18 August 2009
Coming Soon: Suicide by Secret Service?
Perhaps lost in the concern over the appearance of openly armed private citizens at recent Presidential appearances is the fact that the demonstrators may as well wear jackets with bullseyes painted on them. I would at least assume that every such person is a target for a Secret Service or police sharpshooter, whether such attention is really warranted or not. That would at least give these yahoos an intelligible reason to carry firearms, though the reasoning would certainly be circular. Otherwise, it's fair to ask such people what immediate danger they think themselves in that they have to strut about so. They might answer that they don't need to feel endangered to display firearms openly, or don't have to justify their exercise of a constitutional right. Whatever their constitutional cover, they carry the guns because they want to, because they want the world to know that they are ready to kill at any moment in defense of their perpetually endangered right to...kill at any moment. They construe the Second Amendment to confer upon themselves as private citizens the right to kill, when in fact the explicit right to keep and bear arms in anticipation of forming a citizen militia, the inferred right to personal self-defense, and the assumed right to kill are three different things. But why even argue this point? The President, while campaigning last year, deferred to the Supreme Court's dubious ruling that the amendment conferred a personal right to bear arms. He is no threat to any gun owner unless gun owners choose not to trust him for their thinly disguised racist reasons. But some Americans have already decided that the President of the United States is their enemy -- not merely a fool leading the country to ruin, mind you (so let the comparisons die on your tongue) -- but an essentially if not actually alien enemy of the country he was elected to preside over. They posture as if the republic were in danger, but they endanger it, if anyone does today. I don't know if the Arizona jackasses are birthers, deathers or any other kind of conspiracy-monger, but I suspect that they belong in the same general category. I hope they enjoy the scrutiny. If they start whining that "Big Brother" is watching them, they ought to remember that they asked for it.
Healthcare: The Transatlantic Debate
Great Britain has become embroiled in the American debate over health care reform. The leader of Britain's own Conservative party has denounced a Tory MP who has gone on Fox News in this country to denounce his own nation's National Health Service. The leader, David Cameron, has reaffirmed his own commitment to the NHS and has promised to strengthen it if he becomes Prime Minister in the next general election. His denunciation of MP Daniel Hannan has sparked a debate within British conservative circles, Hannan having emboldened others to speak out against NHS in defiance of the party leader and in sync with U.S. Republicans.
Cal Thomas, who has staked out a fringe position in the American debate (even Mr.Right was baffled when I described Thomas's views to him), notes the British imbroglio in his latest column. Statistics suggest to some observers that Britons are forced into a kind of trade-off. The nation's recovery rate from many forms of cancer is worse than America's, but many people are satisfied with free, universal health care. Critics, including Thomas, insinuate that inferior treatment of major diseases is an inevitable consequence of universal coverage. He writes that the British predicament is likely to grow worse, citing statistics that suggest that "socialized medicine has created a shortage of doctors, nurses and other clinical staff." Thomas interprets this as confirming a common argument against "socialized medicine," which is that it would decrease the monetary incentives for people to enter the medical profession.
His main argument this week, before he succumbs to his compulsion to equate universal health care with Nazism, is that "Free is nice, but best is better." He seems to be saying that Americans and Britons alike should prefer a system in which some people can get the best care that money can buy, regardless of whether individuals can afford it themselves. There's an implicit argument here that only money can guarantee adequate medicine, that the absence of a proper profit motive in the medical profession throws the competence of those who end up in the profession despite the lack of proper incentive in question. There's also a predictable contempt for Britons who express contentment with, or Americans who desire, "free" health care, which according to Thomas is actually an unfair burden on the successful minority of taxpayers.
It may be "statist" of me to ask, but why can't we or any other country make it a national priority to train a generation of doctors and nurses the way we strove, or at least made an appearance of striving, to train a generation of scientists following the launch of Sputnik and during the space race? What would be wrong with that? Would people like Cal Thomas question the competence of doctors who are not motivated by greed or ambition, but by a dedication to medicine and the public good? And wouldn't such a commitment almost automatically belie all the paranoia spread by the likes of Thomas about "socialized medicine" as a slippery slope to government-mandated euthanasia? At this very moment, I suspect it would make a major difference in the American debate if the President and the Democrats made such a commitment, regardless of the fate of the current reform plan. Complaints would inevitably follow. Some people will dislike what would look to them like "drafting" people into the medical profession. But if a nation has a right to call on its citizens to kill in its defense, it should be less objectionable to recruit Americans to save lives. I'd be very curious to learn why anyone would think otherwise.
Cal Thomas, who has staked out a fringe position in the American debate (even Mr.Right was baffled when I described Thomas's views to him), notes the British imbroglio in his latest column. Statistics suggest to some observers that Britons are forced into a kind of trade-off. The nation's recovery rate from many forms of cancer is worse than America's, but many people are satisfied with free, universal health care. Critics, including Thomas, insinuate that inferior treatment of major diseases is an inevitable consequence of universal coverage. He writes that the British predicament is likely to grow worse, citing statistics that suggest that "socialized medicine has created a shortage of doctors, nurses and other clinical staff." Thomas interprets this as confirming a common argument against "socialized medicine," which is that it would decrease the monetary incentives for people to enter the medical profession.
His main argument this week, before he succumbs to his compulsion to equate universal health care with Nazism, is that "Free is nice, but best is better." He seems to be saying that Americans and Britons alike should prefer a system in which some people can get the best care that money can buy, regardless of whether individuals can afford it themselves. There's an implicit argument here that only money can guarantee adequate medicine, that the absence of a proper profit motive in the medical profession throws the competence of those who end up in the profession despite the lack of proper incentive in question. There's also a predictable contempt for Britons who express contentment with, or Americans who desire, "free" health care, which according to Thomas is actually an unfair burden on the successful minority of taxpayers.
It may be "statist" of me to ask, but why can't we or any other country make it a national priority to train a generation of doctors and nurses the way we strove, or at least made an appearance of striving, to train a generation of scientists following the launch of Sputnik and during the space race? What would be wrong with that? Would people like Cal Thomas question the competence of doctors who are not motivated by greed or ambition, but by a dedication to medicine and the public good? And wouldn't such a commitment almost automatically belie all the paranoia spread by the likes of Thomas about "socialized medicine" as a slippery slope to government-mandated euthanasia? At this very moment, I suspect it would make a major difference in the American debate if the President and the Democrats made such a commitment, regardless of the fate of the current reform plan. Complaints would inevitably follow. Some people will dislike what would look to them like "drafting" people into the medical profession. But if a nation has a right to call on its citizens to kill in its defense, it should be less objectionable to recruit Americans to save lives. I'd be very curious to learn why anyone would think otherwise.
17 August 2009
In Defense of Birthers?
While Mr. Right may be a "deather" (see below, though he hadn't heard of that tag before I told him about it today) it's unclear whether he's a "birther." At the very least he's a critical sympathizer with the movement. The criticism consists of his complaint that the leading spokesperson for the movement, Orly Taitz, is an inarticulate speaker, a fact he blames on English not being her first language. But he didn't consider it inappropriate for the birthers to inquire into the President's background. Liberals demanded all kinds of information (though not exactly the same kinds) about George W. Bush, he argued, though he denies that the birther movement is just a tit-for-tat tactic by disgruntled Republicans.
"Aren't you curious about his background?" he asked me. The answer is that I'm not curious because I'm not suspicious about it. But for Mr. Right speculation about Obama's background and possibly secret origins seems to follow from his perception that the President is somehow culturally alien. Once again he repeated the canard that Obama is a Marxist. Asked to tell when the President confirmed this, Mr. Right first pointed to the "nationalization" of the banks and the proposed "nationalization" of health care, then asked (and not for the first time) why I wasn't curious about the fact that all of Obama's advisers were Marxists. There followed a litany of the usual names: Alinsky, Ayers, etc. "And those are all the advisers he's ever had?" I asked, "Are those his only advisers?" He conceded that there might be at least one advisor who was only a "plain Socialist," but he felt that his point had been made.
"If you want to think that Socialism is on a par with capitalism, go right ahead," he said, "History proves otherwise and the majority of the American people know better." Actually, I hadn't espoused Socialism, except if you think I'd done so implicitly by refusing to condemn the President's policies. I'd be for a strong regulatory state that retained private ownership of industry so long as it remained consistent with the national interest, that in turn to be determined by pragmatic rather than ideological standards. But I refuse to rule out Socialism as an option the American people can choose, and I reject the insinuation that any sympathy for Socialism renders someone so un-American that their ancestry ought to be suspect. Socialism may not have been American in origin, but it ceased to be non-American or un-American the moment Americans started to believe in it. And if anything, it'd become even less anti-American if voters actually chose it as their path to the future. This seems very unlikely now after generations of indiscriminate anti-communist propaganda, but you never know. And no, you can't see my birth certificate. It's a matter of principle.
"Aren't you curious about his background?" he asked me. The answer is that I'm not curious because I'm not suspicious about it. But for Mr. Right speculation about Obama's background and possibly secret origins seems to follow from his perception that the President is somehow culturally alien. Once again he repeated the canard that Obama is a Marxist. Asked to tell when the President confirmed this, Mr. Right first pointed to the "nationalization" of the banks and the proposed "nationalization" of health care, then asked (and not for the first time) why I wasn't curious about the fact that all of Obama's advisers were Marxists. There followed a litany of the usual names: Alinsky, Ayers, etc. "And those are all the advisers he's ever had?" I asked, "Are those his only advisers?" He conceded that there might be at least one advisor who was only a "plain Socialist," but he felt that his point had been made.
"If you want to think that Socialism is on a par with capitalism, go right ahead," he said, "History proves otherwise and the majority of the American people know better." Actually, I hadn't espoused Socialism, except if you think I'd done so implicitly by refusing to condemn the President's policies. I'd be for a strong regulatory state that retained private ownership of industry so long as it remained consistent with the national interest, that in turn to be determined by pragmatic rather than ideological standards. But I refuse to rule out Socialism as an option the American people can choose, and I reject the insinuation that any sympathy for Socialism renders someone so un-American that their ancestry ought to be suspect. Socialism may not have been American in origin, but it ceased to be non-American or un-American the moment Americans started to believe in it. And if anything, it'd become even less anti-American if voters actually chose it as their path to the future. This seems very unlikely now after generations of indiscriminate anti-communist propaganda, but you never know. And no, you can't see my birth certificate. It's a matter of principle.
The "Death Panel" Section
Section 1233 of H.R. 3200 is the apparent source of alleged anxieties about the establishment of "death panels" along the lines described by Sarah Palin. Defenders of the Democratic reform plan have argued that this section does nothing more than extend insurance coverage to the consultations described therein. Mr. Right recently called my attention to the section because he saw the implication of death panels in it. After hearing him I decided that I finally ought to read the section. To my eyes, at least, the Democratic description of i"Advanced Care Planning" sounds more accurate than the alarmist Republican inference. Regrettably, the legislation is written in the inevitable and probably inescapable bureaucratese typical of big bills. It may be better for everyone if I just paste the whole section here and let readers figure it out for themselves.
SEC. 1233. ADVANCE CARE PLANNING CONSULTATION.
(a) Medicare-
(1) IN GENERAL- Section 1861 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395x) is amended--
(A) in subsection (s)(2)--
(i) by striking `and' at the end of subparagraph (DD);
(ii) by adding `and' at the end of subparagraph (EE); and
(iii) by adding at the end the following new subparagraph:
`(FF) advance care planning consultation (as defined in subsection (hhh)(1));'; and
(B) by adding at the end the following new subsection:
`Advance Care Planning Consultation
`(hhh)(1) Subject to paragraphs (3) and (4), the term `advance care planning consultation' means a consultation between the individual and a practitioner described in paragraph (2) regarding advance care planning, if, subject to paragraph (3), the individual involved has not had such a consultation within the last 5 years. Such consultation shall include the following:
`(A) An explanation by the practitioner of advance care planning, including key questions and considerations, important steps, and suggested people to talk to.
`(B) An explanation by the practitioner of advance directives, including living wills and durable powers of attorney, and their uses.
`(C) An explanation by the practitioner of the role and responsibilities of a health care proxy.
`(D) The provision by the practitioner of a list of national and State-specific resources to assist consumers and their families with advance care planning, including the national toll-free hotline, the advance care planning clearinghouses, and State legal service organizations (including those funded through the Older Americans Act of 1965).
`(E) An explanation by the practitioner of the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice, and benefits for such services and supports that are available under this title.
`(F)(i) Subject to clause (ii), an explanation of orders regarding life sustaining treatment or similar orders, which shall include--
`(I) the reasons why the development of such an order is beneficial to the individual and the individual's family and the reasons why such an order should be updated periodically as the health of the individual changes;
`(II) the information needed for an individual or legal surrogate to make informed decisions regarding the completion of such an order; and
`(III) the identification of resources that an individual may use to determine the requirements of the State in which such individual resides so that the treatment wishes of that individual will be carried out if the individual is unable to communicate those wishes, including requirements regarding the designation of a surrogate decisionmaker (also known as a health care proxy).
`(ii) The Secretary shall limit the requirement for explanations under clause (i) to consultations furnished in a State--
`(I) in which all legal barriers have been addressed for enabling orders for life sustaining treatment to constitute a set of medical orders respected across all care settings; and
`(II) that has in effect a program for orders for life sustaining treatment described in clause (iii).
`(iii) A program for orders for life sustaining treatment for a States described in this clause is a program that--
`(I) ensures such orders are standardized and uniquely identifiable throughout the State;
`(II) distributes or makes accessible such orders to physicians and other health professionals that (acting within the scope of the professional's authority under State law) may sign orders for life sustaining treatment;
`(III) provides training for health care professionals across the continuum of care about the goals and use of orders for life sustaining treatment; and
`(IV) is guided by a coalition of stakeholders includes representatives from emergency medical services, emergency department physicians or nurses, state long-term care association, state medical association, state surveyors, agency responsible for senior services, state department of health, state hospital association, home health association, state bar association, and state hospice association.
