Oh Mighty ISIS!

Reports of the decline of the self-styled Islamic State have unsurprisingly proved exaggerated. Instead, the jihadi army has made gains against both Iraq and Syria this week, leaving some global observers more concerned for the classical ruins in the city of Palmyra, likely candidates for iconoclastic demolition as they are, than for the lives of the army's still more likely human victims. Whether we like it or not, the Daesh is always going to have an advantage in moral over the soldiers of a sectarian and corrupt government, on one hand, and a blatant tyranny on the other. Maybe the Shiite militias reportedly coming to the rescue of Ramadi are sufficiently fanatical to stand up to the takfiri host, but the hirelings of the regular Iraqi and Syrian armies must rightly ask whether resistance is worth the risk. To those of us watching from the outside the imperative to resist and repel the IS is self-evident. To us, the fight against the Daesh is a fight for freedom, but for people who arguably have never been free as we understand the idea, life under a new master may be preferable to death for any idea. As for the jihadis themselves, I suppose I'm not the one to question whether the war really counts as a religious experience for them. But whether it does or not, they seem to have a more realistic hope for power and plunder than their opponents ever can under their current leaders. More than fanaticism, I suspect, the feeling that power is the only key to prosperity drives them. That may not sound religious depending on how you define religion, but as I understand it Islam has never taken an "our kingdom is not of this world" attitude. Part of why Islam as a whole seems more political, if not totalitarian, than the other Abrahamic faiths may be that Muslims are more likely to feel that this world is theirs to take and rule. Christians have often felt likewise, of course, but that impulse may be inhibited sometimes by a sense that it contradicts Jesus's message, while jihadi conquest does not necessarily contradict Muhammad's message. Another way to look at it is that jihad is the prosperity gospel for Muslims, with the difference that the jihadi is more convinced that his prosperity depends on coercive power over other people. Neither the Iraqi government nor even the Syrian tyranny can plausibly promise that kind of power, which may prove that, like it or not, the IS is more egalitarian, at least within its own ranks, than its opponents. That's how rotten the Middle East is today, and if no one other than the IS can realistically promise to make people's lives better, and not merely to create "opportunity" for them, it isn't going to get any better -- at least in our eyes.

Holding their feet to a fire made of money

I got a begging letter from the President the other day. It was the first from him in a while and it surprised me since, as he writes, "I have no more campaigns to run." He boasts that "the GOP's grand predictions of doom and gloom haven't come true," and advises Republicans that if they hope to re-brand themselves as the party of the middle class, "They must walk the walk when it comes to addressing the issues most important to growing the middle class ... like raising the minimum wage and ensuring equal pay for women [ellipsis in original]." They must stop "ignoring the will of the people," though I suppose each Republican believes himself or herself to be obeying the will of their people. Such confusions help explain why Obama "can't force them to act on critical issues," but he suggests that the American people can. At least they can "hold [Republicans'] feet to the fire....They need to feel the heat from you and others across the country." That sounds like a call for a letter-writing, phone-calling and e-mailing campaign to swamp congressmen's inboxes with righteous demands for "policies that make life better for all." The President advises that we make clear to Republicans that we'll "hold them accountable at the ballot box if they don't" straighten out. So that's what we should tell them in our letters, calls, e-mails and tweets, right? Maybe, but what Obama really has in mind is that you donate money to the Democratic National Committee in sums beginning with the cute, timely figure of $20.16. This support "is critical to holding the Republicans' feet to the fire and demanding action to make the lives of all Americans better." Apparently this money is not going entirely into 2016 campaign funds but will be used, at least in part, to "rally Americans to demand action for all from the Republican-controlled Congress." I would have thought that the letter, presuming it reaches as many homes as I suspect, would have sufficed for that purpose, especially augmented by some Obama orations. This roundabout way of rallying opinion seems wasteful. The President is saying, in effect: I want you to hold Republicans' feet to the fire, so give us money so we can tell you to hold Republicans' feet to the fire. Moreover, I don't think it'll have the effect Obama hopes for. He may hope to build a bonfire of money to threaten the GOP, but those guys are firewalkers when it comes to this sort of thing. Hell, they'll walk through fire just to get money, so I doubt this late tough talk will intimidate them at all. But I suppose that if you're a full-time politician in our time this would make sense. What better way to have your constituents intimidate your foes than by having them give you money? Possibly we might think of something, but I doubt that Obama or his Republican begging counterparts want to hear it.

On the road to Hell with Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky

Sam Harris, one of our best-selling New Atheists, disagrees with anti-imperialist Noam Chomsky on the need to confront militant Islam around the world. He recently invited Chomsky to hold a public discussion on related subjects, and while it looks now like no such conversation will happen Harris, with Chomsky's permission, has published their exchange of e-mails at his website. It isn't really flattering to either man. Chomsky comes across as almost imperious in his contempt for Harris, while Harris stated desire to strive for common ground seems slightly insincere given his obvious intent to challenge Chomsky on a point already raised in one of Harris's books. In short, Harris believes that ends redeem means if they don't justify them. He believes that ultimate judgments on political violence must take the intentions of actors into account. He is irked by Chomsky's seeming refusal to take intentions into account. He is particularly irked by Chomsky's rhetorical linkage of the 2001 terror attacks on the United States with the U.S. bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant in 1998. Chomsky appears to believe that on some level the attack on Sudan was a worse crime because of its longterm humanitarian consequences for a poor nation, while Harris believes that we can't judge either event without taking the perpetrators' very different intentions into account. The two intellectuals disagree most starkly over the intentions of President Clinton. Harris believes that it matters that Clinton acted because he thought the plant had something to do with chemical weapons for terrorist use -- that the President acted to prevent terrorism and save lives. Chomsky is reluctant to credit Clinton with any good intentions, arguing first that the bombing was intended most likely as pure reprisal for recent terror attacks against American interests, and then that even if Clinton ordered the bombing on preventive grounds, his indifference to the likely humanitarian consequences marks him as depraved if not also racist. And knowing Harris's reputation for New Atheist vigilance against theocracy and religiously-motivated violence, Chomsky reminds him repeatedly that George W. Bush claimed a divine mandate for the invasion of Iraq. Having insulted Harris well before the exchange began by calling him a worshipper of a cult of the State, Chomsky basically blew him off by saying a conversation with someone so morally blind wasn't worth having. Harris, of course, still believes it's Chomsky who's morally blind.

The odd thing about the exchange is the rhetorical emphasis on "intentions" when what's really being discussed is one of the oldest and most controversial premises: that the end justifies the means. Harris's position is clear: much, if not all, is justified to stop the spread of militant Islam, if not the spread of theocracy in general. If Clinton bombed the pharmaceutical plant to strike at Islamist terrorism, then the collateral damage can be forgiven to a great extent if not entirely excused or endorsed. I don't know whether Chomsky believes that ends never justify means, but when he perceives the end to be nothing more than American global hegemony he can forgive nothing about the means. The 1998 bombing is more about American imperial arrogance than it is about any terrorist threat, and in his ever-infuriating fashion he feels obliged as an American citizen to focus his critical attention on those acts for which he feels responsible, and for which he holds Harris responsible. Chomsky judges acts by their humanitarian consequences, and this orientation really distinguishes him from Harris, who is more concerned with a theoretical future upon which our intentions appear to have meaningful influence. When Harris writes or speaks about intentions, it's more accurate to say that for him ends are more likely to disqualify than justify means. The point he wants Chomsky and others to acknowledge isn't that the Sudan bombing is good because of Clinton's intentions. It's that the 2001 terror attacks were worse because they were carried out in the interest of Islamist jihad. Harris is less interested in what people do than in what they want; that's what really threatens him. There are lots of people out there who want jihad or want a caliphate. Harris does not want these things, and some of his writings suggest that there is no limit to what may be done to prevent them. Why his negative intentions should count more than those of other people -- Islamists also see themselves on the defensive, preventing the spread of secularism, imperialism, Zionism, etc. -- is unclear, though Harris believes he can prove the priority his fears should have over theirs. But that's a discussion Chomsky doesn't want or need to have. All along, my impression has been that he doesn't want to see people killed, and any cause that requires slaughter is as bad as any other in his eyes. In turn, that leaves him with few options if he really wants to reform the world in the face of widespread intransigence, but I doubt that Harris meant to bring that point up. In the end, the Harris-Chomsky exchange may prove more useful than a public conversation would have been. At the very least it describes the limits of two limited worldviews, each of which includes much with which I sympathize. If they couldn't have a civil conversation, that may only prove that in the long run neither man has much to contribute toward solving the problems of our time.

Wild West 2015

In Waco TX at least nine people are dead and twice that number hospitalized in the latest outbreak of mass gun violence in America. This time, however, things were a little different from the norm. It wasn't one angry little nut and a bunch of innocent victims this time. It was three rival biker gangs opening fire on one another outside a restaurant. That may be why we're not getting continuous live coverage of the atrocity -- although the fact that today is Sunday may also have something to do with it, given the news networks' relatively limited resources and schedules of pre-recorded programs. Going into the week, it'll be interesting to see if this story grows legs. Will it be another rallying point for the gun-control movement, or are they so entranced by the angry-nut paradigm that this crossfire battle will seem to matter less? Since it's most likely that we're not dealing with black perpetrators this time -- to my knowledge the casualties haven't been identified yet -- will we have a separate round of national soul-searching to ask what's wrong with whoever these people prove to be? Yet if these prove to be the archetypal white bikers -- for some it may suffice that they're archetypal Texans -- won't this violence reflect as badly on their communities and their ethnic culture as black violence supposedly reflects on those perpetrators' communities and ethnic culture? Right now it's too soon to tell, but what we hear and don't hear about this incident may tell us a lot about how the media, the opinionators, and the people in general really think about violence in America. Stay tuned.

