presumed to have an ideological affinity with the brothers already. Can the Kochs actually corrupt Republican conservatives or libertarians? You would need very specific proof even for suspicion, something like a pet project of interest or concern only to the brothers, as opposed to an overall ideological agenda with which ideological politicians are presumed already to agree -- some legislation with no apparent purpose but to make the Kochs money. Absent that, the Kochs' donations only sponsor candidates who already agree with them on principle and need the money to get elected, not persuaded.

The ideological polarization (or bipolar ideologization) of American politics arguably renders traditional concepts of political corruption obsolete, if ideologues are understood to be incapable of changing their minds on policy or principle. Could the Kochs possibly change Elizabeth Warren's (or Zephyr Teachout's) mind about anything? Or for the sake of balance, could George Soros (or whomever right-wingers see as the leftist moneyman of the moment) change Ted Cruz's mind? If anything, the hardening of ideology has only encouraged investments in politics by the wealthy, not because money changes more minds but because ideological politicians are safer investments than pragmatists or politicians with any pretense of objectivity.

Suppose a corrupting influence of money over politics could be proved. What would that mean? Presumably it would mean not just that a politician votes a certain way because he receives money from someone -- that's the influence -- but also that he votes in a way inconsistent with an objective or pragmatic understanding, whenever either is possible, of the national interest or the public good -- that's the corruption. The only reason to care about corruption is if corruption means that politicians will vote the wrong way. If you don't presume that some policy questions have right or wrong answers, or good or bad consequences, then anyone should be able to influence his representative with all the arguments or enticements at his disposal. Corruption is bad -- is corrupt -- if it closes a politician's mind, if it blinds him to the right thing to do or inspires him to knowingly reject it. Ever since the Founders rejected the idea that constituents could explicitly and bindingly instruct representatives how to vote, American politics presumes that representatives will legislate with open, objective minds. If ideology is the opposite of an open or objective mind, while it is also possible to know the "right thing to do" without reference to ideology, then ideology itself is the real corrupting element in politics, and money in politics is only gravy. Of course, it's even more impossible to ban ideology than it would be to ban corruption. You can only hope that ordinary Americans will recognize ideology as corrupt -- or, more likely, "crazy," -- and rise up against them like people rose up against Communist ideologues in Europe a generation ago. But despite persistent and increasing disgruntlement in the electorate that result seems no more likely than ever -- and if that lamentable state of affairs can be traced to money in politics, if money can be blamed for Americans thinking they can only ever choose between two lousy options, maybe that's where the real corruption is.

The NBA and 'freedom of speech' in civil society

Once again an owner of a National Basketball Association franchise is pressured to sell because of allegedly racist comments made in a less-than-private environment. In this case the owner of the Atlanta Hawks is being shamed out of the league for opining that efforts should have been made to attract more white fans to home games, the implication being that the existing crowd, from the players to the cheerleaders to the people already in the seats, were too black for some people's comfort. For some observers this is further proof that the U.S. is going down the chute of political correctness, but such observers need a gentle reminder that it is not the United States government pushing the poor man out, however much some would like to see President Obama behind this in some way. Instead, the NBA is part of what pundits and political scientists call "civil society," the conglomeration of private, voluntary associations that provide what many consider a necessary buffer between the individual and the state. A healthy civil society is deemed essential to liberal democracy by those who note its absence wherever liberal democracy fails to take root. Where there is civil society, it is presumed, the people are more free, in part because civil society relieves them of dependence on government for mere existence, or for information about the world. Taking the long view, these sweeping claims for civil society may be true. But in a pluralist society it is accepted that common standards of, for want of a better word, civility, will not and can not prevail among all the institutions that form civil society. Civil society must accommodate, to some extent, religions that require adherents to be less "free" than the liberal ideal. So too, it seems, it must accommodate entities like the NBA that have decided not to tolerate the least hint of racism among franchise owners, however much their policies appear to violate liberal principles of privacy and free speech. That's how it has to be, I suppose, if civil society is necessary to a civil nation, not to mention civilization -- and if civil society isn't just someone's synonym for free enterprise or laissez-faire.

The sklavenmoral of the master class

David Brooks has described Russia's interventions in Ukraine and the rise of the "Islamic State" in Syria and Iraq as "revolts of the weak." That sounds paradoxical since both ISIS and Vladimir Putin are perceived to advance their interests through raw application of force. To call them "weak" is almost to say that strength, or at least brute force, is weakness. However, Brooks isn't talking about physical strength or the kind that finds expression in warfare. Instead, Russians, Muslims and others are "weak" if they "can’t compete if they play by the normal rules of civilization." By appealing to pure force, "they are conspiring to blow up the rule book."

When is strength not strength but weakness? When a transvaluation of values is underway. Brooks's column put me back into the Nietzschean frame of mind I've worked within on and off for a while recently. It had struck me that in modern times we had seen an ultimate transvaluation, an upending of Nietzsche's own genealogy of morals. As I remember it, he theorized that morality, as we know it, arose from a revolt of the "weak." Previously, when the strong, or strength, ruled without question, people thought only in terms of good and bad. Strength was good, the lack of it bad. Morality introduced the idea that the opposite of good was "wrong" or "evil." The strong should not claim power simply because they are strong; to thus rule over the weak was morally wrong, if not evil. Nietzsche proposed that the weak conquered the strong, on one level at least, once concepts of morality prevailed at every class level.

Nietzsche imagined morality as the revolt of have-nots against haves, and so called it a sklavenmoral or "slave morality," but in the 21st century morality both sides appeal to its principles. Isn't it a sklavenmoral, a repudiation of strength, when the haves tell the have-nots that they may not take what they need to survive (or simply what they want) even though they can, presumably, through strength of numbers -- either in raw physical terms or through the vehicle of democratic government?  Here's an important difference: the sklavenmoral of the have-nots targets the haves' conscience by calling them evil and warning them of divine retribution or other bad consequences of their abuse of power, while the sklavenmoral of the haves targets the conscience or, rather, the low self-esteem of the have-nots by calling them weak and arguing that they don't deserve the things they want or need.

Sklavenmorals are probably inevitable in any competitive environment. In less philosophical terms, this sort of morality is rooted in the feeling that your more successful competitor has cheated in some way. That feeling presumes that your own way of doing something is sufficient if not exclusively correct, and shields you from the more painful conclusions that someone else's way is better or that you're inherently limited no matter what way you do things. When competition is a given, any rules proposed are inevitably self-serving. The rich have gotten wealthy the right way, for instance, and it's wrong for others simply to take wealth from them by force or other means the wealthy don't respect. Force is proof of bad character and an essential weakness of those who can't play by the rules. True competition, however, has no rules, and the only true rule is that which ends competition -- or at least competition for survival. By Nietzschean standards that itself is slave morality, and by my own it still is, I suppose, since I'm proposing a competition against a natural order of competition with the rules changed in my favor. This anti-competitive morality has one special virtue, I suggest: it'll never be hypocritical, as nearly all other moralizing is, whether philosophical or political.

'Convert them or kill them'

Who said it? If you've looked at any entertainment news today, you know that it was Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame, addressing the problem of the Islamic State while promoting his new book on Sean Hannity's TV show. Robertson says his preference would be to engage ISIS in bible study and teach them about Jesus, but if the other option is a war of religion he's "prepared for either one."

Put this quote in the bank and save it for the next time someone says Christians aren't like that, or haven't been for centuries. As for those already coming to Robertson's defense by saying that ISIS and other Islamic extremists "started it," the fact is that Christians have been saying that Muslims started it ever since they first heard of Muhammad. Muslims "started it," as far as Christians are concerned, by denying the divinity of Jesus and daring to claim that God gave humanity yet another revelation. I don't mean to say that Muslims are innocent over the course of global history, but that they ceased to be innocent in the eyes of Christians well before they started converting people by the sword. Meanwhile, I'm sure the folks at ISIS feel that the rest of the world has been given adequate opportunity to recognize the truth of Islam, and that the gun becomes necessary in the face of what they see as violent resistance, if not outright oppression by infidels. Both Christians and Muslims crow about all the peaceful appeals they've made before they've had to reach for the sword or the gun. But how peaceful are such appeals when the sword or gun is always there, in plain sight of everybody? Maybe the earliest Christians, the ones who let themselves get martyred in Rome, actually proselytized without any threat of violence, but most of history tells a different story. For Muslims, there was probably an even smaller window of time when the invitation to convert wasn't implicitly backed by the threat of the sword.