`(2) A practitioner described in this paragraph is--
`(A) a physician (as defined in subsection (r)(1)); and
`(B) a nurse practitioner or physician's assistant who has the authority under State law to sign orders for life sustaining treatments.
`(3)(A) An initial preventive physical examination under subsection (WW), including any related discussion during such examination, shall not be considered an advance care planning consultation for purposes of applying the 5-year limitation under paragraph (1).
`(B) An advance care planning consultation with respect to an individual may be conducted more frequently than provided under paragraph (1) if there is a significant change in the health condition of the individual, including diagnosis of a chronic, progressive, life-limiting disease, a life-threatening or terminal diagnosis or life-threatening injury, or upon admission to a skilled nursing facility, a long-term care facility (as defined by the Secretary), or a hospice program.
`(4) A consultation under this subsection may include the formulation of an order regarding life sustaining treatment or a similar order.
`(5)(A) For purposes of this section, the term `order regarding life sustaining treatment' means, with respect to an individual, an actionable medical order relating to the treatment of that individual that--
`(i) is signed and dated by a physician (as defined in subsection (r)(1)) or another health care professional (as specified by the Secretary and who is acting within the scope of the professional's authority under State law in signing such an order, including a nurse practitioner or physician assistant) and is in a form that permits it to stay with the individual and be followed by health care professionals and providers across the continuum of care;
`(ii) effectively communicates the individual's preferences regarding life sustaining treatment, including an indication of the treatment and care desired by the individual;
`(iii) is uniquely identifiable and standardized within a given locality, region, or State (as identified by the Secretary); and
`(iv) may incorporate any advance directive (as defined in section 1866(f)(3)) if executed by the individual.
`(B) The level of treatment indicated under subparagraph (A)(ii) may range from an indication for full treatment to an indication to limit some or all or specified interventions. Such indicated levels of treatment may include indications respecting, among other items--
`(i) the intensity of medical intervention if the patient is pulse less, apneic, or has serious cardiac or pulmonary problems;
`(ii) the individual's desire regarding transfer to a hospital or remaining at the current care setting;
`(iii) the use of antibiotics; and
`(iv) the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration.'.
(2) PAYMENT- Section 1848(j)(3) of such Act (42 U.S.C. 1395w-4(j)(3)) is amended by inserting `(2)(FF),' after `(2)(EE),'.
(3) FREQUENCY LIMITATION- Section 1862(a) of such Act (42 U.S.C. 1395y(a)) is amended--
(A) in paragraph (1)--
(i) in subparagraph (N), by striking `and' at the end;
(ii) in subparagraph (O) by striking the semicolon at the end and inserting `, and'; and
(iii) by adding at the end the following new subparagraph:
`(P) in the case of advance care planning consultations (as defined in section 1861(hhh)(1)), which are performed more frequently than is covered under such section;'; and
(B) in paragraph (7), by striking `or (K)' and inserting `(K), or (P)'.
(4) EFFECTIVE DATE- The amendments made by this subsection shall apply to consultations furnished on or after January 1, 2011.
(b) Expansion of Physician Quality Reporting Initiative for End of Life Care-
(1) Physician'S QUALITY REPORTING INITIATIVE- Section 1848(k)(2) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395w-4(k)(2)) is amended by adding at the end the following new paragraphs:
`(3) Physician'S QUALITY REPORTING INITIATIVE-
`(A) IN GENERAL- For purposes of reporting data on quality measures for covered professional services furnished during 2011 and any subsequent year, to the extent that measures are available, the Secretary shall include quality measures on end of life care and advanced care planning that have been adopted or endorsed by a consensus-based organization, if appropriate. Such measures shall measure both the creation of and adherence to orders for life-sustaining treatment.
`(B) PROPOSED SET OF MEASURES- The Secretary shall publish in the Federal Register proposed quality measures on end of life care and advanced care planning that the Secretary determines are described in subparagraph (A) and would be appropriate for eligible professionals to use to submit data to the Secretary. The Secretary shall provide for a period of public comment on such set of measures before finalizing such proposed measures.'.
(c) Inclusion of Information in Medicare & You Handbook-
(1) MEDICARE & YOU HANDBOOK-
(A) IN GENERAL- Not later than 1 year after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall update the online version of the Medicare & You Handbook to include the following:
(i) An explanation of advance care planning and advance directives, including--
(I) living wills;
(II) durable power of attorney;
(III) orders of life-sustaining treatment; and
(IV) health care proxies.
(ii) A description of Federal and State resources available to assist individuals and their families with advance care planning and advance directives, including--
(I) available State legal service organizations to assist individuals with advance care planning, including those organizations that receive funding pursuant to the Older Americans Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. 93001 et seq.);
(II) website links or addresses for State-specific advance directive forms; and
(III) any additional information, as determined by the Secretary.
(B) UPDATE OF PAPER AND SUBSEQUENT VERSIONS- The Secretary shall include the information described in subparagraph (A) in all paper and electronic versions of the Medicare & You Handbook that are published on or after the date that is 1 year after the date of the enactment of this Act.
(1) IN GENERAL- Section 1861 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395x) is amended--
(A) in subsection (s)(2)--
(i) by striking `and' at the end of subparagraph (DD);
(ii) by adding `and' at the end of subparagraph (EE); and
(iii) by adding at the end the following new subparagraph:
`(FF) advance care planning consultation (as defined in subsection (hhh)(1));'; and
(B) by adding at the end the following new subsection:
`Advance Care Planning Consultation
`(hhh)(1) Subject to paragraphs (3) and (4), the term `advance care planning consultation' means a consultation between the individual and a practitioner described in paragraph (2) regarding advance care planning, if, subject to paragraph (3), the individual involved has not had such a consultation within the last 5 years. Such consultation shall include the following:
`(A) An explanation by the practitioner of advance care planning, including key questions and considerations, important steps, and suggested people to talk to.
`(B) An explanation by the practitioner of advance directives, including living wills and durable powers of attorney, and their uses.
`(C) An explanation by the practitioner of the role and responsibilities of a health care proxy.
`(D) The provision by the practitioner of a list of national and State-specific resources to assist consumers and their families with advance care planning, including the national toll-free hotline, the advance care planning clearinghouses, and State legal service organizations (including those funded through the Older Americans Act of 1965).
`(E) An explanation by the practitioner of the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice, and benefits for such services and supports that are available under this title.
`(F)(i) Subject to clause (ii), an explanation of orders regarding life sustaining treatment or similar orders, which shall include--
`(I) the reasons why the development of such an order is beneficial to the individual and the individual's family and the reasons why such an order should be updated periodically as the health of the individual changes;
`(II) the information needed for an individual or legal surrogate to make informed decisions regarding the completion of such an order; and
`(III) the identification of resources that an individual may use to determine the requirements of the State in which such individual resides so that the treatment wishes of that individual will be carried out if the individual is unable to communicate those wishes, including requirements regarding the designation of a surrogate decisionmaker (also known as a health care proxy).
`(ii) The Secretary shall limit the requirement for explanations under clause (i) to consultations furnished in a State--
`(I) in which all legal barriers have been addressed for enabling orders for life sustaining treatment to constitute a set of medical orders respected across all care settings; and
`(II) that has in effect a program for orders for life sustaining treatment described in clause (iii).
`(iii) A program for orders for life sustaining treatment for a States described in this clause is a program that--
`(I) ensures such orders are standardized and uniquely identifiable throughout the State;
`(II) distributes or makes accessible such orders to physicians and other health professionals that (acting within the scope of the professional's authority under State law) may sign orders for life sustaining treatment;
`(III) provides training for health care professionals across the continuum of care about the goals and use of orders for life sustaining treatment; and
`(IV) is guided by a coalition of stakeholders includes representatives from emergency medical services, emergency department physicians or nurses, state long-term care association, state medical association, state surveyors, agency responsible for senior services, state department of health, state hospital association, home health association, state bar association, and state hospice association.
`(2) A practitioner described in this paragraph is--
`(A) a physician (as defined in subsection (r)(1)); and
`(B) a nurse practitioner or physician's assistant who has the authority under State law to sign orders for life sustaining treatments.
`(3)(A) An initial preventive physical examination under subsection (WW), including any related discussion during such examination, shall not be considered an advance care planning consultation for purposes of applying the 5-year limitation under paragraph (1).
`(B) An advance care planning consultation with respect to an individual may be conducted more frequently than provided under paragraph (1) if there is a significant change in the health condition of the individual, including diagnosis of a chronic, progressive, life-limiting disease, a life-threatening or terminal diagnosis or life-threatening injury, or upon admission to a skilled nursing facility, a long-term care facility (as defined by the Secretary), or a hospice program.
`(4) A consultation under this subsection may include the formulation of an order regarding life sustaining treatment or a similar order.
`(5)(A) For purposes of this section, the term `order regarding life sustaining treatment' means, with respect to an individual, an actionable medical order relating to the treatment of that individual that--
`(i) is signed and dated by a physician (as defined in subsection (r)(1)) or another health care professional (as specified by the Secretary and who is acting within the scope of the professional's authority under State law in signing such an order, including a nurse practitioner or physician assistant) and is in a form that permits it to stay with the individual and be followed by health care professionals and providers across the continuum of care;
`(ii) effectively communicates the individual's preferences regarding life sustaining treatment, including an indication of the treatment and care desired by the individual;
`(iii) is uniquely identifiable and standardized within a given locality, region, or State (as identified by the Secretary); and
`(iv) may incorporate any advance directive (as defined in section 1866(f)(3)) if executed by the individual.
`(B) The level of treatment indicated under subparagraph (A)(ii) may range from an indication for full treatment to an indication to limit some or all or specified interventions. Such indicated levels of treatment may include indications respecting, among other items--
`(i) the intensity of medical intervention if the patient is pulse less, apneic, or has serious cardiac or pulmonary problems;
`(ii) the individual's desire regarding transfer to a hospital or remaining at the current care setting;
`(iii) the use of antibiotics; and
`(iv) the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration.'.
(2) PAYMENT- Section 1848(j)(3) of such Act (42 U.S.C. 1395w-4(j)(3)) is amended by inserting `(2)(FF),' after `(2)(EE),'.
(3) FREQUENCY LIMITATION- Section 1862(a) of such Act (42 U.S.C. 1395y(a)) is amended--
(A) in paragraph (1)--
(i) in subparagraph (N), by striking `and' at the end;
(ii) in subparagraph (O) by striking the semicolon at the end and inserting `, and'; and
(iii) by adding at the end the following new subparagraph:
`(P) in the case of advance care planning consultations (as defined in section 1861(hhh)(1)), which are performed more frequently than is covered under such section;'; and
(B) in paragraph (7), by striking `or (K)' and inserting `(K), or (P)'.
(4) EFFECTIVE DATE- The amendments made by this subsection shall apply to consultations furnished on or after January 1, 2011.
(b) Expansion of Physician Quality Reporting Initiative for End of Life Care-
(1) Physician'S QUALITY REPORTING INITIATIVE- Section 1848(k)(2) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395w-4(k)(2)) is amended by adding at the end the following new paragraphs:
`(3) Physician'S QUALITY REPORTING INITIATIVE-
`(A) IN GENERAL- For purposes of reporting data on quality measures for covered professional services furnished during 2011 and any subsequent year, to the extent that measures are available, the Secretary shall include quality measures on end of life care and advanced care planning that have been adopted or endorsed by a consensus-based organization, if appropriate. Such measures shall measure both the creation of and adherence to orders for life-sustaining treatment.
`(B) PROPOSED SET OF MEASURES- The Secretary shall publish in the Federal Register proposed quality measures on end of life care and advanced care planning that the Secretary determines are described in subparagraph (A) and would be appropriate for eligible professionals to use to submit data to the Secretary. The Secretary shall provide for a period of public comment on such set of measures before finalizing such proposed measures.'.
(c) Inclusion of Information in Medicare & You Handbook-
(1) MEDICARE & YOU HANDBOOK-
(A) IN GENERAL- Not later than 1 year after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall update the online version of the Medicare & You Handbook to include the following:
(i) An explanation of advance care planning and advance directives, including--
(I) living wills;
(II) durable power of attorney;
(III) orders of life-sustaining treatment; and
(IV) health care proxies.
(ii) A description of Federal and State resources available to assist individuals and their families with advance care planning and advance directives, including--
(I) available State legal service organizations to assist individuals with advance care planning, including those organizations that receive funding pursuant to the Older Americans Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. 93001 et seq.);
(II) website links or addresses for State-specific advance directive forms; and
(III) any additional information, as determined by the Secretary.
(B) UPDATE OF PAPER AND SUBSEQUENT VERSIONS- The Secretary shall include the information described in subparagraph (A) in all paper and electronic versions of the Medicare & You Handbook that are published on or after the date that is 1 year after the date of the enactment of this Act.
* * *
One of Mr. Right's general objections to the plan is that it allegedly takes decision making away from medical experts and places it in the hands of bureaucrats. In this particular case, the criticism seems unjustified, since the consultation is done with "practitioners" with explicitly delineated medical qualifications. Also, far from being a death panel, the consultation appears to allow the patient to set his preferences at either extreme, from do-not-resuscitate to heroic measures, or anywhere in between that he sees fit. The overall idea is to give people an incentive to use the counseling to establish their preferences early rather than have loved ones or doctors guess the preferences during a crisis. This strikes me as a case in which critics are reading their own anxieties about "bureaucrats" into innocuous measures. Mr. Right himself says that the issue isn't whether the government is going to kill anybody, but whether bureaucrats should have the power to allocate inevitably limited medical resources. Since no such power is granted to bureaucrats in this section, the source of Republican objections must lie elsewhere, either within this cumbersome bill or in their own heads. However, if someone sees something in here that I'm not noticing, I'd like to have it called to my attention.