Why defend religion? Let Jeb explain

Liberty University is part of the pilgrimage trail for Republican presidential aspirants. Ted Cruz opened his campaign there a little while ago, in a way some of the students resented. Last weekend Jeb Bush went there to burnish his Christianist credentials. More so even than Cruz, the former Florida governor of the royal line presented himself as a defender of the faith. He specifically defended Christianity against an alleged attack campaign by progressives, backed by the power of the Obama administration. He described a kind of persecution of the humble folks who defy government mandates or dictates as a matter of conscience. These people, Bush said, have been misrepresented by their oppressors.

How strange, in our own time, to hear Christianity spoken of as some sort of backward and oppressive force.  Outside [Liberty University], it’s a depressing fact that when some people think of Christianity and of Judeo-Christian values, they think of something static, narrow, and outdated.  We can take this as unfair criticism, as it typically is, or we can take it as further challenge to show in our lives the most dynamic, inclusive, and joyful message that ever came into the world.

The former governor went on to defend Christianists' right of conscience without ever mentioning that recently guaranteed right of theirs, the exercise of which angers progressives the most.  Bush was happy to portray Christians as compassionate, charitable, and pacific, and even willing to endorse openly their opposition to abortion ("Wherever there is a child waiting to be born, we say choose life, and we say it with love."), but not once in the transcript submitted to the news media in advance does he affirm, as his audience might expect of him, that homosexuality is sin. Instead, he spoke vaguely against "secular dogmas" including "restrictions and rights that do not exist in the Constitution." He denounces Obama's "aggressive stance against" religious freedom, and says sarcastically that "Somebody here is being small-minded and intolerant, and it sure isn’t the nuns, ministers, and laymen and women who ask only to live and practice their faith." No, I guess not. It couldn't be the superstitious homophobes who only have "tradition" and "revelation" to justify themselves who are small-minded and intolerant. It has to be those who tell others not to be small-minded and intolerant.

Leaving that topic aside, Bush's speech is further proof that Christians, like every other group, define themselves idealistically and selectively. For every person for whom the essence of Christianity is "Thou Shalt Not" or "Burn in Hell," there's at least one who echoes Bush's alternate definition of its essence. For him, Christianity's message is that "God’s favor is upon the gentle, the kind, and the poor in spirit, and that, as Jesus said, "“Blessed are the meek … Blessed are the merciful … Blessed are the peacemakers.” Unsurprisingly, he repeats the claim that individual human life had no value before Jesus. He imagines a world without Christianity and describes, "power without restraint, conflict without reconciliation, oppression without deliverance, corruption without reformation, tragedy without renewal, achievement without grace." It actually sounds pretty familiar, except that it reminds me of a world where Christianity does exist. With blinkers on, Bush presses on, predictably quoting Martin Luther King: "No law in the world could have produced such unalloyed compassion, such genuine love, such thorough altruism." For what it's worth, King said this while making a distinction between "love," to which the quote refers, and justice. "A higher law is needed to produce love," he wrote, while "Man made laws are needed to ensure justice." While King may have felt that justice itself depended on some form of "love," he still made a distinction that may be lost on Bush and his audience. King meant that no man-made law can make you love someone, not (at least on this occasion) that Christianity made the rule of law and liberal civilization possible. But Christians love to think that the whole edifice of civilization would collapse if we forgot Jesus or, perhaps more importantly, the taboos of his time. Take God out of public life and we'll be back to human sacrifice in a heartbeat, because that's happening in all the non-Christian countries out there.

Some subtleties are inevitably lost on a layman like Bush, but I wonder whether his Liberty audience was capable of finding one line of the speech as unintentionally hilarious as I did. As part of his apologia the former governor said, "Offhand, I cannot think of any more subversive moral idea ever loosed on the world than “the last shall be first, and the first last." It isn't funny that he finds this subversive; it's funny that he doesn't find it subversive of his own party's ideology. "The last shall be first, and the first last," doesn't seem compatible with tax breaks for the wealthy or resistance to any form of wealth redistribution -- but I forgot: the last shall be first and so on in the kingdom of heaven. Down here you had better be grateful for all that loving Christian charity. Bush is all for charity, of course, on the age-old assumption that a good deed is more good when it's voluntary, results counting for less with God, apparently, than the charitable frame of mind. At least I assume that's what his answer would be if we asked: if it's right, why shouldn't it be a duty? Bush said himself that he trusts "the Little Sisters" more than he does "Big Brother," after all.

But why wouldn't Bush put the best face on his faith? All faithful do it. Even some Islamic State savage will tell you that his is a religion of peace. It's always something else, something exterior to the essence of religion, that forces the faithful to fight, kill and conquer. Once the infidels are dead or have submitted, all will be well. Of course, those outside circumstances often determine how we see not just our own religion but other peoples'. In his Nation magazine takedown of Karen Armstrong,  David Nirenberg made this point by citing a 1957 U.S. intelligence document that deemed Islam an asset in the global Cold War. Back then, the beliefs shared by Christians and Muslims were more important than their differences, since they made the faiths natural allies against atheistic, materialistic Communism. Now the differences between the two are foregrounded so sharply that many Americans assume that Islam is antithetical to their secular and spiritual values. Bush said nothing about Islam in his Liberty speech, except implicitly in his comments about the persecution of Christians around the world, but just as his definition of Christianity is shaped by the perceived antagonism of secular progressivism, the perceived challenge of Islam no doubt also drives him to emphasize the meekness and peacefulness of Christians. Muslims, too, may have agreed sixty years ago that similarities outweighed differences in the face of the godless threat, but today they define themselves defensively in the face of aggression they insist on identifying with Christianity. Maybe Jeb Bush should tell them that those godless progressives are the source of all the trouble -- but maybe he isn't that dumb.

Why defend religion?

Karen Armstrong, author of many popular works of religious history, recently published Fields of Blood, a book designed to defend religion -- both in general and in its many particulars -- from the charge lobbed by "New Atheists" in general and Islamophobes in particular that religion motivated much of the world's history of violence. In the current issue of The Nation, David Nirenberg takes Armstrong apart for both inconsistency and naivete. He takes a darker view, noting how the apocalyptic imagination of Zoroastrianism has influenced all the Abrahamic religions in a way that seems inconsistent with Armstrong's idealization of religion as (in Nirenberg's paraphrase) "a benign and fundamental source of empathy, love of the other and cognitive comfort in an otherwise incomprehensible cosmos." For Nirenberg, imagining the violent end of the world as the climax of a war between good and evil doesn't seem empathic or loving, though it may give cognitive comfort to some. In his account, Armstrong excuses all such phenomena by arguing that religions turn violent only when believers are "traumatized" by oppression or faith is corrupted by political concerns. If Nirenberg describes her fairly, Armstrong seems to be saying that true religion is incapable of violent thoughts, or that any violent thoughts that emerge do not follow from the core tenets of any particular faith. Nirenberg himself says "we must be willing to explore the myriad potentials of our many religious traditions, rather than simply defining the more violent ones arbitrarily out of existence."

Liberal apologists for religion, as Armstrong seems to be, work from the premise, often grounded in personal experience, that devout believers are often good, benevolent, peaceful people. Their assumption is that religion is important if not essential to these people's benevolence. They defend religion in part because they feel the good people should not be denied their source of inspiration, solace, etc., and in part because they fear that many people won't be so good without that inspiration. The classic case is Martin Luther King. Christopher Hitchens, a New Atheist, argued that none of the good things about King were necessarily religious. Apologists for religion question whether King would be as motivated to do good, or as effective as he was, without an essentially religious inspiration. They believe that his ideas about equality, integration and nonviolence have something to do with belief in God. Whether they're believers themselves or not, apologists for religion appreciate the logic that deduces the brotherhood of man from the fatherhood of God, while some question whether more materialist viewpoints are as compassionate and caring. In short, a belief persists that any ideal of justice must have a metaphysical or transcendent basis to be compelling. The apologists know what they want religion to be, and they can point to examples in hopes of proving that it is what they want it to be, no matter how many examples may indicate that it's something else entirely. However, it's a mistake to try to deduce the essence of religion, in order to determine whether it's violent or not, from subjectively selected exemplars like King. At the very least, we can't attempt to answer the great question debated between Armstrong and Nirenberg without asking why people become religious, or why religions developed among us, in the first place. Some may say God is love, but was he born from love? Some say Islam is peace, but did it rise in peace? Unless they can answer such questions convincingly, with facts rather than faith, the apologists of religion are only indulging all too predictably in wishful thinking.

