Endgame in the 23rd District

Dierdre Scozzafava, the controversial Republican nominee to fill a GOP vacancy in New York's 23rd Congressional district, has "suspended" her campaign, effectively dropping out of the race. More dramatically yet, she has now endorsed the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, over Conservative challenger Doug Hoffman. "Movement" conservatives who otherwise adhere to the Republicans across the country have rallied to Hoffman to protest the local party's appointment of Scozzafava to run in lieu of a primary. Hoffman himself accepted the Conservative nod to protest the alleged fact that Scozzafava was too liberal to be a Republican. Scozzafava now asserts that Hoffman is too conservative to represent his district. The question now becomes whether "mainstream" Republicans will follow Scozzafava's recommendation. This begs the question of what a mainstream Republican is, at least in the 23rd District.

Those of us who encourage third-party formation are probably at least a little guilty of discounting the existence of "moderate" Republicans or Democrats. The fact that either party takes "moderate" positions relative to the demands of progressive or conservative grass-roots agitators tends to be taken as proof that the major parties don't really stand for anything but gaining power and raising money. The fact that a "moderate" Republican now endorses a Democrat over a Conservative may confirm that impression for many observers. At the same time, some third-party boosters long for a genuinely "moderate" party, believing that the major parties are too ideological or that they cynically publicize ideological differences. I'm probably guilty of contradicting myself over time, in that I'd like to see more ideologically distinct parties in the interest of broadening the national debate while distrusting ideology as a personal rule. My own ideal would be something along the lines of local people deliberating without preconceptions or preconditions to determine what their own interests and needs are each election cycle, crafting something like a platform based on consensus and offering their support at the polls to someone who'll promise to be governed by that platform. I'd like to think people capable of determining that certain circumstances might justify tax cuts while others might require tax hikes without ideology demanding that taxes never be raised or never be cut.

In any event, my own frustration with the American Bipolarchy sometimes blinds me to the fact that there are Republicans who aren't movement conservatives nor conservatives of any kind who have just as much right to mold the GOP in their image as their conservative rivals do. I bring this up because the storyline of the 23rd District election comes down, in many minds, to whether there's room in the Republican party for perceived or self-styled moderates. Anything other than a win for Scozzafava, which now can't happen, will be taken as an argument that the Republican party must be a conservative party, rather than the Conservative party being the conservative party. I just want to question any assumption anyone might have that the GOP is either an authentic voice of movement conservatism or a soulless pillar of the Bipolarchy, with no options in between. I oppose the Bipolarchy, but I believe there are places for both the Democratic and Republican parties in a post-Bipolarchy polity, only not necessarily as ideological parties. Their redemption does not depend on them becoming ideological. They could instead revert to the sort of ethnocultural formations that they were before the transitional period from the Great Depression to the Great Society, when they were identified more with the interests of certain allied groups of Americans rather than with anything but the vaguest sort of invocations of Jefferson or Lincoln. Interest group politics is more like what Madison envisioned when he predicted that the nation's size would prevent any single faction from dominating the government. Ideological factions would enliven the debate, but the persistence of interest-group politics that don't determine their interests according to ideology would ideally check ideology when it threatens to defy pragmatism and steer the nation on a blinkered course.

I still stand by my cynical opportunist recommendation to give the Conservative Party viability by letting them elect a Representative, but my hoped-for result is a perpetual rivalry between Conservatives and Republicans for the non-Democratic or non-liberal vote. If the 23rd District election results in an effective amalgamation of Republicans and Conservatives, there won't be any real change in the Bipolarchy. The Bipolarchy will persist unless it becomes permanently clear that Republicans and Conservatives stand for different things, and that requires us to recognize that the Republican party can stand for something besides conservatism that still deserves the respect of the rest of us.

All Conservatism is Local

The Conservative Party of New York State has gained national attention for its surging campaign to elect Doug Hoffman to represent the 23rd District in Congress over a Republican candidate as well as a Democratic nominee. A victory by Hoffman might establish the Conservatives as a viable alternative to the Republican Party for Empire State conservatives, or it may prove a tactical maneuver, whether Hoffman wins or loses, in a long-term strategy for movement conservatives to take over the state GOP and its fundraising apparatus.

Is the Conservative Party in a position to exploit a Hoffman upset? It's hard to say. Hoffman may be the face the party chooses to showcase in the 23rd District, but it shows different faces depending on where you are in New York. Like all smaller parties here, the Conservatives play the cross-endorsement game to get better ballot position, and Conservatives in each county make their own tactical decisions with little apparent regard for ideological consistency statewide.

Consider Albany, where I live. In the state capital city the Conservative Party has endorsed Jerry Jennings for mayor. Jennings is the Democratic incumbent and heir to one of the most enduring political machines of modern times. He is opposed by a Republican, Nathan Lebron, and a Working Families candidate, Corey Ellis, who lost to Jennings in the Democratic primary. The Hoffman candidacy has shown that Conservatives don't consider themselves obliged to endorse Republicans, but to prefer an archetypal machine Democrat to a GOP candidate is strange. Stranger still, some of Jennings's cronies were defeated by insurgents in the Democratic primaries, but remain on the final ballot on the Conservative line.

Perhaps the Albany party practices literal conservatism. Is it not the conservative thing, leaving ideology out of it, to stick with the machine that has ruled Albany from time immemorial? It should be obvious, anyway, that the conservatism practiced in Albany is something quite different from what the nation sees in the 23rd District. Would the Albany Conservatives ever support someone like Hoffman to represent themselves in Congress, or in City Hall? A more important question is whether the statewide Conservatives need to enforce some sort of ideological consistency throughout New York in order to take the maximum advantage of whatever success Hoffman has next month. That is, will conservatives need to infiltrate Conservative county organizations in order to make themselves a viable statewide party? Or should New York conservatives worry less about ideological correctness and more about allowing local parties to represent constituencies in ways that Republicans or Democrats don't? This is going to be a tough question for them, because another way of saying, as I suggest in my title, that all conservatism is local is that all conservatism is relative. For ideological conservatives that may be unacceptable, but local or literal conservatives may prove more pragmatic.