Truck-Bombing in Russia
A Russian official takes a conspiratorial view of the suicide truck bombing that has killed at least 20 people in the nation's turbulent Ingushetia region. Muslim separatists are most likely to blame for the attack, but the Russian sees them laying with strange bedfellows. He accuses the U.S. and other western powers of supporting the separatists, the west's aversion to Muslim guerrillas and terrorists presumably being mitigated by their hatred of Russia. Using provocative language, at least as reported in English, the official accuses the west of scheming to stop Russia from regaining its "Soviet-era might."
That's a bombshell if the translation is accurate and the statement represents the Medvedev-Putin mentality. Russia, one would think, should have no reason to aspire to "Soviet-era might" because Russia and the Soviet Union are not synonymous. The USSR encompassed many nations that are now separate and independent, from Ukraine to Uzbekistan, so that, territorially speaking, Russia cannot have "Soviet-era might." If anything, these former Soviet republics should view references to Soviet-era might with more alarm than the west.
Furthermore, Russia often seems to act as if it's entitled to "Soviet-era might." Russians sometimes seem to think that their geographic size entitles them to a major voice in global affairs, a claim that Canada, perhaps surprisingly, never makes. Like other ambitious nations (including the United States), Russia has a lot of people who think that their culture has something to teach the rest of the world. That idea dates back well before the Bolshevik revolution, but has had little basis in genuine cultural appeal apart from novelists and classical composers.
No nation is entitled to be a superpower. At the same time, no nation has a right to prevent another from becoming a superpower. If the U.S. is backing separatists to make mischief for Russia, it ought to stop. In turn, Russians really should get over themselves a little. To the extent that there is a global marketplace for cultural ideas, it's been clear for a long time that the world hasn't been buying what Russia's been selling. Russia is entitled to no more influence in the world than they've earned fairly as a model for emulation. The fact that there are separatist movements signals that the country still has a long way to go.
That's a bombshell if the translation is accurate and the statement represents the Medvedev-Putin mentality. Russia, one would think, should have no reason to aspire to "Soviet-era might" because Russia and the Soviet Union are not synonymous. The USSR encompassed many nations that are now separate and independent, from Ukraine to Uzbekistan, so that, territorially speaking, Russia cannot have "Soviet-era might." If anything, these former Soviet republics should view references to Soviet-era might with more alarm than the west.
Furthermore, Russia often seems to act as if it's entitled to "Soviet-era might." Russians sometimes seem to think that their geographic size entitles them to a major voice in global affairs, a claim that Canada, perhaps surprisingly, never makes. Like other ambitious nations (including the United States), Russia has a lot of people who think that their culture has something to teach the rest of the world. That idea dates back well before the Bolshevik revolution, but has had little basis in genuine cultural appeal apart from novelists and classical composers.
No nation is entitled to be a superpower. At the same time, no nation has a right to prevent another from becoming a superpower. If the U.S. is backing separatists to make mischief for Russia, it ought to stop. In turn, Russians really should get over themselves a little. To the extent that there is a global marketplace for cultural ideas, it's been clear for a long time that the world hasn't been buying what Russia's been selling. Russia is entitled to no more influence in the world than they've earned fairly as a model for emulation. The fact that there are separatist movements signals that the country still has a long way to go.
14 August 2009
What's in a Name? The Kim for Mayor Campaign
Ron Kim is the public safety commissioner of Saratoga Springs and the Democratic candidate for this year's mayoral election. He is half-Korean in his ancestry. The Saratoga newspaper reports today that Kim has asked for the removal of online reader comments on articles about his campaign "that are culturally biased and racist." Most such comments, apparently, are riffs on his last name, the Korean equivalent of "Smith" which he shares with the infamous ruling family of North Korea. The comments allegedly equate candidate Kim with Kim Jong Il, to an extent that the candidate found people telling him that the newspaper was calling him a dictator.
There are many ways to look at this. For starters, wordplay itself isn't inherently racist. If someone named Bush runs for office anywhere, he or she should expect to be compared or equated with the notorious presidential clan, even if only for the sake of jokes. Candidate Kim is compared to Dear Leader Kim because of the name, not because both men have Korean ancestry. If the candidate's name were Ron Cho and someone still equated him with the dictator (rather than the comedienne or the Virginia Tech amoklaufer), he might have a case for claiming racism. On the other hand, a person of any other race named Kim (most likely a first name in such cases) might also get compared to the Korean tyrant.
Meanwhile, the newspaper notes that its reader-comment pages have the usual "Report Abuse" feature that would have allowed the candidate or his supporters to flag the offending posters or petition to have them removed from the page. Candidate Kim apparently only heard of the posts from other people and had not seen them himself. Newspaper representatives claim that he ought to have followed the procedure offered to protest the posts, or at least met with the publisher before taking his complaint to the media at large. It's nice that a complaint process exists, but it probably irked Kim to see that either no one had availed themselves of it on his behalf or editors had ignored any complaints. He should grow a slightly thicker skin. As I stated above, the offending comments were based on his name first, not his ethnicity. It might be regrettable that people are tempted to make jokes or insinuations based on common names, and the practice may well be holding back many otherwise inoffensive Hitlers, Mussolinis and Maos out there. But the candidate shouldn't make more of it than is actually there. I think we might all recognize genuine anti-Korean racism when we see it, and unless Kim can show examples of that kind, he should save his invective for his real political opponents.
There are many ways to look at this. For starters, wordplay itself isn't inherently racist. If someone named Bush runs for office anywhere, he or she should expect to be compared or equated with the notorious presidential clan, even if only for the sake of jokes. Candidate Kim is compared to Dear Leader Kim because of the name, not because both men have Korean ancestry. If the candidate's name were Ron Cho and someone still equated him with the dictator (rather than the comedienne or the Virginia Tech amoklaufer), he might have a case for claiming racism. On the other hand, a person of any other race named Kim (most likely a first name in such cases) might also get compared to the Korean tyrant.
Meanwhile, the newspaper notes that its reader-comment pages have the usual "Report Abuse" feature that would have allowed the candidate or his supporters to flag the offending posters or petition to have them removed from the page. Candidate Kim apparently only heard of the posts from other people and had not seen them himself. Newspaper representatives claim that he ought to have followed the procedure offered to protest the posts, or at least met with the publisher before taking his complaint to the media at large. It's nice that a complaint process exists, but it probably irked Kim to see that either no one had availed themselves of it on his behalf or editors had ignored any complaints. He should grow a slightly thicker skin. As I stated above, the offending comments were based on his name first, not his ethnicity. It might be regrettable that people are tempted to make jokes or insinuations based on common names, and the practice may well be holding back many otherwise inoffensive Hitlers, Mussolinis and Maos out there. But the candidate shouldn't make more of it than is actually there. I think we might all recognize genuine anti-Korean racism when we see it, and unless Kim can show examples of that kind, he should save his invective for his real political opponents.
13 August 2009
The American Bipolarchy: Power without Discipline
Listening to yet another round of Republican infighting raised anew the old questions of why one faction doesn't split from the other. I have my own answer to the question, which is that all sides covet the party organization's fundraising apparatus. But I suddenly found the old question begging a new one: why is it up to disaffected factions to leave the party or not?
The more I think about the American Bipolarchy, the more convinced I become that it is a structural rather than a conspiratorial phenomenon, the result of a sequence of decisions of policies, few of which were designed consciously to exclude rival parties. I wonder whether invoking the Bipolarchy creates a deceptive image of two powerful parties on the model of the monopoly parties of one-party states. The fact is, the Democratic and Republican parties lack a particular power that is characteristic of tyrannical parties elsewhere. When we think of the history of communist parties, for instance, we likely think of a succession of purges. These purges would not only eliminate people from positions of power within the parties, but often would expel them from the parties entirely, which in one-party states was tantamount to disfranchisement. Elderly purge victims like Vyacheslav Molotov might spend the rest of their long lives begging to be reinstated into the ruling party. Nothing like this happens in the dominant American parties.
Nobody gets thrown out of the Republican party for failing to toe the current ideological line, no matter how many people call for or dare dissidents to go elsewhere. All the groups can call each other "RINOs" or otherwise disparage each other's partisan credentials, but no one has the power to state as fact that someone else is no longer a Republican. On one hand, this looks like a matter of common sense; if one faction purged another, the losers would have nothing else to do but join the other major party or form a new party, and it makes no sense to force people to vote against you in the general election. On the other hand, it may have been a historical accident that revealed the genius of this reticence, since recent history, at least, has shown that dissidents, if not pushed out or purged, will not leave. This wasn't always the case a century ago. The more local you got, especially, primaries very often resulted in independent tickets as recently as 100 years ago. In my research on the city of Troy I found that the 1905 mayoral election was a four-way contest, not counting smaller parties like socialists or prohibitionists, because independents had split from both the Democratic and Republican parties. But this tendency seems to have become less pronounced as the 20th century went on. Perhaps there was an ultimate concession that splintering was always futile, but perhaps something else was happening that made dissidents less likely to bolt. What that might have been may be a key to the consolidation of the Bipolarchy, and that makes it a subject for further research.
The more I think about the American Bipolarchy, the more convinced I become that it is a structural rather than a conspiratorial phenomenon, the result of a sequence of decisions of policies, few of which were designed consciously to exclude rival parties. I wonder whether invoking the Bipolarchy creates a deceptive image of two powerful parties on the model of the monopoly parties of one-party states. The fact is, the Democratic and Republican parties lack a particular power that is characteristic of tyrannical parties elsewhere. When we think of the history of communist parties, for instance, we likely think of a succession of purges. These purges would not only eliminate people from positions of power within the parties, but often would expel them from the parties entirely, which in one-party states was tantamount to disfranchisement. Elderly purge victims like Vyacheslav Molotov might spend the rest of their long lives begging to be reinstated into the ruling party. Nothing like this happens in the dominant American parties.
Nobody gets thrown out of the Republican party for failing to toe the current ideological line, no matter how many people call for or dare dissidents to go elsewhere. All the groups can call each other "RINOs" or otherwise disparage each other's partisan credentials, but no one has the power to state as fact that someone else is no longer a Republican. On one hand, this looks like a matter of common sense; if one faction purged another, the losers would have nothing else to do but join the other major party or form a new party, and it makes no sense to force people to vote against you in the general election. On the other hand, it may have been a historical accident that revealed the genius of this reticence, since recent history, at least, has shown that dissidents, if not pushed out or purged, will not leave. This wasn't always the case a century ago. The more local you got, especially, primaries very often resulted in independent tickets as recently as 100 years ago. In my research on the city of Troy I found that the 1905 mayoral election was a four-way contest, not counting smaller parties like socialists or prohibitionists, because independents had split from both the Democratic and Republican parties. But this tendency seems to have become less pronounced as the 20th century went on. Perhaps there was an ultimate concession that splintering was always futile, but perhaps something else was happening that made dissidents less likely to bolt. What that might have been may be a key to the consolidation of the Bipolarchy, and that makes it a subject for further research.
Idiot-Proofing the Healthcare Debate
A constructive suggestion by a Republican! Credit is due to Kathleen Parker, who seems like one of the few reasonable ones left. Her latest column addresses the fear inspired by the end-of-life counseling provision in the Democratic proposal. While she's literate enough to understand what it actually means, which is that such counseling will now be covered by insurance, she concedes that many people are bound to see that as the first step on a slippery slope that might lead to the "death panels" of Sarah Palin's rotten imagination. Parker offers an amendment which she hopes would calm most fears. "All that's needed is specific language saying that these end-of-life consultations are not mandatory -- either for physicians or patients -- and that there would be no penalty, either in coverage or compensation, for declining to participate," she writes. I see no reason for Democrats not to take up her suggestion. If they did this, Republicans and allied reactionaries would have even less excuse for their paranoid raving than they have now. Their continued opposition could then be attributed, as it should have been all along, not to fear but to hate.
12 August 2009
Another Note on Conservatism
It was dispiriting to discover on page 159 of Patrick Allitt's The Conservatives that the first self-conscious, self-identified "conservative" movement in the U.S. only emerged in the 1950s. If that was so, what was the point of the first 158 pages? Actually, the point was to point out the precursors to the full-blown conservative movement, and in turn to show what the movement took from past thinkers, and what it changed. As a whole, Allitt has reinforced my own sense that modern conservatism had deviated from what might be called the conservative tradition in this country and in Western civ in general. There's always been an aversion to so-called "forced" equality, but older versions of conservatism at least asserted that inequality was necessary and even beneficial to society as a whole. They believed that leadership and wisdom were qualities that required leisure to learn, so that societies had to have aristocracies in order to have proper leadership. With that came a notion that those with privilege had a responsibility toward society as a whole, not just to lead it but to set good examples for it. With the American Revolution and the idea of a "natural aristocracy" came the idea that excessive concentrations of wealth were dangerous to a republic. This attitude persisted at least through the days of Teddy Roosevelt, and Allitt points out that many founding fathers of modern-day conservatism still regarded excessive entrepreneurealism with suspicion. In part this was because some still upheld farm life as the human ideal, but there was also a strong feeling that accumulating wealth was not an end in itself. Since the middle of the last century, this sensibility has been nearly drowned out by a rabid entrepreneurial individualism that goes at least as far back as William Graham Sumner and metastasized under the sensational influence of Ayn Rand. Now, it seems, the social responsibility of wealth extends, as far as too many conservatives are concerned, only to giving to charity, while there's little sense left of obligation toward the state. American conservatism is distinguished, in its decadent modern form, by a distrust of the state, apart from its capacity as a police force to control the masses, that is opposite from the conservative traditions of other lands.
Conservatism isn't something that evolves inexorably. It was true that the "liberalism" of the 19th century became the "conservatism" of the 20th century, but there's no sign yet of a similar turnover from the 20th to the 21st. Americans who want to preserve the New Deal social order, for instance, are not regarded as "conservatives," but remain "liberals" in the public mind. This is largely because conservatives, having refused with Palestinian stubbornness to concede the permanence of FDR's reforms, have kept politics on settings dating back to the 1930s. At some point, however, it must make more sense to call their agenda "radical" rather than conservative, since they want to dig at roots of our social order that reach down nearly a century into the past. Distinguishing the extreme individualism of modern Republian conservatism from the older tradition of social cohesion might clarify matters, and there are some American Conservatives trying to do this. But as long as Republicans see advantages in fearmongering and keeping people scared of reform, they'll still look like conservatives to most people, however unfair that might be to more honorable people.