Blasphemy, art and hate

Jonah Goldberg believes he's caught some liberals in an inconsistency. He's noted the way Pamela Geller, the organizer of the Draw Muhammad contest that was attacked unsuccessfully by two wannabe mujaheddin earlier this month, has been almost unanimously condemned as a hatemonger in the media. This strikes Goldberg as an inconsistent position for liberals to hold if they did not two decades ago criticize Andreas Serrano and Chris Olifi for artworks then notorious for their offensiveness to Christians. For those who've forgotten, Serrano is the creator of Piss Christ, while Olifi used elephant dung in a painting of the Virgin Mary. Despite protests from Christians, Goldberg recalls, liberals defended these artists' absolute right not just to free expression, and not just to offend Christians with absolute immunity -- though it remains doubtful whether Olifi in particular even meant offense -- but also, and most irksomely to Goldberg, their absolute entitlement to taxpayer funding of their art. The relevance of this last point to the Draw Muhammad contest is tangential at best, but Goldberg is so stoked by twenty-year old scandals that he drags in Thomas Jefferson to argue that a person shouldn't have to subsidize "ideas he disbelieves and abhors" without mentioning that the ideas Jefferson had in mind were religious doctrines -- which would seem to indicate, if anything, that Jefferson would object just as much to the state compelling citizens to defer to the taboos of any religious denomination. What he objected to specifically in the quote Goldberg cites is the support of a religious establishment through taxation of people of other religions or denominations; I suspect he'd think of state patronage of the arts somewhat differently, even as I doubt he'd recognize the work of Serrano or Olifi as art. This leaves Goldberg's implicit equation of the two pretentious artists and the Islamophobe provocateur. Geller has been called a hatemonger because her attitude toward Islam is self-evidently partisan. Call me inconsistent if you like, but I think there's a difference between seeing the faults of Islam as the faults of religion (or at least monotheism) in general, on one hand, and faulting Islam mainly because it's not your religion. But it's one thing to call Geller out for obvious bias and to suggest, as Goldberg claims Chris Cuomo did on Twitter, that she had no right to stage the contest. Cuomo reportedly equates the Draw Muhammad contest with the sort of "fighting words" that courts have denied the absolute protection of the First Amendment. That's plain wrong, unless Cuomo wants to argue that everyone on Earth has an obligation to respect Islam's taboo on picturing its prophet, and that failure to do so is hate. Meanwhile, Goldberg invites us to see the works of Serrano and Olifi as hate speech, implying that they were as offensive to Christians as Geller's contest was to Muslims, if not more so because American Christians, as taxpayers, were forced to subsidize their exhibition with some fraction of a cent apiece. To be clear, his point is not to argue for the suppression of Piss Christ, though he would prevent any involuntary public funding of its display if he could. His main point, having re-established to his satisfaction how offensive those art pieces were, is to note how unresponsive liberals are when Christians take offense, while criticism of Geller is presumably responsive to Muslims having taken offense at the contest. Goldberg holds himself up as a model of consistency because he'd oppose Geller getting an NEA grant she's never sought. But he hints that liberals are inconsistent, by his standard, because they're cowards, and because "Violence pays." Yet Goldberg reads like the most liberal -- or should I say politically correct -- person in the room in his insistence on recognition of Christians' hurt feelings over those silly exhibits. Because they're offended, Piss Christ is blasphemous -- or is it the other way around? -- and equivalent, if only in debate points, to hate speech. Aren't self-styled conservatives like Goldberg the ones telling all the wussie babies to get over it when their feelings are hurt and get on with life? If he wants to tell Muslims that, I'm all for him, but the fact that he brings up the controversies of the Nineties suggests that too many people on his side haven't gotten over the perceived slights of the past. If his point is that we shouldn't care if Muslims' feelings are hurt, then we still don't have to care if Christians are still offended over Piss Christ. As far as I can tell he's caught one person, Chris Cuomo, in an inconsistency -- and that's presuming Cuomo had an opinion about art twenty years ago. Some of us are consistent on this issue, however, and it's in keeping with that consistent principle that I can tell Goldberg to go screw himself.

The free trade debate: democracy against itself

President Obama is feuding this month with one of the most popular U.S. Senators of his own party, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Touted often as the anti-Hillary, Warren may not challenge Clinton next year for the presidential nomination but continues to stake positions to the left of Clinton and Obama. She opposes the latest "fast track" legislation empowering the President to negotiate trade deals requiring only bare-majority approval from the Senate. Her concern is that the latest trade deal would empower an international body to sanction signatory countries in a way that could serve to gut purely domestic regulations on business and finance. Her stated worry is that, since the grant of fast-track authority will extend for six years, then a Republican President, should one be elected next year, could negotiate international trade deals in a way designed to undermine the American regulatory order. But while her rhetoric presumably emphasizes what a Republican might do, the fact remains that the current Democratic president supports the bill while dismissing her concerns as baseless theoretical speculation and her opposition as political showmanship.

Trade deals are mainly about opening markets to American goods, and their advocates take it on faith that more exports to more markets mean more jobs for Americans. But ever since Ross Perot heard that giant sucking sound back in the 1990s that optimistic premise has been challenged by populists on the left and right who believe the opening of markets to foreign goods on more favorable terms means less jobs for Americans. Obama has been promoting his trade deal by promising more jobs; he even cajoled the head of Nike to pledge the creation of 10,000 American jobs after the trade deal is ratified. Skeptics are less impressed by Nike's promises than the prospects for people likely to lose jobs to global competition. Is Nike going to hire them?

Obama isn't simply following in Bill Clinton's footsteps but affirming the Democratic party's historic commitment to free trade. During the 19th century, when the defining issue in politics often was trade, the Democrats consistently favored free trade, meaning the minimization or elimination of tariffs, while the Whigs and the Republicans preferred protectionist policies. The dispute really goes back to Jefferson and Hamilton, the latter advocating protectionist policies from the beginning as necessary to the growth of an industrial sector, the former seeing them as mere favoritism for what we'd now call special interests. The original Democratic party was a coalition of Southern planters and working-class Northerners concentrated in the big cities where many jobs depended on foreign trade. These groups saw protectionism as nothing more than robbing Peter to pay Paul, while the protectionists accused them of having merely personal or parochial rather than national interests in mind. In the 20th century the Democrats won over a larger working class whose jobs depended on the health of the manufacturing sector. As the manufacturing sector declined due to global competition, more Democrats became protectionists. As Republicans became more ideologically committed to laissez-faire politics in contradistinction to socialism, many grew more committed to free trade.

Protectionists in both the Democratic and Republican parties today are often described as populists. Trade policy divides Americans along different lines than other political controversies. A "populist" constituency favors protectionism, reluctant to sacrifice a single American job to the ideal (or ideology) of free trade, while libertarians (and many "liberals") believe free trade is "fair" in some sense or other, whether by creating opportunities for poor people around the world -- presumably including the U.S. -- or by rewarding the best competitors, wherever they are. Complicating the debate further is a kind of ideology we might call consumerist democracy. This ideology presumes that consumers benefit from free trade either through lower prices or through competitive improvements in product quality -- if not both ways. Since in many if not all sectors of the economy consumers outnumber producers, consumerist democracy invariably favors free trade and sees protectionists as the oldtime Democrats did, as mere special interests. Republican consumerist democracy -- George Will is perhaps its most-read advocate -- presumes that increased competitiveness always benefits the consumer, so that if trade deals force changes to regulations that hamper American competitiveness, as Warren fears, so much better for the consumer.  Protectionists are likely to regard consumer interests as selfish rather than patriotic, but consumerists most likely return the favor, assuming that protectionists put individual job security above the interests of the consumer majority and the overall health of the economy. Who is the majority and who is selfish? The answer isn't as simple as an appeal to majority rule, since it really depends on how the majority defines itself. If most of us think of ourselves as consumers first, protectionists are likely to lose every time. Should we not think of ourselves as consumers first? If so, why not, and how should we see ourselves instead? "Right" and "left" don't necessarily have answers to these questions, as you might guess from the way each major party splits on trade issues and the way reporters have to resort to alternate labels to describe the disagreements. But trade policy is arguably a defining issue for any nation, regardless of whether its parties and factions can address it coherently or not, and the fact that our major parties become incoherent when debating trade policy should have clued us in some time ago, as Perot suggested, that neither one is adequate to the defining challenges of our time.

If power corrupts, must we do without power?