The most contemptible thing about Robertson's latest rant is the idea that ISIS can be neutralized, short of death, only by their acceptance of Jesus. Again, let history judge the peacefulness of Christians. If I'm right about ISIS in my belief that religion only rationalizes their deeper need for political power, their conversion would really only give them wealthier, more powerful sponsors for their violence. But many Christians persist in a belief that there are political and social implications to the divinity of Jesus, so that people like Robertson credit Christianity for the relative freedom and prosperity of "Christian" nations while blaming poverty in Muslim countries on Islam. They haven't convinced me yet. Instead of getting the ISIS idiots to trade one version of God for another, mightn't we make more progress if we could somehow convince them that there was no God to justify their lust for power and violence? They might well still kill a lot of people in pursuit of power, but at least they wouldn't go out of their way to kill them for not converting, as Phil Robertson proposes doing.

And for those keeping score: he talks a good game about being ready for a gunfight and about sitting down for bible study with ISIS, but as long as talk is all he does about it when his talk can influence others -- he's a coward, too.

For once, a terrorist who really is a coward

If you don't know who I mean, I mean that masked dude who beheaded a helpless journalist -- and may have beheaded another earlier, the voices on the videos being similar -- while talking smack to the President of the United States. Even now you may argue that an executioner isn't necessarily a coward, but he's something of a self-appointed executioner, isn't he? Meanwhile, we have no evidence that he cuts heads during break time from real fighting against real soldiers. This is as no-risk as terrorism gets -- especially with the mask on. Here in the U.S. we're all too quick to label all terrorists cowards, as if unorthodox or asymmetrical warfare is inherently dishonorable. I've even seen that American fool, whose death was reported last week, called a coward even though he died, from all indications, in combat. It's as if what was cowardly was his decision to fight for a foreign cause, however stupid, instead of muddling along like a good bourgeois drone. Calling him or anyone who risks or sacrifices his life a coward, however wicked the cause, is stupid. But by all means, call that masked Islamic State moron a coward, because until we see proof to the contrary that's what he is. Call him a moron, too, because he's murdered someone, and may yet risk his life, for the lie of God's will -- both the lie of revelation and the lie that slaughter is his duty rather than his pleasure. If he ever does get in a fight, I hope he's taken alive. That way he can keep on being a coward in his own mind for the rest of his days.

Are there principles at stake in Ukraine?

In short: no.

Imagine an alternate scenario. To protest President Yanukovich's decision to make a trade deal with Russia instead of the European Union, the western part of Ukraine secedes, declares itself a separate nation and seeks membership in the EU. I don't doubt that Yanukovich would have used force to keep the country whole, and I feel pretty certain that Russia would help him in any way President Putin could think of and get away with. So the actual conflict, in which Russia is helping the eastern region against the central government, probably isn't about any group's right to self-determination as a matter of principle, as the Russians claim it is.

But the war in Ukraine is no more a struggle for democracy against the sort of authoritarianism Putin currently embodies. The current government effectively gave up any such pretense after the Maidan uprising drove Yanukovich from power. Maybe that was a triumph for "freedom" or "liberty," but using people power to drive an elected leader from power is no more democracy in Ukraine than it was in Egypt. I'm willing to believe that Yanukovich was corrupt, a toady of Russia, whatever you want to say. But as far as I know it was his prerogative as the elected leader of his country to make the trade deal he thought best, by whatever criterion. That he didn't make the deal a large number of Ukrainians wanted is not sufficient cause to demand, much less effect, his ouster before his term was up. This has to be stressed now that some Americans want to drum up an ideological crusade against Russian authoritarianism. Russians may be everything Americans think they are, but they still have reason to question the legitimacy of Yanukovich's replacement. Before you celebrate the Maidan as direct democracy in action, ask whether you'd like governments in your own country to rise or fall in similar fashion.

Rather, the Maidan, like last year's uprising in Egypt, point toward a devolution of democracy. They signal a dangerous distrust of electoral democracy if not of representative government itself. While blind faith in democracy -- an assumption that it can never result in tyranny -- may not be justified, bad faith within a democracy -- an assumption that it is always on the verge of tyranny, that your opposition is always scheming to impose tyranny -- is hardly more justified. Suspicion of democracy has grown steadily since the decolonization of the Third World raised the spectre of "one man, one vote, once" democracy, the sort inevitably co-opted by the ambitious and ruthless and converted to authoritarianism at best, despotism at worst. Increasingly we see faithless democracy, founded on distrust of those who disagree with you and suspicion of their motives, in which the stakes are too high ever to acquiesce in controversial policies until the next election, so long as it's assumed that the next election may not take place, or that the ruling party will rig it somehow or otherwise steal it. Yanukovich is becoming a tyrant and must go; Morsi is becoming a tyrant and must go. How soon before more people say "Obama is becoming a tyrant ..." -- or fill in the name of a Republican for future reference? We distrust the "authoritarian" demand for submission, and now we distrust the implicit democratic requirement of submission as authoritarian. It's said that Putin fears the Maidan and the Ukrainian example because it may recur in Russia. Whatever he thinks, it is something to fear if it means that any mob of people can drive an elected leader from power for any reason. In the U.S. we're invited to see the Ukrainian war as a people's struggle for freedom from the ever-evil empire. In effect, to support Ukraine now is to endorse the Maidan and encourage imitators. Saying this doesn't mean I want to see Yanukovich restored to power in Kiev; at the least it's too late for that now. But do we really want a world where anyone can gather a mob and undo an election? You might say the mob won't win if the government really has its people behind it, but in our time, with the evidence in front of us, can you be so sure? Russia's bullying presence in ruthless pursuit of national interest makes the issue look simpler than it is. But neither Putin's authoritarianism, whatever its actual extent, nor the mob veto of the Maidan is a model worth promoting globally. If Putin is violating Ukrainian sovereignty, it's only after Ukrainians violated their own sovereignty more than once. Principles, such as they are, cancel out, leaving national interests -- and if the U.S. has a material national interest in the fate of Ukraine I wish someone would tell me what it is.

An American soldier of the Islamic State

A decade ago, we were assured that American Muslims presented no threat to national security because they were integrating successfully into American society. They enjoyed economic opportunities here that were lacking in the Middle East, or in Europe for that matter, and so felt none of the frustration that fueled Islamist radicalism and terrorism. This week we learned of an American, raised in Minnesota and a former resident of San Diego, who died fighting for "the Islamic State" (aka ISIS or ISIL) in Syria. Has something changed?

Reporters have noted that Douglas MacArthur McCain is the second person from his high school class to die in a jihad, a friend having fought and fallen for the al-Shabab group in Somalia a few years ago. McCain "reverted" to Islam -- some Muslims prefer this verb on the assumption that all people are born Muslim -- possibly under the influence of Somali immigrants in his community. For some, this will be an argument against immigration from Somalia or any Muslim country.

Before we draw conclusions about Muslims, however, let's remember that those assurances about economic opportunity securing social and cultural integration were made before the Recession of 2008. If the formula was valid in the first place, it follows that less economic opportunity means less opportunity for integration or assimilation. We need to know more about this man personally to explain why he chose jihad rather than crime or gangs, but we may want to consider that fewer opportunities increase the pool of people looking for fulfillment, meaning, power, self-respect, for whom jihad may be an option. If someone answers that it's each individual's personal responsibility to create opportunities for himself, rather than wait for the state to create opportunities for him, -- well, that's what McCain did, wasn't it?

