'the liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done.'

In the past I've been skeptical toward the fearful belief of neocons and globalist liberals that Vladimir Putin is deliberately advancing an anti-liberal agenda worldwide. I'm now compelled to address an interview Putin gave last week to the Financial Times newspaper, in which he said that "the liberal idea has become obsolete." The first thing to make clear is that he's not advocating the abandonment of liberalism by any country, except possibly for the United States. As always, in keeping with his principle of respecting sovereignty unconditionally, Putin claims not to interfere with the domestic affairs of any other country. In each country, he says, the people must decide their own future. Of course, Putin has a habit of uncritically equating "the people" with the regime or ruling party, as if every dictatorship is its people's choice in some sense, if only in the sense that it's not some other people's choice. To make his point more clear, he goes out of his way to state that he does not endorse the domestic policies of President Maduro in Venezuela, implying that much could be done better there. Putin doesn't support Maduro against his opposition because he likes Maduro or his policies. As was the case with Hugo Chavez, Putin works with Maduro "because he [is] president ... not ... as an individual." If he prefers Maduro to the opposition, it's because he abhors the chaos he takes, with Libya as his model, to be the inevitable consequence of regime change driven by ideologically motivated international pressure. No country or part of the world has the right to impose its ideology or values on any other, Putin says. While we in the U.S. identify that habit of imposition with the neocons within the Republican party, liberal Democrats have been just as eager, as in Libya during Obama's administration, to force democratization where the soil doesn't seem to be ready. From Putin's outsider perspective, this may be part of the global "liberalism" he rejects. While he's often critical of Donald Trump in the interview, he interprets Trump's "America First" attitude as a kind of normalization of American foreign policy. "I don't think his desire to make America first is a paradox," Putin says, "I want Russia to be first, and that is not perceived as a paradox; there is nothing unusual there." He sees Trump's election as an uprising against a globalization process that seemingly has done Americans more harm than good, but he warns against an overreaction against globalization that could disrupt global order.

What is "liberalism" in Putin's mind? In the interview, he implicitly equates it with multiculturalism and suggests that the global migration crisis has proven an unconstrained multicultural approach "untenable." Taking what might be called a "populist" stance, the Russian argues that governments must look after "the interests of the core population" first. It's unclear what "core" translates, whether Putin simply means the majority of any country or is asserting some sort of ethnic essentialism implying that some people are more of the body than others. He also contrasts liberalism, more predictably, with "traditional values." He tries to have it both ways during the interview, denying that Russia is officially homophobic in any way while scoffing at modern notions of gender diversity. "Some things appear excessive to us," he says, "Let everyone be happy ... But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population." Are homosexuals not part of the core population? It's hard to tell in translation, but Putin also says that "Russia is an Orthodox Christian nation" and that "traditional values are more stable and more important for millions of people than this liberal idea."

Putin says something else interesting about liberalism as he sees it. The problem with liberalism isn't just that it embraces multiculturalism to an excessive extent, but that "nobody is doing anything." Specifically, they're not doing anything about migrant crime. Echoing Trump, Putin tends to identify unlimited migration with crime, and he definitely sees it as a crisis. However, "the liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done." Putin believes that liberals "say that all is well, that everything is as it should be." The sort of solutions Putin might employ -- he's careful not to endorse Trump's plans for border walls and punitive tariffs -- strike liberals as worse than the problem, presumably because they violate liberal ideals of human rights. "They say this is bad and that is bad as well," Putin protests, "Tell me, what is good then?" Echoing Trump or any number of European populists, he complains that "the migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants must be protected." Whatever his views on migrant crime, Putin echoes a general point I've made about liberalism. Being uncomfortable with states of emergency or exception, liberals are loathe to acknowledge crises. Their constitutional ideals depend on the absence of crisis or any existential stake in politics. To liberals, a crisis -- or at least a crisis declared by the wrong people -- is the first slippery step toward a state of emergency and dictatorship. In this context, to be anti-migrant is to be authoritarian. This belief has much to do with an ad hominem notion of politics I've discussed elsewhere, which trusts no one to exercise emergency powers or even propose measures that might increase human suffering. If liberals can't seem to answer Putin's question, "what is good?" it may be because 21st century liberals have lost the ability or will to think in a utilitarian way. You may not agree with however Putin defines his "core" population, or how an American politician might define his, but it may still prove necessary for leaders in any country to calculate the greatest good for the greatest number, even when that number isn't "all." If liberals can't bring themselves to do this, they may find it more difficult than they think to prove Putin's claims of obsolescence wrong.

