Third Parties and Independent Media: Not Quite a Perfect Fit

Metroland is "The Capital Region's Alternative Newsweekly." As such, it could be expected to give some recognition to independent gubernatorial candidates in New York as viable alternatives to Andrew Cuomo and Carl Paladino. Last weekend's issue expanded upon the joint appearance of Green candidate Howie Hawkins and Libertarian candidate Warren Redlich in Albany the previous week, but the resulting article by Ali Hibbs, reflecting Metroland's progressive editorial policy, proved largely a puff piece for Hawkins. While the subject headlined was the mainstream media's exclusion of both Hawkins and Redlich (not to mention unnamed others) from gubernatorial debates and campaign coverage in general, Redlich didn't exactly get equal time from Hibbs. When he's quoted, it's not to articulate the Libertarian position, but to praise Hawkins. Redlich did get to make some telling points about Bipolarchy-induced paralysis, however.

“People are tired of what’s going on in Washington and Albany,” says Redlich. “They’re not happy. There’s a perception that the Tea Party is opposed to the Democratic Party, but the problem is that people aren’t happy with both parties. We don’t agree on some of the issues, but I can tell you that I think Howie Hawkins is a man of principle and that he’s not in bed with special interests.”

Redlich also gets the last word -- again on behalf of third-partyism in general rather than his own particular cause.

“If we had the media attention that the major-party candidates have,” asserts Redlich, “then people would know more about what we’re saying. I can only tell you that when I speak to audiences, people like what I have to say. I’ve seen Howie speak to audiences and people like what he has to say. Andrew Cuomo doesn’t say anything. Carl Paladino says stuff that appeals to a narrow, angry group of people. I really think that, if people were able to hear what we have to say—if we were able to get that message out—you would see some pretty surprising numbers.”

Overall, however, the editors of Metroland have packaged Hibbs's article to make Hawkins appear as the real alternative to Cuomo and Paladino. The cover art shows Hawkins, not Redlich, entering a boxing ring to challenge the front runner, and the article is illustrated by equal-sized photographs of Cuomo, Paladino and Hawkins; Redlich goes unpictured. The bulk of the article describes Hawkins's history of activism and steady improvement in Syracuse elections. He won 41% of the vote in a city council election last year, after earning just 3% on his first try. That's an admirable story of perseverance, and equally worthy of attention is Hawkins's key plank of his platform: the repeal of the stock-transfer tax rebate that has been in effect since 1979. For more than seventy years before, stock traders paid a tax which theoretically "amounts to a penny or two per trade." Under Democratic governor Hugh Carey a substantial rebate was instituted, giving much of the money back to the traders; within a few years it had become a 100% rebate. Hawkins claims that repealing the rebate would produce a budget surplus nearly double the projected deficit for the fiscal year. He also questions whether Wall Street would pack up and flee the state if the rebate were repealed, as Governor Paterson fears. He'd use the proceeds from the repeal and more progressive income tax to stimulate the state economy with "a plan to employ every New Yorker who wants a job."

Given the setup of the article, I would have liked to read Redlich's opinion of the rebate-repeal plan, though I suppose I can predict his opposition to it. An article and an "alternative newsweekly" more interested in promoting a necessary real debate than in simply promoting the Green Party would have provided Redlich more room to explain why his platform, which "tends more toward austerity," would be more palatable than Cuomo's or Paladino's, or why it might be more necessary than Hawkins's program. I appreciate that Metroland represents progressive opinion and is usually open to libertarian opinion on cultural issues only, but if there is a necessary debate that Democrats and Republicans aren't offering us, it has to include the full range of conscientious opinion, whether it has hitherto been pigeonholed as "right," "left" or other. I say this as a New Yorker who will most likely vote for Hawkins next month. I agree with the candidate that "having a third significant party in American politics is necessary," but I wouldn't stop there. I'd like to see a fourth, a fifth, and however many more are necessary to represent fully all the reasonable options open to the country. I still believe that a no-party system is the ideal, but my paradoxical suggestion is that we'll get there sooner by expanding rather than contracting our choices.

Carl Paladino: The Man of the Hour

The Republican candidate for governor of New York could not have timed better his speech yesterday before a group of Orthodox rabbis in the metropolis in which he decried the notion of schoolchildren being "brainwashed" into believing homosexuality "equally valid." As he spoke, the big news in the big city, and to a lesser extent statewide, was the gay-bashing rampage of a Bronx Latin Kings franchise. Homophobia is real and it is violent, and anyone who legitimizes it, no matter how much they denounce violence or make soothing noises about individual rights, legitimizes homophobic violence. With his usual mulishness, Paladino stands by his remarks while making a big deal out of red-penciling one sentence he deemed excessive. Homosexuality, he'd have us understand, isn't dysfunctional in its own right, -- though it's "not how God created us" -- but homosexual marriage is. Like many Americans, Paladino reserves the right to denounce homosexuality as a matter of religious conscience while urging tolerance toward homosexuals like his own nephew, without acknowledging that millennia of "conscientious" homophobia have provided the moral foundation for gay-bashing. People like Paladino cannot see their way to the necessity of teaching acceptance of homosexuality as a positive good for those so inclined as the best hope of nipping violent homophobia in the bud. But here is an instance where the principle of human rights requires the nation to set itself against biblical law or "tradition" and risk the wrath of God if necessary. It's not much of a risk as far as I'm concerned. In this context, Paladino's confused homophobia is just another reason why he's unfit to govern New York, but it may be the plank of his personal platform that drops like a trapdoor to kill his campaign.

The Nobel Peace Prize and Global Accountability

The Chinese government is predictably upset over the awarding of this year's Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned advocate of multiparty democracy. The Communist dictatorship threatens diplomatic reprisals against the Nobel's homeland of Norway and complains that the Peace Prize should only go to people who promote international peace and disarmament. It could be taken for granted that the People's Republic would see the award as a form of interference in its internal affairs, but I wonder whether Mao Zedong felt the same way or expressed similar sentiments when the Nobel was given to an American dissident, Martin Luther King, in 1964. He probably didn't give a damn one way or another, though if the record shows that his government did comment, it probably would have been to praise King in his struggle against American "capitalist" racism. As for Americans, I did a quick check of the Google News Archive to see whether people in 1964 objected to King getting the Peace Prize. I know on an anecdotal level that some people disliked the idea; with my own ears I've heard people say about King, "He talked about peace, but everywhere he went there were riots." I'm sure some people felt he was a Communist agitator and thus unworthy of the honor -- and in fact the nearest thing to an official rebuke of the 1964 Prize came from King's biggest enemy in the government, J. Edgar Hoover, who used the occasion to call King the biggest liar in America. Hoover was defended in print by William F. Buckley, who (presumably not knowing how much Hoover was persecuting King) claimed that King was wrong to blame the FBI for failing to prevent violence against civil rights workers in the South, while the award was also denounced by novelist John O'Hara in a column that apparently isn't available to read online. President Johnson, whose opinion is the only one that counts in a comparison to the present Chinese government, did not denounce King or his award, and was more likely to do the opposite at that optimistic moment for progressive liberalism and the civil rights movement.