Since this year began, the Speaker of the New York State Assembly, a Democrat, and the Majority Leader of the State Senate, a Republican, have been arrested on corruption charges. Other legislators are in various levels of legal trouble, and the governor himself is widely suspected of some sort of shady dealings in his handling of a purported anti-corruption commission. New York State may seem uniquely corrupt at its highest levels of government, but what state can claim to be immune? Where does the problem lay? Since much of government corruption takes the form of influence peddling, some suggest that government should have less influence, less power. If legislators or executive officials are taking bribes, some say that by reducing government's power over the economy you reduce the private sector's incentive to offer bribes. But if private actors offer bribes or favors to gain competitive advantages over rivals the fault would seem to less with government's power and scope than with the demoralizing incentives of competition. People say "power corrupts" without seeming to acknowledge that wealth is power. If they mean "political power corrupts," then concentrations of wealth in a capitalist society are concentrations of political power. Acknowledging this doesn't lift any responsibility from the heads of our elected representatives, however. How do we ensure for ourselves representatives who won't become corrupt, especially in a political system in which anyone who wins an election is already partially corrupted by the necessity of soliciting campaign contributions? As we're reminded constantly of the susceptibility of representative government to corruption, we might understand how many people around the world would rather entrust power to one person in the hope that that person will prove incorruptible, or on the assumption that, despite Lord Acton's warning, absolute power does not corrupt absolutely but actually transcends corruption, since under absolute power no one could hope to sway the leader with mere bribes. Of course, Acton had in mind a different sort of corruption that we still have to take into account.  The absolute ruler faces, if anything, a greater test of character than the mere legislator, or at least different aspects of his character are tested by his power. The American Founders, or Madison at least, believed no man incorruptible; they instituted checks and balances exactly because, to paraphrase Madison, men are not and can never be angels. But Madison's careful system of checks and balances fails if corruption takes root in every branch of government, or among all the informal interest groups Madison expected to counterbalance one another. That leaves accountability as the ultimate safeguard against corruption, but increasingly the electorate itself is distrusted if not discredited. The right thinks the left electorate corrupt due to its dependence on government spending; the left thinks the right electorate corrupt due to its selfishness. Each side thinks the other corrupted by prejudices or outright ignorance. Regardless of partisan leanings, many worry that "authoritarian" leaders can corrupt the entire democratic process, reducing it to a sham redesigned to keep them in power permanently. Term limits promise no cure when power and corruption are concentrated in parties rather than people, or when the "authoritarian" can change the law to lift the limits on his rule. We seem to have exhausted all options available to us under the "rule of law." While that leaves us with the primal prerogative of the people to rule through raw force of numbers, nature obviously can't guarantee us that the people are right to rise every time they do. All you can do, ultimately, is get rid of the current bastards and hope for the best from the next set, but not for long. We can dream, as so many utopians did in the last century, of a purified people and a purified polity in which public virtue is observed with religious zeal, but too often in those years questionable purification came at an unquestionably terrible price. Should that danger rise again, all you can do is get rid of the current bastards and hope for the best from the next set, but not for long. The sine qua non of democratic republican life, as the Founders often acknowledged, is vigilance, which is itself no guarantee of good government. It is, however, our best way to keep bad government from getting worse, as it always can. You can say some system of vigilance is working now when top political leaders are arrested without revolutionary violence. Perhaps the most constructive political question we can ask now is whether the system can work better and nip such crimes (that wait to be proven) in the bud.

Was PEN punching down?

By the time the PEN writers' organization gave its Freedom of Expression Courage award to Charlie Hebdo magazine last night more than 200 writers had signed a statement dissociating themselves from the event. The protesters, as noted in an earlier post, believe that PEN goes too far by actually rewarding the controversial cartoon paper, much of whose staff were murdered by religious fanatics earlier this year, for its deliberately offensive content. Read a comment thread on the latest coverage and you'll see that the controversy continues and is sure to endure. The problem is that the different schools of thought involved are talking past one another. All seem to have valid points, but these seem irreconcilable. For starters, the protester's baseline argument is entirely valid. They claim to still support Charlie's right to "expression that violates the acceptable," but they rightly claim that they aren't obliged to endorse the content of that expression. The bone of contention is the perception that a "Freedom of Expression Courage" award implicitly endorses that content. It may seem self-evident that PEN was honoring the French paper for its courage first and foremost, but the protesters assume that any sort of award takes PEN beyond a defensibly defensive, value-free position and encourages expression -- the mockery of Muslims -- that does harm presumably outweighing the benefits of free speech. Critics of PEN return constantly to the point that Muslims in France are mostly poor and oppressed, their assumption being that mockery of their religion only exacerbates their sense of oppression. Charlie Hebdo and its new fans are accused of "punching down" by people who can see no good reason to do that -- to satirize the poor or the strangers in our midst -- instead of figuratively punching up by "speaking truth to power." To the extent that violence is power, Charlie has done just that, and my understanding is that the magazine mocks the establishment, including the majority religion, far more often than it mocks Muhammad or Muslims in general. None of this will satisfy those whose first demand seems to be that the poor, the outsiders, the downtrodden, get respect. A demand for unconditional respect is a key feature of all the movements that fall under the rubric "political correctness," and the politically correct feeling about Charlie Hebdo seems to be that the magazine unacceptably denies respect to France's Muslims. None of the protesters against PEN consider that a capital offense, obviously, but they are offended on behalf of the presumed silent majority of devout but nonviolent Muslims.

Now for the other side of the coin. If critics of Charlie say you can't honor the magazine without endorsing something unworthy, critics of the critics reply that you can't criticize Charlie without implicitly asserting that it shouldn't -- and no one should -- make cartoons of Muhammad. From this perspective, to protest the PEN award is to beg the question: should we never caricature the Prophet? Must everyone on Earth -- or at least in France -- respect the taboos of Muslims? And if so, is that because they're the wretched of the earth, and therefore shouldn't have insults added to injuries, or because global comity requires us all to respect a demand essential to this Other's identity? It certainly can't be because Muslims might kill cartoonists. But I suspect the critics would rather duck this question and argue instead that freedom of expression should justify itself by finding better things to do. That there are better things to do than mock Muhammad is indisputable, but I'm not sure we want to judge freedom of expression by such a utilitarian standard. In the end, all the critics are left with is a feeling that a people they deem oppressed doesn't deserve to have its feelings hurt. That sounds to me like someone saying the poor are always right, or at least never wrong. Then the cynic in me says that if the poor were always right they wouldn't be poor. An idealist in me instantly rebels at that thought, though I'm not exactly sure why, and I suspect that people on both sides of the Charlie Hebdo controversy are undergoing similar internal conflicts. For what it's worth, I suspect that the perpetrators of the Charlie massacre did not.

Carly Fiorina, collectivist

One of the longshots in the field for the Republican presidential nomination is Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of the Hewlett-Packard company and more recently an unsuccessful candidate for one of California's U.S. Senate seats. She announced her candidacy over the weekend with a mercifully brief tirade against "low expectations," "identity politics" and the rule of a "political class." Fiorina contends that the Founders never intended the country to be run by a political class, but that really depends on how you define the term. Those who imposed property qualifications for voting presumably believed in a "political class" defined by wealth, and while Fiorina presumably means something more like "career politicians" you might ask how men like Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton or Madison, to be nonpartisan about it, were not career politicians. They may have had farms or firms to run, but neither those private ventures nor their public endeavors were so time consuming that one had to be sacrificed for the other -- though in Jefferson's case you could assume that public life had priority, while he certainly didn't run his farm like a business. Meanwhile, when Fiorina speaks of overthrowing a "political class" she argues implicitly, as has everyone from Ross Perot to Donald Trump, that "running a business" almost uniquely qualifies a person for political life. As did they, she may hope to incite populist ire against the "political class" among the working class, but do you really think she believes the working class and the management class equally qualified to run the country?

In any event, any pretense to populism on her part hits a wall when workers recall her acts as CEO. Unwisely, she failed to secure control over the carlyfiorina.org domain name -- have you ever considered that the expansion of internet domains is a kind of extortion racket aimed at celebrities? -- and a website of that name is now publicizing all the layoffs she ordered while running Hewlett Packard. The news today is that Fiorina intends to defend her record. She justifies the layoffs by telling Katie Couric that they were necessary to "transform a company from failing to succeeding," though she claims she found each one "a terrible decision to make." She'd rather people note how she also fired executives in the name of accountability, though she may rather they forget that she herself was fired in the end. Let's not lose focus on the layoffs, however. While we may accept that an employee's job is not his own property and that he lacks an unconditional right to keep it, we can't ignore the way terrible decisions like Fiorina's belie the rugged and exceptionally American individualism she and many others espouse. Fiorina is a Republican and thus presumably a champion of individualism against "collectivism" as practiced by socialist, communist or totalitarian states. In such places, Americans are told, the individual's interests and his very well being are secondary to the good of the collective, which is usually no more than the venal good of a ruling clique, if not its leader alone. Where collectivism prevails, the individual is sacrificed arbitrarily to a collective that is either a fanatic fantasy (see Islamism) or a cynical lie (see Marxist Leninism). But as a CEO Fiorina was entitled to deprive individuals of their livelihood for the sake of a collective, the Hewlett-Packard company, whose interest was self-evidently monetary and nothing more. A true Republican would argue that here personal responsibility kicks in -- for the workers. It's up to them to find new ways to make themselves useful. But doesn't collectivism in all its forms hold its victims responsible for their ruin? It's either an individual's duty to sacrifice himself, or else he deserves to be sacrificed because he's done something wrong. Apologists for CEOs and the economy that sustains them may try whatever sophistry they like, but the bare fact remains that layoffs are sacrifices of individuals for a collective good. Many a CEO no doubt sees herself as a rugged individualist in the American tradition, but people like Fiorina are really nothing of the sort.

Draw, Muhammad!