Thomas Friedman wrote recently that more people in the world feel "un-free" despite trends of political liberalization around the world. He argues that achieving freedom from dictatorship isn't enough for people; following the latest author he's read, he distinguishes between "freedom from" and "freedom to" and says people need more of the latter. It looks like the old distinction between "negative" and "positive" liberty, but it also looks like only part of a larger picture. "Freedom to" includes free enterprise, at least in Friedman's enumeration, but it is one thing for law to permit it, another for opportunities actually to exist. Couldn't the reality be the reverse of what Friedman perceives? There might be plenty of "freedom to," on paper at least, but people really miss "freedom from," particularly two of the FDR-era Four Freedoms: freedom from want and freedom from fear. In the competitive environment identified with "freedom to," these two freedoms often seem like distant if not unrealizable ideals. For some, the best path to achieving these ideals looks little like freedom to others. I read somewhere else recently that liberalism will always face opposing ideologies around the world. That has to be because liberalism (much less its American "conservative" variant) can't really guarantee freedom from want or fear, while others, less scrupulously, will. Around the world, many still feel that the surest way to this kind of security -- personal, not national -- is to get political power. In order to live, they must rule. Such people depend on what Friedman calls "imposed order," but he seems to see this as the object of ruling elites, not the goal of the masses anywhere, who presumably want "freedom to." The alternative is order based on shared values and an assumption that everyone will share in a nation's "journey of progress." The question Friedman should ask is whether everyone really can share in a journey of progress without some sort of imposed order -- order imposed upon those concerned only with their own journey and content to leave others behind.

I don't claim that the last paragraph explains Douglas McCain. To the extent that religion is relevant to his experience his motives most likely weren't entirely rational, and jihad was probably some sort of existential experience for him. Yet it seems likely that, for some reason, he and his long-dead classmate could only find fulfillment in jihad, in the struggle to bring order to the world through a caliphate. As an American McCain didn't lack "freedom to," but it clearly wasn't enough for him. That only makes him a loser or a "terrorist" in many eyes, now that we know about him, and if his solution to the world's problems was Shari'a, then even I can't regret his passing too much. His fate is less a tragedy than a warning -- not a warning against Islam but against a world where "freedom" is the only answer offered to any problem, even when the slogan, at least, is self-evidently inadequate to the problem. We can keep on blaming the losers and the evil men who seduce them with dreams of power, but if in years to come we keep on seeing such people, isn't something else to blame?

What happens in Bizarro Ferguson?

In the wake of the protests and looting in Ferguson MO it's been asked: how would people react if the reverse situation occurred -- if a black policeman shot an unarmed white man? The closest thing we have currently to such a case took place in Utah earlier this month when a "non-white" cop shot down a suspect alternately described as white or Hispanic. The story hasn't been covered much apart from local and conservative media, the latter taking up the issue, presumably, to highlight how the outrage in and over Ferguson is racially selective. From the local reports I've read, the victim in Utah, like the victim in Ferguson, was "no angel." As in many cases regardless of race, a failure to "comply" was fatal for the victim. And in fact, there have been protests against the shooting, but they've been small and peaceful. But to answer the theoretical question, my gut feeling as a white person is that most white people already inclined to support the police would continue to do so. A racist minority may feel that blacks don't belong on a police force, but for the majority, I suspect, a black man turns blue once he puts on the uniform. More importantly, while some whites may be racist, fewer are tribal in any way that would assure sympathy for a "no angel" white kid gunned down for messing with the police. You're unlikely to hear celebrities or other strangers refer to such a victim as their "brother." White racism is a kind of negative tribalism defined by distrust toward others but not by any great solidarity with one's own. It may be different in Europe, but white American culture really is defined to an important extent by the "personal responsibility" ethos. White Americans are far less likely to feel the loss of a fellow white person who is otherwise a stranger personally, compared to how black Americans seem to feel when one of theirs is shot down. The difference is understandable; many blacks seem to feel that any assault on a black individual is an assault on blackness, on black America as a whole. White Americans only feel that way when criminals of color kill their kind; they're more likely to give cops of color some benefit of the doubt, and more ready to accept that a white kid killed by any cop probably brought it upon himself. Both an excess of solidarity that becomes uncritical and a lack of solidarity that becomes indifference are extremes to be avoided. The real issue, of course, remains how police should behave regardless of their or their victims' color.

We're No Angels

The big challenge many of us face when contemplating the Ferguson tragedy is the near-impossibility of reserving judgment. That's partly because reserving judgment usually entails a presumption of innocence until proof establishes guilt, yet it seems impossible for most people to presume both the kid and the cop innocent. Instead, because of the nature of their encounter, to presume one innocent is to presume the other guilty. To claim that the cop committed no crime is perceived as claiming that the kid deserved death. To presume the kid innocent, in the sense of not having brought about his own death, is perceived as presuming malice (or racism) on the part of the cop. This is the emotional and rhetorical environment in which the New York Times can provoke outrage by publishing a story that states simply that the kid was "no angel." That much was evident from the security-camera video of his misadventure in a convenience store minutes before his death. Yet the article has been deemed insensitive, having appeared on the day of the kid's funeral, not to mention indicative of a tendency offensive to black observers in which the media allegedly sets an impossible standard for a "perfect victim" whenever a cop shoots a black person, and in a way that inevitably distracts from the real issue of police procedure and police responsibility for another unarmed corpse. The fear is that the moment you concede that the victim is "no angel," you open the door to blaming the victim; if he's no angel, he must have done something wrong to invite gunfire. This doesn't follow, but it's also understandable that many black opinionators doubt people's ability to think logically about such matters, given how many idiots, racists or knee-jerk cop-lovers seem to think that the kid deserved death merely for roughing up a shopkeeper. Yet you needn't be a crackpot or a cracker to feel that a "no angel" account of the victim is a necessary corrective to the sentimental "gentle giant" description his family and friends understandably still insist upon. What will make you neither crackpot nor cracker is your ability to remember that the ultimate, objective issue is still about police procedure. This is more a political than a legal issue because the cop may be vindicated by having followed procedure, yet we can still believe that the procedure is profoundly wrong if it results, in this case and others, in unarmed perpetrators of any sort mortally wounded. I've seen a lot of talk about how it's unrealistic to have expected the cop to shoot to wound, that he must shoot to stop, which usually means lethal force aimed at the center of the body. But how unrealistic is it to expect our police officers (i.e. our "peace officers") to know how to subdue an unarmed assailant of any size without killing him? No matter how unrealistic it may be, it's still our prerogative to demand that higher standard of self-defense, and to demand that officers be held accountable when they fail to meet it. In the end, our answerable to us, or should be more so, or else this country becomes, as Al Sharpton warns, a police state. But all that being said, if the kid being "no angel" before his last night on earth has nothing to do with the cop's responsibility for killing the kid, then there shouldn't be any harm in saying he was no angel. History can't defer indefinitely to the feelings of a grieving family any more than it should comply with the demands of police. The kid was no angel, but being unarmed he didn't deserve to die. What the cop deserves, who can say? There's a question for you.

Ukraine: It's all about money?