In the present Information Age, the Nobel committee and the Chinese government take starkly opposed positions on the role and rights of global opinion. The Nobel committee states quite plainly that the more China plays an important global role, the more its internal practices are rightfully subject to international scrutiny and public criticism. Exactly because information media are global in scope, China has probably become more insistent than ever that the country's government is no one's business outside China -- that foreigners aren't even entitled to an opinion to the extent that any opinion "interferes" with Communist sovereignty. While foreigners have no right to conspire materially to overthrow the Chinese government, they have every right granted them by their respective governments, on top of the prerogatives of conscience, to pass judgment on China, the United States, or any other nation, as well as Islam, Christianity or any other religion. There is such a thing as tyranny in the world, though you'd be excused for wanting to deny that after hearing Americans complain so much about their own country, and the Nobel committee has a right to take Chinese people's word for it. Even if a majority of Chinese are complacent and acquiescent, as are majorities everywhere, the persecution of individual non-violent dissidents should subject China to international shame. If we believe in democracy, and if democracy must eventually become global in scope for the sake of the species, then everyone on Earth is accountable to everyone else. At a time when other nations supposedly look to China as a model of rational development under a purportedly meritocratic oligarchy in the guise of the people's representatives, Chinese repression of dissent is a proper subject for global discussion.

The Democrats' 'Unpopular' Values and the Need for Scare Tactics

The latest New York Review of Books has a pessimistic forecast for the congressional elections from political writer Michael Tomasky. Pessimism's nothing new on the liberal front, but Tomasky's article deserves attention for his even more demoralizing analysis of long-term Democratic weakness. You don't have to be a Democrat to be demoralized by what he writes.

Tomasky contends that there's a profound rhetorical gap separating Democrats and Republicans, the latter enjoying repeated success at framing political debates around their values while the former often seem inexplicably inarticulate about their own values. If Democrats have a hard time spinning a vision, Tomasky suggests, that may be because they know, or are afraid, that their core values are simply unpopular with the American electorate, or less popular than "Republican" values, i.e. those values that Republicans have successfully identified with their own cause. The situation is so messed up, he suggests, that Americans seem to like what Democrats do, but not what they believe. Tomasky's short list of "Democratic" values supposedly rejected by Americans is alarming.

In American politics, Republicans routinely speak in broad themes and tend to blur the details, while Democrats typically ignore broad themes and focus on details. Republicans, for example, speak constantly of “liberty” and “freedom” and couch practically all their initiatives—tax cuts, deregulation, and so forth—within these large categories. Democrats, on the other hand, talk more about specific programs and policies and steer clear of big themes. There is a reason for this: Republican themes, like “liberty,” are popular, while
Republican policies often are not; and Democratic themes (“community,” “compassion,” “justice”) are less popular, while many specific Democratic programs—Social Security, Medicare, even (in many polls) putting a price on carbon emissions—have majority support. This is why, when all else fails, Democrats try to scare people about the threat to Social Security if the GOP takes over, as indeed they are doing right now.

What Democrats have typically not done well since Reagan’s time is connect their policies to their larger beliefs. In fact they have usually tried to hide those beliefs, or change the conversation when the subject arose. The result has been that for many years Republicans have been able to present their philosophy as somehow truly “American,” while attacking the Democratic belief system as contrary to American values.

"Community," "compassion" and "justice" aren't popular, while "liberty" is. Tomasky isn't even arguing that Republicans have made it so, only that they've taken advantage of Americans' alleged bias in favor of liberty at the apparent expense of communal values. Americans aren't rejecting Democratic appeals to community, compassion and justice, because Tomasky says Democrats aren't making those appeals. That would seem to mean that an already-existing hostility to those communal values makes many Americans reflexively hostile to Democratic policies unless they see an immediate personal benefit from them or happen to be angry for the moment at Republicans.

Tomasky offers no statistical basis from polling data that his three communal values are as unpopular as he claims. For all we know, he may infer the fact from election results from 1980 forward; if Republicans won most of the time, it must mean that voters reject certain values. But if Democrats themselves, on Tomasky's own testimony, "hide" their beliefs, how is any election a referendum on them? For that matter, why should voters assume that the Democratic party actually upholds those values if Democrats hide their beliefs? Tomasky seems to be making assumptions that aren't necessarily justified about the assumptions voters make. He also offers little practical advice, implying that Democrats need to find a way to make their policies appear "American" and "patriotic" rather than "compassionate," etc. But if voters identify American patriotism with "freedom" and "liberty," as Tomasky concedes, how do you convince them that policies allegedly at odds with "liberty" (as will certainly be alleged) are more patriotic than those of the party that wraps itself in the flag and proclaims liberty throughout the land? I'm still not convinced that the communal values are as hopeless as Tomasky thinks; they simply need more credible expression than Democrats can give them.

Reading the article more cynically, however, I did find something that Democrats might find useful. Tomasky anticipates that Republican control of either house of Congress will result in countless congressional investigations of the Obama administration, whether sincerely or sanely motivated or not. At his highest pitch of alarm, he suggests that these expected inquiries could lead to "another impeachment drama." There, rather than in repeating the usual Social Security alarms, is where the good old politics of fear might be applied most usefully, as Tomasky himself hints:

Republicans would deny that impeachment is ultimately on their minds. But why wouldn’t it be? They have shown repeatedly that they play to their base, and much of their base already believes that Obama is probably not an American citizen and therefore is an illegitimate president. In a Harris Poll from March, 24 percent of Republicans even agreed that Obama “may be the Antichrist.” When your most loyal voters think that, not trying to remove the man from office would amount to malpractice. If the Democrats are worried about the
much-discussed “enthusiasm gap” between Republicans’ voters and theirs, perhaps bringing these issues out of the shadows would help close it.

This just might work. While it seems extremely unlikely that the GOP will win the Senate majority it would need to convict Obama of any offense, it's probably worth it for Democrats to insinuate as much as possible that Republican congressional candidates have an agenda to overthrow the Executive Branch by a quasi-legal coup d'etat in the next two years. Most Democratic pols and strategists are probably too reasonable to take the threat seriously themselves, but given what Republicans say about Democrats, waving the pre-bloodied shirt of partisan impeachment conspiracy could well get those precious independents worked up against the Republicans, too. Is this suggestion dishonest or dishonorable? Well, I said I was in cynical mode right now, and I also think it'd be entertaining to have every Republican congressional candidate tell us now if they have any plans to remove the President from office. If they deny it, they might lose votes from their own base. It looks like a win-win scenario to me .

Whatever Happened to Doug Hoffman?

A small item in the local paper marks the apparent end of a nearly-meteoric political career: Conservative party congressional candidate Doug Hoffman has abandoned his second campaign to represent the 23rd District of New York in the House of Representatives and endorsed his Republican rival, Matt Doheny. Here's a more detailed version of events.

Hoffman, who nearly defeated Democrat Bill Owens as the Conservative candidate in a special election last year, was expected to win this year's GOP primary, but was upset by Doheny. Hoffman captured national attention as one of the most serious and successful challengers to Republican hegemony over conservative voters, benefiting from rank-and-file discontent with an anointed Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, who was perceived by some as more liberal than the Democrat in the race. Scozzafava eventually dropped out of the race. While Hoffman lost the final vote, a star seemed to have been born and his takeover of the local GOP was taken as a foregone conclusion. But just as they did last year, local Republican leaders opposed Hoffman, this time in favor of Doheny, who proved more palatable to the rank and file than Scozzafava. Hoffman tried to make abortion a major issue in the primary, noting that Doheny would permit abortions during the first trimester of pregnancy, and portrayed his rival as a "fast-talking lawyer" who represented Wall Street rather than Main Street. While Hoffman secured the Conservative line for a second time and recently won a Right-to-Life endorsement, many local observers felt that he ran a disorganized and ill-prepared campaign.