Details are still coming in about a shooting affray in Garland Texas, where an organization called the American Freedom Defense Initiative was hosting a "Draw the Prophet" contest with a reported $10,000 prize for the best caricature of the founder of Islam. Two suspects are reported killed after apparently wounding a policeman outside the building housing the event. The AFDI is also known as Stop Islamization of America. It appears to be a textbook example of an Islamophobic movement, its very name denoting a threat that cannot be taken seriously. Its founder, Pamela Geller, is a right-wing commentator with some libertarian tendencies; she is pro-choice on reproductive rights as well as supportive of gay marriage, though she claims to endorse the "Judeo-Christian ethical tradition." Islam, she argues, deviates from that ancestral tradition by being in essence a "political movement." She considers President Obama "post-American" if not anti-American in his perceived refusal to enforce U.S. global dominance and defend American values against Islamic attack. On her website, Geller describes today's incident as an act of "war on free speech." But while I affirm anyone's right to draw Muhammad without suffering violent reprisal or any penalty, if Geller's in a war it's one she declared. As opposed to Charlie Hebdo magazine, her event had no other purpose than to provoke Muslims. The French paper offends Muslims in the course of offending everyone, while Geller and her organization, as far as I know, are selectively irreverent. Geller herself appears to be a dedicated Zionist and her reverence for an "ethical tradition" encompassing Christianity has already been noted. If hostility toward Islam isn't grounded in hostility to monotheism in general or religion in general, then the Islamophobe resents Islam as a rival rather than a real evil.  If Geller isn't going to offer prizes for the best caricatures of Jesus, Moses or just plain God, that selectivity makes today's event look less like a free-speech celebration than a festival of hate. And on some level I suspect that today's bloody outcome is the best Geller could possibly imagine, so long as none of her own people are dead. Muslims will have themselves to blame for the publicity Geller will reap and the fresh scorn even innocent Muslims will suffer -- they really ought to let their omnipotent God take care of blasphemers wherever Muslims themselves can't make the law -- but the predictable idiocy of some in their camp shouldn't make heroes of people who have nothing better to do than provoke idiots. That sounds pretty idiotic itself.

The T Word

The Baltimore story moved from tragic to farcical mode once the President of the United States described the rioters of April 27 as "thugs." Right-wingers took heart, having been condemned as racists in recent months for describing rioters in Ferguson MO, not to mention Ferguson victim Michael Brown, as "thugs." But if they thought they were off the hook, along came a black Baltimore councilman to condemn the President for using that same word. If you're going to say "thugs," this solon said, you may as well say the N-word. Well, doubleyou tee eff!  I had noticed this new taboo last fall and wondered about it. What makes "thug" a racist epithet? The complaint from the activists was that certain people used the word only to describe black criminals and rioters. That I can't verify, but my gut feeling is that, however reactionaries feel about black people, they did not intend "thug" as a euphemism for something more obviously racist. "Thug" still means what it has meant since the British discovered the alleged killer cults of "Thuggee" in India. If not always denoting a killer, it always signifies a criminal using brutal methods, perhaps as a matter of pleasure, perhaps as a matter of principle. It does to most English-speakers, at least. But if some blacks think the word is aimed at them, it's because some blacks have claimed the word as their own. "Thug" has been a popular hip-hop word since Tupac's time, though it may signify something else in hip-hop culture than it signifies for the rest of us. Once blacks think of "thug" as a "black" word, it's probably natural to assume that anyone else who uses the word is talking about blacks. But this is easily disproved. If Baltimore cops inflicted the spinal injury that killed Freddie Gray, then they were cops. The white cop who shot the guy in the back in South Carolina is a thug. And people whose idea of protest or uprising is to loot their neighborhood stores and set fires are thugs. And people who object to the description are idiots.

Lawlessness

Rioting drives people to false alternatives: either the rioting individuals are entirely to blame for the situation or else the riots are so sociologically predetermined that blaming individuals misses the point of the event. It should be self-evident that individual depravity is not a sufficient cause of riots, or else some people would riot all the time. But one can go too far in making rioters mere puppets of historical conditions or extensions of root causes. Individual depravity does explain why some people's idea of a political statement is to sack a CVS drug store, although it may be debatable whether any of the perpetrators in Baltimore thought they were making a political statement. Rioting is a political statement regardless, since it signals that something is wrong with people and society. A purely moralist response -- saying "thou shalt not riot," which could mean "thou shalt not loot" or "thou shalt not protest" -- is inadequate to the situation. Realism requires us to recognize that under certain circumstances things will happen no matter how many moral objections you make, and that the surer way to keep such things from happening is to change the circumstances rather than the people. Say something like that, of course, and some people will think you don't believe in holding people responsible for looting and violence. There's a popular fallacy that assumes that when you acknowledge root causes and provocative circumstances you somehow absolve wrongdoers of responsibility for their misdeeds. But just because it may be easier to prevent riot by changing society rather than changing people, that obviously doesn't mean that people don't have to change or that individuals can't be held accountable, on the spot, for rioting. Some people talk as if those who acknowledge root causes and see the necessity of social change would simply let people riot until changes are made. On top of that there's a racist assumption that the Obama administration wants authorities to go easy on rioters who are most likely entirely black. Leaving the racism aside, such assumptions underrate our ability to do things simultaneously that may appear contradictory from an ideological or partisan perspective. It should be possible to push for social justice and take punitive measures against people whose pillaging of their own neighborhoods belies any pretense of political dissidence. Rioters may not deserve death but when they can't think of anything better to do then loot the neighborhood liquor store they don't deserve any sympathy, either. The state should show them a strong hand, as it should show a strong hand to those whose actions and reckless disregard for the economic well being of their fellow citizens have reduced multitudes to such a desperate state.

Je suis islamphobe?

PEN ("Poets, Essayists and Novelists"), the American branch of a leading international writers' organization, will give its annual Freedom of Expression Courage award to Charlie Hebdo magazine, the French publication whose editorial staff was massacred by Islamist gunmen earlier this year. In a move that has caught some observers by surprise the way Pearl Harbor did, six prominent authors, including two Booker Prize-winning novelists, have withdrawn from the event following the announcement of the Courage award. Acting as spokesman by default, the novelist Peter Carey made sure to deplore the murders but made clear that he felt the magazine undeserving of the honor. To honor Charlie Hebdo, he said, was to turn a blind eye to France's mistreatment of its "large and disempowered" Muslim minority, if not share in France's "cultural arrogance." This boycott has drawn a predictable (if unpredictably vulgar) reaction from Salman Rushdie, who in the heat of his initial anger described the protesting writers as "pussies." More deplorable, perhaps, than the vulgarity for which he later apologized was Rushdie's comment that "I hope nobody ever comes after them," implicitly referring to his own ordeal and implying that the protesting writers had surrendered any claim on sympathy should they ever get targeted by the easily offended or violently intolerant.

You can understand Rushdie's feelings about such things, but what about Carey's? In his view, apparently, Charlie Hebdo was doing nothing brave or honorable by "punching down" at a downtrodden people. One wonders whether the salient feature of the offended people in Carey's eyes is their poverty rather than their religion. A feeling persists that we shouldn't be too hard on Islam because so many of its adherents are poor, not to mention dark. A belief persists that any adverse commentary on the religion of Islam is Islamophobic -- that is, bigoted in the same way anti-semitism or hatred of black people is. The core assumption seems to be that you can't attack Islam without insulting Muslims in a way they either don't deserve or somehow deserve less than Christians, Jews or others.

On this blog I've grappled with the idea of Islamophobia, sometimes thinking it a useless scareword but more often lately using it to describe a perhaps more specific attitude than the word signifies for some. I think the word should mean what it seems to up front; it should describe an irrational fear of Islam. Thus I use "islamophobes" to describe Americans (though they have counterparts elsewhere) who believe the religion of Islam itself to be an inherent and imminent if not existential threat to their security and freedom as American citizens. Those who suspect the local mosque of hosting a terrorist cell or spreading Wahhabi propaganda, on no evidence beyond its mere existence, are Islamophobes. Those who think Islam a stupid religion in its Wahhabi form or any other are not, though those who think Islam uniquely stupid among the Abrahamic religions, if not among all religions, may be borderline cases. Those who denounce Islam while promoting Christianity or Judaism, overstating the differences while ignoring the similarities, are arguably Islamphobic but I'd rather call them religious bigots. Some observers may suspect that any animosity toward or mere mockery of Islam is motivated at base by fear, but I disagree. At the least we would have to distinguish between degrees of fear, particularly between the sort of "fear" that would inspire cartoonists to caricature the Prophet Muhammad and the fear that would keep their pens in their drawers. It might be argued that if you didn't "fear" Muslims on some level you'd simply ignore them, but that leaves no room for the sort of scorn or contempt that Charlie Hebdo reportedly expressed toward every prominent institution of France. These fine distinctions of mine may be wasted on someone who feels that Charlie Hebdo's cartoons were vicious and hateful, no matter what thoughts or feelings motivated them. But they allow me to judge whether such sentimentality is worthy of consideration, as the objections to honoring the magazine are not. My position remains that if Muslims really want to share the world with the rest of us rather than rule us, they must grow thicker skins. Until then, their susceptibility to offense is contemptible in a way that is not mitigated by the social injustices they endure in many places. It may not be possible to make this point more clearly than to keep the memory of the Charlie Hebdo massacre fresh, and its meaning clear. Peter Carey and those who share his views are entirely within their prerogatives to speak out against genuine unfairness toward Muslims in France and elsewhere, and for all I know the PEN event might have been an ideal forum, but to complain that Charlie Hebdo is unfair in any comparable way is idiotic, and that's my freedom of speech for today.

Clinton Cash and the benefits of a long campaign

Clinton fans are scrambling to defend the former Secretary of State and damn her accusers following the publicizing by the New York Times of excerpts from an upcoming investigative volume, Clinton Cash, in which Peter Schweizer raises questions about the coincidences of foreign donations to the charitable Clinton Foundation. The Times emphasized the timing of big donations by a Canadian uranium company in the process of being bought out by a Russian company, the process requiring American approval because the company controls some U.S. uranium resources. These donations, say Schweizer and the Times, were not properly reported by the Foundation, and beg the question of their intent to facilitate government approval of the sale. More revelations, or at least more questions, will follow the publication of Schweizer's book next week.