The leaders of Russia and Ukraine are meeting today at an awkward moment for Russia. The Ukrainians captured some Russian soldiers on Ukrainian soil hours earlier, and the best the Russians could do was say that a patrol had blundered across the border by accident. Happily, the incident hasn't disrupted the meeting, at which President Putin clarified Russia's position on the Ukraine and its economic ties to the rest of Europe. In short, Putin claims that the Russian economy will lose billions of rubles as Ukraine switches its orientation toward the European Union, and other countries in a Russocentric trade group will suffer as well. The Russians are also concerned that Ukraine will prove a gateway for European goods to compete with Russian products and Russian labor. In short, rather than waging some sort of war on freedom, Russia's motives are blatantly protectionist. Putin concedes Ukraine's political sovereignty but insists that its trade policies should not be made to the detriment of Russia or any other country. But that's competition, Vlad. If Ukraine is sovereign, Ukrainians can choose whom they'll trade with, and if an old trade partner suffers, that partner's a sore loser if he threatens retaliation. To be fair, however, the largely unspoken aspect of this crisis has been the extent to which the EU may have insisted on zero-sum conditions so that its gain is necessarily Russia's loss. This has a lot to do with Ukraine adopting new standards to join one group and abandoning the old group's standards, and it may be less a matter of malice toward Russia than an inevitable consequence of the politicization of international trade. Again, if Ukraine is sovereign it can tell Putin to bugger off, if it dares, but if Americans want their own politicians to be more conscious of the consequences for workers of its economic policies they ought to show some sympathy toward Putin's concern for Russian workers and businesses. Ideally, the remedy is not to subject Ukraine to political intimidation, but there seems to be no ideal economic option for Ukrainians and Russians right now. If Russia's complaints against the EU are valid, then free trade doesn't prevail in Ukraine any more than it might were the country a vassal of Russia. Whether free trade itself is the ideal state, if that means competition and its inevitable losers and suffering, is another question worth asking, though I doubt it will come up at the current summit.

ISIS delenda est

The self-described "Islamic State" simultaneously waging war against Iraq and Syria is everyone's Islamophobic nightmare of a militarized "caliphate" come to life. These guys are the real deal and aren't playing, we're told. They've imposed convert-or-die (or pay jizya) terms on non-Muslims and reportedly place Shiites virtually in the same category. They stand accused of war crimes for which they've provided the evidence in propaganda videos designed to impress sympathizers with their strength while intimidating everyone else. No limit is imagined to the scope of their ambitions, given their appeal to the global Sunni umma and threats to attack the U.S. and other past oppressors. ISIS (or ISIL, or just plain IS) has evolved rapidly into a classic existential threat to the free world, so naturally the usual suspects in the U.S. deem its existence a threat to national security. The President is urged to escalate his air war against IS positions in Iraq and to expand it into Syria if necessary, while he is inevitably blamed for ignoring their rise to threatening power. The Syrians themselves invite cooperation against a genuinely existential threat to the Assad dictatorship, but demand to be treated as strategic partners in any operations, warning that they will treat unilateral U.S. action as aggression, for all the good doing so may do them. Nevertheless you can understand Syrian distrust since it was an American desire for regime change against a perceived impediment to Middle East peace that created the vacuum the IS seeks to fill. At this point, however, it ill becomes Assad to begrudge the manner in which his onetime enemy becomes his possible savior. It would also ill become the U.S. not to accept at least some of Syria's conditions, since if you believe the hype about the IS than Assad becomes the Stalin you team up with against Hitler, the way his father was Stalin to GHW Bush's FDR against the last generation's "Hitler," Saddam Hussein. By now it should be apparent that there'll be no liberal democracy in Syria for the time being, which will still suck for those Syrians critical of Assad, but it may also be apparent to the decision makers that for now there's no better option than Assad. That doesn't mean he's a good option for his own people, but the proof of that one way or the other will come in the long term, not in the annual human-rights reports. Still, compared to what the IS presumably has in mind, Syria, whose ruler belongs to a religious minority but doesn't proselytize, by the sword or otherwise, is a relatively free society by the worsening standards of the Arab Muslim world. All of this depends on how seriously you take the IS and its aspirations. They seem like a global gang for whom militant (or takfiri) Sunnism rationalizes a lust for power as the only way to a decent life. "Freedom" isn't working as a battle cry in that part of the world because most people there, I suspect, realize that power, rather than freedom, is the key to their survival. If it's power they really want, however, would they be satisfied with local power, or are they Muslim Trotskyites whose identity depends on a perpetual revolution? You can't know, so do you take a chance now, either to tolerate their rise to power and their possible stabilization into responsible statesmen, or to do everything within the world's power to destroy them, while they have friends nowhere else, at least among the governments? Who would veto the destruction of the IS? Not Russia, presumably, if it helps their Syrian friends? Not China, presumably, if it would discourage their Uighurs from their own jihad? Yet would destroying ISIS be the right thing to do, either for immediate benefit or as a precedent? Is it as necessary as many make it seem now? We should look beyond immediate fears of terrorist attacks to imagine all the possible consequences of the IS war to unify Sunni Islam, weighing other possibilities against the atrocities that are admittedly inevitable, before we and the world make up our minds.

The Perry Case

Last year the district attorney of Travis County, Texas, was arrested for drunk driving. She displayed the arrogance of the privileged while under arrest, demanding that the local sheriff be summoned to take care of her problem. She served 45 days for the offense and returned to work. Texas doesn't provide for automatic removal of such an official for such an offense. Nor does the governor of the state have the power to remove her. However, he shares in the power of the purse. The governor's idea was to cut off funding for her office, which includes a Public Integrity Unit, by vetoing the relevant spending provision, thus rendering her powerless. She has not resigned, though she will retire at the end of her term. Now the governor is in legal jeopardy. A special prosecutor claims that the governor abused his power and illegally attempted to coerce a public servant by using his veto and, apparently more damningly, stating explicitly that he would veto the funding if the district attorney didn't resign. Some observers have suggested that the governor might not be so deep in trouble had he simply used his veto without issuing the threat. Since this is America, most people will base their judgments on the matter on the fact that the governor is Rick Perry, a Republican who made a fool of himself in the last presidential campaign but may run for that office again in 2016. Regardless of his identity, it's probably a more relevant fact that the district attorney's Public Integrity Office was investigating the Cancer Research and Prevention Institute of Texas, a project in which cronies of Perry were closely involved, and that Perry would be able to name the d.a.'s replacement had she resigned. But all this shows is that there are no good guys in this particular story, since the d.a.'s drunken spree arguably demonstrated her unfitness for public office, and especially for a post responsible for "public integrity." It may be that Perry took advantage of an opportunity he didn't create to try to force her out of office, but it's not obvious to me, not being a Texan, that his actions, however opportunistic or even cynical, are also illegal. A decade ago, I recall it being suggested that Congress stop the war in Iraq by denying funding to the military. That's obviously another level of government, but it suggests that in general denying funding is a legitimate way to check unpopular or unwise policies. It's being argued in Texas that it isn't a legitimate way to target an individual or force her out of office. But it follows from none of this that this person should still have herself, except according to the letter of an inadequate law. She shouldn't be the victim or hero of this story, since its real moral seems to be, however much we'd like to reject stereotypes of a "political class," that politicians in the American Bipolarchy are too often just plain jerks.

One man's summer is another man's spring

You know things are messed up in Ferguson MO when even the Fox News reporters are questioning police tactics. Last night was the worst since Ferguson became the focus of the nation, and both sympathizers with the police and sympathizers with the young man slain by the police were quick to blame outside agitators. Groups like the Revolution Club of Chicago and the New Black Panther Party (that favorite of Fox), as well as white anarchists, are in town to cause trouble or, in their minds, to speed up a true uprising. A lot of people in Ferguson, residents included, are sick and tired. In other countries when a critical mass of people get sick and tired a government can fall and they call it a spring. There's far from a critical mass today in Ferguson, much less the United States, but you can wonder how different in spirit the protesters are from protesters in Tunisia, where a kid killing himself helped bring a government down, or in Egypt, where people got fed up twice over in three years' time, or in Ukraine, where one group of people got fed up with the government and overthrew it, and another group got fed up with the first and seceded. Americans like to cheer on spontaneous protests in other countries but distrust them on their own soil. That's understandable if you think your fellow citizens don't actually have serious complaints, but couldn't that have been what a passive majority thought in Tunisia, in Egypt, or in Ukraine? Maybe we imagine that we know what all these people stood for, but the one thing they have in common across their borders is that they felt oppressed. On our own soil, we're more critical of protests against oppression -- my own temptation just now was to write "alleged oppression." We don't give our own protesters as much benefit of the doubt as we do protesters against foreign regimes -- and it isn't even a matter of whether the country in question is an "enemy" of America. Egypt wasn't, but many of us rooted for the people in Tahrir Square, and some rooted both times, when a second wave of revolt overwhelmed the first. Sometimes who you're against makes a difference; America loved the Maidan in Kiev but hates the Russophone Ukrainians who rose in turn against it. I'm not going to suggest that the people in Ferguson are moral equivalents of any of these groups. All I ask is that Americans show a little of the same skepticism many show toward the Ferguson protesters toward mass protesters elsewhere in the world, before we make more commitments we regret. But if we think it is good to rebel everywhere else on Earth, perhaps we shouldn't dismiss so quickly or contemptuously those who feel a need to rebel at home.