Once he lost the primary (it should be recalled that there was no primary for the special election) Hoffman rapidly lost credibility as an independent challenger. The feeling was that if he'd lost the GOP primary when it was his for the taking due to his fresh celebrity, he was a hopelessly flawed campaigner with less chance for victory than ever. His fate was apparently sealed when the Upstate New York Tea Party indicated that they were ready to abandon Hoffman in favor of Doheny. Determined to deny Democrats continued control of Congress, the UNYTEA deemed compromise the order of the day and urged Hoffman to put ideological solidarity before personal ambition. In short, they appealed to lesser-evilism and declared their willingness to settle for Doheny's degree of conservatism over Hoffman's presumably purer brew. Hoffman himself, his finances uncertain in the absence of the national support he enjoyed last year, finally accepted this logic and withdrew. His name will remain on the ballot since, unlike Rick Lazio, he has no judicial nomination to accept, but it'll only attract last-ditch protest voters in November.

The anti-Democratic hysteria whipped up by the right-wing media may have destroyed the potential for independent political action on the "right" for the foreseeable future. Lesser-evilism prevails among reactionaries who can imagine no worse fate for the country than continued Democratic rule. While it appears that Matt Doheny is a legitimately lesser evil for conservatives than Dede Scozzafava, it also seems that the Democrats are a greater evil than ever in their eyes. One wonders what would have happened had Scozzafava run in and won this year's primary. Would conservatives have settled for her rather than take another chance on Hoffman? The fact that she didn't run may be victory enough for conservatives in NY23, but the fact remains that they chose a candidate anointed by the same people, as far as I can tell, who anointed Scozzafava last year. What sort of victory is that? Only the future can tell.

So Much For Those Libertarian Tea Partiers

A new survey discloses that self-identified Tea Partiers identify strongly with the Religious Right. This finding belies some reports I've read recently that suggested that the TP movements, due to their focus on fiscal conservatism, would downplay "culture war" issues. It would also seem to dispel most remaining hopes that the TPs might nudge the nation toward a more libertarian orientation. I realize that not all libertarians are secular humanists, and the TPs surveyed remain more distrustful of government than Republicans in general, but it was probably the supposed libertarian sentiment of the early Tea Parties that created some early optimistic expectations. Historians might have liked to see a sequence of surveys from the early outbreaks of 2009 until now, to see how "Christian conservative" sentiment has fluctuated over the evolution of the TP phenomena. If the percentages seem alarmingly high now, they may have been less alarming a year ago or more, and the apparent theocratic bias of the present movement may signify a shaking-out process as disillusioned libertarians and other independents dumped their tea into the sink and left the parties to the reactionaries and the Republican clean-up teams.

I'm writing on the fly and haven't had time to look at the actual findings in depth, but here's the Public Religion Research Institute website for future reference.

Tempest in a Nevada Teapot

There is no single Tea Party movement in America, no Tea Party Central that dictates to local chapters, though some organizations might like to fill that role. Fresh proof of the decentralized and sometimes contradictory nature of the Tea phenomenon comes from Nevada, where Scott Ashjian, an independent candidate for U.S. Senate representing the Tea Party of Nevada has released an audiotape of a meeting with the Republican candidate, Sharron Angle, at which she urged Ashjian to drop out of the race. Angle herself is often identified as the "tea party" challenger to Senator Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, and TP support is credited with lifting her to victory in the Republican primary. Ashjian, however, has remained in the race, resisting pressure from Republicans and other TP groups who want him to withdraw. Ashjian's meeting with Angle was brokered by the chairman of the Tea Party of Nevada, who has resigned following his candidate's release of the recording.

According to reports of the recording, Angle appeals to Ashjian on lesser-evil principles, warning him that if he remains in the race, Reid will be re-elected. She's modest in her promises to Ashjian, offering him at best access to Jim DeMint and other Senators with whom Angle claims to have "juice." While Ashjian spurned Angle's offer, it's interesting to note one of his own demands: a formal apology from the Tea Party Express, one of the most successful TP fundraising groups, for accusing him of being a fraud and a plant, running only in order to divide the conservative vote and ensure Reid's re-election. A genuine fraud, I suspect, wouldn't care what the Express thought of him or want an apology from them.

Angle has caught fresh heat from the Nevada media, and possibly within her own camp, for her recorded criticisms of the Republican party. There's little cause for outrage here: Angle ran as an insurgent with an infiltration agenda to reform the GOP, so her criticism of the national party establishment should surprise or offend no one. It's not as if she's saying she'll cross the aisle and vote with Democrats, after all. She's also within her rights to ask Ashjian to step aside. While I disagree with lesser-evil arguments, people are still free to make them. Ashjian has been criticized for publicizing the recording; for some observers, it's the ultimate proof that his only purpose has been to sabotage the Republican candidate. But unless he made some promise of confidentiality to Angle that he has now broken, it's his prerogative to publicize the offer of a deal that he's rejected. The individual most clearly disgraced by the episode is the erstwhile chairman of the Tea Party of Nevada, who upon resigning immediately endorsed Angle. His purpose in arranging the meeting, apparently, was to convince his candidate, Ashjian, to step aside in Angle's favor. If some Nevadans accuse Ashjian of being an impostor, what do they make of a TP leader who'd decided to sacrifice political independence on the altar of lesser-evilism? He seems to be one of the Tea Partiers who've opted for the short cut to power through infiltration of the Republican party. His reasons are self-evidently reactionary; he hates or fears the Democratic party and liberalism. He may not represent Tea Partyism as a whole, but his example shows that politics driven by fear or hatred will never really be independent.

To Strangle Sharron Angle: the Double Standard of Reality and Fantasy

"W hich is worse?" Mr. Right asked Mr. Peepers the other day, "Carl Paladino telling Fred Dicker, 'I'll take you out,' or Harry Reid saying he wants to strangle Sharron Angle?"

"Paladino," Mr. Peepers answered promptly.

"You would," Mr. Right scoffed at the Democratic loyalist, "That's just more proof of the double standard that prevails on your side."

Had he asked me, I'd also have said Paladino. "Wanting to strangle" someone has become too much of a figure of speech to be taken seriously as an actual threat of violence. To me, such a remark doesn't compare to a politician threatening a reporter face-to-face, as was the case with Paladino and Dicker. If I'm applying a double standard, it's not based on partisanship or ideology but on an assumption, based itself on admittedly limited acquaintance, that Carl Paladino means what he says. If he wants to present himself as an unconventional politician, he shouldn't be surprised if people take his words as real threats, not typical political rhetoric.

Subsequently, Mr. Right defended Paladino's conduct by writing: "Tell you what: Any member of any organization whose photographer stuck his camera in my daughter's bedroom at night WOULD BE threatened with bodily harm and I'm sure you'd react the same way." This only shows why Mr. Right himself would be unfit for political office. On the other hand, he cites a professor of mass communications who contends that Dicker crossed a line of propriety while confronting Paladino, while Mr. Right himself is not uncritical of the Republican candidate. The Paladino-Dicker showdown was sparked by Paladino's blind accusation that his Democratic rival, Andrew Cuomo, had cheated on his wife during their marriage. In Mr. Right's opinion, Paladino's accusation was "reckless, crude and ignorant."