Conservatism isn't something that evolves inexorably. It was true that the "liberalism" of the 19th century became the "conservatism" of the 20th century, but there's no sign yet of a similar turnover from the 20th to the 21st. Americans who want to preserve the New Deal social order, for instance, are not regarded as "conservatives," but remain "liberals" in the public mind. This is largely because conservatives, having refused with Palestinian stubbornness to concede the permanence of FDR's reforms, have kept politics on settings dating back to the 1930s. At some point, however, it must make more sense to call their agenda "radical" rather than conservative, since they want to dig at roots of our social order that reach down nearly a century into the past. Distinguishing the extreme individualism of modern Republian conservatism from the older tradition of social cohesion might clarify matters, and there are some American Conservatives trying to do this. But as long as Republicans see advantages in fearmongering and keeping people scared of reform, they'll still look like conservatives to most people, however unfair that might be to more honorable people.
11 August 2009
The Philosophy of Deatherism
While some so-called deathers may believe that there are explicit provisions in the Democratic health care-reform proposals that mandate compulsory euthanasia, much of the opposition seems to be grounded in assumptions or suspicions about how "rationed" health care run by liberal Democrats might work. Those suspicions in turn are based on the belief that liberals practice a "culture of death" characterized by their support for women's reproductive sovereignty and the belief of some in a right to die at a time of one's choosing, with assistance if necessary.
Cal Thomas might be described as a philosophical deather. His latest column on the subject shows plainly enough that he doesn't see his antagonists as the Democratic party but as the "culture of death."
This is a one-sided debate, since Democrats and other supporters of health care reform aren't debating these topics at all. If anything, they take affirmative answers to all of the above for granted, since such regard for human life explains why they want to provide health care for everybody. Somehow, Thomas doesn't get this. To him, the advocates of universal health care are the enemies of life.
What is Thomas's proof of this assertion?
Notice that this is a proof based entirely upon his own assumptions about how the "secular left" thinks. It is unsupported by even one quote from any identifiable "secular leftist" who has ever made such suggestions, unless, as Thomas probably does, you presume that anyone who advocates universal health care really means, or desires, "rationing." Thomas says such an attitude results when people stop regarding human beings as "special," but I'd think universal health care is based on a notion that everyone is special, only apparently not in the way Thomas thinks. "Secular leftists" can't regard people as "special," it seems, which may come as a cruel surprise to many bereaved secular leftists over the years.
Again, Thomas has nothing to say about any of the existing proposals, but bases his opposition to them on a presumption about the evil motives of their supporters. Since that presumption has no basis in reality, the columnists' intervention in the health care debate is worse than worthless. The problem is that many of the opponents of health care reform or universal health care think the same way. No tweaking of any proposal will mollify them, since any advance for "rationing" can only mean unleashing Dr. Kevorkian from his hellish lair, perhaps in the uniform of the surgeon general leading an army of killer nurses of the kind that haunted the waking dreams of the lunatic who used to hang out in downtown Troy. The fears of the deathers should be taken just as seriously as that old man's ravings, but since they're part of the official opposition, they're apparently entitled to more attention than they actually deserve.
Cal Thomas might be described as a philosophical deather. His latest column on the subject shows plainly enough that he doesn't see his antagonists as the Democratic party but as the "culture of death."
The debate — OK, the shouting match — we are having over “health-care reform” is about many things, including cost, who gets help and who does not and who, or what, gets to make that determination. Underlying it all is a larger question: Is human life something special? Is it to be valued more highly than, say, plants and pets? When someone is in a “persistent vegetative state” do we mean to say that person is equal in value to a carrot?
This is a one-sided debate, since Democrats and other supporters of health care reform aren't debating these topics at all. If anything, they take affirmative answers to all of the above for granted, since such regard for human life explains why they want to provide health care for everybody. Somehow, Thomas doesn't get this. To him, the advocates of universal health care are the enemies of life.
It is between these two distinctly different worldview goalposts that the battle is taking place. Few from the “endowed rights” side [i.e. those who think rights come from God] are saying that a100-year-old with an inoperable brain tumor should be given extraordinary and expensive care to keep the heart pumping, even after brain waves have gone flat. But there is a big difference between “letting go” and “snuffing out.” The unnatural progression for many on the secular left is to see such a person as a “burden.”
What is Thomas's proof of this assertion?
The secular left claims we are evolutionary accidents who managed to crawl out of the slime and by “natural selection” stand erect and over millions of years outsmart our ancestors, the apes. If that is your belief, then you probably think health care should be rationed. Why spend lots of money to improve — or save — the life of someone who evolved from slime and has no special significance other than the “accident” of becoming human?
Notice that this is a proof based entirely upon his own assumptions about how the "secular left" thinks. It is unsupported by even one quote from any identifiable "secular leftist" who has ever made such suggestions, unless, as Thomas probably does, you presume that anyone who advocates universal health care really means, or desires, "rationing." Thomas says such an attitude results when people stop regarding human beings as "special," but I'd think universal health care is based on a notion that everyone is special, only apparently not in the way Thomas thinks. "Secular leftists" can't regard people as "special," it seems, which may come as a cruel surprise to many bereaved secular leftists over the years.
Again, Thomas has nothing to say about any of the existing proposals, but bases his opposition to them on a presumption about the evil motives of their supporters. Since that presumption has no basis in reality, the columnists' intervention in the health care debate is worse than worthless. The problem is that many of the opponents of health care reform or universal health care think the same way. No tweaking of any proposal will mollify them, since any advance for "rationing" can only mean unleashing Dr. Kevorkian from his hellish lair, perhaps in the uniform of the surgeon general leading an army of killer nurses of the kind that haunted the waking dreams of the lunatic who used to hang out in downtown Troy. The fears of the deathers should be taken just as seriously as that old man's ravings, but since they're part of the official opposition, they're apparently entitled to more attention than they actually deserve.
10 August 2009
Social Studies Through Films: HANDS OVER THE CITY (1963)
No, I didn't post this here by mistake. I've put a movie review here instead of on Mondo 70 because I thought that Francesco Rosi's 1963 movie has something meaningful to say about the ties between partisanship and political corruption. It's a fine film in its own right, though it may seem dry by "wild world of cinema" standards. Rod Steiger stars, but his voice is dubbed into Italian by another actor. His performance ends up as a kind of pantomime, but he clearly understands the character and gives his all, short of his voice. His presence gives the film a kind of resonance for people who remember Steiger from On the Waterfront and similar hard-hitting urban dramas.
Steiger plays Edoardo Nottola, a developer who has a seat on the Naples city council. He's got a big apartment complex project in the works and is knocking down one neighborhood to build another, at profit to himself. The film opens with a spectacular sequence in which Nottola's pile-drivers accidentally bring down a rickety building. This is what I call Italian neorealism on steroids. If Rosi wants to show a building falling down, he knocks down a real, full-sized building.
The collapse, which results in fatalities and injuries, becomes a political scandal, with critics assuming that Nottola is cutting corners around Neapolitian building codes. But as a politician, he has a powerful political party behind him. As a landlord and employer, he has the power to deliver votes and make his party obliged to him. In return, the party defends him, accusing critics of trying to politicize the issue.
Nevertheless, an investigation takes place, despite partisan obstruction, even while Nottola's colleagues consider throwing him under the bus. In the end, however, the developer prevails, arguing on his own behalf that his political enemies are only going after him for propaganda purposes, without any real regard for the people whose hovels he promises to replace with modern apartments.
Nottola's story illustrates a point I've made here about the way partisanship confers immunity on politicians and licenses them to transgress as far as they dare. You can see this immunity principle at work in debates over whether to investigate members of the Bush administration for their roles in the torture of alleged terrorists. Against the idea of prosecution it is argued that bringing alleged criminals to account would be "criminalizing politics." When people who happen to belong to one party accuse others who happen to be in another party of criminal conduct, partisanship encourages us to presume that the accusers are acting chiefly from partisan motives, not from sincere concern for justice. At least that's how partisans usually react when someone from their own party is accused.
The interesting, eye-opening aspect of Hands Over the City is that this familiar scenario plays out in a setting with a genuine multiparty system. Naples in 1963 was not a "Bipolarchy." Though Rosi (or the writer of the English subtitles) is coy about identifying the parties by name, there's clearly a "left," a "right" and a "center." Before watching the film, I had assumed that a bipolarchic system like the U.S. was the most likely breeding ground for partisan immunity. Hands Over the City suggests that any party system, with any number of parties, can foster similar corruption. All it takes is partisanship so pervasive that people no longer believe in the existence of an objective space free from partisan interest, where there might be right or wrong, crime or justice, independent of how parties might suffer or benefit from events. It helps, too, to have cynical, self-interested characters like Nottola who latch onto the political system and leech off of it, fully aware of the immunity it can confer on him.
The moral I take from Hands Over the City is that wherever there are parties, there is the danger of a culture of partisan immunity prevailing, and that the danger doesn't seem to decrease as you add more parties. The only real solution may be to achieve a genuine no-party (as opposed to one-party) system in which no wrongdoer can claim sanctuary in the privileged position of an official opposition, and no one will protect a wrongdoer from justice because he's part of one's particular team. You might argue that we don't need to dismantle parties, we only need to elect people of sound moral character. But it was James "Father of the Constitution" Madison who said that if men were angels we could do without a lot of safeguards we end up finding quite necessary. It may be that even more safeguards are needed than Madison anticipated.
09 August 2009
Partisanship: An Entitlement to Lie?
Former governor Palin calls the Democratic healthcare reform plan "evil" and claims that, under its provisions, the government would claim the prerogative to determine whether her handicapped child would be allowed to live. This is a variation on the "deather" theme that reactionary Republicans have been playing all summer. And no one dares to call them liars to their faces. No one makes the call that their claims aren't worth hearing. Why? Because they are the opposition, and liberal democracy gives dissent the benefit of the doubt. Unlike other notorious nations, we effectively grant the opposition party (though only the "official" opposition party) an entitlement to appear on television whenever they please to make whatever assertions they please. No extreme of outlandishness, no obvious lie, disqualifies them from this entitlement. Thus the deathers and thus the birthers. The problem with this situation is twofold. First, it basically entitles the official opposition to lie if they have nothing more substantive to say. Second, the entitlement, as I said, really only extends to the official opposition. There are dissidents against the Democratic plan who want a greater government role in providing health care and insurance. They are not as often heard as the hysterics who happen to have the Bipolarchy seal of approval that identifies them as the legitimate opposition. If anything, the rotating monopoly on dissent only emboldens the current opposition party to take more irresponsible positions, so long as they aren't answerable to any third group that might claim that they are equally legitimate in opposition to both major parties. But any claim about the Bipolarchy, I'm obliged to admit, begs a question. If the Republican party can do or say nothing in opposition to discredit it permanently among the electorate, is that because the system is rigged to protect both major parties, or because the electorate, bipolar in its own right, is incapable of thinking outside the Bipolarchy box? The answer might determine whether political reform in this country is actually possible.
06 August 2009
The Voice of the South? "Errrr, errrrr..."
Senator Voinovich of Ohio, a Republican, worries that the GOP has grown too Southern. He raised eyebrows a week ago when he told the Columbus Dispatch: "It's the Southerners. They get on TV and go 'errr, errrrr.' People hear them and say, 'These people, they're Southerners. The party's being taken over by Southerners.'"
Commenting on Voinovich's remark, conservative-leaning columnist Kathleen Parker concedes that "Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity." The proof of this is the large percentage of Southerners who question the President's place of birth and his eligibility to serve in office. The source of that percentage is the same Daily Kos poll that I tend to mistrust, but the Republicans have been turning into a Southern party long before that controversy arose. It may have been an inevitable outcome as soon as Richard Nixon adopted the "Southern Strategy" for the 1968 election. There are some Republicans (Mr. Right, for one) who still deny the existence of the Southern Strategy. There are others who try a more sophisticated argument, claiming that Republicans won southern votes by asserting law-and-order principles that had nothing, the apologists allege, to do with race. However it happened, the South, once "solid" for Democrats, followed the lead of the likes of Strom Thurmond into the Party of Lincoln, to the point where they seem to be driving others out.
As a critic of the American Bipolarchy, I see no reason why there can't be both a conservative party of some kind and a Southern party. The Founders expected politics to take the form of clashing regional interests, so the rise of a party dedicated to representing the interests of a particular region would, arguably, be less objectionable to them than the rise of the allegedly ideological parties that form the present-day Bipolarchy. It might also be a clarifying moment for self-styled conservatives to distinguish their fundamental principles and priorities from the prejudices of the old Confederacy. A conservative party purged of Southernism (though not closed to appropriately principled Southerners) might be less fanatical about faith, for instance. Southerners, from what I can tell, imagine themselves as the bearers of authentic American conservatism. The appearance of a conservative movement that repudiates the most obnoxious aspects of Southern heritage might make them rethink their assumptions.
But more likely the conservative media will backlash on poor old Voinovich and accuse him of prejudice against a geographical region. That "errr, errrrr" business may strike some as equivalent to white folks attempting to imitate the Ebonics of their own imagination. To be honest, when I attempt a Southern dialect, those aren't exactly the first syllables out of my mouth. In any event, neither a split nor a purge is likely, because both Southerners and those who resent their influence still want access to the Republican fund-raising machine. Each group most likely assumes that the Republican party belongs to them, but so long as people can't imagine alternatives to the two major parties, it's indisputably true that both these groups belong to the Republican party.