Afghanistan: The Bipolarchy War

The Washington Post has given considerable space to an important military advisor who has resigned in protest against American military policy in Afghanistan. Coming from the country, he's come to the conclusion that continued American presence in Afghanistan on the current scale only fuels the ongoing insurgency while miring the United States in what he describes as a multifaceted civil war. He offers no reassurance about the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but he has obviously rejected the arguments of both the Bush and Obama administrations that Taliban control of the country would provide the terrorist network with an essential base for the organization of attacks on other countries. He sees the conflict in Afghanistan as a war of all against all, with many factions having no more ideology than what he calls "valley-ism," a desire to run things on their own ground without interference from anyone else. It sounds like some people's ideal of how the U.S. itself should work, but Afghanistan seems to be a place where tribes and sects can get away with it, no matter who tries to tell them otherwise.

This is a case in which the American people confront a bipartisan consensus that the Taliban must be prevented from retaking power in Afghanistan at all costs. For public consumption, at least, that consensus depends on the premise that a Taliban restoration would crucially enhance al-Qaeda's ability to strike at the U.S. Dissidents exist on the left "anti-imperialist" fringe of the Democratic party and, if anywhere, on the right "isolationist" fringe of the Republican party. These are the same elements that opposed the invasion of Iraq, and they're the necessary building blocks of any mass movement against either entrenchment or escalation in Afghanistan. Neither is strong enough to place its own party on an antiwar platform, but would they be capable together of appealing to a non-partisan "center" that also questions the necessity and cost of the Afghan war? Is Afghanistan an issue that could provoke a mass political realignment in the U.S., replacing the old left-right divide with an admittedly bipolar division between interventionists and anti-interventionists? Could foreign policy be the 21st century equivalent of the slavery-expansion issue in the 1850s, when an earlier Bipolarchy failed to represent public opinion and was destroyed? Or have all the structural changes in our electoral process since then made it possible for the present Bipolarchy to defy public opinion in favor of its own consensus and its own choice of issues without risk of consequences? We can't begin to formulate answers or predictions until we get a better idea of actual public opinion on Afghanistan, but we can see plainly enough right now that a Bipolarchy consensus does exist on the issue, whether the American people like it or not.

Government and Wealth

For nearly a week I've been brooding over Governor Paterson's opposition to the federal government's plan to cut salaries and bonuses for executives of bailed-out companies. The Democrat opposes the idea because it will cost New York State the tax revenue that would come from its cut of the extra money the executives would have received. It has been pointed out to him by fellow Democrats that, since taxpayers would be paying those salaries via bailouts, cutting salaries and bonuses could be seen as a kind of tax cuts. But you can see why the Governor of New York might not be impressed by tax-relief spread out across the country at a loss to his own state. Other observers might argue that Paterson "sees" an essential truth that his fellow partisans miss: that the wealth-creation of the great executives fuels government itself and that anything government does to curtail that wealth-creation is done at government's own peril. But maybe our gubernatorial oracle detects a kind of paradox without recognizing it as such. He belongs to the party that is always accused of wanting to redistribute wealth unjustly, robbing from billionaire Peter to pay plebeian Paul. The implication of the charge is that government somehow impoverishes Peter and thus ultimately undermines Paul's chances for survival to the extent that Paul has come to depend on the government largess taken from Peter. The further implication is that all this activity somehow undermines Peter's power to generate wealth. But isn't Paterson telling us something else? Hasn't he implied that for the redistribution system to work, that system must place no limits on Peter's wealth, and that in reality the liberal redistributionist agenda depends on the continued existence of super-wealthy people and enterprises, and that therefore liberals are no enemies of the super-wealthy at all? Yet Republicans persist in calling liberals the enemies of wealth, while liberal Democrats are glad to play that role before the appropriate audiences. Some Republicans in their enthusiasm for the game even call Democrats socialists, but the system that Paterson has implicitly described looks anything but socialist. It looks more like a system of exploiting capitalism that still allows capitalists considerable leeway in exploiting workers. Some capitalists might resent the system, but calling it socialist only shows how spoiled they've grown in this country.

Don't even get me started on the other argument against the salary caps -- the warning that it will cause a "brain drain" as the masters of the universe seek better opportunities elsewhere. Unless they have hidden talents for acting, singing, or sports, I see little cause to worry.

Should Presidents Beg?

I hadn't gotten a line from Barack Obama since last November. He'd written to me often last year asking for money, but even though I never sent him anything I supposed that he wasn't too annoyed with me, since he won anyway. Now, after nearly a year, he's sent me a note asking "Can I count on you?" The man deserves credit for perseverance at least.

The President called me by name on the envelope, but the letter inside, disappointingly, is addressed to "Dear Friend." Things look serious on the evidence of his opening: "There are times in the life of our nation when America's course can only be set by the concerted effort of citizens determined to pull our country through. This is one of those times -- and your personal involvement in moving America forward is absolutely essential."

He reminds me that "as you know, we have put in place a comprehensive strategy designed to attack America's economic crisis on all fronts. It's a strategy to create jobs, to help responsible homeowners, to restart lending and to grow our economy over the long term. And we are beginning to see signs of progress. But, let's be clear with one another. We are facing extraordinary challenges and only extraordinary and sustained effort will help meet them."

Obama has done his part. "I have acted on the economy, health insurance reform, energy and education with the knowledge that a 'business as usual' approach will not serve our nation," he writes, "Now, you and I must act with the understanding that it will take exceptional energy and effort to mobilize public support for our plans."

So what would the President have me do? He'd like me "to make a decision right now to support a fundamentally important Democratic Party initiative." Would that be giving money to congressional candidates? No, but it does mean giving money. This time he wants me to contribute to Organizing for America, which he describes as "a coming together of people from every corner of our nation. Folks who understand just how much is at stake are working side-by-side and asking, 'What can I do to lift America up?'"