To be as fair as possible to Mr. Right, I decided to track down Senator Reid's remark about strangling Angle, his Republican challenger in Nevada. Here a problem arose: there appears to be no evidence whatsoever online of Reid ever saying such a thing. Given the breadth of the Republican reactionary blogosphere, had Reid said such a thing it should have been easy to find in transcript or YouTube format, with time and place referenced. Nothing of the kind exists. Mr. Right himself does not tell us when or where Reid said it.

I suspect that Mr. Right, while skimming the surface of the right-wing blog bog, came across this site, which is the first thing that shows up when you do a Google search including "Reid," "Sharron Angle" and "strangle." Read the blog itself and you find that the source isn't Reid but Angle -- and she isn't even accusing her opponent of saying that he'd like to strangle her. She's simply stating metaphorically that Reid tried to strangle her general election campaign by swamping Nevada with a massive ad buy immediately following her Republican primary win. Nor by headlining the "strangle" charge did the original blogger mean to accuse Reid of a desire to choke the life from Angle's body with his own hands. Mr. Right has most likely read too much into this headline by not reading the story closely enough.

The apparently fictional Reid quote isn't Mr. Right's only evidence for a double standard on the subject of physical threats. He cites Rahm Emmanuel "pronouncing a number of political enemies 'dead' [while] no one bats an eye," for instance. As for whether Paladino's threat to Dicker proves him "too angry" for elected office, Mr. Right absurdly offers the by-now infamously dispassionate President Obama as a counter-example of a liberal Democrat who doesn't take criticism well. Notice the change of subject. Mr. Right doesn't dare claim that Obama threatened to "take out" Fox News or its talking heads or do anything metaphorically similar. But he's desperate to show that Carl Paladino is not uniquely disqualified by his temperament from holding public office, so he reaches for any potential comparison in order to normalize Paladino's flash of thuggishness.

Finally, though, Mr. Right decides that personalities aren't the real issue in the New York gubernatorial campaign -- policies are. That's his cue to blame the economic crisis on Andrew Cuomo in his capacity as HUD secretary during the Clinton administration by encouraging the issuance of mortgages to poor people and somehow, presumably, strongarming banks to bundle and commodify and trade and insure them into an unsustainable bubble. I agree that the housing bubble should be an issue in this campaign so the extent to which Wall Street blew it up can be made clear. And if Cuomo does bear a share of blame, that's all the more reason for New Yorkers to consider third-party candidates as untainted alternatives to both Cuomo and Paladino. When political writers neglect to tell you that these alternatives exist, I'd really like to strangle them.

Thomas Friedman sees 'Third Party Rising' ... in 2012

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman is still trying to summon his hoped-for "radical center" into battle to topple the American Bipolarchy, though he's adopted the slightly more realistic target of 2012 instead of expecting the now-impossible for 2010. In "Third Party Rising," his latest column , he once more tentatively identifies the "radical center" constituency while proposing a platform for it.

[After a week in Silicon Valley, Friedman reports that] I continue to be astounded by the level of disgust with Washington, D.C., and our two-party system — so much so that I am ready to hazard a prediction: Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her — one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome.

Notice the singular noun, candidate. Friedman is thinking presidential here, for good or ill. This Promised One's constituency could include "at least two serious groups, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, developing “third parties” to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline. These mystery groups, presumably, are the building blocks or core cells of the Radical Center. Friedman has discussed people like these before; they're aspiring technocrats, capitalist innovators who believe in cooperating with government, not fighting it at every turn. They are frustrated with Democrats and disgusted with Republicans -- or is that vice versa? Give either party control of the Executive and Legislative branches and you still get "suboptimal" government, and Friedman says "Suboptimal is O.K. for ordinary times, but these are not ordinary times."



How to optimize government?

We have to rip open this two-party duopoly and have it challenged by a serious third party that will talk about education reform, without worrying about offending unions; financial reform, without worrying about losing donations from Wall Street; corporate tax reductions to stimulate jobs, without worrying about offending the far left; energy and climate reform, without worrying about offending the far right and coal-state Democrats; and proper health care reform, without worrying about offending insurers and drug companies.

Friedman submits a sound bite for a 2012 third-party debate participant: "“These two parties are lying to you. They can’t tell you the truth because they are each trapped in decades of special interests. I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world’s leaders, not the new Romans.” Sounds good, but people have said it before. Every third party candidate who manages to crack public awareness says that the big two are lying, that they're captives of special interests, etc. Does Friedman expect that Americans will finally be ready to listen two years from now, or does he have some idea of making a third-party candidate more credible than his or her predecessors have seemed in the past? Are we simply to wait until he unveils the Promised One from the "serious groups" of the east or west and invests that One with credibility all by himself? Are the serious groups doing any grass-roots work, at "coffee parties" (whatever happened to...?) or elsewhere, to cultivate state and local Radical Center tickets, or do they and Friedman expect us to stake everything, Perot-style, on some charismatic technocrat's presidential run? From the evidence we have now, if Friedman's "serious groups" do plan to stake all on the Presidency, they may not be as serious as he claims.

Why Do Americans Kill?

The latest issue of the Journal of American History arrived in the mail over the weekend. Most of the time, the first things I read in the quarterly are the book reviews, which keep one up to date on the latest historiographic trends and debates. One of the first reviews in the new number considers Randolph Roth's American Homicide, a study designed to explain the high U.S. murder rate compared to other "affluent democracies." From David Sikenat's review, this passage jumped out at me:

Building on the work of the criminologist Gary LaFree, Roth argues that two related factors correlate most heavily to the murder rate: 'the proportion of adults who say they trust their government to do the right thing and the proportion who believe that most public officials are honest' (p. 17). In essence, the less faith Americans have in their government, the more likely they are to commit murder. For instance, the murder rate declined significantly during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency, when Americans had significant faith in government, only to have the murder rate rebound in the sixties and seventies because of unrest brought about by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate.

The rest of Sikenat's review questions Roth's methodology and the accuracy of his homicide statistics without comment on the LaFree thesis on which Roth's argument appears to depend. LaFree's book Losing Legitimacy is available online as a Google Book; here is a relevant chapter that clarifies his view on trust or faith in government. Taken at third hand, LaFree's finding could be interpreted to attribute murderous tendencies to an ideological lack of faith in government, such as expressed by many American reactionaries today. Skimming over LaFree's actual writing tells a somewhat different story. He argues that homicide (if not all violent crime) increases due to loss of faith in government, as in the Sixties, but isn't necessarily influenced by lack of faith. In any event, LaFree attempts to correlate homicide rates with very broad public-opinion surveys, which is to say that, at most, American murderousness might be correlated with the level of anti-government sentiment, though not necessarily anti-government sentiment itself. It also seems that you're more likely to kill, based on LaFree's research, if you think that government isn't doing something it's supposed to than if you think government is doing something it shouldn't.

It's unclear whether LaFree or Roth goes on to compare the American stats with those for other affluent democracies. It is clear, however, that LaFree, at least, is writing about street crime, not the amoklauf that is still largely an American phenomenon. Nevertheless, theirs is a disturbing suggestion that ought to be researched further. Americans have, arguably, a more complicated relationship to government as a concept and as a fact, and on emotional and psychological as well as legal levels, than people of other lands. If that argument can be proven, and a link between that relationship and criminal impulses confirmed, it might say something damning about the American experiment or what's become of it.