Commenting on Voinovich's remark, conservative-leaning columnist Kathleen Parker concedes that "Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity." The proof of this is the large percentage of Southerners who question the President's place of birth and his eligibility to serve in office. The source of that percentage is the same Daily Kos poll that I tend to mistrust, but the Republicans have been turning into a Southern party long before that controversy arose. It may have been an inevitable outcome as soon as Richard Nixon adopted the "Southern Strategy" for the 1968 election. There are some Republicans (Mr. Right, for one) who still deny the existence of the Southern Strategy. There are others who try a more sophisticated argument, claiming that Republicans won southern votes by asserting law-and-order principles that had nothing, the apologists allege, to do with race. However it happened, the South, once "solid" for Democrats, followed the lead of the likes of Strom Thurmond into the Party of Lincoln, to the point where they seem to be driving others out.
As a critic of the American Bipolarchy, I see no reason why there can't be both a conservative party of some kind and a Southern party. The Founders expected politics to take the form of clashing regional interests, so the rise of a party dedicated to representing the interests of a particular region would, arguably, be less objectionable to them than the rise of the allegedly ideological parties that form the present-day Bipolarchy. It might also be a clarifying moment for self-styled conservatives to distinguish their fundamental principles and priorities from the prejudices of the old Confederacy. A conservative party purged of Southernism (though not closed to appropriately principled Southerners) might be less fanatical about faith, for instance. Southerners, from what I can tell, imagine themselves as the bearers of authentic American conservatism. The appearance of a conservative movement that repudiates the most obnoxious aspects of Southern heritage might make them rethink their assumptions.
But more likely the conservative media will backlash on poor old Voinovich and accuse him of prejudice against a geographical region. That "errr, errrrr" business may strike some as equivalent to white folks attempting to imitate the Ebonics of their own imagination. To be honest, when I attempt a Southern dialect, those aren't exactly the first syllables out of my mouth. In any event, neither a split nor a purge is likely, because both Southerners and those who resent their influence still want access to the Republican fund-raising machine. Each group most likely assumes that the Republican party belongs to them, but so long as people can't imagine alternatives to the two major parties, it's indisputably true that both these groups belong to the Republican party.
Liberal Anger on the Rise?
An ugly tone came into reports this week of Republican mass heckling at "town hall" meetings held by Democratic congressmen to pitch their healthcare-reform plans, a phenomenon described more objectively here. There was a note of conspiracy-theory in the charge that the hecklers did not act spontaneously, but were operating according to a Republican script of talking points. Beyond that, there was an unseemly air of outrage over the fact that anyone dared question the administration's proposals. Don't get me wrong; I'm for big-time reform and I disagree with GOP obstructionism. But when you watch MSNBC especially you get the impression that the hosts think that no one has a right to heckle or "shout down" Democrats. This is hypocrisy coming from people who mocked George W. Bush whenever he chickened out of addressing foreign legislatures where heckling was likely. It's hypocrisy from the left in general, the people who invented the tactic of shouting people down with heckling slogans.
But I sense more then hypocrisy at work here. I sense an angry liberal backlash building against conservative anger. I get a vibe from ostensibly liberal commentators and from people around me that their patience with conservatives is at or near an end. I don't want to overstate the implications of this feeling. Most liberals remain liberals at heart, but I wonder whether anger at conservatives, whether over the healthcare heckling or the admittedly despicable birther movement, might make some liberals less so when it comes to expressing their anger. There'd be nothing wrong with more heated rhetoric; I'd rather have more people say what they really mean, since that might have unexpectedly constructive results. But if it gets to a point where people start thinking that the opposition has no right to oppose, then we'll become no better than the countries we like to chide for how they treat dissenters. There can never be a government policy so perfect that no one could have reason to say it was wrong, in practice or on principle.
The responsibility of democracy is to make sure that a loud minority doesn't get mistaken for a majority opinion. The only way to prove that one side is the majority is through numbers. Are there Republicans heckling Democrats? Then lets see how many Democrats or others can heckle Republicans. How hard is it to find a GOP congressman and ask why he or she supports a system of privileged health care access, or why they believe the rich have more right to life than the rest of us? Instead of wishing that Republicans would shut up, their opponents should try to drown them out. The whining of some commentators betrays a fear that their side can't match the fervor of the opposition. Instead of questioning the legitimacy of dissenters, they should be stirring up an army of assenters. If they can't do that, then their side deserves to lose -- and if you don't like that, then your problem is with the American people as well as the Republican party.
But I sense more then hypocrisy at work here. I sense an angry liberal backlash building against conservative anger. I get a vibe from ostensibly liberal commentators and from people around me that their patience with conservatives is at or near an end. I don't want to overstate the implications of this feeling. Most liberals remain liberals at heart, but I wonder whether anger at conservatives, whether over the healthcare heckling or the admittedly despicable birther movement, might make some liberals less so when it comes to expressing their anger. There'd be nothing wrong with more heated rhetoric; I'd rather have more people say what they really mean, since that might have unexpectedly constructive results. But if it gets to a point where people start thinking that the opposition has no right to oppose, then we'll become no better than the countries we like to chide for how they treat dissenters. There can never be a government policy so perfect that no one could have reason to say it was wrong, in practice or on principle.
The responsibility of democracy is to make sure that a loud minority doesn't get mistaken for a majority opinion. The only way to prove that one side is the majority is through numbers. Are there Republicans heckling Democrats? Then lets see how many Democrats or others can heckle Republicans. How hard is it to find a GOP congressman and ask why he or she supports a system of privileged health care access, or why they believe the rich have more right to life than the rest of us? Instead of wishing that Republicans would shut up, their opponents should try to drown them out. The whining of some commentators betrays a fear that their side can't match the fervor of the opposition. Instead of questioning the legitimacy of dissenters, they should be stirring up an army of assenters. If they can't do that, then their side deserves to lose -- and if you don't like that, then your problem is with the American people as well as the Republican party.
05 August 2009
Who Cares About the Birthers
Eugene Robinson has published an opinion column in which he asks whether the "birther" phenomenon is "an orchestrated campaign to somehow delegitimize Obama's presidency," before advising readers not to take it seriously, since "taking it seriously would be like arguing about the color of unicorns." My advice to Robinson is "physician, heal thyself." It'd be a lot easier to ignore the birthers if pro-Democratic reporters wouldn't keep dragging them out from under rocks. For every Lou Dobbs who tries to have it both ways by reporting on the controversy itself while seemingly stoking it, there are, it sometimes seems, twice as many MSNBC commentators talking about how terrible Dobbs is. Maybe I just watch that station too often, but doing so has given me the suspicious feeling that some "liberal media" elements are trying to inflate the birthers beyond their actual significance in a conscious effort to discredit the Republican party by association with the lunatic fringe. Robinson, himself a familiar face on MSNBC, cites a survey from a dubious source (Daily Kos, fanatically pro-Democrat) that purports to prove that as many as 58% of surveyed Republicans have doubts or outright disbelieve that the President of the United States is constitutionally eligible for his job. This, Robinson writes, "is a fascinating indicator of just how far the Republican Party has drifted from the mainstream." I really, really doubt that those numbers reflect the truth. The Republicans are bad enough without making most of them look even worse than they are. Worse yet, as I've said before, continuing to publicize the birthers could tempt still more credulous yahoos into believing the buncombe. The best way to deal with the fringe phenomenon of the birthers is to treat it like most other fringe phenomena of political life; ignore them and they'll go away, literally, from your pages, your websites and airwaves, until their beliefs are taken no more seriously than those of the John Birch Society. They still exist, you know, but once people stopped worrying about them about forty years ago, they stopped being something to worry about. Let the birthers find their level in the same fashion.
04 August 2009
Amoklauf in Pennsylvania (updated)
This time it was an aerobics class, a room with up to 40 women in it. Three are dead, as is the gunman, and more are wounded, so the death toll may rise. The site and choice of targets are suggestive, but it is far too soon to speculate meaningfully about the man's motive, except that he had an obvious compulsion to take out as many women as he could before the time came, apparently, to end his own life. Yet another brave American lived out his fatal fantasy of gunplay, and yet more will contribute their usual asinine post-mortems to the effect that someone armed could have defended herself and the other women. I'm sure, though, that on some level the gunman thought he was acting in self-defense, too -- maybe even when he shot himself.
Our free states were certainly more secure by virtue of this guy having a gun, weren't they?
Update: the killer has been identified as the alleged author of a web diary that reveals nine months of contemplation and planning for the attack, including a visit to the fitness center earlier this year that ended when he "chickened out." The diary seems to expose the shooter as an extreme social misfit who blamed women in general for his inability to connect with any of them. Guns presumably gave him the power to punish women for denying him his due. It occurs to me that that a presumed right to punish may be inextricably linked with the right to self-defense most gun enthusiasts claim, that it might not suffice for many of them simply to escape an attacker unless they can also punish the enemy for the affront on one's personal space. This may just be another way of saying that the gun owner provisionally appoints himself judge, jury and executioner under the self-designated emergency conditions of self-defense. What worries people about widespread gun ownership is the constant threat that someone will decide for reasons of his own that others have wronged him and have to be punished. Guns themselves can never be purely defensive instruments, so self-defense may not justify gun ownership as obviously as gun owners claim. Incidents like last night's amoklauf are the opposite side of the same coin.
Our free states were certainly more secure by virtue of this guy having a gun, weren't they?
Update: the killer has been identified as the alleged author of a web diary that reveals nine months of contemplation and planning for the attack, including a visit to the fitness center earlier this year that ended when he "chickened out." The diary seems to expose the shooter as an extreme social misfit who blamed women in general for his inability to connect with any of them. Guns presumably gave him the power to punish women for denying him his due. It occurs to me that that a presumed right to punish may be inextricably linked with the right to self-defense most gun enthusiasts claim, that it might not suffice for many of them simply to escape an attacker unless they can also punish the enemy for the affront on one's personal space. This may just be another way of saying that the gun owner provisionally appoints himself judge, jury and executioner under the self-designated emergency conditions of self-defense. What worries people about widespread gun ownership is the constant threat that someone will decide for reasons of his own that others have wronged him and have to be punished. Guns themselves can never be purely defensive instruments, so self-defense may not justify gun ownership as obviously as gun owners claim. Incidents like last night's amoklauf are the opposite side of the same coin.
A "Deather" Writes
"Deathers" is a term I first heard on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC program last week. A play on the term "birthers," it identifies those extremist opponents of the President's health-care reform plans who believe, or at least claim, that "Obamacare" will result, unintentionally or not, in the mass demise of old people who will lose out on health care. Cal Thomas, the conservative columnist, is a sort of philosophical deather. He writes from the U.K. this week, where he's appalled to learn about a case in which the House of Lords ruled in favor of a multiple sclerosis patient who wants to end her life at a Swiss "euthanasia clinic." The Lords have required the country's Director of Public Prosecutions to "spell out exactly when the government will act if someone helps a friend take their own life abroad." The decision, I infer from Thomas's commentary, limits the Director's power to prosecute the patient's husband, for instance, if he accompanies her to the clinic.
"One doesn't have to be a futurist or a prophet to see where this is headed," Thomas writes, "Having removed the right to life from the unborn in the UK and the United States, it is only a matter of conditioning before the at first 'voluntary' and ultimately involuntary snuffing out of life at its other end will be tolerated and, indeed, promoted as the state seeks new ways to cut expenses."
I thought liberals were the ones who believed in the "slippery slope," but that just goes to show again that "liberal" and "conservative" are nearly useless labels for describing the factions involved in our national debates. Thomas clearly fears (and I'll give him credit for sincerely fearing) a slippery slope from the "right to die" to government-mandated euthanasia, which some (and perhaps Thomas himself) see as a long-term consequence of "rationed" health care. But he's also got to get a dig in at the reproductive rights movement.
"As suicide, like abortion, becomes a 'choice,' it will be done for reasons that go beyond the reason through which it is ushered in: the supposed 'intolerable pain and suffering' and 'lack of hope' of recovery," he continues, "Abortion on demand was conceived through the bogus rape of an unmarried woman and now it can be had for any reason, or no reason."
What worries Thomas is the possibility that the decision to die might not be made by the actual sick person. "Should that decision be left in the hands of others whose motives may be suspect, or even to our own hands when our perspective may be clouded by drugs or pressures from family members trying to unload their 'burden' and get to the estate before the money is spent?" he asks -- as if no family had ever taken such steps for greedy reasons before, say, the advent of Dr. Kervorkian.
"If granny has willed you her nest egg, why not convince her and the doctor to slip her a pill and end her 'suffering?'" Thomas theorizes, "Wouldn't she 'want it that way' so as not to be a 'burden' to her family?" This, of course, is a monstrous insult to anyone who has actually had to deal with a loved one who wanted to die more quickly, and the insult is only made worse by the timing of Thomas's column, which is obviously meant to draw analogies between greedy, selfish relatives and an insensitive state dedicated to "rationing."
Thomas is a Christian conservative, though on many issues he's backed away from old-school Christian activism on the Moral Majority model. This issue, however, is an old fashioned crusade for the columnist. "The one who gave us life has, or ought to have, sole discretion as to when it ends," he thunders, "But if increasing numbers of us think 'the one' refers to a character in 'The Matrix' [way to stay hip, Cal!] and that we are just evolutionary accidents, then the conclusion of it all is euthanasia for the elderly, the 'defective,' the inconvenient and the unwanted. It's coming sooner than you think to a senior center near you, especially if Obamacare becomes law."
In their hysteria about euthanasia, some conservatives lose track of the script for their ongoing jihad against liberals. The last time I looked, liberals were supposed to be "bleeding hearts," compassionate to a fault when it comes to those conservatives consider unworthy of compassion, too willing to burden the self-reliant with the costs of helping the dependent. If "Obamacare" is a liberal scheme, then shouldn't conservatives assume that it will be the able-bodied who'll suffer as "socialized medicine" perpetuates the no-longer productive lives of the infirm? Might the all-powerful state not seek out those who pose the greatest risk through reckless behavior of using up hospital resources that ought to go to the weakest and most helpless? Wouldn't liberals rather kill the young to save the old the way they supposedly rob the rich to give to the poor? Does that argument sound absurd to conservative readers? Well, don't knock it until you try it. For all I know, if you started making that case on the radio or online, you could actually kill health-care reform.