I visited Organizing for America's website, which is www.barackobama.com. The organizing organization's main activity, at first glance, is to incite Americans into telephoning their representatives in Congress and firming up their resolution to support the President's agenda.

"Let me be clear," the President resumes, "This initiative is essential to our efforts to renew America." But if anything, it seemed superfluous. If Obama wants me to call up Paul Tonko and warn him not to be a Blue Dog, or to put the spurs to Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, he could have said so in this letter. I admit that sending the letter itself costs money and might justify a bit of panhandling, but maintaining the website as well as sending letters only makes the organization more costly, however hip and modern it makes it appear. And for that he wants a minimum of $25, an ideal of $35, and $50 or $100 if I can spare it -- and I should make the check out to the Democratic National Committee. So I got the letter, which means that the President got his message out without the techies whose site I never visited before today, yet he expects me to subsidize the techies. Worse, he wants me to help "carry our message to living rooms, coffee shops, front porches and community centers all across this great country of ours," but rather than trust me to carry it myself (admittedly a risk on his part) he wants me to pay other people to do it.

Call me an old fogy if you must, but the mere idea of the President of the United States asking for a handout of any sort is offensive to my small-r republican sensibilities. I don't know if George W. Bush made similar pleas because I wasn't on the "right" mailing lists at the time, but whether he's set a precedent or not, this President has lowered himself a bit in my judgmental eyes for this bit of begging. You'd like to think, also, that any President would at least at times pretend to stand above parties, or at least above fundraising, but who am I kidding with this idealism? Barack Obama is a creature of the Democratic Party, and for any Democrat, as for any Republican, fundraising is job one. In this particular case, he isn't doing his job.

G.W. Bush as a Motivational Speaker

The news that George W. Bush and his wife have signed up to be motivational speakers has to be one of the most absurd stories of the week. Here is a man widely perceived to be a failed President, who before his election was a byword for failed entrepreneurship. What can he say to motivate the go-getters who attend such extravaganzas?

The former first family will join a tour of motivators that made a stop in Albany a few months ago. Then, Rudy Giuliani, Colin Powell and Steve Forbes were part of the caravan, and my understanding is that some of these worthies will appear with the Bushes on their performance dates. Some people who attended the Albany event expressed surprise at an unadvertised degree of Christian proselytizing tied into it. That bit of intelligence, combined with a certain concentration of Republican personages suggests to me that the "Get Motivated!" managers have hired Bush on the calculation that he will draw great crowds of people who still admire the man for ideological or religious reasons, who see him, despite all other failings, as a moral exemplar compared to his predecessor and an indisputable "real" American compared to his successor. While these encounters are apolitical events, they are also rallies of the small entrepreneurs and would-bes who have formed a major part of the GOP constituency since Barry Goldwater's time, and on some level, for some reason Bush is still an idol to them. That may be because he still shares their values despite his inability to practice them effectively in private life. He strikes me as a "power of positive thinking" type, which is perhaps not so different from "hope" as some might think apart from an inferred emphasis on self-enrichment. I have no doubt that even "Dubya" can come up with a medley of slogans, bromides and affirmations for his motivatable audience. They may in fact come naturally to him, as glossolalia does to some people. I'd be curious to learn what he does say, though I suspect it would take a Mencken or a Thomas Frank to do it justice.

GOP: "We're not the enemy!"

Lamar Alexander protests too much. Today he warns the President not to make an "Enemies' List" of his critics, all of them after all being well-meaning and honorable men, and he cautions Obama against the fate of the last President known to keep such a list, Richard Nixon. Alexander insists that all these honorable men, and there are honorable women involved as well, no doubt, "want to work" with the Administration. Does that extend to Rush Limbaugh, who has said that he wants the President to fail? Would Alexander acknowledge that Limbaugh, at least, is an enemy? Are the birthers enemies? Or do they just want to work with the President in clarifying beyond the last reach of doubt the where and when of his nativity for history's sake?

Were I in a more generous mood, I might grant that there's nothing personal to most Republican criticism of Obama's policies, and that from their own sensitive perspective such criticism should not rise to the level of enmity in anyone's mind. But when the criticism is so comprehensive that the President would have to abandon his own principles to "work with" an opposition that he is constitutionally unobliged to recognize, thanks to the verdict of the voters, Republicans should not sound so offended when their determination to deny Obama any fruits of his victory is described in fair language as enmity. The Republican party and its radio auxiliaries are waging a fear campaign to thwart the will of the electorate. How can that not look like enmity to at least some people?

For some people, Alexander's warning comes too late. I've seen supermarket tabloids that take the existence of such a list for granted and claim to report regularly on additions to it. Their market is those people who were already convinced a year ago that Barack Obama was their enemy, and those people are a constituency that no Republican would dare repudiate. Anyone who can stand to listen has probably heard such talk of enemies' lists on radio as well, or seen reports of lists online. This preemptive presumption of enmity means that enmity toward Obama existed, and he has enemies, independently of any perception of their enmity on Obama's part. I see no reason why the President's friends can't state this fact, although I'd advise them to identify such people as enemies of economic recovery, enemies of working people, enemies of public health, enemies of peace, etc., depending on the context, so that listeners realize that those named aren't enemies of Obama alone. For people like Lamar Alexander I'd recommend more honesty about their own positions and motives. And for him specifically, if he believes that Obama's recognition of his enemies must lead him to Nixonian tactics and a Nixonian fate, I might suggest an Idiot of the Week nomination.

Against the Bipolarchy in New York State

The special election to fill the vacancy in New York's 23rd congressional district has its own Wikipedia page, allowing interested readers to keep track of the candidates, endorsements and controversies involved. The race has gradually captured the attention of the national news media because it has exposed fissures within the supposedly-monolithic conservative movement which even the most obtuse or ideologically blinkered observers can't ignore.