For Republicans and Clinton-haters across the ideological spectrum, the big question is whether donations to the Foundation bought influence with the State Department during Clinton's tenure. Because Schweizer is a Republican, a former GW Bush speechwriter and adviser to Sarah Palin, and the author of some polemical works in the past, Clinton loyalists would have us dismiss his every word as a smear and the author as part of the famously vast right-wing conspiracy against the Clintons. No doubt Clinton Cash is a hatchet job, intended to undermine her presidential candidacy, but what follows from that? We can assume a lot about right-wing hacks, but we can't assume that this book is just a big lie. Presume that Schweizer set out looking for dirt on Secretary Clinton. Does that fact itself prove that there is no dirt to be found? Tell that to all the hacks on the other side doggedly investigating all the Republican front-runners. Shall we dismiss whatever they may find about Cruz, Rubio, Paul or Jeb Bush -- not to mention what Schweizer himself is reportedly investigating about Bush? Certainly Schweizer can be suspected of putting the most negative spin possible on whatever facts he's uncovered, but as long as he's found facts we should be able to interpret them for ourselves without Clintonites or Democrats telling us what they mean. And if the best they can say now is "there was no quid pro quo!" then they're no better than the Republicans and right-wing donors they denounce so often, who can and do say the same thing all the time. If we have to depend on Republican hacks to raise such questions, that's only because Democrats lack the will to inquire and others to the Clintons' left haven't the access or the power. At a point in American history when someone can be anointed the presumptive presidential candidate of a major party nearly a year before anyone votes in a caucus or primary, these are exactly the questions to be asked between the time the candidate declares and the time the people vote. If we're going to make a presidential campaign season last so long, we may as well make the most of the time we're given, and if partisans feel now that only their ox has been gored, there's still plenty of time to learn more about Clinton's competitors. Do you doubt that we will? And if these revelations and questions about Clinton threaten so many people's dreams of a woman President in 2017, then draft Senator Warren or someone else more capable of standing up to the inevitable scrutiny, or else, as such people always say to those their left, put aside your idealist demands and put the people's interests first.

Republican foreign policy: extremes without a center?

Senator Graham of South Carolina is considering a run next year for the Republican presidential nomination. He seems driven by a belief that foreign policy will be the most important issue in 2016, and he has previewed his campaign by defining himself in contrast with a declared candidate, Sen. Paul of Kentucky. Paul himself, perhaps thinking he has gone too far from his father's non-interventionist position, is pre-emptively defining himself in contrast with Graham and his mentor, Sen. McCain of Arizona. The Kentuckian started a spat this week with his strage claim that Graham and McCain were "lapdogs" for President Obama's foreign policy. That sounded almost delusional, given how often those two have criticized the President for "leading from behind," but Paul seems to think that all disagreement with his own foreign policy, whatever that may be, is essentially the same. In response, Graham and McCain described Paul's foreign policy as "behind leading from behind." Rather than lapdogs, McCain said, he and Graham were Doberman Pinschers worrying the President. Obama's erstwhile opponent reportedly illustrated this to an interviewer by barking like such a dog. But given how Iranophobic and Israelophilic Paul has become, presumably in pursuit of primary votes and Sheldon Adelson's money, his critics seem just as delusional. To be fair, however, they're probably judging Paul by the entirety of his foreign-policy statements, not just by his most recent pandering. Still, their stance seems just as absolutist as Paul's; all disagreement with their neocon policy is weakness or "leading from behind." For Graham and Paul there seems to be no middle ground in foreign policy, though the other Republican candidates and potential candidates may want to fill that gap. Of course, GOP opinion is likely to bunch up closer to Graham's end, raising Paul up like the lighter end of a see-saw, elevating him if only by contrast with a pack of exceptionalist sabre-rattlers. I'd be surprised if Paul himself didn't think the U.S. should "lead" in some way, though to be fair his idea of leadership is probably less belligerent than his fellow Republicans' vision. I wonder whether libertarians like Paul assume an inevitable competition among nations the way Republicans do. Republicans like Graham and McCain assume that the only alternative to American leadership is leadership by a less worthy nation or coalition; the core assumption is the geopolitics is a competition in which nations must dominate or be dominated. Libertarians believe in competition, of course, but they idealize it, imagining a kind of utopian competition free from force or fraud that actually becomes a kind of cooperation with the best of all possible results for society as a whole. They may imagine a competition among nations, but without that dominate-or-be-dominated edge. They'll never go for conscious, conscientious cooperation through the vehicle of world government, because that'd be politics, but their belief in a spontaneous order may be preferable to the typical Republican belief in irrepressible conflicts. Of course, Paul will be participating in Republican primaries, so his position is likely to evolve further into an uglier amalgam of libertarian and neocon ideas, but as long as Graham lurks as a potential rival threatening a do-over of the McCain 2008 campaign, the Kentuckian will be able to draw a line keeping himself from selling out any further.

Revolutionary suicide: can one man make a difference?

You may have heard or read of the guy who landed his gyrocopter in front of the U.S. Capitol earlier this month in order to make a statement in favor of campaign finance reform. You may also have heard of the incident a little while earlier in which a man stood in front of the Capitol and shot himself to death. We still know little about this man apart from his name and home. His name was Leo Thornton and his statement was also political in nature. Witnesses report that Thornton carried a sign reading, "Tax the 1%" or something to that effect. It's easy to dismiss such a man as a hopeless, tragic nut -- until you recall how suicide can change things elsewhere in the world. Suicide has been a form of political protest for some time now. Americans first noticed it when South Vietnamese monks set themselves on fire in the Sixties. In Czechoslovakia, after the Soviets snuffed the Prague Spring, at least one Czech made a similar statement against oppression. In our time, the most famous protest suicide is Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation in 2011 is credited with triggering the "Arab Spring" movement. Whatever the results elsewhere, Bouazizi's own country is considered a success story so far. My question is: why shouldn't Bouazizi have been dismissed as a disgruntled nut, as Thornton is dismissed by almost everyone in the U.S.? It can be noted that Bouazizi, a street vendor, had suffered oppression directly at the hands of his government, while we still know too little about Thornton to determine whether he had a direct, personal grievance against the U.S. government or the social order. In some ways, a better American analogue for Bouazizi, though not a suicide, might be Eric Garner, the man who died after cops choked him out for allegedly selling "loosie" cigarettes. Garner's death helped spark a social movement, but would we know him today if he had killed himself over his harassment by the cops? It seems unlikely. It may be that suicide is less immediately associated with mental illness outside the western world. If Bouazizi killed himself because he could no longer stand the way his government treated him, fellow Tunisians apparently were more inclined to think that proved something was wrong with the government, while Americans may more likely assume that something is wrong with the man who kills himself to protest something.

Tunisia is considered a more democratic country today than it was when Bouazizi killed himself, but in a way it may already have been more democratic than some self-proclaimed democracies. Democracy is a slippery concept that tends to get mixed up with ideas like "representative government" and "rule of law," whether all these ideas are compatible or not. Part of the idea of democracy, everyone would agree, is that everyone can have a say in government, even if your only real say is voting for a representative to legislate for you. A corollary notion is that anyone in a democracy can make a difference. Tunisia had a democratic moment when Bouazizi's suicide made a difference. Does that mean the U.S. is less democratic because Thornton's suicide won't make a difference? I'm not sure. It doesn't follow from our democratic ideals that everyone will make a difference, after all. It's also up to the people as a whole to decide what someone's suicide means. Tunisians responded emphatically and empathetically to Bouazizi's suicide, while Americans could be excused for thinking that higher tax rates for the rich is a poor cause to kill yourself for in the absence of information about Thornton's own plight. But leaving Thornton's particulars out for a moment, let's imagine again a suicidal Eric Garner, one who suffered what the real man suffered but survived only to decide he couldn't take it anymore. How would Americans respond? Would we even have heard of him? If we can't imagine Americans seeing anyone's suicide as proof of social injustice, then on some level we as a people, let alone our system of government, may be less democratic than the Tunisian masses who responded to Bouazizi's death. On some level the Tunisians respected him, as an individual and a citizen, more than Americans could respect any counterpart here. That doesn't mean that Thornton should have been an American Bouazizi, but if you can't imagine an American Bouazizi, that may not be a good thing for us.

Is Eritrea the enemy?

The Committee to Protect Journalists has presented a list of the ten "most censored" countries. According to the CPJ, "The list is based on research into the use of tactics ranging from imprisonment and repressive laws to harassment of journalists and restrictions on Internet access." By their standard the "most censored" if not most repressive regime on Earth is not North Korea, not Iran, and not even Saudi Arabia -- though all make the top ten -- but the little nation of Eritrea on the Horn of Africa. Defining censorship in part negatively by lack of access to information, CPJ notes that Eritrea trails the world in Internet access and ranks at the bottom in cellphone ownership. As for sins of commission, Eritrea is "Africa's worst jailer of journalists," typically holding would-be whistleblowers without trial. Overall, Eritrea boasts "a media climate so oppressive that even reporters for state-run news outlets live in constant fear of arrest." The country has suffered under Isaias Aferwerki's authoritarian rule since 1993, but things have only gotten worse after the "Arab Spring" raised alarms in a country in which Muslims form a third of the population.