"One doesn't have to be a futurist or a prophet to see where this is headed," Thomas writes, "Having removed the right to life from the unborn in the UK and the United States, it is only a matter of conditioning before the at first 'voluntary' and ultimately involuntary snuffing out of life at its other end will be tolerated and, indeed, promoted as the state seeks new ways to cut expenses."
I thought liberals were the ones who believed in the "slippery slope," but that just goes to show again that "liberal" and "conservative" are nearly useless labels for describing the factions involved in our national debates. Thomas clearly fears (and I'll give him credit for sincerely fearing) a slippery slope from the "right to die" to government-mandated euthanasia, which some (and perhaps Thomas himself) see as a long-term consequence of "rationed" health care. But he's also got to get a dig in at the reproductive rights movement.
"As suicide, like abortion, becomes a 'choice,' it will be done for reasons that go beyond the reason through which it is ushered in: the supposed 'intolerable pain and suffering' and 'lack of hope' of recovery," he continues, "Abortion on demand was conceived through the bogus rape of an unmarried woman and now it can be had for any reason, or no reason."
What worries Thomas is the possibility that the decision to die might not be made by the actual sick person. "Should that decision be left in the hands of others whose motives may be suspect, or even to our own hands when our perspective may be clouded by drugs or pressures from family members trying to unload their 'burden' and get to the estate before the money is spent?" he asks -- as if no family had ever taken such steps for greedy reasons before, say, the advent of Dr. Kervorkian.
"If granny has willed you her nest egg, why not convince her and the doctor to slip her a pill and end her 'suffering?'" Thomas theorizes, "Wouldn't she 'want it that way' so as not to be a 'burden' to her family?" This, of course, is a monstrous insult to anyone who has actually had to deal with a loved one who wanted to die more quickly, and the insult is only made worse by the timing of Thomas's column, which is obviously meant to draw analogies between greedy, selfish relatives and an insensitive state dedicated to "rationing."
Thomas is a Christian conservative, though on many issues he's backed away from old-school Christian activism on the Moral Majority model. This issue, however, is an old fashioned crusade for the columnist. "The one who gave us life has, or ought to have, sole discretion as to when it ends," he thunders, "But if increasing numbers of us think 'the one' refers to a character in 'The Matrix' [way to stay hip, Cal!] and that we are just evolutionary accidents, then the conclusion of it all is euthanasia for the elderly, the 'defective,' the inconvenient and the unwanted. It's coming sooner than you think to a senior center near you, especially if Obamacare becomes law."
In their hysteria about euthanasia, some conservatives lose track of the script for their ongoing jihad against liberals. The last time I looked, liberals were supposed to be "bleeding hearts," compassionate to a fault when it comes to those conservatives consider unworthy of compassion, too willing to burden the self-reliant with the costs of helping the dependent. If "Obamacare" is a liberal scheme, then shouldn't conservatives assume that it will be the able-bodied who'll suffer as "socialized medicine" perpetuates the no-longer productive lives of the infirm? Might the all-powerful state not seek out those who pose the greatest risk through reckless behavior of using up hospital resources that ought to go to the weakest and most helpless? Wouldn't liberals rather kill the young to save the old the way they supposedly rob the rich to give to the poor? Does that argument sound absurd to conservative readers? Well, don't knock it until you try it. For all I know, if you started making that case on the radio or online, you could actually kill health-care reform.
03 August 2009
Who Are the Conservatives?
My newest book out of the library is Patrick Allitt's The Conservatives: Ideas & Personalities Throughout American History. It has the prestige of an academic press (Yale) and blurbs by some formidable historians, but it didn't take me long to wonder what the point of the book was. Allitt himself states the problem in his introduction.
Nevertheless, Allitt's thesis is that there has been a "conservative" side in every contentious period in American history. The problem is whether the side he identifies as "conservative" is the one today's self-identified "conservatives" endorse. For instance, in the early national period he identifies the Federalists as the "conservative" party, while most self-styled conservatives of the present day probably identify with the Jeffersonian side because of its advocacy of limited government and states' rights. A minority of conservatives of more populist leanings might side with the Federalists because they agree with Alexander Hamilton on the need for protectionist trade policies, but many more, from what I can tell, have endorsed the principle of free trade as part of the broader concept of free enterprise -- an idea which itself was problematic for many conservatives of the 19th century. Also, it's quite possible for a 21st century conservative to claim that Federalists and Jeffersonians alike would be conservatives by the present standard, just as it's possible to argue that both sides from the 18th century would agree that all sides of the present system are irredeemably corrupt, or that the people as a whole are irredeemably depraved.
The meaning of the word "conservative," in a political context, has changed since the days of the Founding. Allitt adheres to the philosophic sense of the term, which opposes conservatism to "radicalism." Federalists were conservatives, by this standard, because they believed (or simply charged) that opponents from Jefferson to Paine wanted to undertake fundamental root-and-branch reform of the entire social order. That anti-radical aspect of conservatism persists, but in political terms, as we well know, the word is now opposed to "liberalism," which is not the same as "radicalism" (despite what some say) but really signifies a form of permissiveness in which people are allowed to have things they allegedly don't deserve and do things they allegedly oughtn't. It's all to obvious to any sentient observer that "liberals" are often just as opposed to radical reform as conservatives, and are actually more inclined to accuse conservatives of radicalism than to indulge in it themselves.
Allitt thinks there is at least one connecting thread that unites American conservatives across the ages. That would be anti-egalitarianism, an opposition to the idea that equality should extend beyond the "before the law" concept to minimize class differences and restrain excesses of wealth. In the earliest times, Federalists (and some Jeffersonians) resisted extending the right to vote to people without landed property, not to mention women or racial minorities. Federalists in particular supposedly resented the idea of having to electioneer and pander to plebeians, expecting to be recognized for their superiority without having to advertise themselves. Today's conservatives still resist the idea of social equality, since it violates their ideal of just desserts, but they've definitely abandoned the snobbishness of their supposed Federalist forebears, as the anti-intellectualism of Republicans from Joe McCarthy to George W. Bush will attest.
It may be true that in every meaningful political conflict in U.S. history there's been a "conservative" side, but how useful is that information, really, especially when Allitt concedes that there's never been a monolithic, consistent conservative movement carrying the same package of ideas from the Founding to the present? I suspect that Allitt takes the "conservative" label too seriously just because so many conservatives (and liberals) do. It may be harsh to say this of a college professor, but I also suspect that the "Conservatives" label makes his treatise easier to sell. He'd definitely have nothing to sell, maybe even nothing to say, without it. I'm going to press on with the book because it might have something interesting to say about reactionary movements through history, but if anyone picks it up thinking that it'll explain today's conservatives in a historical context, I think they're in for disappointment.
Writers about American conservatism have often observed that the word itself has meant different things at different times and that there is no consistency in conservatives' beliefs about what should be conserved. This truth need not be surprising; conservatives have generally taken an antitheoretical approach to their world. American conservatism, moreover, has often been reactive, responding to perceived political and intellectual challenges. As the challenges and threats changed, so did the nature of the conservative response. Beliefs that once seemed radical later came to seem conservative.
Nevertheless, Allitt's thesis is that there has been a "conservative" side in every contentious period in American history. The problem is whether the side he identifies as "conservative" is the one today's self-identified "conservatives" endorse. For instance, in the early national period he identifies the Federalists as the "conservative" party, while most self-styled conservatives of the present day probably identify with the Jeffersonian side because of its advocacy of limited government and states' rights. A minority of conservatives of more populist leanings might side with the Federalists because they agree with Alexander Hamilton on the need for protectionist trade policies, but many more, from what I can tell, have endorsed the principle of free trade as part of the broader concept of free enterprise -- an idea which itself was problematic for many conservatives of the 19th century. Also, it's quite possible for a 21st century conservative to claim that Federalists and Jeffersonians alike would be conservatives by the present standard, just as it's possible to argue that both sides from the 18th century would agree that all sides of the present system are irredeemably corrupt, or that the people as a whole are irredeemably depraved.
The meaning of the word "conservative," in a political context, has changed since the days of the Founding. Allitt adheres to the philosophic sense of the term, which opposes conservatism to "radicalism." Federalists were conservatives, by this standard, because they believed (or simply charged) that opponents from Jefferson to Paine wanted to undertake fundamental root-and-branch reform of the entire social order. That anti-radical aspect of conservatism persists, but in political terms, as we well know, the word is now opposed to "liberalism," which is not the same as "radicalism" (despite what some say) but really signifies a form of permissiveness in which people are allowed to have things they allegedly don't deserve and do things they allegedly oughtn't. It's all to obvious to any sentient observer that "liberals" are often just as opposed to radical reform as conservatives, and are actually more inclined to accuse conservatives of radicalism than to indulge in it themselves.
Allitt thinks there is at least one connecting thread that unites American conservatives across the ages. That would be anti-egalitarianism, an opposition to the idea that equality should extend beyond the "before the law" concept to minimize class differences and restrain excesses of wealth. In the earliest times, Federalists (and some Jeffersonians) resisted extending the right to vote to people without landed property, not to mention women or racial minorities. Federalists in particular supposedly resented the idea of having to electioneer and pander to plebeians, expecting to be recognized for their superiority without having to advertise themselves. Today's conservatives still resist the idea of social equality, since it violates their ideal of just desserts, but they've definitely abandoned the snobbishness of their supposed Federalist forebears, as the anti-intellectualism of Republicans from Joe McCarthy to George W. Bush will attest.
It may be true that in every meaningful political conflict in U.S. history there's been a "conservative" side, but how useful is that information, really, especially when Allitt concedes that there's never been a monolithic, consistent conservative movement carrying the same package of ideas from the Founding to the present? I suspect that Allitt takes the "conservative" label too seriously just because so many conservatives (and liberals) do. It may be harsh to say this of a college professor, but I also suspect that the "Conservatives" label makes his treatise easier to sell. He'd definitely have nothing to sell, maybe even nothing to say, without it. I'm going to press on with the book because it might have something interesting to say about reactionary movements through history, but if anyone picks it up thinking that it'll explain today's conservatives in a historical context, I think they're in for disappointment.
Are revolutions democratic?
Venezuela's shutdown of numerous radio stations, most if not all broadcasting opposition viewpoints, offers only redundant confirmation for most critics of their suspicions about Hugo Chavez's government. The technicalities cited as reasons for taking over the frequencies look like fig leaves that barely cover the president's naked desire to suppress dissent. Chavez doesn't help matters by editorializing about seizing the media from the "bourgeoisie." If they're being shut down because of violating regulations, what has class to do with it?
Despite being an elected president, Chavez has always seen himself as a revolutionary, and revolutions are always coercive in nature. There'd be no need for revolutions, after all, if everyone agreed on the necessity of reforms at any given moment. Revolutionaries must be determined to tell dissidents that their dissent is irrelevant. We like to think that a genuinely democratic revolution would accomplish this without violence or violating people's rights. In democracy, after all, majorities rule, within constitutional restraints, and dissent is irrelevant to the exercise of power if not to the perpetual public debate. But too often revolutionaries seem uninterested in perpetuating debate. Chavez has a democratic mandate but doesn't appear to trust it. He seems fearful that dissident or reactionary elements could turn a majority of the people against him, even if a majority supports him now. That bit about the "bourgeoisie" also betrays an attitude antithetical to the kind of debate Americans associate with democratic republicanism. The U.S. takes for granted a permanent conflict of interest groups, each of which is free to claim air time or print space (though not guaranteed either) to assert its point of view. Chavez may think that the public airwaves belong only to "The People," and not to any private interests. The problem with that viewpoint, especially when you're running a self-consciously revolutionary state, is the ease with which leaders can assume that the only entity that represents The People is the state itself. How can any person opposing the state prove that he, rather than the state, speaks for The People? Ideally elections should decide, but Venezuela's actions seem designed to reduce dissidents' ability to influence public opinion, and to leave the state with overwhelming advantages. Revolutionaries feel entitled to act that way because they believe, on some level, that they called The People into being and that they alone know who The People are and what their true interests are. Any attempt to say that people are not what the revolution says The People should be is, from the standpoint of revolution, counter-revolutionary.
Only The People, in theory, can refute this argument by rising in sufficient force to overthrow the revolution. Liberals hope that any revolutionary government will have a redeeming moment of insight in which they realize that they have lost the people's confidence. That would be the moment when "People Power" revolutions on the Philippine model can triumph. Revolutionaries, however, are always tempted to see resistance as the people betraying their own duty to become The People. They're tempted to take Bertolt Brecht's ironic advice to appoint a new People when the current ones have lost the confidence of the Party or the state. Then the extreme options range from Bolshevik-style terror and re-education to Hitler's alleged determination that all Germans deserved to die for failing to win the war. These options seem still a long way off for Venezuela. Chavez remains a popular leader, and his popularity might well survive further steps to suppress dissent. There are plenty of people on Earth who are happy to have strong governments because they consider the rich, not the state, to be their oppressors, and those people aren't likely to shed tears if some rich people lose rights that other countries take for granted. I don't know enough about Venezuela to assume that there are no ways other than through the dissident media for people to criticize government policies, or that the government offers no way to redress grievances within the revolutionary apparatus. But if the moral of the latest news is that Hugo Chavez just doesn't want to be criticized on the radio, then these closures are a step in a bad direction. They also show the limits of liberal appeals to the "rule of law." Venezuela wouldn't be the first country to come up with laws simply to inconvenience dissidents, or to come up with creative ways of enforcing existing laws to the same effect. Ultimately the nearest thing to a guarantee of freedom of dissent is still personal courage, and there's never any guarantee that there'll be enough courageous people to make a difference. That's why your own courage is always the most important factor in any free society. It might inspire courage in others, and with enough people inspired, history has shown us the results.