The vacancy opened when the President nominated the Republican incumbent, John McHugh, to become Secretary of the Army. Apparently unconcerned about the future of a "red" district, albeit one that preferred Obama to McCain last November, the incumbent accepted the appointment. Assemblyman Dierdre Scozzafava was nominated by a committee of Republican county chairmen in lieu of a primary election. A failed Republican candidate, Doug Hoffman, accepted the nomination of the Conservative Party, a long-established institution in New York that usually endorses Republican candidates automatically. Scozzafava is seen as too liberal on social issues including abortion and gay marriage, to receive Conservative support.

The most recent poll cited by Wikipedia credits Hoffman with support from 23% of the people surveyed, while Bill Owens, the Democratic candidate, leads the race with 33% support. Scozzafava has 29% support in the latest survey. She will also appear on the Independence Party line, while Owens will have the Working Families line.

A growing host of conservative pundits, politicians and pressure groups has endorsed Hoffman, the most famous names among them being former presidential candidate Fred Thompson and neocon columnist William Kristol. Scozzafava has been endorsed by a more eclectic coalition that includes Republican elected officials, Newt Gingrich, the New York State United Teachers union, the National Rifle Association and the fanatically Democratic Daily Kos website. Kos himself, usually hostile to any challenge to Democrats from the left, here supports a Republican he deems more liberal than the Democratic nominee. He excuses himself by labelling Owens a "Blue Dog" who had been an independent before his nomination.

My own view is that someone who wants to advance the Democratic agenda, but is not greedy, should support Hoffman. Since the seat was Republican in the first place, Hoffman's victory would not be a loss in Democratic voting strength, even if people argue that anything short of Democratic victory in every election is a rebuke to President Obama. Never mind him. The opportunity here, not just for opportunistic Democrats but for all enemies of the American Bipolarchy, is to give a "third party" the elusive viability that would come from electing a member to Congress. My hope is that, given the climate of dissatisfaction with Republican representation of the conservative movement, a Hoffman win would embolden the Conservative party to contest more elections in its own right rather than complacently endorse Republican candidates. The benefit to Democrats in the short term would be, ideally, a permanent split in the anti-Democratic bloc. The benefit to everyone in the long term would be the emboldening of progressive and leftist New Yorkers, in the absence of a monolithic Republican-conservative bogeyman, to make their own break from the Democratic party, to challenge incumbents or fill vacancies in "blue" districts with actual independents committed to the agenda of progressive constituents rather than that of a big-tent national committee. The odds are probably against this best-case scenario, but if it even seems possible it ought to be encouraged.

But ideology blinds some Democratic sympathizers to the opportunity in front of them. I saw some discussion of the 23rd district on the Rachel Maddow Show last night, and the theme seemed to be the menace of extremism represented by the Conservative candidacy, the malign effect of which was anticipated to be the further purging of moderates from the Republican party. Hoffman's rise was not attributed to self-assertiveness on the part of Conservatives, but to a desire to punish the local GOP for nominating a moderate. It was interesting to see progressive propagandists pontificate on whom Republicans should nominate and the implicit duty of conservatives to defer to Republican leadership. It looked as if Maddow was trying to urge some kind of "moderate" discipline on both the GOP and conservative voters, and in that moment I almost heard the Bipolarchy itself talking. It goes without saying, I suppose, that Maddow's audience will want another Democratic vote in Congress despite the party's existing comfortable majority, but the show's attitude is of a piece with Kos's intervention to save Republicans and conservatives from themselves. Neither sees the potential benefit of even this minimal subversion of the Bipolarchy because they clearly dislike the people who'd be crashing the party. Conservatism licensed by the Republican party is barely palatable to them anyway, so one can imagine how unlicensed conservatism will strike them. It would probably be much like how the rise of unlicensed progressives and leftists would strike them,should the opportunity arise.

Addendum: Damon Eris at Poli-Tea has been following this race intensively for a while. Here's a collection of his comments on the campaign.

The Limits of Partisan Immunity?

Leaders of the New York State Democratic party, including both U.S. Senators, are pressuring state senator Hiram Monserrate to resign following his conviction on a misdemeanor assault charge. The conviction does not automatically cost him his seat, and he is expected to receive a light sentence because the crime is officially his first offense. But the incident that led to the trial was a high-profile one which, despite his girlfriend's recanting of her charges against him, gives the senator the image of a batterer of women. Here we may discover the limits of the partisan immunity principle. In practice, partisan immunity protects a legally embattled politician from losing his seat by accusing his accusers of persecuting rather than prosecuting the politician for partisan motives. Both major parties invoke the principle without citing it as one, defenders of Dick Cheney accusing Democrats of partisan persecution, on one hand, and defenders of Rep. Rangel accusing Republicans of the same thing. Monserrate is in a different position because he's been convicted in a criminal court. At the same time, Democrats are probably calculating the actual advantage to the enemy of Monserrate's unrepentant persistence in office, compared to the alleged advantage one party often accuses the other of seeking. Worse yet, Monserrate most likely has few friends among New York Democrats. He collaborated with another Hispanic senator in a power play earlier this year that temporarily threw control of the upper house into Republican hands until the two renegade Democrats got what they wanted, which above all seemed to be the toppling of a black majority leader. At this point, Monserrate's only hope of survival depends on whether his district is one that could be claimed by a Republican in the next election in the absence of his own personal following. The New York Democracy now considers him expendable, however, and this shows that partisan immunity is a concept formulated for partisan rather than individual benefit. If the party does not benefit from extending immunity to an individual politician, that individual will be left to his own devices, at best.

Another Advance Obit for Newspapers

The new Harper's has an impressionistic piece by Richard Rodriguez on the "twilight of the American newspaper." He's less interested in blaming technology for successfully supplanting print media than for inexorably stripping people of that sense of place on which newspapers seemed to depend. With virtual friends all over the world, he suggests, people are less rooted and less interested in what's happening in their immediate physical environment, and without that vital interest in locality, newspapers become meaningless. As he puts it, "When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed." Here's a thicker excerpt:

We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill....We might say now: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor [all cities that lost papers this year -- ed.] The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with "I." Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin's wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl-punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from city.