'the Constitution does not require proportional representation'

While a surprising number of cases decided in the current Supreme Court term have seen justices crossing party or ideological lines, the decision announced today in the case of Rucho v. Common Cause saw a more typical partisan split. Plaintiffs, including both Democrats and Republicans, wanted the Court to curtail the practice of so-called partisan gerrymandering by state legislatures, through which partisan majorities redraw districts with the idea of ensuring maximum representation for their own party. The Republican-appointed majority of justices, led by Chief Justice Roberts, decided that they have no authority to intervene, since gerrymandering does not violate the "one person, one vote" principle that justifies other forms of judicial intervention. In a summary of his opinion, Roberts makes the significant observation that "one person, one vote" is not synonymous with proportional representation, the implicit standard of fairness allegedly violated by gerrymandering. He states bluntly that "the Constitution does not require proportional representation." While "each person is entitled to an equal say in the election of representatives," it "hardly follows from that principle that a person is entitled to have his political party achieve representation commensurate to its share of statewide support." In short, political parties are not entitled to proportionate representation. That fact should be self-evident from the territorial principle of representation, since partisanship is unevenly distributed geographically. Roberts is careful to deny that he or the majority "condones" partisan gerrymandering, but observes that the remedy lies elsewhere than in the Court. As some instant critics of the ruling have observed, it really reinforces the necessity of defeating parties that abuse their power through gerrymandering at the polls, or thwarting them by amending state constitutions.

In dissent, Justice Kagan expresses impatience with the majority. If they concede that "gerrymandering is 'incompatible with democratic principles,'" Kagan assumes a self-evident duty of the Court to respond. She roots that obligation in the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is violated by "the devaluation of one citizen's vote as compared to others." She points out that federal courts have intervened against partisan gerrymandering at the state level without appealing to the proportionate-representation principle, rendering Roberts' objection to that irrelevant. Instead, Kagan claims, these courts hold states to their own constitutional standards as well as the nation's. Alas, one must presume that the high court overrules the lower courts. The ultimate problem, it seems, is whether the equal-protection argument can be separated from what Roberts perceives, and rejects, as an entitlement claim by political parties in place of people.  The Chief Justice sees no essential rights violation when one's party isn't represented in a legislature in the proportion to which partisans may believe it entitled. This perception misses what Kagan takes to be the real issue: partisan gerrymandering is partisan politicians "entrenching themselves in power by diluting the votes of their rivals' supporters." In short, partisan gerrymandering is cheating. But Roberts presumably ignored rather than missed this point, since he doesn't see partisan cheating as an actionable violation of individual rights. It's not surprising that the minority sees the majority opinion as undemocratic, since it appears to acquiesce in a practice widely seen as tantamount to the sort of vote-rigging that alleged authoritarians practice around the world. To be fair to the minority, I can well imagine some of those supposed authoritarians -- those that actually rig elections, as the reputed authoritarian Erdogan apparently neglected to do in Istanbul last week -- echoing the inference that an individual's voting rights are not harmed no matter how badly the rules screw over his party. Unfortunately, democracy at the macro level is diluted by every division of power along geographic lines. The Electoral College arguably violates the equal-protection principle advanced by Kagan more egregiously than any state's gerrymandering, yet it is the supreme law of the land. Roberts may be a killjoy when he points out what the Court can't do about such things, but despite Kagan's disparagement, he did point to alternate remedies. A real test of our democracy may come should partisan gerrymandering or other forms of election-rigging prove capable of thwarting those remedies, but then it will be the people's responsibility, not the courts', to respond.