Transparency and paralysis in government

David Frum has a provocative piece in the September Atlantic in which he argues that reforms undertaken since the 1970s to make government more transparent and less corrupt have only made it more difficult for government to do anything useful. What's really provocative about the argument is the implication that strong leadership rather than rules and procedures, much less checks and balances, is what gets things done. Here's the argument in Frum's own words:

We have had campaign-finance reform, and reform of the seniority system in Congress, and endless rounds of anticorruption measures in the federal government. Calls for “transparency” and “accountability” have meant more administrative and judicial supervision. In turn, power flows to impersonal institutions (agency review boards, courts, and so on) and away from elected leaders who can get things done—and who can be punished at the ballot box for delay and disappointment.

Frum's argument is related to the line of political thought I've called Neo-Lincolnism, which values leadership in forms ranging from deal-making to arm-twisting over an idealized notion of deliberative persuasion in which leaders make things happen by making speeches. Lyndon Johnson is as much an exemplar of the leadership advocated by neo-Lincolnism as Lincoln himself. While Neo-Lincolnism has focused on presidential leadership, often as a critique by Democrats of Barack Obama's alleged over-emphasis on speechmaking, Frum expands the argument to criticize a loss of congressional leadership over the last forty years. An unintended consequence of liberal Democrats' efforts to break the power of their elderly, reactionary southern compatriots over congressional committees is that "Committees and subcommittees multiplied to the point where no single chair has the power to guarantee anything. This breakdown of the committee system empowered the rank-and-file member—and provided the lobbying industry with more targets to influence. Committees now open their proceedings to the public. Many are televised. All of this allows lobbyists to keep a close eye on events—and to confirm that the politicians to whom they have contributed deliver value."

Frum finds it bitterly ironic that reforms enacted "to eliminate backroom wheeling and dealing" having only given lobbyists more influence over government. Well-meaning reformers are only "eliminating governance itself." Whether you agree or not, the charge begs the question of what Frum means by "governance." In simplest terms, of course, we can say "getting things done." As Frum, a moderate conservative, well knows, many Americans believe that the point of our system of government is to prevent things getting done when getting things done seems to threaten either vested interests or enshrined individual rights. Frum realizes that activist "conservative" judges have contributed to the current problem by subjecting politics to excessive judicial supervision. But the original impetus to which he traces our current torpor came from liberals who resented "wheeling and dealing" and were determined to root out corruption wherever they perceived it. Liberals of a certain stripe resent most deal-making because they wish that politics could be settled through principled deliberation. While LBJ and Lincoln are, in their respective fashions, icons of liberalism, the insinuation of neo-Lincolnism, as echoed in Frum's article, is anti-liberal (though not conservative) in one particular sense. A great liberal hope, inscribed in the Constitution itself, is that procedures should suffice to get things done while compensating for the foibles of individual leaders. James Madison hoped that checks, balances and so on would channel the ambitions and other impulses that make men less than angels toward constructive, mutually beneficial ends. By the 21st century,  it seemed as if ambitions checked ambitions too well, too thoroughly, so that none seemed to prevail and nothing seemed to get done. Neo-Lincolnism hints that real, effective leadership can't be contained entirely by the strictures of proceduralism -- that at least in the sort of society we've lived in all along, wheeling and dealing, horse trading, arm twisting, are all inescapably necessary even if they betray or belie the liberal ideals of principled deliberation. What redeems Neo-Lincolnism as a democratic idea is the insistence of both original neo-Lincolniam Sean Wilentz and a possible sympathizer like David Frum that leaders remain accountable to the people for whatever they do in a way that unelected actors, from judges to lobbyists, are not. This political philosophy allows ends to justify means more than pure liberalism does, but as long as we agree that the people, not the leaders, are the ultimate judges of ends and means alike, Neo-Lincolnian arguments may contribute to getting things done in the long run.

How many wrongs make a right?

It's been an interesting weekend in Ferguson MO starting with Friday's revelation of a convenience-store security tape apparently showing a young man roughing up a shopkeeper while trying to steal cigars a short time before a cop shot the young man to death. Reactions to the tape were fascinating. Some cynics were happy to see the story told by the victim's family of an innocent "gentle giant" belied by the footage. It confirmed an impression that a black man who gets shot by a cop must have done something wrong, or at least something stupid. Unfortunately, many observers made an unjustified leap in logic to argue as if the young man deserved death for his actions in the store, even as the police made clear that the cop who killed the youth didn't know he was a robbery suspect. Meanwhile, sympathizers with the victim treated the footage as an ad hominem argument against the dead man, a distraction from the crucial question of the police procedure when the youth was stopped while jaywalking. In fact, no one has a right to infer from the security footage how the doomed youth behaved when the cop stopped him. If the footage has encouraged a belief, in advance of definitive testimony about the shooting, that the incident was a justifiable homicide, on the assumption that the victim was violent and menacing, than releasing the footage was an irresponsible act. Yet it will still be welcomed as a contribution to the whole truth of the story, regardless of its legal implications. Its social consequences were less welcome; it seemed to provoke new rounds of rioting and looting, including some spiteful targeting of the store with the cigars. No one approves of this yet no one can stop it. "No justice, no peace" has a compelling logic that defies efforts by community leaders and activists to turn the rhetoric on and off. For the mob, "justice" is the arrest and at least the prosecution of the cop for murder. He is presumed guilty by many, some of whom probably see any killing of a black by a white as murder, if not an act of war. Objectively, however, the issue is not whatever attitude he might have had toward a large black man but the leeway for lethal force given police everywhere. Even in the worst-case scenario imagined by police apologists, in which the victim was trying to take the cop's gun, it isn't unreasonable to expect cops to be capable of defending themselves and protecting their gear without using lethal force, particularly when the assailant, as everyone agrees, had no weapons of his own. The rules police make for themselves may exculpate the cop depending on what actually happened, but that won't necessarily make his walking away without penalty just. It's the people's prerogative to question justice as defined by police, but if they can't find a better way to articulate their questioning than to sack unoffending stores they surrender much of the sympathy to which they might otherwise be entitled. Worse, it shifts the subject back to "what should be done with black criminals?" from "what should be done with cops who use excessive force?" where it belongs. On the other hand, if mass anger is at all justified, excess anger shouldn't entirely dismiss the grievance from the minds of presumably objective observers. If the cop did wrong, you can't let him walk just to spite the looters or Al Sharpton or whoever's protest offends you. We still need to know exactly what happened, and it would help if we could agree on what should have happened before anyone passes judgment on anyone else.

Is this a Libertarian moment? How would we tell?

Conor Friedersdorf rises on the Atlantic webpage to defend libertarianism from the scoffing of other opinionators. Friedersdorf takes offense at some pundits' "disdainful" and "vexing" rejection of the proposition that we're on the verge of a "libertarian moment" in American politics. It becomes apparent that he and his antagonists are writing about different things. To be more specific, Friedersdorf's notion of "libertarianism" differs from that of most people. The problem with most people, he believes, is that they identify "libertarianism" with the most extreme ideas of avowed libertarians, when libertarians as a whole are far from monolithic or fanatical in their views and priorities. "There are a lot of people, including commenters on this site, who laugh at Fox News' absurd characterizations of liberals," he protests, "yet somehow cling to similarly cartoonish notions of what libertarians are."