Rodriguez wants people to realize that their virtual lives are some sort of second-class sham, an inferior version of a reality that they're being denied by people who want to sell them some cheap alternative. This passage is an attempt to get people's populist dander up:

You know what futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Davos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves? They want exactly what they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, overweight, disembodied Kindle reader. They want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons....They want to go shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo....they want to see their names in hard copy in the "New Establishment" issue of Vanity Fair....they want five-star bricks and mortar and DO NOT DISTURB signs and views of the park. And in order to reserve these things for themselves they will plug up your eyes and your ears and your mouth, and if they can figure out a way to pump episodes of The Simpsons through the darkening corridors of your brain as you expire (ADD TO SHOPPING CART) they will do it.

It's a partially comforting fantasy to believe that the vanguard of unwelcome change isn't made up of true believers but cynical con men who only believe in money; if you can show that they're nothing but hucksters who've sold the hottest fashion line to a nation of emperors, you might get the masses to renounce their new fancies and return to their old ways. At the very least, such a fantasy assures you that there are still people who think and feel as you do, even if they're your mortal enemies. But even if we call Rodriguez's suspicion speculation rather than fantasy, my hunch is that it's at best only partly true. The pod people aren't necessarily ruled by some urbane cynical sensualist. At the same time, who's actually said that we mere proles can't have or shouldn't want all the things Rodriguez writes about. I must have missed that while living through the last generation. Still, if we stick to his basic point that a growing detachment from our physical homescape is a factor in the decline of newspapers, there's room for agreement. It doesn't exactly point us toward solving the problem, if we want to save newspapers, but Rodriguez never claims that there is a solution. His is one of the best feel-bad essays I've read this year.

The Official Opposition Network

It seems wrong somehow for the Obama administration to notice a certain ideological editorial bias on the part of one of the country's news networks. Any implication that opposition media might be treated differently from those that don't dissent so much goes against the American grain and, worse, tends to confirm the supermarket-tabloid level suspicion that the President has a Nixon-style "enemies list." Fox News itself no doubt welcomes the recognition while it denies the charge, and it will certainly confirm the paranoid impulses of some of their talkers. In some eyes, to be identified as opposition media is to be targeted for censorship. The talkers have long feared a revival of the Fairness Doctrine as an instrument of suppression, and some also claim to dread a Venezuela-style denial of routine license renewal as a means of driving opposition opinion off the ether. If the Democrats at all think that this discussion might make Fox change its ways, they're terribly mistaken. It will more likely intensify the network's alarmist tendencies while allowing its talkers to portray themselves as brave dissidents against the great and powerful government.

Before television, Americans took the partisanship of news media for granted. They knew that a Hearst paper or Time magazine would have a Republican or conservative bias, while certain other papers or journals were known to go the other way. But apart from Edward R. Murrow, television news aimed for an objectivity that took the simple negative form of not endorsing candidates for office or otherwise editorializing on issues of the day. Whether there ever can be such a thing as political objectivity is debatable, of course, and TV news's objectivity inevitably took the form of a kind of consensus that in time seemed more obviously to exclude newer viewpoints from Goldwater-style conservatism to hippie radicalism. As Goldwaterism evolved into Reaganism, yet failed to pervade the news media, Reaganites and their successors finally decided that the news networks were not objective, but biased against the entrepreneurial-conservative viewpoint. At the same time, though less loudly, progressives denounced the same media entities as "corporate media" that excluded viewpoints critical of aspects of capitalism. Reaganite efforts to create alternate media, from the Washington Times to talk radio to Fox News, finally provoked a reaction in the turn of MSNBC into a Democratic-progressive vehicle, so that now television news looks pretty much like newspapers did in the 20th century. If anything, we may be heading back to the 19th century, when there were papers known to everyone as mouthpieces not merely for parties but for the administration itself. And some people may want to go all the way back to the 18th century, when partisan papers were sometimes seen as dangerous or even subversive instruments of faction: unprincipled, self-interested or foreign-subsidized opposition.

There is a hostility toward Fox News among Democrats that exceeds, in my view, the critique of "liberal bias" that led to Fox's invention. Fox fans might call it simple resentment of whatever success Fox has enjoyed in persuading people, though I doubt they do more than preach to the converted. The perception that Fox has actually converted people probably does fuel Democratic hostility, but so does a belief that TV, despite the hallowed example of Murrow, has some public obligation to objectivity that newspapers never shared. By "Democratic," in this case, I mean those left-centrists who don't accept the "corporate media" charge of critics further to the left. The assumption that conservatism, however defined, exalts private over public interests may also contribute to the notion that Fox and other conservative media are somehow-illegitimate factions rather than legitimate participants in the national discussion. Whatever the reason, the Reaganite determination to challenge a (to them) outdated consensus, to contest premises formerly taken for granted across the board, certainly rankles intellectually complacent liberals who would rather not hear the challenges than have to answer them. By comparison, the emergence of MSNBC is a healthy development to the extent that it represents a critical engagement with Reaganism, even if MSNBC and Fox together may appear to take TV discourse to a new low level of insult and paranoia. The consensus objectivity of the past was exclusionary (and the American Bipolarchy itself is a creature of consensus), and the more media reject the idea that an obsolete objectivity should prevail, the more people may be emboldened to demand time or a channel for their own viewpoints rather than expect the news establishment to speak for them. The thing to be avoided is a new quasi-consensus based on the assumption that Fox, MSNBC and CNN (presumably representing the center) together represent all the political possibilities available to Americans. But for the moment the thing really to be avoided is the self-righteous assumption that there's something wrong with Fox News having a viewpoint of its own, even if you think that viewpoint is wrong.