ei

Think 3 Video News: Reproductive Rights March on Lark Street, Albany NY, June 22, 2019

By the standard set by the early marches against the Trump administration, the June 22 demonstration for reproductive rights in Albany was a small-time affair. That may be because there's little sense of urgency about abortion rights here. Today's march was mainly a protest against anti-abortion measures taken in other states, but even if those result, after legal challenges, in a Supreme Court overturn of Roe v. Wade, New York State seems unlikely to ban abortions. It's nice to feel compassionate about women elsewhere, but maybe it was just too nice out on the first Saturday of the summer.




This group started outside the State Museum at the Empire State Plaza and marched around the Center Square area until I caught them on Lark Street. You're not seeing the whole lot here, though you do get to see Rep. Tonko, the local congressman, tagging along. You aren't seeing the woman who showed up in a Handmaid's Tale costume to signify that denying women reproductive sovereignty was tantamount to reducing them to patriarchal servitude. That line of argument still impresses many people, at least in these parts, but it arguably reduces all opposition to abortion to one obnoxious impulse. It's been effective in the past to pose a stark abortion vs. fundamentalist tyranny dichotomy, but I wonder whether changes in the national mood recently have altered that dynamic. I also wonder whether any rational resolution to the long debate is possible, when there are moral absolutes impervious to reason on either side.



I tend toward the view that consistency requires the "pro-life" camp to prove its regard for life by providing for the living, on the premise that if the state has an interest in anyone being born, it should have an equal interest in keeping everyone born alive. But that doesn't necessarily follow for anti-abortion people, who may believe instead that people are entitled only to a "chance" and are obliged eventually to rise or fall on their own. They may see abortion as intolerable cruelty, but their opposition may not mitigate their endorsement of rules of life that seem cruel to many others. It's also inconsistent, I suppose, for a movement driven so much by hedonism to relegate the ultimate helpless entities to the mercy (or simply the prerogative) of their biological landlords, but like other forms of populism the pro-choice movement is "here and now" oriented and resistant to more theoretical appeals to solidarity -- especially if they compromise the movement's sense of sovereignty. You will look for seamless garments in vain in this debate. The one thing you can be sure of is that whatever the states or the courts say, abortions will continue as they always have. Whether people will continue to care once the procedure no longer enjoys an offensive official sanction, only time can tell.

The Reparations Debate

The House of Representatives is considering legislation to empower consideration of paying reparations to the descendants of slaves. At a committee meeting today, black authors spoke on both sides of the question. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote a best-selling book a few years ago advocating reparations, focused on Senator McConnell's recent argument that Americans in 2019 can't be held responsible for offenses from more than 150 years ago. Attempting to refute McConnell, Coates resorted to a number of analogies to cases in which the U.S. recognizes and honors obligations dating back generations or centuries. Comparing reparations to treaty obligations or long-term Civil War pensions is questionable, however, since those involved formal commitments made to be binding indefinitely or well into the future, while Coates wants legislators only now to acknowledge an old moral debt. This sophistry aside, Coates asserts a principle of collective responsibility similar to the citizens' obligation to pay tax regardless of our individual personal responsibility for government policies. In his view, citizenship binds us to "a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach." In practice, this means that citizens today remain responsible for unpaid moral debts of the past. Presumably anticipating those who argue that the Union dead of the Civil War paid that debt, Coates argues that the debt only grew during the Jim Crow era, which extended into the lifetimes of McConnell and others who disclaim responsibility for racist injustice. I haven't read Coates' book, but the impression I take from his testimony today is that he may be less interested in a monetary payout than in some sort of national humbling. It seems at least as important to him that Americans acknowledge the debt as that they pay it. For him, I suspect, the reparations debate itself serves as a corrective to a perceived moral arrogance among Americans, from which, Coates may believe, follows a sense of exceptional entitlement in the wider world as well as a chauvinism at home that inevitably takes on a divisive ethnocentric character.