If a "libertarian moment" comes, Friedersdorf predicts, it won't come in the form of wholesale adoption of libertarian views or the uncompromising enactment of libertarian policies. He tentatively defines a libertarian moment as one when "younger voters will support policies and elect leaders that enhance liberty in comparison to the status quo." If we want to know what this might mean in practice, Friedersdorf insists that we not focus on the most obvious or most extreme sources in the Libertarian Party or the Ron Paul movement or the fans of Ayn Rand. What, then, is the "liberty" younger voters may prefer? It becomes clear that Friedersdorf envisions a "moment" in which libertarianism is not defined primarily in economic terms. He prefers a libertarianism that's synonymous with "civil libertarianism," from resistance to national-security surveillance to drug-law reform to the expansion of gay rights. Hence:

If fewer people are caged for inhaling the smoke of a plant, that's a libertarian victory. If fewer people's doors are kicked in late at night by police officers dressed in combat fatigues, that's a libertarian victory. If more cancer patients can legally obtain a substance that alleviates their suffering, that's a libertarian victory. If fewer assets are seized by police without proof of guilt, that's a libertarian victory.

A fair number of writers in the comments thread have questioned this particular assumption. The adjective "civil libertarian" may be more popular nowadays, but some observers note that all of the above can just as easily be called "liberal victories." They would have been recognized as such unanimously not so long ago, and some reactionaries probably still see these phenomena as primarily "liberal." The only reason, it seems, to call them "libertarian" instead is if you identify "liberalism" with the "statism" against which formal libertarianism protests. For libertarian politicians, whether formal party members or individual ideologues, the main reason to promote "civil libertarianism," apart from believing sincerely in these victories, is to identify these most obvious goods with the more controversial libertarian economic agenda. However, I take Friedersdorf at his apparent word that he wishes to downplay the economic aspects of libertarianism. For him, I infer, libertarianism in most general terms means a less intrusive state. His libertarian presumption, I presume, is that in nearly every instance a less intrusive state is better for society. More committed libertarians no doubt hope to convince young voters that the way to prevent any reversal of the victories Friedersdorf cites is to minimize government intrusiveness at all levels. We'll have a libertarian moment if they can convince a critical mass of people, but I suspect that few people will make so sweeping a generalization. Whatever ideology or even the Constitution says, each generation has to decide for itself what is properly subject to democratic regulation and what isn't. It doesn't follow that we must give up the welfare state or the regulatory state to secure the right to smoke pot. It may or may not be a libertarian moment if Americans actually draw that conclusion, but it definitely won't be a good moment for the country.

In Missouri, the latest rush to judgment

Here we go again: a policeman kills a black person. The victim is reportedly unarmed, but it's as yet officially unknown whether he fought with the cop. Most people draw their own conclusions: a racist cop acted out of fear, hatred or arrogance; a stupid punk got what was coming to him for showing attitude, getting confrontational, etc. Outbreaks of looting follow, which only harden the attitudes of many white observers, whose comments only harden the attitudes of black observers. Who is the victim? As with Trayvon Martin, some see him as a child, others as a "gangbanger." Who is the cop? The general public doesn't know his name yet, yet some think they know him in some essential way. They assume either that he lashed out at a stereotype of black youth, or that he had no choice but to defend himself from attack. The fact is, most people following this story don't need to know anymore: black kid vs. cop is all they need to know, no matter whose side they take. A surprisingly nuanced look at the latest controversy comes from a figure in the last one: the attorney for George Zimmerman. He writes for CNN that attitudes either way -- cops toward blacks, blacks toward cops -- are problematic and dangerous, but argues that police have to take "the first step" toward reconciliation, since their authority places responsibility on them. "In return," he emphasizes, we must respect police authority and the risks of their work. It is a "grave reality," he argues, that "the way we engage a police officer can affect whether we walk away, whether we are driven away in handcuffs, or whether we are taken away on a stretcher." But this is still also a matter of police responsibility, and we might note that, ideally at least, the people should set the rules of engagement for their police. If Mark O'Mara concedes these points, a more respectful environment for police may result. But if he looks like a voice of reason this time, you can always scroll down to the comments thread for what are most likely more typical opinions, from those absolutely convinced that the cop committed murder to those who believe that black people's problems (or, more likely, the writers' own problems with black people) would end if they'd only talk and dress better. Prejudice is rampant in our land of individual liberty, no less than in the past. As ever, prejudice belies any pretense of individualist sentiments. A true individualist really has no choice but to reserve judgment until we know more about the two individuals who confronted each other in Ferguson, but reserving judgment seems to be a lost discipline in this paranoid nation.

Statism and American (or Russian) exceptionalism

Last week's New Yorker piece on Russia by David Remnick, an old Russia hand before he took over the magazine, drove home a real cultural difference between Russians and Americans.  For supporters of Vladimir Putin, the state is a focus of national pride in a way it most certainly isn't for many Americans. A repentant liberal tells Remnick: "Back then [as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991] we believed we could build a democracy without a state....But society began to change, and I am a reflection of that change." A Russian right-winger, hence a strong Putin supporter, tells how he hated Boris Yeltsin, the successor to the USSR, for "hollowing out the state." The same man assumes that the West has always sought "the destruction of the [Russian] state." He sees Putin's Russia as the country's "fifth empire" and the latest resurgence of a state ordained by "some sort of mysterious forces."

While in the U.S. anti-statists identify statism with liberalism, Russian statists see the state as the antithesis of liberalism, or a bulwark against it -- liberalism here being understood as western decadence and immorality. This is something bigger than Putin or "Putinism," as Julia Ioffe notes when writing in The New Republic that wishing Putin away would only result in someone similar, if not worse from a western or liberal standpoint, taking over. To Ioffe, Putin "is giving Russia something that is quintessentially Russian:" reverence for a powerful state based on the feeling that "there's not much separating you, or anyone, from the void." She traces Russian statism to a perpetual "fear of the future" due to a perpetually dysfunctional economy. Each "empire," she suggests, fell due to bankruptcy; Putin's may go the same way, but we still shouldn't expect a liberal dawn in Russia if that happens, if by liberalism we mean liberation from a craving for, if not a dependence upon, a powerful, always potentially oppressive state.

Americans no doubt will be tempted to find a character flaw in Russian culture to account for all this, as if Russians deviate from an American norm in their attitude toward the state. It's probably more true that Russians and Americans occupy opposite extremes in their attitudes. Americans seem to see statism as a negative measure of self-reliance or "personal responsibility;" if you want a powerful state, it's because you're weak or afraid or simply lazy. It's said that the American Founders regarded the state as a necessary evil; it's probably safe to say Russians don't think that way. It's more likely that, despite several generations of allegedly atheistic Communism, Russians retain a traditional belief in the state as part of a hierarchy of life or a great chain of being -- a natural if not sacred phenomenon. At this point of comparison the U.S. does appear exceptional in its founding by colonies of settlers cutting ties from the previous source of authority, disregarding any indigenous sources, and making up rules to minimize any state's impact on free men's commerce. The American presumption seems to be that we are not inherently subject to some power on earth, while some such subordination seems implicit in the sort of conservative statism, dedicated to preserving and advancing a traditional culture, seen in Russia and other places. The state is the vessel or vehicle of culture; to belong to the culture, it may be thought, is to belong to the state.

Whatever that culture is, it's not the same as the "civil society" liberals idealize -- it's not so voluntary and obviously not as scrupulously separate from the state. Liberals presume that this degree of statism, compounded by traditionalism, handicaps cultures, keeping them intellectually and economically backward, even though the conclusion doesn't necessarily follow. Putin himself thinks differently. Remnick quotes him: "[T]he point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness." In practice, however, conservatism too often confuses forward and upward movement with downward or backward movement, since it presumes that progress depends upon and serves tradition. American conservatism seems more straightforward these days: it opposes any movement that may discomfit vested interests, and its whole design of government is to protect vested (or founding) interests from interference or subordination. From a perspective favoring the welfare of humanity as a whole, there may be little to choose from between statist and anti-statist conservatism, except that the former, by retaining a right to command (which the latter abhors) may be better suited for collective survival in extreme circumstances. I'd rather take my chances with a self-styled American progressive, Theodore Roosevelt, who credited Abraham Lincoln with the idea that "a strong people might have a strong government and yet remain the freest on the earth." Both American conservatives, who favor a weak state, and Russians, who allegedly favor a weak people, are missing key pieces of the equation. They shouldn't be that hard to find and put together.