"Can You Hear Us Now?" Probably Not

Travelling between Albany and Troy this afternoon, I suddenly realized I was going right past the headquarters of the Albany Times Union at the time of the promised "Can You Hear Us Now?" demonstration, organized to protest alleged media neglect of the tea party/September 12 protest movements. As it turned out, a protest was going on. My passing estimate was that there was somewhere between a dozen and a score of people putting on a show. I was in no position to stop, but I did notice one sign that read, "No More Socialized Anything!" and another that reiterated the titular challenge. As vehicles passed, the demonstrators agitated for drivers to honk their horns in support. I didn't hear any, but I'm sure some did during the afternoon. It was a nice day in town, but perhaps a little too cool to be standing on a street corner away from the city center when there were leaves to look at or football games to watch. I suppose I should give credit to those that showed, but at the same time there was no proof of an aggrieved mass movement there.

One Man's Obscenity...

Sarah Silverman, a comedian, appeared on Bill Maher's talk show the other day and said something obscene -- or at least it was obscene to the ears of the Catholic League, that institution of bigotry-envy that acts as the Popish equivalent of the Anti-Defamation League or the Rev. Jesse Jackson. According to the League's own website, this was Silverman's obscenity:

What is the Vatican worth, like 500 billion dollars? This is great, sell the Vatican, take a big chunk of the money, build a gorgeous condominium for you and all your friends to live in…and with the money left over, feed the whole f---ing world....You [The Pope] preach to live humbly, and I totally agree. So, now maybe it’s time for you to move out of your house that is a city. On an ego level alone, you will be the biggest hero in the history of ever. And by the
way, any involvement in the Holocaust, bygones…If you sell the Vatican, and you take that money, and you use it to feed every single human being on the planet, you will get crazy p---y. All the p---y.

In the opinion of Catholic League grand inquisitor Bill Donohue, this is an "obscene rip" at the Vatican and a "filthy diatribe," and further proof that there is "something pathological" to Maher's indulgence of anti-Catholic commentary. Donohue explains that the Church has done quite enough for the world by running "more hospitals...than any other private institution in the world," though the story of the Widow's Mite might come to even irreligious minds. One wonders whether the obscenity that so offended the admittedly easily-offended Donohue was Silverman's dirty words or the idea that Catholicism should live up to the teachings of its founding spirit.

Donohue's bigotry-envy is blatant in his crack that Silverman's little rant wouldn't be tolerated "if the chosen target were the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem and the state of Israel." Whether targeting that official makes sense compared to the wealth of the Vatican is one issue, but the more obvious one is Donohue's persistent insistent that any criticism of Catholics or Catholicism be equated with bigotry against Jews or blacks. Once upon a time, when Catholicism was identified with particular ethnic groups in certain countries, like the Irish in the U.S. in the 19th century, you might have made a case for anti-Catholicism as a form of bigotry. But I define bigotry as hostility based on who you are rather than what you do, and anti-Catholicism is self-evidently a critique of the beliefs and practices of Catholics rather than their mere existence. Catholicism is no longer identified with particular races of people the way Judaism is identified with Jewish ethnicity or Israeli nationality, or the way Islam is often (if wrongly) identified with Arabs or Pakistanis. Catholicism is a value system and like every other value system it is accountable for its values. But before I go further I should note that Silverman never criticized any aspect of the Catholic value system, unless you count a papal habit of accumulating property and art treasures. All she said was that a rich institution ostensibly dedicated to helping the poor could go further in helping the poor by giving up its most ostentatious wealth. But Donohue is so thin-skinned as a matter of choice that he feels compelled to lash out as if Silverman and Maher had reformed the Know-Nothing party. I might have made him a late contender for Idiot of the Week, but Donohue is such a chronic offender that he really doesn't belong in the weekly competition anymore. He belongs in an Idiocy Hall of Fame.

Idiot of the Week: Keith Bardwell

The year is 2009 and the son of an interracial relationship is President of the United States. But as this story relates, in Louisiana there is a justice of the peace named Keith Bardwell who refuses to perform interracial marriages out of concern for the suffering the children of such pairings might experience. Given the year, Bardwell is quick to deny that he is a racist. To prove his point, he notes that he performs marriages for black couples all the time. But he believes that neither whites nor blacks fully accept mixed-race people. Bardwell's age isn't given either in the wire-service story or the original local report, but the Hammond Daily Star does tell us that he's been a JP for 34 years. Had it been 54 years his attitude might be more plausible. To his credit, he did tell the aggrieved couple that they could seek permission from another JP, which they did. But that doesn't change the fact that this man probably won't be owning a football team anytime soon.

Limbaugh Punted

As I wrote earlier this week, I had no problem with Rush Limbaugh buying a share of an NFL franchise. It was an issue on which even politicized people had a right to have no opinion whatsoever. Now that the mastermind of the scheme to purchase the St. Louis Rams has booted Limbaugh from the group, it will only enhance the radio talker's standing among his dittohead followers as a martyr to political correctness, reverse racism or whatever he wants to call it. Now that I think of it, it would be amusing to see if Limbaugh's listeners start a retaliatory boycott of the NFL (to punish the players' union) and switch their loyalties to the new football league that's in the works. For all I know, someone has already proposed this, but somehow it seems unlikely. In any event, even though I think objectively that the entire scandal has been unfair to Limbaugh, it really does amuse me to see this champion of capitalism kicked out of a money-making venture due to somebody's arbitrary calculation that he was bad for business.

"Can You Hear Us Now?" Good?

Tea-partiers and like-minded people think that they aren't getting proper recognition from the media. They feel that the turnout for the September 12 march on Washington was underreported and the event itself largely ignored by most major news organizations. The next phase of the struggle, then, is to get into the faces of the media, metaphorically or not. Operation "Can You Hear Us Now?" has targeted news organizations for mass calls and e-mails, and in Albany organizers are planning a live event, a demonstration outside the offices of the local newspaper, the Times Union. Of course, with the event scheduled for a Saturday the demonstration may not get as much coverage as the protesters hope for, but they presume that their proximity will make it impossible for whatever reporters are there to ignore them.