Coleman Hughes lacks Coates' cultural pedigree, having neither won a Pulitzer Prize nor written for Marvel Comics. The report of today's hearing identifies him mainly as a contributor to Quillette, an online magazine known for opposition to political correctness. Hughes himself makes a point of informing the congressmen that he consistently votes Democrat, while predicting pessimistically that he'll be branded as a Republican stooge for opposing reparations. Some observers may think that his declaration of partisanship is belied by his resort to a common Republican talking point: the repudiation of victimhood. One of his arguments against reparations is that it will somehow stigmatize the recipients as historical (and permanent?) victims, but that argument is pointless against those who genuinely believe that they as a people have been historically victimized and feel empowered by asserting what they see as self-evident truth. Hughes may think that the claim of permanent victimhood will contribute to what he predicts will be a further division of the country resulting from reparations. While Coates is careful to say that reparations are a national obligation, Hughes states bluntly that it will be perceived as a penalty imposed on white people, reducing race relations to "a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants." Somehow, however, he seems to think it would be less divisive to pay reparations to living victims of Jim Crow injustices. While that sounds unlikely, Hughes does think it more fair since it presumably would target true hardship, as would better legislation to address urban crime, whereas reparations for slavery would indiscriminately reward well-off people like himself who neither need nor want a payout from the government. Reparations for slavery may once have been a good idea, he argues, but regardless of what Coates thinks about enduring obligations, Hughes believes that the time when they would have been practical and effective passed long ago. Something should have been done immediately after the Civil War, he claims, arguing implicitly for a more draconian Reconstruction policy that seemed politically viable at the time. My own view is similar, but you still have to wonder how draconian it could have been to avoid an even worse reign of racist terror than the South actually saw in those years. Americans simply aren't that draconian as a rule, but perhaps a really useful discussion of race relations and mutual obligations could start by getting the Mitch McConnells of the country to concede that the Confederacy deserved worse than it actually got. There's no guarantee that anything meaningful would follow from such a concession, but it would still be an interesting national conversation....

The business of America is ...?

The President's comments on the Federal Reserve in a CNBC interview this week have come under the typical scrutiny from those looking for authoritarian tendencies in Donald Trump. For instance, a New York Times reporter wrote that Trump "seemed to lament that the Fed, which is independent of the White House, did not operate like China's central bank, which is largely subservient to the government." The reporter correctly quotes the President saying, however facetiously, that Xi Jinping was "head of the Fed in China," adding Trump's explanation that on questions of interest rates and related matters Xi "can do whatever he wants." He described what he perceives as a competitive advantage enjoyed by China, where financial policy can be manipulated, as Trump claims, to soften the impact of the tariffs his administration has imposed on the People's Republic. If the Fed has a problem from Trump's perspective, however, it's not that its board of governors retains a degree of independence from politics -- their 14-year terms outlast the presidents who appoint them -- but that the board doesn't necessarily share Trump's view of economic policy in general as an extension of national-security policy.