A Nietzschean interpretation of American Politics?

It may seem like there's a lot of resentment in the air in this country, but Jack Bronston would say you're spelling it wrong. In an op-ed for the Sunday Times Union, the former state senator suggests that Americans, and many people elsewhere, are suffering from a surfeit of ressentiment, a French word popularized worldwide and reified by Friedrich Nietzsche into a term of political science. As explained most thoroughly in his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche uses ressentiment to describe the feeling that those who are better off than us are so by immoral means. Ressentiment is the starting point of that sklavenmoral which the philosopher identifies as the root of morality in general. In the more ancient past, he argues, there wasn't good and evil, but simply good and bad, bad simply meaning less good, less adequate. Morality and evil come into the picture when those worse off, instead of conceding their inferiority or the superiority of their betters, insist that the betters cheated or sinned their way into superiority. In a deft bit of intellectual or emotional jujitsu, the "slaves" managed to convert their betters to a moral viewpoint, with consequences Nietzsche finds somewhat regrettable.

Bronston defines ressentiment in his own terms as "a feeling of helplessness, envy and hatred by people who feel they have been taken advantage of by powerful rulers or more favored adversaries who ... have acted immorally to gain their advantage." Bronston believes that times of economic upheaval like the present make feelings of helplessness more widespread and increase the potential for ressentiment to run wild in the political realm. Rather than provoking the "slaves" of the 21st century to rewrite the rules anew and impose a new morality, economically-driven ressentiment, Bronston proposes, simply makes the masses vulnerable to demagogues of both "left" and "right." The danger of ressentiment, in his view, is its potential to empower authoritarian rulers, whether they be Christian or Muslim fundamentalists or Russian nationalists. Strangely, Marxists aren't listed among the threats though they would probably be the modern exemplars of ressentiment in Nietzche's view. Maybe Bronston doesn't identify Marxism with the sort of irrationality that defines ressentiment in his own analysis.

In Nietzsche's own time, I doubt that he thought that more than a handful of people were not governed by some sort of ressentiment, since morality of the sort he denounced had spread universally by the processes he described in the Genealogy. As Bronston himself hints, ressentiment crosses class and cultural lines in this country, including entrepreneurial conservatism as the sklavenmoral of the master class. I'm not sure Bronston or any other modern pundit can adopt Nietzschean terminology in part only. Bronston wants to oppose ressentiment to some simple idea of rationality, or some acknowledgement that opportunities still exist for free people, but the correct opposite to Nietzchean ressentiment is that pre-morality that exalts the strong and despises whatever falls short. Only libertarianism, perhaps, comes anywhere close to that dubious ideal, and I don't think that's what Bronston wants for America or the world. What he seems to want, from the evidence of the column, is for Americans to shake off the feeling of helplessness that he thinks fuels modern ressentiment. We need to feel empowered again, but to please Bronston, we have to do so without the aid of demagogic politicians or preachers. That would seem to oblige us to perpetrate some giant economic revival on our own initiative, perhaps without concerning ourselves with political power. But Bronston's critique of alleged ressentiment begs a question: does he believe that we should not believe that people have acted immorally in bringing us to our present predicament? Does he think that there's no need for some sort of moral revolt from below to tame the banks and the brokers? He doesn't give us enough evidence to guess his true views. We know only that he wants us to go about things rationally and not follow blindly the rabblerousers and mad mullahs of our time. That's a fair request, but it doesn't really tell us what is to be done. Maybe Bronston doesn't consider that his job, which may have been only to tell us to question our motives and think before we act. We certainly should think, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't judge, and if Bronston is telling us not to do that, his advice may prove worse than useless.

Idiot of the Week: Rick Sanchez

For turning a career setback into career suicide, I nominate the erstwhile host of "Rick's List," a prime-time program on CNN that has been terminated to make room for the Spitzer-Parker "don't call it Crossfire" show. Sanchez feels victimized, not only by his network but by white people in general, Jews in particular, and that notorious bigot John Stewart especially. The details are here, with a link to the transcript of Sanchez's doomsday interview on Sirius satellite radio. I never watched his show so I can't judge it -- though he may judge me for my neglect, since it would seem to show my anti-Hispanic, anti-poor people prejudices. I presume he didn't talk on his show like he does in the interview or else the show would have ended sooner. He was still going to have a CNN job, apparently, until last night. Perhaps he can get into the conspiracy theory business now.

The Anti-Bipolarchy of New York: Greens and Libertarians agree to disagree with the two-party system

If the Green Party stands to the left of the Democratic Party, as can be safely assumed, and the Libertarian Party stands to the right of the Republican Party, as is widely assumed, it might also be assumed that Greens and Libertarians should be more hostile toward each other than Democrats and Republicans are. But just as Churchill and Stalin could join forces against Hitler, Greens and Libertarians have recently found a common cause in opposition to the American Bipolarchy. Seeing themselves as the truly independent alternative parties, as opposed to such pretenders as the Conservative and Working Families parties, Greens and Libertarians have often taken a principled stand in favor of easier ballot access and equal participation in candidate debates for both parties, as well as other independents. This collaboration was highlighted by a joint appearance in Albany yesterday by Howie Hawkins and Warren Redlich, the Green and Libertarian candidates for governor of New York.

At a time when more New Yorkers ought to grow suspicious of both Republican Carl Paladino's irresponsible temperament and Democrat Andrew Cuomo's potentially corrupting establishment ties, can we hope for a backlash against the Lazio Logic that condemns us to a "real choice" between two candidates even when neither appeals to us much? If so, Hawkins and Redlich are the candidates poised to benefit, though Kristin Davis and Charles Barron present alternatives for this campaign. In Albany yesterday, Redlich and Hawkins challenged the imperative of ideological solidarity that sustains the Bipolarchy by each denouncing both Cuomo and Paladino. Simply by doing so, they prove the necessity they assert for their inclusion in any gubernatorial debates; "left," as defined by Cuomo, and "right," as defined by Paladino, are not the only options for New York.

Most New Yorkers adhere to the Democratic-Republican Bipolarchy because they accept the premises of lesser-evilism. A conservative must hold his nose and vote for Paladino to prevent the worst-case scenario of Cuomo's election, while a liberal must also hold his nose while voting for Cuomo to prevent the even-worse scenario of Paladino's election. While Greens and Libertarians, to my knowledge, have no plan to replace Democrats and Republicans as a New Bipolarchy, it seems reasonable to ask whether the two parties would be as civil toward each other should both have a more realistic chance of winning power as they are now as allied outsiders. The two parties presumably have profound philosophical differences (though thinkers elsewhere have proposed a "green libertarian" synthesis that would, for instance, attack pollution as a violation of individual rights), and we should not expect them to minimize or deny those differences.