Again, people opposed to "big government" are showing initiative I once thought them incapable of. The revival of a populist streak has in many cases overcome what I took to be a characteristic conservative aversion to crowds or the mob mentality. It seems like the "right" has the field to itself, apart from still-aggrieved minorities, because the "left" suffers from a complacency based on the belief that Barack Obama is their President. Instead of taking to the streets themselves to pressure the Democratic regime to push through more progressive reforms, they look at opposition demonstrations and imagine the brownshirts on the march. Some won't go that far in their fearful rhetoric, but many of those most likely still see the tea parties and like phenomena as irrational mobs. My point is not that they aren't irrational mobs, but that it's odd and even unseemly to see the "left" look down its collective nose at mass demonstrations. Maybe it's understandable when they're demonstrations of which leftists don't approve, but shouldn't it be the leftist strategy to prove that they are the party of the people by bringing out the bigger battalions, to answer every tea party or anti-"big government" outburst with a larger demonstration of support for bigger and better government in the people's interest? I can't help but wonder whether too many liberals, progressives, etc. simply act now on the assumption that the Democratic Party is the proper vehicle for all their aspirations, and that to go off the rez to make demands of the Dems would simply confuse things. It should come as no surprise if that's the case, since that's what most reactionaries do when the Republican party holds the national reins. But the reactionaries are doing more now while out of power than they've done during past cycles of exile. The question now is whether progressives can match or top them while they arguably have some chance of influencing government by doing so, or whether it'll take yet another Democratic crack-up to galvanize them into more constant action.

Snow(e)blind: Coalition Government in America?

The elevation of Senator Snowe to the status of a national heroine yesterday was a pretty contemptible display. I have no problem with her voting for the Democratic health bill, but the idea that her superfluous vote somehow legitimates the measure more than the already existing majority did disgusted me. The Democratic party from the President down, as well as the allegedly liberal media, have in effect endorsed the notion that Bipolarchical coalition rather than majority rule is the governing principle of the United States. The majority party's desperation not to appear "partisan" despite the electorate's grant of power to rule on its own betrays the extent to which partisanship has become an extra-constitutional organizing principle of American politics. A sufficiency of voters has decreed over the past three years that Democrats do not need to consult or compromise with Republicans in order to govern the country, but Democratic leaders have decided that they must. They've enabled the spurious argument that the Republican party is a constituent element of the United States that is entitled to a degree of representation bordering on the Polish liberum veto despite the outcome of recent elections. To Republicans themselves, the idea that one Senator's vote makes the bill bipartisan must seem even more ridiculous than Democratic efforts to compromise with a party that only had power to complain and lie. But they benefit just the same from the universal concession that their party must be consulted even when it hasn't earned the right. And they will argue hereafter, as they already have, that no policy to which they haven't consented is really legitimate, no matter what the Constitution says.

The American Bipolarchy is a historically accidental coalition of parties, each of whose efforts to manipulate the electoral system to its own benefit has benefited both parties to the effective exclusion of ideas and interest groups outside of a "mainstream" of fundraising entities that finance political advertising. It isn't a matter of conspiratorial collusion except insofar as it's motivated by a shared sincere belief that any "third party" must represent a dangerous form of extremism. Neither party has reason to disrupt a state of affairs that benefits both in turn, but neither would really object to the destruction of the other -- or so one assumes until one reads news like yesterday's, which reminds the reader that one partner in the Bipolarchy seems to be more naive than the other. I suspect that many if not most Republicans would happily see the "Democrat" party destroyed or at least turned into a harmless clone of Republican conservatism. Democrats, on the other hand, seem to acknowledge that there is such a thing as the Bipolarchy -- and that it's a good thing. That comes with being liberals, I suppose. But there are numerous voices and interests who, by Bipolarchy logic, belong on the Democratic side of things, yet feel that they were not consulted on health care reform -- and because they did not belong to the official opposition, they didn't have to be. The party that they're told is theirs was more solicitous toward a single opposition Senator than toward many more people who are supposedly their natural constituents, and that supposedly makes the end product more representative. That's how representative government works in this country.

Who Needs a Peace Prize, Anyway?

As soon as I heard about the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, I knew that I would be in agreement with many people I normally don't agree with in thinking he hadn't earned it. I expected to hear or read opinions so obnoxious in every other regard that I'd be tempted to rethink my opinion of Obama's award. What I didn't quite expect was Cal Thomas's latest column, in which he argues that Obama's prize is meaningless -- because the Nobel Prize itself is meaningless.

"The peace prize concept is flawed," Thomas writes, "because the problem of war does not lie with those who would make peace, but with those who would make war. If the Nobel Committee were realistic, it would stop handing out peace prizes and start issuing awards for those who have confronted evil and produced peace in nations that have only known oppression." For example, during the 1980s Thomas would have preferred to see the Nobel committee honor that holy trinity of anti-communism, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II. To show that he's not entirely partisan about this, however, he suggests that Bill Clinton "would also be a legitimate candidate for his efforts that stabilized Bosnia."

Thomas disagrees with the whole concept of the Peace Prize, as generally understood, because he does not believe that peace can be achieved by renouncing war. "The Nobel Committee apparently believes that by diplomatically singing 'All we are saying is give peace a chance' evil people will study war no more and be so impressed by our intentions they will lay down their arms."

For Thomas, the persistence of "evil" makes it impossible for people of genuine good will to renounce war. "Evil" people (e.g., Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) will never renounce war themselves, he states, but can only be "defeated." In a passage that proves only that Thomas watches too much television, he compares the Nobel Committee to "like-minded male wimps around the world [who] idolize Michael J. Fox instead of John Wayne and find their role models in the liberal ladies of 'The View,' not in muscular characters like Jack Bauer (and Chloe, who gets it) on '24.'" The TV theme had already been established when Thomas suggested earlier in the column that the committee may as well have awarded the Peace Prize to Homer Simpson.