The President opened the interview with a chiding of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, normally loyal to a fault to Republican presidents, over its opposition to his tariff policies. There was no simpler way for Trump to differentiate himself from conventional Republicanism than by differentiating American interests from those of the Chamber of Commerce. Before, the typical (or perhaps the stereotypical) Republican might not have recognized any difference of interests. By opposing tariffs, however, the Chamber, in Trump's view, puts the interests of its constituent corporations, many of whom manufacture products abroad, against the American interest as the President understands it. For nearly a century, Calvin Coolidge's observation that "the chief business of America is business" has been Republican orthodoxy. It has been interpreted to render protectionist trade policy, once the defining Republican platform plank, a heresy against free enterprise. By no means, of course, is Donald Trump against free enterprise, but he clearly has, to say the least, a heterodox vision of America's "business" that transcends the momentary bottom-line interests of American businesses. For him, trade is inescapably a matter, at least in part, of national security. The American economy, for him, is a weapon. His complaint against the Fed is basically that they fail to see this. He sees their job as manipulating interest rates and other powers within their purview to maximize the nation's advantages in trade negotiations or, if necessary, trade wars. So long as he assumes that other countries use their "Feds" that way, he will expect the American Fed to respond accordingly. In his interview, he's wishing not so much that he had more control over the Fed, but that the Fed saw things more as he does. His complaint extends to the Chamber and to an extent to the Republican party itself, which has long contemptuously equated a nationalist trade policy with the anti-market and purportedly anti-competitive practice of "picking winners." The current GOP orthodoxy sees businesses seeking protection from allegedly unfair foreign competition as "special interests" who'd benefit more from protectionism than the price paid by consumers can justify. Trump's heresy, interpreted generously for argument's sake, sees no employer as a special interest -- unless, to be less generous, that employer speaks ill of him -- and is interested only in picking the nation to win. Whether Trump deserves this generosity for long remains to be determined, but he's doing more to challenge Republican orthodoxy on some fronts than Democrats have in some time, and at the least that's not a bad thing.

The end of a tradition?

Albany held its annual Pride parade today. The event held special significance because the gay community and its sympathizers are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riot this year. I can hear the parade, and the arrival of the crowd anticipating it, from my house a block parallel to the parade route. I've taken video of the parade for the past couple of years because I liked the juxtaposition of the celebrants with the archaic rage of the handful of religious-right protesters who showed up yearly to heckle the march. They used to set up with their signs and their megaphone in front of a gas station along the route, facing the marchers just as they turned right from Lark Street (the self-styled Greenwich Village of Albany) onto Madison Avenue. Last year, the hecklers moved (or were moved) to the Dana Park pedestrian island. It was only a short distance from their old spot, but it presumably kept enough distance between the hecklers and the spectators to discourage potentially dangerous confrontations. It also put the hecklers behind the police line that diverted traffic away from the parade route. This year I saw no hecklers either in front of the gas station or at Dana Park. I walked along Madison to the entrance to Washington Park, where Pride celebrations would continue after the parade, and found no hecklers. Unless they set up shop somewhere on Lark, I have to guess that they simply didn't show. That leaves me wondering whether they simply gave up or were somehow discouraged from making their annual appearance. Either way, their absence probably looked like a victory to those who remembered and resented their presence in the past. I confess that their disappearance stripped the event of much of the drama that made it entertaining for me. On the other hand, the annual event was never supposed to be the Drama parade, and if the lack of hecklers made things more enjoyable for the majority of spectators, any regret I have would be petty, especially when I most likely share the majority's opinion of the hecklers. Progress inevitably will render many dramas less dramatic, and history inevitably will start new dramas as it continues on its way.