What each party should avoid in the future as both gain strength is the partisan exaggeration of philosophical differences that has transformed our present Bipolarchy into a paralyzed parody of consensus without consensus, an agreement never to agree. A Green or Libertarian has every right to declare his own policies preferable for the state or the nation. He has less right, intellectually at least, to declare the other's policies intolerable. Democratic republicanism flourishes, paradoxically enough, in an environment of relative indifference to the outcome of elections, in which voters vigorously declare their individual preferences but are willing to settle for any option chosen by a majority rather than feeling forced to settle for a next-worst option out of fear of a supposedly intolerable worst. We may perceive Greens and Libertarians as standing further apart from each other than Democrats and Republicans, but that's only when we plot them on a fictional left-right axis. If the two insurgent parties, and others with them, can find a common alternative language for articulating their principled differences while transcending the polarizing left-right paradigm, they might do their country a great service regardless of which one wins a big election first.

'The revolution will not be tweeted.'

This week's New Yorker includes an essay by Malcolm Gladwell expressing skepticism toward large claims currently being made for the revolutionary potential of online social media like Facebook and Twitter. There was supposed to have been a "Twitter Revolution," for instance, in the former Soviet republic of Moldova, while Twitter allegedly served as an essential organizing tool for protests against the supposedly stolen election in Iran last year. But Gladwell observes that the social media did less to organize dissidents in those countries than to keep them in contact with western sympathizers. He believes that social media's potential in such risky circumstances is limited because those media do little to cultivate the strong ties among "critical friends" upon which effective resistance movements, e.g. the southern sit-ins of the 1960s and the Eastern European protests of 1989, depend.

Gladwell distinguishes between strong ties and weak ties, noting that social media specialize in the latter. The proliferation of weak ties made possible by social media are useful for disseminating information and collaborative creativity, but "seldom lead to high-risk activism." What makes the ties weak is an apparent inherent limit on what you can expect or demand from your Facebook friends in a pinch. They make it easier for people to participate in a wider range of low-risk activities, but Gladwell doubts that they do much to increase anyone's motivation to take principled risks. "Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice," he writes. Social media, then, give us an option to do less when the options used to be all or nothing.

Social media will make poor platforms for high-risk activism, Gladwell claims, because they aren't conducive to the hierarchical organization he deems necessary for effective action. Instead of organizational hierarchies capable of setting goals and priorities, social media specialize in creating decentralized networks. These networks "can't think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error," Gladwell presumes, asking: "How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?"

Gladwell's message -- "[I]f you're taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy," has obvious implications outside the realm of social media. In our usual context, it throws into question the usefulness of social media for people attempting to build alternatives to the American Bipolarchy. That's not as risky an agenda as defying the Iranian government, but were it as low-risk a proposition as it seems it should be it should have been done already. Can social media help? Howard Dean's campaign in 2004 proved that the Internet could spark real enthusiasm for a candidate, while Ron Paul's campaign in 2008 proved that the Internet can be a formidable fundraising tool. When it came to counting votes, neither candidate lived up to his online hype. In Dean's case, online enthusiasm proved no substitute for oldschool door-to-door politicking in Iowa, while Paul's fundraising base was broad but insufficiently concentrated anywhere geographically to win primaries. Since the appeal of social media is based in large part on the opportunities it creates for making distant friends, there'll always be a national or presidential temptation tied to online third-partyism. Social media also cultivate networks based on pre-existing affinities, while elections must be won by persuading a broader base of people who don't necessarily agree with you in the beginning. To win an election anywhere you have to have a local concentration of forces and resources. Does social media enhance anyone's ability to collect and control these forces? The evidence is insufficient, but the counter-example of the Tea Party movements shows that old-fashioned mass demonstrations still make a grater impression than any virtual demonstration can. For a while to come, people will probably remain more impressed by an appeal from a live person than from an e-mail or tweet. The majority of Americans may yet remain outside all online social networks, as may the majority of people in any given electoral district. Anyone who thinks that social media alone will spark any sort of insurrection is living in science fiction.

They Don't Like Tea in the Big City?

Kathleen Parker is on the verge of at least fifteen minutes of fame. The Pulitzer-prize winning op-ed columnist and relatively moderate Republican will be Elliot Spitzer's sparring partner on a new CNN talking-head program, and for that purpose the South Carolinian country girl has moved to New York City. Her experiences so far have provoked speculations in her latest column about the sociological background to the nation's ideological divide.

In simplest terms, Parker proposes that people in areas of high population density are more tolerant of a degree of government that people from less densely populated regions would find intrusive and needless. While she's already chafing under restrictions that may be unique to New York, she appears to concede in general terms that more government is required where there are more people. "Simply put, the more people cram themselves into small spaces, the more government will be involved in their lives," she writes, "If you live in a large urban area, chances are you are accustomed to lots of rules and regs. But to the newcomer, fresh from living largely independently by her own wits, the oppression of bureaucratic order is a fresh sort of hell."

While Parker accepts the necessity of a higher degree for regulation of urban life, she won't be the first person to complain that New York under Michael Bloomberg seems to over-regulate beyond reason. She cites the mayor's notorious order banning trans-fats from the city, which leads Parker's cable guy to complain that he can only get good donuts in New Jersey these days. On her own, Parker bristles at the thought that you can't light a candle on a birthday cupcake in an office building. On the other hand, she adds, "You can't have 8 million people acting out their individual impulses. What if half the city's residents decided to fire up the Weber for some burgers on a given Saturday?"

Parker's complaints are more libertarian than conservative; call them reactionary and split the difference. "It is one thing to create laws that protect us from another's stupidity, but shouldn't the cable guy have the right to be stupid?" she asks, "Every now and then? I haven't eaten a doughnut in 20 years, but suddenly I have a nearly uncontrollable urge to hit Krispy Kreme." In other words, she at least pretends to feel an impulse to do something she admits is unhealthy in order to feel more free. Were she in a more reflective mood, she might consider whether her perceived lack of freedom is consistent with her actual level of freedom within the American social order. Parker is no great fan of the Tea Parties, but at times she seems to share their strange sense that they are less free than they actually are. She attributes this vague fellow feeling to her "low-density" upbringing,

Many so-called Everyday Americans who live in the oft-maligned red states essentially are people who live in more-open spaces and, therefore, see little need or benefit for government management of their lives. The frontier may be nearly gone, but the person who prefers wider horizons will have little use for bureaucrats bearing the latest government how-to (or how-not-to) document. Those who have opted to live in densely populated blue areas need third-party authorities to maintain order and figure they'll trade a little freedom for the convenience and cultural riches of city life.

Parker worries that these "completely different orientations toward life in general and the role of government specifically [can't] be reconciled." Each group will have its own answer to the serious question Parker means to raise: "At what point is the common good bad for people?" It'd be easy and glib to say that the common good by definition can't be bad for anyone, but nearly every word in Parker's question begs another question. What do we mean by "common good?" Who gets to define it? What does she mean by "people?" Individuals or society as a whole? You can even ask what she means by "bad?" Will anyone suffer in a material way? Will the country suffer? Or will some supposedly grown-up people simply feel bad because government somehow makes them feel like children?

Of course, the crucial debates of our time aren't about candles on cupcakes or trans-fat in donuts. I don't know if population density can determine people's attitudes toward regulating banks or oil drilling, but I will allow that a person's perception of how regulation impacts his own life could influence his attitude toward regulation in general as a political topic. Whether population density alone predicts that is still open to question. Some college towns across the country have pretty low population density when you don't count the actual campus, yet they are probably pretty consistently pro-government and pro-regulation. Still, Parker makes an important distinction between a demographic and a geographic explanation for current disagreements; this is not a problem to be solved simply by separating one whole region of the country from the rest. She also unwittingly raises the point that the current disagreements are as much matters of attitude, to say the least, as matters of fact. Low-density living may well cultivate a psychological aversion to "intrusive" government. If so, maybe a lot of people simply need to get their heads examined.