Despite being an elected president, Chavez has always seen himself as a revolutionary, and revolutions are always coercive in nature. There'd be no need for revolutions, after all, if everyone agreed on the necessity of reforms at any given moment. Revolutionaries must be determined to tell dissidents that their dissent is irrelevant. We like to think that a genuinely democratic revolution would accomplish this without violence or violating people's rights. In democracy, after all, majorities rule, within constitutional restraints, and dissent is irrelevant to the exercise of power if not to the perpetual public debate. But too often revolutionaries seem uninterested in perpetuating debate. Chavez has a democratic mandate but doesn't appear to trust it. He seems fearful that dissident or reactionary elements could turn a majority of the people against him, even if a majority supports him now. That bit about the "bourgeoisie" also betrays an attitude antithetical to the kind of debate Americans associate with democratic republicanism. The U.S. takes for granted a permanent conflict of interest groups, each of which is free to claim air time or print space (though not guaranteed either) to assert its point of view. Chavez may think that the public airwaves belong only to "The People," and not to any private interests. The problem with that viewpoint, especially when you're running a self-consciously revolutionary state, is the ease with which leaders can assume that the only entity that represents The People is the state itself. How can any person opposing the state prove that he, rather than the state, speaks for The People? Ideally elections should decide, but Venezuela's actions seem designed to reduce dissidents' ability to influence public opinion, and to leave the state with overwhelming advantages. Revolutionaries feel entitled to act that way because they believe, on some level, that they called The People into being and that they alone know who The People are and what their true interests are. Any attempt to say that people are not what the revolution says The People should be is, from the standpoint of revolution, counter-revolutionary.
Only The People, in theory, can refute this argument by rising in sufficient force to overthrow the revolution. Liberals hope that any revolutionary government will have a redeeming moment of insight in which they realize that they have lost the people's confidence. That would be the moment when "People Power" revolutions on the Philippine model can triumph. Revolutionaries, however, are always tempted to see resistance as the people betraying their own duty to become The People. They're tempted to take Bertolt Brecht's ironic advice to appoint a new People when the current ones have lost the confidence of the Party or the state. Then the extreme options range from Bolshevik-style terror and re-education to Hitler's alleged determination that all Germans deserved to die for failing to win the war. These options seem still a long way off for Venezuela. Chavez remains a popular leader, and his popularity might well survive further steps to suppress dissent. There are plenty of people on Earth who are happy to have strong governments because they consider the rich, not the state, to be their oppressors, and those people aren't likely to shed tears if some rich people lose rights that other countries take for granted. I don't know enough about Venezuela to assume that there are no ways other than through the dissident media for people to criticize government policies, or that the government offers no way to redress grievances within the revolutionary apparatus. But if the moral of the latest news is that Hugo Chavez just doesn't want to be criticized on the radio, then these closures are a step in a bad direction. They also show the limits of liberal appeals to the "rule of law." Venezuela wouldn't be the first country to come up with laws simply to inconvenience dissidents, or to come up with creative ways of enforcing existing laws to the same effect. Ultimately the nearest thing to a guarantee of freedom of dissent is still personal courage, and there's never any guarantee that there'll be enough courageous people to make a difference. That's why your own courage is always the most important factor in any free society. It might inspire courage in others, and with enough people inspired, history has shown us the results.
31 July 2009
Corazon Aquino (1933-2009)
The widow of a martyred dissident, Aquino popularized the term "people power" in 1986 when she became the rallying point of mass protests against a presidential election that was alleged to have been stolen from her by the incumbent, the infamous Ferdinand Marcos. International observers anticipated a bloody crackdown, but instead the Marcos government cracked. Military leaders defected to the opposition and Marcos himself fled the country within a month of the apparently rigged election. The "People Power" Revolution became a template for mass uprisings, as a rule nonviolent, against corrupt or tyrannical regimes. Observers at the time may have scoffed that people power would never work against a more totalitarian regime, on the assumption that such regimes had terrorized their subjects into abject submission. This was still the time of the Cold War, when American intellectuals still made convenient distinctions between totalitarian regimes (usually communist) and mere authoritarian states (often friendly to the U.S.). But the revolutions of 1989-91 offered at worst a mixed record against so-called totalitarian states. Most of the Warsaw Pact fell without a fight, and inside the Soviet Union itself people power helped defeat the coup against Gorbachev. In Romania the revolution turned violent in reaction to government violence, and the dictator was killed. In China the government prevailed against the Tiananmen Square demonstrators, but China was also the most advanced Communist state, at least by western standards of economic liberalism, so make what you will of that.
Part of the argument for invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein was that he had so thoroughly terrorized his people that they could never liberate themselves. This year, outsiders have watched Iran in hopes that the election protests there would escalate into another people power or "color" revolution, even if the protesters themselves intended no such thing. If there is no revolution, some in the west will argue that the Islamic Republic has terrorized its people into submission, despite great evidence to the contrary, and there will be more talk of "regime change," whether leaders listen or not. But I doubt whether many people in 1986 thought that Aquino had any chance against Marcos. The world should remember her on the occasion of her death as what Shiites call a "model for emulation," but in a secular rather than religious context. History shows that people power isn't guaranteed to succeed, but common sense proves infallibly that it can't work if no one tries. For those who live in the comforts of established liberal democracy, Aquino's example should be a reminder never to assume that any regime can never be overthrown, and not to assume a right to act on any people's behalf before they make an effort themselves.
Part of the argument for invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein was that he had so thoroughly terrorized his people that they could never liberate themselves. This year, outsiders have watched Iran in hopes that the election protests there would escalate into another people power or "color" revolution, even if the protesters themselves intended no such thing. If there is no revolution, some in the west will argue that the Islamic Republic has terrorized its people into submission, despite great evidence to the contrary, and there will be more talk of "regime change," whether leaders listen or not. But I doubt whether many people in 1986 thought that Aquino had any chance against Marcos. The world should remember her on the occasion of her death as what Shiites call a "model for emulation," but in a secular rather than religious context. History shows that people power isn't guaranteed to succeed, but common sense proves infallibly that it can't work if no one tries. For those who live in the comforts of established liberal democracy, Aquino's example should be a reminder never to assume that any regime can never be overthrown, and not to assume a right to act on any people's behalf before they make an effort themselves.
Zero-Sum Politics
Did you ever notice that when anyone suggests that the concentration of wealth in relatively fewer hands may have something to do with the impoverishment of others, Republicans and libertarians pounce on any hint of a "zero-sum" argument? How naive of you, they say, to act as if wealth were a finite resource, so that gain by one group means loss for another. Leave aside the merits of the argument, and you'd be left with the impression that these people, as a rule, reject zero-sum reasoning. Yet when the subject turns to health care, and people propose providing adequate health care for all citizens as a matter of right, many of the people who, in another context, might scoff at zero-sum arguments adopt the very principle they otherwise dismiss. They argue that we can't provide more or better health care for the poor without diminishing both the quantity and quality of care for the middle class and the rich. This is the reasoning behind the attacks on "rationing" and the lunatic corollary that envisions a slippery slope toward government-mandated euthanasia. Challenged on the inconsistency, some might say that medicine and medical personnel are finite resources. But doesn't all wealth have some material point of reference, and wouldn't that make wealth itself, in purely empirical terms, a finite resource? So why would one form of accumulation drain the pool for everyone else, while another doesn't? The answer might have something to do with the direction of accumulation. The rich, someone might argue, can't impoverish the poor, but the poor, through the dread instrument of government, can impoverish their betters. So some see it. It actually makes sense, in a way. The rich can't exactly steal what the poor don't have, while the rich have plenty for the poor to take. But the real issue involves what we claim as our due as citizens of a civilized country, and it pits those who understand that civilization itself is an entitlement claim and those, content with their "natural rights," who say that we can never have more rights than we'd have in the wilderness. The latter group are always alert for encroachments by civilization upon their natural rights, and the spectre of universal health care has the hairs upright on the backs of their necks. They think that the jostle of civilized entitlement and natural rights is indeed a zero-sum game. The character of a nation is determined by how many people agree.
29 July 2009
Doc Savage
When I saw a profile of the radio talker Michael Savage in this week's New Yorker, I wondered whether it was part of some broader "liberal media" plot to discredit the Republican party by publicizing its craziest members and factions. Watch MSNBC enough and you could believe in such a plot, given that network's growing coverage of the birthers, the C. Street "Family," health-care conspiracy theories, etc. It also seemed past the time to publicize Savage, his moment of notoriety being the time he lost his gig on television (ironically, on MSNBC) for telling a caller to get AIDS and die. But Kelefa Sanneh seems less interested in exposing Savage's ideology than in celebrating him as a uniquely eccentric entertainer. Sanneh describes him as "a marvellous storyteller, a quirky thinker, and an incorrigible free associater [who] sometimes sounds less like a political commentator than like the star of a riveting and unusually vivid one-man play...or a fugitive character out of a Philip Roth novel." The author is fascinated by Savage's digressiveness on air and his career track in life, the former Michael Alan Weiner having earned a Ph.D. from Berkeley and authored numerous books on alternative medicine while growing more reactionary as he blamed his limited progress in academia on reverse discrimination and more homophobic as he encountered the early outbreaks of AIDS in a San Francisco clinic.What most fascinates Sanneh is Savage's apparently irrepressible pessimism, a trait that may be characteristic of philosophical conservatism but isn't conducive to "successful rabble-rousing." Savage, from this account, is no cheerleader for any party or movement; "Savage never quite seems able to convince himself that the forces of righteousness will prevail," Sanneh writes. Nor is he a team player; he reportedly insults the likes of Limbaugh and Glenn Beck on a regular basis. A reader might get the impression that Savage isn't for anything apart from the usual historically hypocritical meritocracy espoused by aggrieved white men.
"The immoderate quotes meticulously catalogued by the liberal media-watchdog site mediamatters.org are accurate but misleading, insofar as they reduce a willfully erratic broadcast to a series of political brickbats," Sanneh argues. His reluctance to explicate whatever Savage's actual ideology might be suggests that he might be recommending Savage to audiences who used to be entertained by the nightly meltdowns of irascible characters like Rev. Gene Scott or other cult personalities. But just as I'd warn MSNBC that its seeming strategy of sinking the Republican party by publicizing its association with its most insane constituents might backfire, owing to the underestimated credulity of Americans, so I suggest that any article that gets more people listening to Michael Savage simply for some sort of outre entertainment is deeply misconceived.
"The immoderate quotes meticulously catalogued by the liberal media-watchdog site mediamatters.org are accurate but misleading, insofar as they reduce a willfully erratic broadcast to a series of political brickbats," Sanneh argues. His reluctance to explicate whatever Savage's actual ideology might be suggests that he might be recommending Savage to audiences who used to be entertained by the nightly meltdowns of irascible characters like Rev. Gene Scott or other cult personalities. But just as I'd warn MSNBC that its seeming strategy of sinking the Republican party by publicizing its association with its most insane constituents might backfire, owing to the underestimated credulity of Americans, so I suggest that any article that gets more people listening to Michael Savage simply for some sort of outre entertainment is deeply misconceived.
Gates and the Original Accuser
Lucia Whalen went before the cameras today to vindicate her role in the debacle over Henry Louis Gates's attempt to force his way into his own home, but her comments as reported here raise a few fresh questions. Whalen explained that she was apparently not the first person to see Gates's struggle with his door, but had been approached while walking through the neighborhood by "an elderly woman without a cellphone" who found the behavior suspicious. We may presume that Whalen investigated the situation a little herself, but not sufficiently enough to determine the race of the perceived perpetrators. We'd be going a little too far, I admit, to expect her to walk up to Gates, if she had even the least suspicion that he was a burglar, to ask if he's having trouble with the door. In any event the 911 recordings exposed some sloppy reportage by the police. As is now known, Whalen could say no more than that one of the men at the door might have been Hispanic, but the police report, described as a summary of events, says that she described two black men. Moreover, her new statements create a he said/she said conflict with Sgt. Crowley, who has said that she described the suspicious men to him. Whalen now says that she never spoke to Crowley, but was told by him to stay where she was. All this raises a question: at what point did the police know or believe the men at Gates's door to be black? My guess is that the cops are recollecting things retroactively. Because they discovered a black man, they wrote into the report that black men were described, and Crowley may honestly yet mistakenly recall being told before finding Gates that his suspects were black. The other, less wholesome possibility is that the cops inferred from the more tentative descriptions that they would be dealing with blacks.
As was only fair, Whalen's lawyer noted that her client had not been invited to the Gates-Crowley beer bash scheduled for the White House, then dismissed the snub with impeccable sour-grapes reasoning, disclosing that Whalen doesn't like beer. The lawyer may have overreached in portraying Whalen as the calm hero of the crisis while the "three highly trained guys" involved -- Crowley, Gates and the President -- all overreacted. It makes one wonder whether Whalen really underreacted, though this may prove the kind of situation where you could only know what could have been done if you were there. In any event, if the President realizes his omission and tries to correct it, he really should make it a party for five by tracking down the cell-less old lady who really started the trouble.
In the end, the story is a sort of parable for our time. We live in an era of perhaps-inescapably greater surveillance, and the mere idea of that violates our feeling, as law-abiding people, that we should never be objects of surveillance at any time. Knowing ourselves innocent, it's hard to imagine our self-consciously innocent activities being viewed with suspicion. As a black man, Gates most likely felt only a more intense form of the outrage all of us might feel if trapped in such a nightmare scenario. So I wonder whether the race issue has obscured the real moral of the story, which has more to do with how any of us should deal with surveillance and the proper relation between watchers and watchmen than with whether the whole world should know Henry Louis Gates on sight. Any of us might find ourselves mistakenly accused of something at some time. Some people seem to think that forgiving resignation is the only appropriate response. I'd hope that we keep getting outraged when such stuff happens. The limits of our indignation at such times may mark the limits of our consciousness of ourselves as citizens of a free country.
As was only fair, Whalen's lawyer noted that her client had not been invited to the Gates-Crowley beer bash scheduled for the White House, then dismissed the snub with impeccable sour-grapes reasoning, disclosing that Whalen doesn't like beer. The lawyer may have overreached in portraying Whalen as the calm hero of the crisis while the "three highly trained guys" involved -- Crowley, Gates and the President -- all overreacted. It makes one wonder whether Whalen really underreacted, though this may prove the kind of situation where you could only know what could have been done if you were there. In any event, if the President realizes his omission and tries to correct it, he really should make it a party for five by tracking down the cell-less old lady who really started the trouble.