Reign of tariffs

Republicans in Congress are predictably unhappy with the President's adoption of tariffs as a tool, if not a weapon, of foreign policy -- effectively as a form of economic sanctions. Trump has warned Mexico that its exports to the U.S. will be subject to escalating tariffs until its government takes more effective action to stop the flow of migrants across its northern border. In warning of dire consequences from this policy, Trump's Republican and Mexican critics to an extent confirm the President's much-disparaged claim that countries targeted by his tariffs, and not American consumers, will "pay" for them. The critics warn that tariffs, by further disrupting the Mexican economy, are likely to increase the northward flow of migrants, thus exacerbating the problem Trump wants to solve. It's unclear how badly the tariffs would exacerbate the situation, since many of the migrants headed for the U.S. are actually migrants from other countries into Mexico, but the critics clearly presume that the Mexican economy will suffer. Since the state of the Mexican economy doesn't factor into Trump's insistence on Mexico's responsibility for controlling migrants, however, no worsening of their economy will mitigate their situation in his eyes. Their responsibility will remain the same, and in his eyes Mexico will have only itself to blame if it becomes more difficult for them to meet his demands. Trump will remain unmoved by arguments like this so long as he denies that economic conditions entitle people to cross national borders in search of opportunity or relief. That leaves the argument that American consumers or companies will suffer. Republicans, especially in the right-wing punditocracy, often treat this as an unbeatable argument, but Trump's base may think differently. My evidence for that is minimal so far, but a few weeks ago one of his loyalists wrote to a local newspaper recommending a spirit of sacrifice in deference to the President's determination of national interest on trade issues. For them, trade war may be a moral equivalent of war. That feeling may well leave many Republicans baffled or even frightened. While once upon a time the GOP was the tariff party, the cult of the Market has been Republican orthodoxy for generations now. It demands no interference with markets and presumes that Americans, seeing themselves primarily as consumers, demand the right to buy from wherever products are cheapest. That assumption is the Republican equivalent of the homo economicus thinking that always leaves Democrats wondering why working-class Americans vote for the perceived party of plutocracy instead of in their more obvious-seeming economic interest. It may be time for Republicans themselves to figure out why people don't always vote the way their pocketbooks should seem to dictate -- and in their case it may be a much simpler question. No individual person or household is the whole American economy, and inevitably there are many Americans who don't anticipate hardship for themselves resulting from tariffs on Mexican imports. If that's how they think, why won't they, presumably sharing the President's antipathies, jump at another opportunity to stick it to Mexico? Free-trade think tanks may be able to demonstrate how a large percentage of Americans would suffer from those tariffs, but that would only force the test, presuming that Trump's fans don't reject that evidence as fake news, of patriotism's priority over the pocketbook. While clashes pitting Trump and Trumpets against Democrats get the most media attention, disputes within the ruling party between Trump and the GOP establishment may provide clearer hints of how new, different or dangerous the Trump movement is.

'I really don't like critics...'

Americans really need to grow thicker skins these days, but don't expect leadership on this issue by the President of the United States. Donald Trump might strike you as the sort of person who'd advise just that considering how easily people seem to be offended by him, but it shouldn't take anyone long to realize that he's as thin-skinned as anyone here. In London today, while characteristically downplaying protests against his visit and talking up the numbers who've cheered him, the President said, "I really don't like critics as much as I like and respect people that get things done." Some will find that quote further proof of Trump's authoritarian tendencies, since "getting things done" over objections, principled or otherwise, is what authoritarians claim to do, or at least admire. What's more clear here, however, is the implicit assumption that the critic only criticizes and never gets anything done. In Trump's mind, we can assume, "getting things done" means making deals, while the critics he most resents are those he presumes unwilling to deal with him, those he referred to today as "negative forces." While there probably are critics who prefer only to criticize, either because they want nothing or something else done, there are others who criticize in order to establish the position from which they'll negotiate, e.g. the diplomats of those countries who criticize the President's tariff policies. Trump probably recognizes this distinction himself, but you wouldn't necessarily deduce that from his statements in London. Reflexively he makes a form of ad hominem attack on any critic, most likely repaying them in kind as far as he's concerned. Almost invariably those who criticize him are "failing" or, in the case of the mayor of London, a "stone cold loser." We may have more insight now on why he says this -- if he sees critics as losers because they do nothing but criticize -- but it may simply be an intimidation tactic. How sincerely he means the insult certainly depends on its target, but to criticize critics constantly suggests a certain emotional hypocrisy, at the minimum, when an above-the-fray attitude might be more appropriate. That attitude is clearly what the media establishment expects of politicians, yet to be fair there's plenty of reasons for Trump to take much of the criticism directed at him personally. He might not be able to distinguish reliably between principled and ad hominem criticism, but the rest of us should recognize the difference between principled criticism and the "orange man bad" sort that is all too common. Having acknowledged that, however, you probably could still concede that, with his attitude toward critics of any sort, Donald Trump probably picked the wrong country to govern -- but then again, as all critics should remember, he didn't pick himself to govern it.