"The question should be: why, despite man's best efforts, including the League of Nations and United Nations, have we been unsuccessful in eradicating war?" Thomas writes. It's a question worth asking, but not if you're going to answer from the Bible. Thomas opens the column with an epigraph from Daniel: "War will continue until the end of time." He finds the explanation in James 4:1-3: "What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your pleasures."

Give Thomas and James the benefit of the doubt for a moment, if only so we can ask whether that statement describes only people who are anti-American, or only terrorists. If not, then why does Thomas describe only them as "evil?" Who is so pure that they can be trusted to fight evil and bring peace -- or whatever Cal Thomas recognizes as peace -- without doing evil themselves? Doesn't Ahmadinejad believe himself to be fighting evil in the name of peace? Doesn't Osama bin Laden think the same thing? And isn't the habit of calling "evil" anyone who disagrees with you or has different interests from yours just another thing that man must renounce before peace really has a chance? A teacher Thomas often claims to follow said something once about someone mocking the mote in someone else's eyes while ignoring the beam in his own. It makes you wonder how Thomas can even see the monitor when writing his columns.

Do Parties or People Matter?

Here's a link to an interesting debate taking place between the Poli-Tea Party and Organized Exploitation blogs over the relative merits of independent party building and "infiltration" of the existing parties. Paul of Organized Exploitation argues that an infiltration strategy is more cost-effective than any attempt to build a new party from scratch, while d. eris of Poli-Tea insists that any attempt to infiltrate the major parties will compromise the infiltrators. Paul disagrees, and seems to disagree with the idea that the Bipolarchy (or what Poli-Tea calls the duopoly) is a fundamental structural problem of American political life. His idealistic view is that people of principle can transform either major party into an instrument of principle. My own small intervention in the debate has been to note that history proves the effects of past "infiltrations" to be short-lived. Whether that's structurally predetermined or just a tendency that can be overturned with greater dedication is still open to debate, but I sympathize with Poli-Tea's position that breaking the "duopoly" is an end in itself, if not a national necessity. Where we really need people of principle (and will) is among the general electorate. Parties are built all the time, but the Bipolarchy won't be broken until people disabuse themselves of the notions that they can only entrust power to those who already have it, and that those who don't already have power are self-evidently incompetent to exercise it. No effort to infiltrate a major party will ever dissuade citizens from the prevailing sense of dependence upon the two-party system as the exclusive possessors of governmental expertise. A successful infiltrator may win a personal following of principled voters for a party, but when that person passes from the scene the party remains to exploit his or her memory without necessarily living up to the hero's principles, and people remember the party as the instrument of principled reforms whether it intends to continue them or not. I challenge anyone to argue that this feeling of dependence on the major parties is a good thing. If it isn't, then we should avoid any strategy that will actually perpetuate this dependence.

Let Limbaugh Waste His Money

The National Football League players union seems on the verge of declaring its opposition to Rush Limbaugh acquiring a share in the ownership of the Los Angeles Rams franchise. Several players have said that they would refuse to play for the Rams if the group which includes Limbaugh manages to purchase the team. Their animosity stems from Limbaugh's short-lived tenure as a football commentator on ESPN a few years ago. He was driven from the airwaves after he claimed that the sports media showed favoritism toward Donovan McNabb, the quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles, whom Limbaugh considered overrated, because they wanted a black quarterback to succeed.

Our local Limbaugh fan, Mr. Right, is quick to clarify that his hero did not say that McNabb was an untalented or inferior player. He thinks that Rush (Limbaugh's fans are on a first-name basis with him) was correctly pointing out a "politically correct" tendency in the media to overvalue black players in order to create feel-good scenarios of achievement overcoming racism. Limbaugh's critics claim that he implicitly devalued McNabb and was saying that he only got recognition because of his skin color when he might not have deserved it otherwise. Inevitably, they accused Limbaugh of racism.

Limbaugh is used to this. NBC, accused of liberal bias itself, is making a big deal of giving Limbaugh air time today in an exclusive interview, during which he had this to say on the race issue: “There’s a cliché about conservatives: racist, sexist, bigot, homophobic. Now, you announce you’re a conservative, you’re automatically all those things to the critics. Even though you’re not, that’s what they say you are. They are the real racist, sexist, bigots and homophobes. They are the ones that look at people and see skin color, gender, sex orientation, victim, group."

This is an odd comment because critics presumably weren't judging Limbaugh by how he looks but by what he says. But he was trying to make the usual argument against "reverse racism," which is that liberals refuse to judge people as individuals according to the content of their character, but assign them to categories of victim or oppressor. This is the typical position of those who want an immediate transition from racism to color-blindness without any compensatory phase, and demand to be trusted unconditionally when they say they are unbigoted. They're bound to be disappointed, especially when, like Limbaugh, they're so transparently hostile to the idea that they are answerable to black people for their attitudes and for large parts of their nation's history. I'm not saying that the heritage of slavery and racism makes black people the unique moral arbiters of American politics, but just as it can't be up to blacks exclusively to say when the country has paid up its moral debts, it's not up to whites like Limbaugh exclusively to say so, either. And that's why he rubs so many black people the wrong way, I suspect: he speaks as if black people are still fundamentally accountable to white people as if they were still an alien element in the country that has to earn white approval before they're finally recognized as fully American. But black Americans no more have to prove their national or patriotic credentials to him than he must to them.

Having said all that, I think resistance to his having a share of ownership in a sports team is ridiculous. It's not as if he, as one partner among many, could render the Rams lily-white even if he wanted to -- and I doubt he would. Right now the Rams are a crap team, and if Rush Limbaugh wants to flush his hard-earned money down such a toilet, I don't see why anyone should object. And think of the satisfaction so many people would feel if Donovan McNabb is still playing when the Eagles get to play Limbaugh's Rams and throws five or six touchdown passes against them. Why would anyone deny themselves that experience for petty political reasons?