A prejudiced critique of prejudice?

Kristin Y. Christman says nothing new in a recent Albany Times Union op-ed in which she attributes American foreign policy under President Obama and his predecessors to prejudice. Her particular, if not original spin on the subject is to use categories conceived by the 1950s thinker Gordon Allport, who divided the world into "Prejudiced Personalities" and "Democratic Personalities." Christman, a student of Russian, sees prejudice in American portrayals of Russians as evil actors in Ukraine. She sees similarly selective attitudes wherever the U.S. operates. Her discoveries are old news: we see things in black and white, oversimplify, demand unconditional compliance with our demands, etc. etc. That news isn't so old that it can't stand repetition, of course, and Christman writes plenty of sensible stuff besides. "Evil is not one side of war," she writes, ""Evil is the war [itself] and the belief that the enemy deserves punishment and destruction." I've said nearly the same thing when I warn the world against taking sides whenever war breaks out. Yet obviously I have a problem with Christman or you'd have nothing to read here today. The problem, from my own perspective, is that while Christman understandably singles out Americans for these prejudiced attitudes, she does so with such singlemindedness that you might infer that only Americans have such attitudes. Isn't it also possible that the Russians simplistically see the Ukrainians and their western backers as evil? Isn't it also possible (duh!) that Arabs simplistically see Israelis as evil? I'd guess that Christman does see Prejudiced Personalities as a universal phenomenon, but her column makes it look like a peculiarly American problem. It may be a worse problem for Americans given our tendency to moralize in foreign policy, but where's the country whose foreign policy is unmotivated by prejudice? If Prejudiced Personalities "believe people are superior or inferior," as Christman claims, we should expect to see them in every nation. Asking Americans to change their ways will accomplish little if other countries don't change -- especially when Christman warns that Prejudiced Personalities could be set in place as early as age five. Nor is it very encouraging when the best Christman can suggest is that "we must help children and adults know love more than threats, empathy more than punishment, and caring more than commands." I'm not sure we can get to that point worldwide, given the human material we have to work with now, without a lot of threats, commands and punishments. But that might be my own prejudice talking, -- or a certain misanthropy born not of prejudice, but of experience and reading history.

Trying to blow out blowback

Time for another humanitarian intervention with bombs. The President has decided that the Yazidi people of Iraq, trapped on a mountain after being driven from their homes, are in danger of a massacre bordering on genocide at the hands of The Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL). He has ordered air drops to the Yazidis and "targeted" air strikes against the IS to prevent a likely slaughter. Iraq remains in chaos as the IS have won their first rounds against the vaunted Peshmerga of Kurdistan, while Baghdad remains incapable of reaching a satisfactory power-sharing arrangement for Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. The IS is everyone's nightmare of Islamism (or takfirism) run amok, reportedly threatening pretty much anyone who deviates from their style of Sunnism and demanding conversion as the price of survival. It bears repeating now that they are, to some extent, a product of the west's desire to topple the Assad dictatorship in Syria -- another unintended consequence of our impulse to democratize the world at all costs. Liberals in particular find it hard to accept that in some places some kind of dictatorship really is the best option, or the least awful, and that in such places there is no substitute for personal courage -- no guarantee of your safety -- if you want to criticize the government. In looking at the wider world, liberals have to rethink their priorities. Free speech cannot be the only thing that matters. Americans themselves may have moved closer to realizing that liberty can't solve every problem. The alternative is not unconditional submission to a leader, but it does mean letting rulers rule when the alternative is tribal or ideological anarchy and accepting risk when you see a ruler going wrong. Too many people around the world remain uninterested in democracy as liberals understand it as the sharing of both power and life. Tribes and factions either want to be left alone by everyone else, or see exclusive political power as their only means of survival. The Islamic State may be an army of religious fanatics, but their essential motivation, I suspect, is a feeling that they must rule in order to flourish. Liberal democracy depends on most people relying on something other than political power to survive or flourish. In some parts of the world, we may have to acknowledge, there is no such "something" that people can turn to -- no commerce or civil society. We assume that dictators thwart the development of such things, since we assume that those things are seen as threats to their authority. But in a globalized economy it may be increasingly likely that some places and peoples will be shut out permanently from such things unless they win some resource lottery. For such people, political power may be their only hope for survival, not necessarily by wielding it themselves, but by allowing someone to accumulate enough to be useful to them. Again, liberals assume that dictatorship is never useful for the dictator's subjects because they assume dictators to be self-interested "kleptocrats" when they aren't aspiring gods. This is historically naive, but too few liberals take a longer view because it might mean deferring the gratification of freedom until that proves useful to people. The agony of Iraq should compel any objective observer to conclude that that country was better off under Saddam Hussein. That doesn't mean Iraqis had it good under his rule, or even that there weren't any viable alternatives to his personal rule. It simply means that, except for some people, Iraqis are worse off since their liberation.

Humanitarian intervention is a lovely idea, but the only really effective humanitarian intervention in the affairs of the world will be the one that establishes a world government. The possibility that it might establish a world dictatorship doesn't necessarily disprove the point. 

Loss of faith in democracy?

American public opinion hit a kind of milestone this summer when a survey conducted by ABC News and the Washington Post revealed that a majority of respondents disapproved of the performance of their own representative in Congress. Previously, it was often lamented that Americans deplored the performance of Congress as a whole, or as an institution, but were satisfied with how their own guy was doing. The supposed tendency not to blame your own guy for systematic dysfunction was seen as an obstacle to wholesale reform. So are we closer to a thorough housecleaning now? Not necessarily. We've also learned this summer that approval ratings for President Obama and the Republican Party are at new lows. As long as Bipolarchy prevails, people may gripe about their Congressman but still refuse to replace him with someone from the hated Other Party. Many Americans are probably disgusted with the whole system -- which may help explain why so many intellectual opinionators are worried about the rise of "authoritarianism" around the world. Their great, if largely unspoken fear may be not so much that foreigners will give up on democracy (not to mention "rule of law," "civil society" and other niceties allegedly antithetical to "authoritarian" government), but that Americans will begin to look to the likes of Vladimir Putin, not just for models of perceived strength or toughness, but for models of effective government. That could happen if Americans prove unable to think outside the Bipolarchy box and end up thinking of "American-style government" only in terms of two-party gridlock. Pollsters could do this country a real service if they asked people what qualifications they'd find acceptable for political candidates who don't belong to the two major parties and thus have no practical experience in legislating or administration. When would you feel confident about voting for someone who isn't a Democrat or Republican? There will probably be no one answer. Since Ross Perot's time many Americans have regarded running a successful business as an eminent qualification, but just as many might see the successful businessman as a profiteer and exploiter. Someone who's been a community activist may repel many who use "community organizer" as a pejorative to describe Obama, denoting someone good at making noise but with no practical, responsible experience, but the same activist may inspire many who feel that Obama has not lived up to their ideal of a "community organizer" in politics. No uprising against Bipolarchy is likely to coalesce around one movement; conflicts between some sort of "left" and "right" will most likely persist. The important thing isn't necessarily to give one big party all the power, but to get voters to believe that an (R) or (D) isn't a prerequisite for elective office. If Americans can't stand the two major parties, yet assume no other entity capable of governing the country, then the American experiment is finished. What would follow wouldn't be a choice between authoritarianism and liberal democracy but, as in the larger world, a choice between authoritarianism and armed anarchy. We might spare ourselves that choice if we renew our faith in real democracy, which is not the rule of parties or of constitutions or of checks and balances but rule by ourselves. If we need the Democratic party and the Republican party to rule us, we're really little better than someone who feels that we need a Putin or some other strong man to rule us. You either believe we can do it ourselves, or you submit to whoever can do it himself. That's the choice Americans face in this generation; they'd better start making up their minds.