Let all this sink in.  An organization whose standards must be impeccably liberal says that Eritrea is worse even than North Korea. Surely such a country is an enemy of the United States to the extent that it's an enemy of freedom. And the truth is, we and they don't get on that well. We don't have an ambassador there and the country is under UN sanctions for sponsoring subversive groups in neighboring Ethiopia. For what it's worth, the U.S. rooted for Eritrea during its struggle for independence from a Marxist Ethiopian regime in the waning days of the Cold War, and if you look hard enough you'll probably find propaganda portraying the Eritreans as liberty-loving Founding-Father types, since why else would you fight against Commies? But since independence the U.S. has been neither overly friendly nor overly hostile toward Eritrea. Right now, the diplomatic community is debating whether to improve ties with the country to take advantage of its strategic position in an area rife with Islamist violence. Some observers would rather see regime change first, preferably from natural causes, while all want Eritrea to stop trying to destabilize Ethiopia, a more established ally against Islamism. Ethiopia seems to loom in the Eritrean strategic imagination the way India does for Pakistan, making its potential role as a force for stability and against terrorism problematic. In any event, apart from its alleged mischief in Ethiopia Eritrea is not seen as the enemy and does not appear to support terrorism against the West.

What's the point of this lecture? The point is that Americans should expect Eritrea to be our enemy if it's as hostile to freedom as its ranking by CPJ suggests. They should expect that because whenever any such country proves to be an antagonist, Americans are told that it's because the country in question is an enemy of freedom. Whether they're driven by ideology, religion or irrational national pride, they come into conflict with the U.S. presumably because their foreign policies are driven by hostility to liberty. Even when a country like Saudi Arabia (No. 3 on the CPJ list) is treated as an ally by the U.S. government, the country is widely distrusted among the grassroots because of its perceived hostility to our values. Many Americans seem to have convinced themselves that authoritarianism of any sort inspires hostility toward the United States, since the authoritarian ruler sees our "universal" values as a threat to his power or his values. So when the arguably most authoritarian regime on Earth -- there are other standards for judging than the CPJ's -- proves not to be an inherent enemy of the U.S., if not much of a friend either, that fact ought to raise doubts when the U.S. government or media tell us that some other country opposes us because its system of government is somehow inimical to our values.  If the U.S. has a conflict with an authoritarian or totalitarian state -- depending on how you define these terms or if you take them seriously at all -- our first assumption ought to be that it's a clash of interests rather than a clash of cultures or values. The moral isn't to assume that these countries aren't or can't be our enemies, but that enmity results from something other than what our leaders want you to think.

Putin on comparative history

President Putin did his annual marathon call-in show today. While reporters around the world were most interested in what he might say about Ukraine, Iran, the murder of Boris Nemtsov, etc., I was intrigued when reading a summary afterward by one caller's historical question. Russia will soon be commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, and one patriotic Russian echoed the common American feeling that Europeans are ingrates. Why does Europe give Russia such attitude, ran the complaint, when if not for us they'd all be goose-stepping in German today? -- or words to that effect. Putin actually gave a sensible answer, telling the caller that Russia itself is partly to blame for European attitudes because the Soviet Union (in the words of a presumably official report) "imposed its model of development by force on the nations it liberated from the Nazis." Of course, Putin then went on to score a rhetorical point against the U.S., claiming that under Bush, Obama et al "Washington is doing about the same thing now, trying to impose their model on almost the entire world....And they will fail too." Americans and liberals around the world will no doubt dispute what they see as an apple-orange comparison. In their view, if the U.S. wishes to "impose" anything, it's the rule of law and civil liberty that's every human being's birthright. Putin can't be talking about a different model of economic development because Russia's a capitalist country now, right? So the only alternative to an American "model" must be one with more power for the leader and less freedom for dissent, right? But if Americans see any deviation from the U.S. "model" as tyranny, the rest of the world may see things with, dare I say, more "nuance" and definitely less idealization of the U.S. as a model for governance.

Putin wasn't done with the topic, however. He went on to say that, while some European criticism of Russia may be historically understandable, it would be going too far to equate Stalin, the man who imposed the Soviet model, with Hitler and Nazi Germany, as those averse to totalitarianism are wont to do. Stalinism contained "ugliness and repressions," Putin acknowledged, but it never aspired to the annihilation of an entire group of people. Here he is judging between mass murderers by intent rather than results. Is it somehow less atrocious to aspire, as Stalin did, to annihilate entire "classes" of people than it is to wipe out people based on their ethnicity or religion? Is Stalin really in a lesser category of evil because he used comparatively made-up categories to decide who should be killed, when he wasn't just slaughtering or torturing anyone whose loyalty was suspect? It's perfectly fair to speak of Hitler and Stalin together, as two of a kind, because both men believed that the good society depended on millions of people being slaughtered. Racism is not a worse crime than murder and racist mass-murder is not worse than plain old mass-murder. Putin's problem is that he wants to salvage something of Stalin for patriotic reasons. There's really little to say for Stalin except that he made the Soviet Union a superpower, for what that's worth, and he played a big role in defeating an enemy who was at least arguably more barbaric than he was. But when that's all you've got you get defensive about it. Just as American knee-jerk superpatriots answer critics of our actions abroad with, "If not for us you'd be speaking German (or Russian) today!" their Russian counterparts say much the same thing. Worse, as we see when the discussion turns to Ukraine, they tend to talk as if to be against Russia is to be a Nazi. At least Americans are more diverse in their delusions. For them, if you're against the U.S. you can be either a Commie or a Muslim. 

To close with a perhaps ironic observation, democracies -- as both the U.S. and Russia more or less claim to be -- seem to have a harder time repudiating "evil" leaders than monarchies. It doesn't reflect on the present queen of England, for instance, or on English culture if you say King John or Richard III or whoever was a bad king, a tyrant, etc. That may be because monarchy comes with a principle of personal responsibility, or else it makes it easier to scapegoat individual monarchs for what otherwise might be considered collective, systemic sins. By comparison, even post-Soviet Russia can't fully repudiate Stalin, while China insists on a hairsplitting "70% good, 30% bad" formula for the comparably vile Mao Zedong, and some Americans will only grudgingly concede that the U.S. or its leaders (recent company excepted) has ever done anything bad. In each case, to concede evil in the past threatens to discredit the principles upon which constitutional republics or people's republics are founded, while to acknowledge and condemn a bad monarch doesn't similarly undermine the monarchic principle, to the extent that it is a principle. Perhaps monarchists were onto something despite the fundamental idiocy of the hereditary idea. They did seem to recognize that despite all rhetoric, and even despite the letter of the law, a leader's character mattered most. If modern political systems can't criticize their pasts from fear of discrediting the present, that's a character flaw for democracies, dictatorships and anything in between.  

Rubio: yesterday is over

Senator Rubio of Florida yesterday became the third Republican (and the third Senator) to declare for his party's presidential nomination. He claims to be the most forward-looking of all candidates, contrasting himself most starkly with Hillary Clinton, whom he described as "a leader from yesterday ... promising to take us back to yesterday." Rubio's own motto could be, in his own words: "Yesterday is over, and we are never going back." Speaking more generally, he blames enduring hard times and growing doubt of the American Dream on "too many of our leaders and their ideas ... stuck in the twentieth century." Especially old-fashioned in his eyes are New Deal and Great Society style social programs and economic regulations. Those who remain enamored of such policies "do not see how jobs and prosperity today depend on our ability to compete in a global economy" and obviously don't see how "taxing, borrowing and regulating like it's 1999" undermine our competitiveness. In other words, Rubio's big idea of the future is the Free Market. A critic might be excused for thinking that Rubio himself looks backward, only further back: past the mistakes of the 20th century to the 19th century, when "Americans harnessed the power of the Industrial Age and transformed this country into the leading economy in the world." To be fair, the 19th century provides no real model for Rubio. Then, the U.S. became an economic superpower by building things. Rubio promises to restore our economic superpower by cutting taxes, reducing regulations and repealing the Affordable Care Act. Once all this is done, "the American people will create millions of better-paying jobs." Such claims are nothing new. They presume that Americans today are seething with entrepreneurial energies, with products to sell and markets in mind to sell them to, and are held back only by the dead hands of taxes and regulations. Whenever I hear it I say: prove it. Let your business backers tell us how many people they would hire if they were less accountable to the government, and let them promise to hire those people if the Republican gets elected. If Republicans like Rubio and their sponsors can't name specific companies with specific positions that would be filled today if not for taxes and regulations, we'll see their rhetoric for the hot, smelly air it probably is.

Rubio himself knows that the supposedly crippling burden of taxes and regulations is only part of the problem. He acknowledges that many young people are held back not by government but by student-loan debt. He blames "an outdated higher education system that is too inexpensive and inaccessible to those who need it most." Quite reasonably, he calls for "a 21st century system of higher education that provides working Americans the chance to acquire the skills they need, that no longer graduates students with mountains of debt and degrees that do not lead to jobs, and that graduates more students from high school ready to work." I'm all for that, but how exactly do we get there by cutting taxes, reducing regulations and repealing the ACA? If the object is to control costs, isn't that a form of regulation? And if acquiring certain skills is a priority for national competitiveness, would it be unreasonable to subsidize the learning process, given the obvious national interest? If Rubio plans to depend entirely on the Free Market to give our kids the necessary skills, won't he again be the candidate from the day before yesterday? He and his supporters would say that Free Market ideas are timeless and have no expiration date, but that might be more of a moral judgment than the competitive global marketplace will buy.