Another Republican Pledge: Indoctrinating Self-Reliance

Cal Thomas gives thumbs-up to the Congressional Republicans' "Pledge With America" in his newest column, but still finds something lacking in the campaign document. While he calls it "a refreshing reminder of the founding philosophy," Thomas misses any discussion of voters' role in reforming the country, apart from voting Republican. Had he read more closely, he might have noticed the bit I saw about our obligation to adopt different standards for judging candidates, choosing between them based on whether they promote "opportunity" and liberty, not whether they bring home the bacon to constituents. But Thomas isn't interested in how we vote, apart from the obvious partisan angle, as much as how we live after the 2010 elections. He observes a Republican promise to conduct a "responsible, fact-based conversation with the American people" on fiscal issues, but that seems to strike him as a little dry. He wants to know "what is expected of us?" but he knows what he expects.

As reactionary politicians in the middle of a populist moment, Republicans pander to perceived resentment of elites allegedly telling the rest of us how to live. As a partisan columnist promoting Republicans, Thomas usually sticks with the program. This week, however, he makes it clear that, as far as he's concerned, Republicans themselves need to tell the rest of us how to live.

Too many Americans have been riding the gravy train called 'entitlement' for too long and it is about to derail. Republicans should make weaning them from dependence on government a patriotic duty and the essence of liberty. Focus on those who have overcome poverty and let them serve as examples of what others can do. Let's talk about individuals demonstrating more responsibility for their lives and ensuring their own retirement, with Social Security returning to the insurance program it was originally designed to be: a safety net, not a hammock.

Thomas wants Republicans to instigate a cultural counter-revolution against eighty years of decadent entitlement.

Since the New Deal, there has been an unhealthy relationship between government and the people that has harmed both. But like illegal drugs, there would be little supply if the demand were not high. The idea that people are incapable of taking care of themselves and their immediate families would have been foreign to our Founding Fathers. What too many lack is not resources, but motivation. Remind politicians of the stories from our past and present about people who overcame obstacles, start teaching these stories to the kids in our schools.

Thomas is a typical reactionary who has complained often enough about indoctrination in public schools and elsewhere yet proves here that he objects not to the concept but only to the content of indoctrination. Since "all public policy is founded on an underlying philosophy about humanity and the world," good government and good citizenship would appear to depend upon the indoctrination of the right (or "Right") philosophy. While Thomas doesn't speak officially for the Republican party, he can be presumed to represent constituents who would like the GOP to implement the indoctrination program he recommends.

I can't say too much more about Thomas's agenda because, given the limited space of a column, it appears to be incomplete. For instance, he doesn't say what people should do when obstacles prove less surmountable than those overcome by his unnamed historical heroes, or what individuals or families should do should the vicissitudes of the economy and the Market leave them without security for their retirement. He doesn't explain why dependence upon a government of one's own making is so objectionable, or why the most likely alternative -- dependence upon private, unaccountable employers -- is so preferable. We can infer a moral preference for self-reliance based on a belief that Peter shouldn't be compelled to support Paul, but why the idea of mutual aid as an obligation of citizenship should seem unpatriotic to Thomas is unclear, just as it seems difficult to reconcile his insistence on self-reliance as the essence of public morality with his avowed Christianity. He seems readier to write off misery as the just desserts of irresponsibility than Jesus was, and more ready to hold up the wealthy as models for emulation than "the Master" ever was.

Until Thomas clarifies his views, perhaps in the course of a "responsible, fact-based conversation," I'll have to work under the assumption that he'd have the Republican party teach Americans, through the media and schools, that "every man for himself" is the highest moral principle and that "compete or die" is the supreme law of the land. Whether Republicans themselves propose to do this is a point of concern for Thomas. The possibility that they'd do so is a point of concern for us all.

Lazio Endorses Lesser-Evilism, not the Lesser Evil

Rick Lazio wants the world to know that he has not endorsed Republican nominee Carl Paladino for the New York gubernatorial election. He clearly reserves the right to blast his victorious rival, as he did earlier today on the radio. While withdrawing yesterday from the campaign, for which he had won the Conservative party line, Lazio insisted that Paladino, like Democratic candidate Andrew Cuomo, was a "deeply flawed individual," and that neither man had produced a real plan for economic recovery. I don't doubt that Lazio hates Paladino's guts right now, but his hatred may have blinded him to the implications of his actions.

Lazio claims that he was not pressured by Conservative party leaders, who were allegedly (and I think unreasonably) afraid that Lazio would not draw the 50,000 votes the party needs to retain automatic ballot status in the state, to drop out of the race. But if he was not pressured, and if the consolation-prize Republican nomination for a judicial post in a safely Democratic district -- he had to accept a nomination for another office to surrender the Conservative line for governor -- is no real incentive to quit, then I have to wonder what exactly Lazio thinks he was doing yesterday. The one thing he made clear in his belated concession speech is that he deemed the election of Andrew Cuomo "unacceptable" and did not want to be held responsible for such a calamity befalling New York. Lazio may want to convince himself that his comments did not even imply an endorsement of Paladino, but the real implication of his renunciation is that people who might have voted for him were better off voting for someone else in order to prevent the election of Cuomo. According to Bipolarchy logic the only way to thwart Cuomo is to support Paladino. If Lazio did not think this way himself -- or did not assume this unconsciously -- he would not have withdrawn from the race had he not somehow been pressured into doing so. If Lazio were not himself a bipolarchist he would have declared himself the viable alternative to both Cuomo and Paladino. He has not done so because he really can't see an alternative to the Republican-vs-Democrat choice that most people still consider the "real" one.

Rick Lazio is in denial right now because he's angry. I don't think he's lying consciously to the people so much as lying unconsciously to himself when he says he won't endorse Paladino. He's consoling himself by bitching out Paladino at every opportunity, as if to prove that he really is an independent voice, but his actions have proven otherwise.

The 'Enthusiasm Gap' and the 'Whiners'

The President and Vice-President are furious at what sympathizers perceive as an "enthusiasm gap" favoring Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. Tea-fueled Republicans are aroused, energized and optimistic, while Democrats are reportedly demoralized, apathetic and pessimistic. The Obama administration blames the enthusiasm gap on what the Vice-President calls liberal "whining" and on a perception that the Democrats have accomplished less than they actually have since the President took office. I think they miss the point. Obama and Biden want people to focus on legislative accomplishments, but instead we perceive a jobless recovery and feel a new sensitivity to national debt. Trumpeting health-care-reform legislation does nothing to calm these anxieties. Arguing that the economy would have been worse now had McCain been President is plausible but clearly not compelling. The only thing likely to motivate people to vote Democratic this fall is fear of the "wild Indians" of the Tea Party movement, but I suspect that Democrats have restrained themselves from really smearing the TPs because they remain uncertain about the breadth and depth of grassroots support for the movement. In any event, fear of the TPs does not yet appear to be driving Democratic base constituents to more energetic or enthusiastic activity on their party's behalf.