The publicity war over Gaza and a demographic shift in the U.S.

Someone put a little leaflet on the bulletin board of the coin-op laundry I use in Albany. The slip of paper called on the world, if not Israel to "Stop the Massacre" of Palestinians in Gaza. I saw something similar in a nearby pizzeria this weekend. Haven't seen anything similar urging support for Israel, though you see plenty of that in the letter columns of the local papers. Around the world, there's a perception that Israel is losing a battle for public opinion because people are focusing on the civilian victims in Gaza and rejecting the pro-Israeli argument that Hamas is to blame for them. This should be a hard one for Israel to lose because their antagonists are seen as Islamist extremists. The irony of the global picture is that the Arab neighborhood has little sympathy for Hamas. The new Egyptian government, in particular, sees Hamas as an extension of the hated Muslim Brotherhood, while Islamism itself (or "salafism," "jihadism," "takfirism," etc.) is a dirty word in many places where there's normally no love for Israel. Outside the region, however, it seems that most people don't care who governs Gaza, while the more radical sympathizers with Palestine claim that the "street" supports Gaza (if not Hamas) in spite of the region's unrepresentative governments. A humanitarian reflex responds to news of dead children and other civilians -- that leaflet was illustrated with a scene of crying kids. In many quarters, that reflex is compounded by an "anti-imperialist" or "third-worldist" impulse that regards Israel as the rich white oppressor stomping on the poor dark people and resists passing judgment on the attitudes and tactics of oppressed, presumably desperate people. It's the mirror image, I suppose, of the attitude that justifies nearly every measure taken by the Jewish State in the face of an "existential" threat from irreconcilable bigots and religious fanatics. Meanwhile, a recent survey of Americans suggests that the same demographic trends pointing toward liberal dominance in domestic politics are pointing away from this country's traditional solid support for Israel. A plurality of those surveyed between the ages of 18 and 29 told pollsters that Israel was more to blame than Hamas for the current violence in Gaza. Since trends among younger voters are accented by greater racial and ethnic diversity, it's worth noting that blacks and Hispanics -- the latter more so than the former -- are most likely to be critical toward Israel, though in no case does a majority of any demographic group condemn the Zionist Entity. These young people have grown up with the war on terror, so again we might expect them to be suspicious of an Islamist Entity like Hamas. However, this may be the first generation to get its news more from different forms of social media than from the "mainstream" media -- liberal, corporate or otherwise.  This means they have access to other viewpoints largely absent from the major news outlets, as well as access to unfiltered actuality footage from YouTube, Facebook, etc. None of this means that people are getting a truer or less biased picture of events, but it does mean that they're seeing things outside of a previously determined narrative context of a perpetual threat to the existence of Israel and the lives of all its Jews. This trend disappoints some American observers, to the extent that it may be echoed in Washington and may ruin the best-ever opportunity, with other Arabs looking the other way, to destroy Hamas for good. Hamas itself would be no great loss, if the entity is as fanatical and cynical as claimed and can think of no better way to advance its cause than to provoke the murder of its own constituents. But as we all know by now, Hamas can't be extirpated without a level of collateral damage that fewer and fewer people around the world are willing to tolerate. They might not tolerate Hamas's agenda and its likely consequences, either, but agendas count for less than innocent lives, as long as you resist the argument for civilian responsibility for elected extremists. Whether a demographic shift in American attitudes toward the Middle East might push the region toward peace is unclear. Too few people in any group give the most obvious answer to the who's-to-blame question: "Both." Once that number goes up, something meaningful might happen.

Civilians and/or Citizens

An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Thane Rosenbaum has scandalized many readers by questioning whether citizens, like those in Gaza, who endorse an intransigent regime like the Hamas government, really are the moral equivalent of those "civilians" whom the laws of war protect from military targeting. The actual article is behind the Journal's paywall, but indignant writers have culled numerous quotes from it. This bit, cited by a Washington Post writer who calls Rosenbaum's "the most vile op-ed you will ever read," looks like the money shot:

On some basic level, you forfeit your right to be called civilians when you freely elect members of a terrorist organization as statesmen, invite them to dinner with blood on their hands and allow them to set up shop in your living room as their base of operations. At that point you begin to look a lot more like conscripted soldiers than innocent civilians. And you have wittingly made yourself targets.

As many critics have noted, Rosenbaum's logic is chillingly similar to that of Osama bin Laden when he justified terrorist attacks on American soil. In both cases, critics are repelled by the idea that citizens of democracies can be held responsible by offended outsiders for the actions of their elected representatives. Rosenbaum first came to my attention through a critical comment in the Albany Times Union. Victor Asal writes: "If we accept Rosenbaum's argument, we hold every citizen responsible for every act committed by their leaders. As a citizen, that is a responsibility I truly do not want and should not have placed on my shoulders."

Asal's strongest argument is in defense of the children who inevitably die in attacks on civilians, but have voted for no one. Children obviously aren't responsible for the crimes, actual or alleged, of their governments, but Asal argues that you can't accept the premise of collective civilian responsibility unless you concede that children are also legitimate targets. I think a line can be drawn so that, for instance, you can concede Israel's right to defend itself against Hamas rocket attacks by bombing rocket positions in urban centers while also holding them responsible -- though not necessarily exclusively responsible -- for the deaths of children.  Meanwhile, something doesn't seem right about Asal's disavowal of responsibility for the acts of his government. His attitude is what you might expect under a representative form of government, and especially in the U.S., where from an early point we conceded that our representatives act at their own discretion, and not at our instruction. We have periodic opportunities to repudiate our leaders, but this only seems to prove that we as citizens are not responsible for their actions until the next election, and even then few would accept that by re-electing our leaders we assume the sort of responsibility that makes us eligible for reprisal from foreigners. For Asal there seems to be no difference between a citizen and a civilian -- but is that so? "Civilian" simply means non-military, but it has come to mean "innocent," or at least morally immune from attack during wartime. As Asal shows, civilian innocence is synonymous with non-responsibility for the actions of governments. But is this really what the political philosophy of representative government, of small-r republicanism, is about? Since the American republic was founded, politicians and historians have debated, as noted earlier this week, how involved citizens ought to be in politics. While the Founders and their biographers and students may have disagreed over how active the citizenry should have been in public life, I suspect that neither side -- neither those idealizing political activity as the highest form of human activity nor those who idealized a "society" distinct from politics -- would have endorsed the blanket abdication of responsibility for their representatives that comes when citizens see themselves primarily as civilians. The problem isn't a question of whether we "deserve" attack, but an abandonment of responsibility in peace as well as war, a delegation of responsibility to politicians who can be scapegoated as the cause of all our troubles as well as excessively idealized as the answer to them all. Our continued dependence on the Bipolarchy -- the two-party system -- is only the most obvious evidence that Americans today are not taking responsibility for their country the way the Founders intended. But at a certain point we're no longer innocence no matter how much we deny responsibility.

None of this is meant to suggest that one country is right to hold citizens of another both responsible for their government and liable to attack. Foreign relations are very subjective. Just as Israelis and their friends abroad can hold citizens of Gaza not just responsible but culpable for electing Hamas, so Palestinians and their friends abroad can hold citizens of Israel culpable for the original seizure of land for a Jewish State and subsequent offenses against the previous occupiers, while the Israeli side can still hold Palestinians culpable for refusing the deal of 1948, attacking the newborn country and arguably surrendering their entitlement to anything. As a general rule, however, an awareness that the foreign policies you vote for may have consequences for you ought to encourage voting for more modest foreign policies around the world. When people can't vote, then leaders alone are to blame.