The big non sequitur of Rubio's speech was his linkage of American economic insecurity with perceived weaknesses of American foreign policy under President Obama. The nearest this comes to making sense is when Rubio assigns a share of blame for our malaise to "global chaos" that comes when "America fails to lead." The world will be more stable, and our nation in particular more prosperous, when the U.S. "accepts the mantle of global leadership." We will be more prosperous by remaining hostile toward Iran; by criticizing dictators; by confronting Russian and Chinese "aggression;" by expanding the military; and by "giving our men and women in uniform the resources, care and gratitude they deserve." Some of these things cost money -- taxpayer dollars, that is -- but in these cases Rubio can claim to be investing in prosperity. Yesterday was an "American Century" but despite his general disregard for yesterday Rubio believes we're entitled to another American Century and thinks we can have it without our major economic competitors getting devastated by war. Good luck with that.

Overall, I do admire the honest egoism of a candidate who says, "I have heard some suggest that I should step aside and wait my turn. But I cannot." The nation's future will be decided over the next decade, Rubio believes, and he believes he can help the U.S. retain its "exceptional" identity. He thinks we're exceptional in part because he, the son of an immigrant bartender, might become President. Would he think the nation less exceptional if a Clinton vs. Bush general election appeared to prove the American political order less open to outsiders than he thought? Probably he wouldn't, since exceptionalism is still as much about American privilege as a "free" country among others as it is about opportunity and mobility. In any event, if you don't see opportunity and mobility, you can blame that on government as Rubio prefers to do, or you can admit, as he claims to, that "America doesn't owe me anything." Republicanism appeals to the rank and file because it allows them to blame government for their troubles instead of blaming themselves, but if Republicans and their real constituents get their way the rank and file will only have themselves, or the Republicans' real constituents, to blame if their troubles endure. Then they might think differently when Republicans like Rubio say that their country doesn't owe them anything. Then again, that may be why Republicans never cut government as much they promise. For now I'd like Rubio to say more about reforming education, but beyond that he's got nothing.

Clinton: the deck is stacked

Former Senator Clinton of New York officially declared her second candidacy for President of the United States this weekend. The former Secretary of State has already distinguished herself from her Republican counterparts by eschewing the bombast of a big announcement speech in favor of a statement in a slick commercial. The former First Lady -- who has been treated by some since 2001 as a sort of President Dowager -- appeals to "everyday Americans" to make her their champion. Despite economic recovery, she observes, "the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top." This is standard Jacksonian Democrat rhetoric. The argument is that concentrations of wealth and power effectively deny opportunity to the next generation of competitors. Republicans used to believe this, too, way back in their founding generation, but once they became winners they tended to sympathize with winners. What Clinton will do to lower the stack is unclear, but out of her intended context those words sound ironic, to put it generously, from a candidate considered a preemptive frontrunner, in an environment where anyone who questions her ties to "those at the top," much less holds them against her, is dismissed as an extremist whose criticism will only aid the Republican party. What could be better described as a "stacked deck" then a campaign founded on the premise that whatever Clinton sees fit to do for everyday Americans as their champion is all they're entitled to expect, since she alone stands between them and four years of Republican misrule, and that to demand more will only divide the liberal/progressive movement fatally? Is the deck not stacked when any criticism of Clinton from her left will be condemned as making the "perfect" the enemy of the "good enough?" Clinton wants to be our champion, but in her own mind, or at least in the minds of her lockstep loyalists, she already is the champion, while to the minds of people like Michael Tomasky anyone who challenges her, past a certain point, is a traitor to the poor. Yet we can still ask what Hillary Clinton has done to earn this exalted standing apart from marry Bill. This is not to disparage her legislative and diplomatic achievements but simply to note that ever since 1992 there has been a belief in her entitlement to the Presidency rooted in her presumed entitlement to be co-President with her husband. There is no evading the essentially dynastic nature of such thinking, and it's a sad statement on the situation facing us next year that the Republican party probably has a better chance of repudiating dynastic politics by rejecting Jeb Bush than does the party that claims to champion everyday Americans. But so long as millions of Americans remain convinced that there's only one alternative to Republican rule, the Democrats will do much that may disappoint us but shouldn't surprise us. Everyday Americans need a real champion, but the deck in this game is still stacked against us.

Armenia in the news (slightly embellished)

Turkish officials are angry at Pope Francis for referring to an Armenian genocide during his Easter remarks yesterday. By this point in history I don't know what the Turks are worried about. If the Greeks aren't going to get the reparations for World War II they want from Germany I doubt anyone will want Turkey to pay anything out to Armenia except maybe in the pages of history. Yet for generations the Turks have acted as if they'd get sued the minute they acknowledged what appears to be the historical truth. You'd think it'd be easier to resolve now that Turkey has an Islamist government: blame it all on those Young Turk secular humanists, the same people who made Turks use the Latin alphabet and stop wearing fezzes. But I guess there's something about genocide-deniers everywhere. Their attitude seems toward their victims seems to be: we hate you and wish you were all dead, but we didn't nearly wipe you out back then, though maybe somebody should have.

In a related story, Kanye West, who is Armenian-American by marriage, threw himself into a lake while performing in Armenia, where his in-laws are visiting genocide memorials. Mr. West is reported (here if nowhere else) to have said during his fit that the Armenian genocide was in fact the greatest genocide of all time. Mr. West also reportedly claimed that the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, didn't give a damn about Armenians. This was later confirmed by President Erdogan, who also urged tourists to visit the centennial commemoration of the siege of Gallipoli on April 24 instead of an Armenian genocide commemoration scheduled for the same day. No matter how you look at it, or where you look, the Turks killed a hell of a lot of people in 1915, and some of them were armed. The Turkish government pleads self-defense on all counts.

One cheer for Pakistan

Pakistan is a country with a lot of problems, but its legislature this week inspired some confidence in representative government by voting against giving themselves another. Saudia Arabia wanted to embroil a fellow Sunni state in the turmoil in Yemen. Sunni propaganda apparently claimed that a consolidation of Houthi (Shiite) power there threatened the security of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. However, many Pakistanis apparently blame the Saudis for inspiring and encouraging the Taliban and other Sunni extremists who've destabilized Pakistan. While they don't approve of Iranian interference in Yemen, they also recognize a need for Iranian cooperation in the ultimate pacification of Afghanistan. Had Pakistan responded positively to the Saudi call, it would have made the Yemen conflict even more of a Sunni-Shiite world war than it already is with not only the Saudis but the Iranians, the Egyptians (Sunni) and others apparently interfering. In many ways Pakistan is still plagued by Islamist excesses, but on this occasion at least it's one Muslim country behaving like a grown-up.

'I'm Unemployed Rob Lowe, and I have DirecTV'

Perhaps the most stunning news to be heard from the world of entertainment all year is the report that the Better Business Bureau has compelled the DirecTV satellite service provider to discontinue its series of commercials in which Rob Lowe compares his happy life with the product to the misery or madness of various doppelgangers who subscribe to cable television. The series probably was already past its useful lifespan, since the most recent ones seemed to have very little to say against cable TV, the producers being more interested in how they could transform Lowe and the jokes to be drawn from his multiple personalities. But a cable provider -- Comcast, one of the biggest -- actually took offense, and what's more, protested that the commercials were untruthful about the relative merits of cable and satellite. For once, then, an advertiser has been held accountable, if not liable, for the claims made in commercials. Because this is such an exceptional event, cynics are already saying that it only proves that Comcast has more leverage in the trade than it should have. I wouldn't worry about that if today's decision actually set a precedent for holding all advertisers accountable for their more fantastic claims. Does anyone really think that DirecTV is the only advertiser guilty of these offenses, or even the worst offender?  And shouldn't the Better Business Bureau and its advertising division be responsive to consumers (or potential consumers) as well as competitors with dubious advertisers? Imagine how the next election cycle would change if political advertising were held to the same standard that now shames DirecTV. Aren't most negative campaign ads just variations on the Rob Lowe concept anyway? After all, the candidates do tend to look alike after a while....

A smoking gun in South Carolina

The temptation, now that we have some fairly irrefutable evidence, will be to make the policeman arrested for murder in South Carolina a scapegoat for all the other cops who've killed unarmed people. For some he could serve as proof that the system works when the facts fit properly, if not as inverse vindication of all the other killer cops. This time we can all see with our own eyes, in necessarily terrible detail, a fleeing suspect shot in the back by a police officer. It still doesn't prove everyone's points, of course. The video doesn't prove this one a hate crime, for instance. It doesn't let us read the cop's mind, but it does let us see him at work, perhaps most damningly after the victim has gone down. At the barest minimum the video proves that the accused is a bad cop. It should prove to those who now say that "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" was nothing but a big lie that, whatever the facts were in Ferguson, the general thing protested against there does happen. Does the video prove that this could only happen to a black person? No, but for me, at least, the focus on Ferguson and its echoes elsewhere has been more about cops and their power than it has been about blacks and their systematic victimization. Yes, I get "Black Lives Matter" and the need to affirm that specifically, and the point bears repeating again this week, but police power (including firepower above all) and its abuse also matter, regardless of the target, and I'm not sure that it'll be much affected by racial sensitivity training. A white person may well be less likely to find himself at the point where the video begins, but I suspect that if he starts there he ends the same way as the actual victim. Discussions of excessive police force and excessive tactics overall, whether provoked by the blatant outrage in North Charleston or by the possibly more forgivable tragedy triggered by tazing in Albany, should be about procedure as much as they're about prejudice. Police don't just need to change their ways toward blacks; they need to change their ways, period.