I feel like I should here insert my usual comment about liberals and progressives not having to settle for what Democrats insist is the best deal they can get. While Obama and Biden make a plausible argument that liberals shouldn't trade "not good enough" for "nothing" this November, liberals, progressives, leftists etc. have every right to deny their endorsement to would-be representatives whom they deem not good enough, regardless of the post-electoral consequences. But my affirmation of a right not to have to settle for the Democratic minimum comes with a corollary: the right to refuse to settle is not a right to apathy. If liberals and progressives are dissatisfied with the achievements of the Obama administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress, then why aren't they swelling the ranks of Green parties across the country? Why aren't they rallying behind independent challengers to Obama's left, or even forming anti-tea movements ("hard cider," maybe?) to transplant spinal material into Democratic ranks? Why, if they believe that Democratic failures prove that "the system" never works for them, do they let that system stand? A big part of the answer, I suspect, is that we're dealing with liberals: people who can't help worrying that if they've made so many people angry there really must be something wrong with their views, people appalled at the thought of imposing their will on the unwilling (despite what Republicans say about them) and people incapable of the "or else" mentality that energizes their antagonists. Many liberal Democrats really do seem to be the sort of people who curl up into a ball as soon as someone disagrees sharply with them. If so, should it surprise anyone if they adopt a capitulationist attitude at the first opportunity?

Fortunately for the President, by 2012 there'll probably be enough of a backlash against Republican policies among fickle independents -- pardon the redundancy if you perceive it -- to get Obama re-elected the way the Contract With America assured Bill Clinton's second term. Whether the next two years will be fortunate for the rest of us will be another story, but until liberals take a stand and accept no alternative to their full agenda we'll do this dance again as we've done it before. I suppose if liberals did that they wouldn't be liberals, but while they remain liberals I expect they'll tolerate us asking whether their mentality is really adequate for our time.

Who Were (or Are) the Progressives?

The Nation magazine has yielded to the great modern temptation to fill space in a slow news week with a list. Its cover story for the October 4 issue promises to reveal "The Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth Century" as ranked by academic Peter Dreier. Part of the point of the project, it seems, is to re-establish a positive definition for the word "progressive." While for most Americans the best known Progressive in the country is Flo the car-insurance saleswoman, in political circles the term has been hotly contested. Right wingers have tried to make it as much a pejorative as "liberal," while even self-styled progressives find the term problematic because of its historic associations.

Dreier implicitly defines progressives as "America's utopians, radicals and reformers," and notes that "Every generation needs to retell this story, reinterpret it and use it to help shape the present and future." In other words, he's not going to be bound by any definition based upon the people and the period that made "Progressive" a meaningful political term. Progressivism in 2010 isn't, or needn't be, the Progressivism of 1910. Dreier arguably rules out many of the original Progressives when he insists that "Progressive change happens from the bottom up." That's not what the original Progressives of 100 years ago believed. But many of them don't make Dreier's list. His bias in favor of grassroots excludes most politicians, which means his list doesn't include the man who did more to make the word meaningful than anyone else: Theodore Roosevelt, the ex-President and renegade Republican who ran as the "Bull Moose" Progressive candidate and outpolled an incumbent Republican in the 1912 presidential election. The Democratic winner, Woodrow Wilson, is considered a Progressive himself by some historians, but he doesn't make the cut either, while the fourth-place candidate in 1912, Socialist Eugene V. Debs, does. While Roosevelt and Wilson are out, frivolous figures like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Muhammad Ali are in. Franklin Roosevelt is out (a politician, remember) while Eleanor, predictably enough, makes the cut.

My guess is that Dreier wants to dodge one of the big charges against historical Progressivism: its unapologetic bias in favor of the state. Teddy Roosevelt was a big-government Republican and would probably have been a bigger-government Progressive President. He believed that government had to expand to meet the challenges of modern times and master the powers of finance, industry and labor that had grown alarmingly large by 1912. He is supposed to have said that a strong people has nothing to fear from a strong government, but if so, he said or wrote it before dystopian fantasies of totalitarian potential captured the American imagination and discredited the state as a concept. Even liberals most likely see the state as a necessary evil, and Dreier clearly sees it as something that must be pressured perpetually from below rather than something to be maintained by a conscientious unashamed political class of bureaucrats and regulators.

Classical Progressivism of the Roosevelt-Wilsonian stripe was technocratic. To the extent that it was an ideology, it exalted the expert over the machine boss who ruled by arbitrary will. To both "right" and "left," classical Progressivism has an odious heritage of condescending busybodyism. Par excellence, the Progressives of 100 years ago were the politicians who dared tell their fellow citizens, bosses and workers alike, how to live and how to run their lives. For some Progressives (including birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, who made Dreier's list), that imperative to govern people's lives extended to the now-toxic zone of eugenics, an enthusiasm for which Dreier has to apologize on Sanger's behalf. Eugenics is perhaps the ultimate instance of Progressive interference with personal freedom abhorred by right and left alike. But while Dreier wants to leave behind the statist, technocratic heritage of classical Progressivism, the ideas of Teddy Roosevelt, his peers and his followers might well be usefully re-examined today. We won't want to adopt all the trappings of classical Progressivism -- it shouldn't be a matter of Ivy League whites writing recommendations for the rest of us -- but the ideal of the state as the objective arbiter between capital and labor and the necessary regulator of finance and industry should not be thrown away in another existential outburst of freedom for its own sake. By that standard, Dreier's revised Progressive heritage is a disappointment, though it might have worth in the long run if it provokes a more thoughtful, less politically-correct consideration of the full heritage and potential of Progressivism.

Venezuela: Not a Dictatorship Yet?

According to the reports we get in the U.S., Hugo Chavez has been busily stacking the deck in a variety of ways to rig future Venezuelan elections in favor of his perpetual strongman rule. Over the past decade, many here who'd been willing to give Chavez and his "Bolivarian Socialist" movement some benefit of the doubt had written him off as a virtual dictator or caudillo in the unhappy Latin American tradition. An objective analysis of his measures would probably confirm that he's been trying to make it easier for his party to win. Apparently, however, Chavez hasn't done all he could to cinch things for himself.

The latest reports from Venezuela, based on the first official election returns, indicate that Chavez's party has retained a majority but lost seats in the country's legislature. Most importantly, Chavez has apparently fallen below the two-thirds threshold he requires in order to appoint judges and rule by temporary decrees. In theory, this puts a check on his ability to make himself into the dictator many outsiders assume that he already is. The results were reportedly influenced by voter dissatisfaction with a declining economy and by the willingness of opposition parties to coalesce under conditions where a lesser-evil approach might be justified. Looking back, it may be possible to say that the opposition preferred to accuse Chavez of cheating in the past in order to cover up their own irresponsible factionalism or electoral incompetence. I don't mean to deny that Chavez has ever cheated -- I'd be extremely surprised if he didn't -- but I would suggest that the menace he represents to freedom in Venezuela may be exaggerated, if not as grossly exaggerated as the menace Barack Obama purportedly represents to freedom in the United States in the eyes of Republicans and Tea Partiers. I don't doubt that Chavez thinks of himself as an indispensable man, but the early election results indicate, at the least, that there's a line -- let's call it the Iranian line -- that he hasn't yet crossed. He might cross that line when his own job is at stake again in 2012, but if the early reports hold up and he doesn't make a move to overturn or ignore the results, Chavez -- whatever you think of his policies or his personality -- may be entitled to a little more benefit of the doubt again.