In the end, the story is a sort of parable for our time. We live in an era of perhaps-inescapably greater surveillance, and the mere idea of that violates our feeling, as law-abiding people, that we should never be objects of surveillance at any time. Knowing ourselves innocent, it's hard to imagine our self-consciously innocent activities being viewed with suspicion. As a black man, Gates most likely felt only a more intense form of the outrage all of us might feel if trapped in such a nightmare scenario. So I wonder whether the race issue has obscured the real moral of the story, which has more to do with how any of us should deal with surveillance and the proper relation between watchers and watchmen than with whether the whole world should know Henry Louis Gates on sight. Any of us might find ourselves mistakenly accused of something at some time. Some people seem to think that forgiving resignation is the only appropriate response. I'd hope that we keep getting outraged when such stuff happens. The limits of our indignation at such times may mark the limits of our consciousness of ourselves as citizens of a free country.
28 July 2009
White Men are Profiled, Too
Cal Thomas, the syndicated conservative columnist, feels the pain of Henry Louis Gates, the professor arrested for protesting too vehemently against police suspicions that he was burglarizing his own house last week. Thomas knows Gates, apparently at least well enough to call him Skip, and calls him "a classy guy with excellent social skills and a sharp mind." Thomas, too, claims to have been profiled. As he has stated in several columns, he is on a "terrorist watch list" that obliges him to submit to searches at airports. How he got on the list I haven't been able to learn, but to be fair it is just as likely because he shares the name of a possibly more legitimate suspect as it is anything to do with his political opinions.
"I sometimes get upset when 'profiled' by Transportation Security Administration employees," Thomas writes, "It is tempting to say, 'If I were a terrorist shouting "death to America" you'd probably let me go through,' but because I know it would do no good and that I could be arrested and miss my flight, I hold my tongue." Of course, if fewer Americans held their tongues, a policy that's presumably unfair to Thomas might be modified, but his own resigned complacency is understandable, especially if that's what he would say to security. That sounds just as likely to get him arrested as Gates's assumptions about Sgt. Crowley's motives exacerbated the situation in Cambridge.
Thomas never really says what he thought Gates's proper response ought to have been. Perhaps his empathy prevents him from making recommendations. But the columnist points out that the scene at Gates's house wasn't purely black vs. white, and he makes the same point I have about profiling being not exclusively a white activity against blacks. He quotes Rev. Jesse Jackson in an admission that the civil-rights leader himself feels less anxious when a white rather than a black stranger is walking behind him on a dark street. Thomas is more interested in accounting for the phenomenon of racial profiling, and as is his habit, he finds that liberalism is to blame.
First, the media reinforces a stereotype of irresponsible criminal black men simply by reporting on violent crime. But when it comes to explaining crime itself, Thomas reverts to his reactionary programming:
In the past, Thomas has written as if "Liberal Democrats" were literally and explicitly telling blacks that they can't succeed in America because it's a racist society, and that therefore they should not seek jobs but should insist on their entitlement to welfare. I'm not aware of anyone actually saying anything like this to anybody, and in lieu of actual quotes to that effect I'm willing to call Thomas a liar. In any event, his proposed remedy to ghetto poverty is for blacks to renounce grievances. I don't know if Thomas is so much of a fanatic for meritocracy that he thinks that compensatory policies were never necessary or if he concedes a onetime necessity that has now lapsed. But he wants blacks to stop thinking that "failure is someone else's fault," even though in our age more people besides blacks have reasons to believe that.
What this has to do with Gates grows dim at times, but I guess Thomas's point is that, if people like Gates don't want to be presumed criminal because of their race (even though the evidence now suggests that Gates was not presumed criminal because of his race), they must first give up the presumption of victimization that allegedly entitles them to both break the law and disrespect authority. Gates himself presumably would have some responsibility to help inculcate correct values if he doesn't want to suffer for others' sins. Thomas wants blacks to take the chips off their shoulders, but there's something unconditional about that demand, as if the burden of compromise in interracial relations is all on blacks now. Many Americans would like to think so, and I've seen plenty of proof that they do think so, but whether they have the unilateral right to say so and make it stick is still open to question.
"I sometimes get upset when 'profiled' by Transportation Security Administration employees," Thomas writes, "It is tempting to say, 'If I were a terrorist shouting "death to America" you'd probably let me go through,' but because I know it would do no good and that I could be arrested and miss my flight, I hold my tongue." Of course, if fewer Americans held their tongues, a policy that's presumably unfair to Thomas might be modified, but his own resigned complacency is understandable, especially if that's what he would say to security. That sounds just as likely to get him arrested as Gates's assumptions about Sgt. Crowley's motives exacerbated the situation in Cambridge.
Thomas never really says what he thought Gates's proper response ought to have been. Perhaps his empathy prevents him from making recommendations. But the columnist points out that the scene at Gates's house wasn't purely black vs. white, and he makes the same point I have about profiling being not exclusively a white activity against blacks. He quotes Rev. Jesse Jackson in an admission that the civil-rights leader himself feels less anxious when a white rather than a black stranger is walking behind him on a dark street. Thomas is more interested in accounting for the phenomenon of racial profiling, and as is his habit, he finds that liberalism is to blame.
First, the media reinforces a stereotype of irresponsible criminal black men simply by reporting on violent crime. But when it comes to explaining crime itself, Thomas reverts to his reactionary programming:
Race isn't the cause of these crimes; a social system put in place by liberal Democrats is to blame. That system does not encourage minorities to succeed. It enables them in their victimhood and sense of impoverishment. Liberal Democrats refuse to allow poor black children to escape failing government schools. The welfare system...has doomed several generations of African-Americans to misery, complacency and dependency.
In the past, Thomas has written as if "Liberal Democrats" were literally and explicitly telling blacks that they can't succeed in America because it's a racist society, and that therefore they should not seek jobs but should insist on their entitlement to welfare. I'm not aware of anyone actually saying anything like this to anybody, and in lieu of actual quotes to that effect I'm willing to call Thomas a liar. In any event, his proposed remedy to ghetto poverty is for blacks to renounce grievances. I don't know if Thomas is so much of a fanatic for meritocracy that he thinks that compensatory policies were never necessary or if he concedes a onetime necessity that has now lapsed. But he wants blacks to stop thinking that "failure is someone else's fault," even though in our age more people besides blacks have reasons to believe that.
What this has to do with Gates grows dim at times, but I guess Thomas's point is that, if people like Gates don't want to be presumed criminal because of their race (even though the evidence now suggests that Gates was not presumed criminal because of his race), they must first give up the presumption of victimization that allegedly entitles them to both break the law and disrespect authority. Gates himself presumably would have some responsibility to help inculcate correct values if he doesn't want to suffer for others' sins. Thomas wants blacks to take the chips off their shoulders, but there's something unconditional about that demand, as if the burden of compromise in interracial relations is all on blacks now. Many Americans would like to think so, and I've seen plenty of proof that they do think so, but whether they have the unilateral right to say so and make it stick is still open to question.
The Right to Get isn't the Right to Have
A letter that appeared in this morning's Albany Times Union is a fairly articulate expression of the viewpoint opposed to the idea of a right to health care. David Welch of Scotia is satisfied that health care is not a "natural right" and therefore can't be made a civil right by government action without violating other people's natural rights. In his view, natural rights are not substantive; they can be seen as rights to opportunities that others must not forbid, but they aren't guarantees of getting what you want. Welch elaborates:
What he means in the first case, I think, is that the right to speak doesn't confer a right to be heard. To be more accurate, he should have said that we have no right to computers, since once you have one, and you get internet access, blogging software is generally free. By saying that we have "no right to be provided with a firearm," he's not saying that the government can prevent us from having them, but that the right to opportunity does not guarantee you the possession of the desired object. For Welch, the right to bear arms means only that the government can't infringe on your right to have arms if you can get them.
Guaranteeing things that society considers necessary goods violates natural right as far as Welch is concerned because it compels people to provide the goods without what Welch might consider appropriate compensation. "Socialized health care, in any form, requires others to suffer financially for it to exist," he writes, "A right also has to exist on its own; it cannot require that another right, or the rights of others, be violated." The right violated, presumably, is that of the owner of resources to demand or negotiate for fair compensation. Affirming a right to health care as a guarantee makes it unconditional that the owner of resources must provide them, whether he wants to or not and regardless of whether whatever compensation he receives seems fair to him.
Welch's fallacy, of course, is the assumption that natural rights are the only rights that can exist. His principles effectively limit the effectiveness of civilization because the rights of individuals, based on the presumptive state of nature, would always trump whatever even the most democratic society might choose to define as a common good. He seems incapable of envisioning circumstances in which people might trade in their natural rights, so to speak, in return for guarantees that might make society less brutally competitive. He most likely takes seriously Jefferson's declaration that certain rights with which men are "endowed by their creator" are inalienable. Men either cannot or should not surrender the right to pursue happiness to the material maximum, for instance, in favor of a more secure social life. In more complacent terms, political society requires no sacrifice from the self-reliant in Welch's scheme; they must give up nothing, and especially not their right to decide for themselves how much they deserve, for the sake of social peace.
Refuting Welch requires no elaborate argument. All it takes is to affirm that people can confer substantive rights upon themselves in the course of creating a political society. Of course, no such affirmation can ever guarantee absolutely that we'll get what we claim as rights, but it's no answer to the claim that making it is wrong because it violates the rights that someone claimed for himself prior to entering into society, or that society can only confer the rights that already adhere to man in the state of nature. If that were true, the whole procedure would be redundant. The difference between society and the state of nature, presuming for entertainment purposes only that there are such things as natural rights, is that rights conferred by society come with obligations on its members. Citizenship comes with an obligation to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, etc., according to society's definition of these goods. People who refuse to accept an obligation to contribute to the general welfare by sharing resources may as well go live in the woods, since they see the state as nothing more than a police force to protect them from the have-nots of society while they accumulate wealth without limit.
Welch might claim that his views are more consistent with the Founders and Framers, but that depends on more information than we get from his letter. I'd readily concede that few if any Founders would have assumed a right to health care, but we do know that they were suspicious of the unlimited accumulation of wealth that passes for "freedom" for too many modern Americans. They believed that excessive wealth led to luxury and an inevitable corruption of society and politics. They depended, perhaps naively, on notions of virtuous frugality and simplicity to restrain greed. I wonder sometimes whether they'd reject as completely as some suspect a scheme to check wealth by diverting it to unimpeachable social goods like health care. We can guess, but we can never know the answer. But they left us a mechanism that empowers the people to figure such matters out for themselves and shape policy accordingly, and "natural rights" have no veto on that process. They're fine for purposes of intellectual argument, but anyone who thinks they're the last word on any subject has a lot of thinking yet to do.
Rights focus on general principles. You have a right to speak, but no right to a printing press or blogging software. You have a right to bear arms, but no right to be provided with a firearm. You have a right to exist, and to control what happens to your body, but no right to be provided with a doctor. A right cannot impose a negative cost on others.
What he means in the first case, I think, is that the right to speak doesn't confer a right to be heard. To be more accurate, he should have said that we have no right to computers, since once you have one, and you get internet access, blogging software is generally free. By saying that we have "no right to be provided with a firearm," he's not saying that the government can prevent us from having them, but that the right to opportunity does not guarantee you the possession of the desired object. For Welch, the right to bear arms means only that the government can't infringe on your right to have arms if you can get them.
Guaranteeing things that society considers necessary goods violates natural right as far as Welch is concerned because it compels people to provide the goods without what Welch might consider appropriate compensation. "Socialized health care, in any form, requires others to suffer financially for it to exist," he writes, "A right also has to exist on its own; it cannot require that another right, or the rights of others, be violated." The right violated, presumably, is that of the owner of resources to demand or negotiate for fair compensation. Affirming a right to health care as a guarantee makes it unconditional that the owner of resources must provide them, whether he wants to or not and regardless of whether whatever compensation he receives seems fair to him.
Welch's fallacy, of course, is the assumption that natural rights are the only rights that can exist. His principles effectively limit the effectiveness of civilization because the rights of individuals, based on the presumptive state of nature, would always trump whatever even the most democratic society might choose to define as a common good. He seems incapable of envisioning circumstances in which people might trade in their natural rights, so to speak, in return for guarantees that might make society less brutally competitive. He most likely takes seriously Jefferson's declaration that certain rights with which men are "endowed by their creator" are inalienable. Men either cannot or should not surrender the right to pursue happiness to the material maximum, for instance, in favor of a more secure social life. In more complacent terms, political society requires no sacrifice from the self-reliant in Welch's scheme; they must give up nothing, and especially not their right to decide for themselves how much they deserve, for the sake of social peace.
Refuting Welch requires no elaborate argument. All it takes is to affirm that people can confer substantive rights upon themselves in the course of creating a political society. Of course, no such affirmation can ever guarantee absolutely that we'll get what we claim as rights, but it's no answer to the claim that making it is wrong because it violates the rights that someone claimed for himself prior to entering into society, or that society can only confer the rights that already adhere to man in the state of nature. If that were true, the whole procedure would be redundant. The difference between society and the state of nature, presuming for entertainment purposes only that there are such things as natural rights, is that rights conferred by society come with obligations on its members. Citizenship comes with an obligation to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, etc., according to society's definition of these goods. People who refuse to accept an obligation to contribute to the general welfare by sharing resources may as well go live in the woods, since they see the state as nothing more than a police force to protect them from the have-nots of society while they accumulate wealth without limit.
Welch might claim that his views are more consistent with the Founders and Framers, but that depends on more information than we get from his letter. I'd readily concede that few if any Founders would have assumed a right to health care, but we do know that they were suspicious of the unlimited accumulation of wealth that passes for "freedom" for too many modern Americans. They believed that excessive wealth led to luxury and an inevitable corruption of society and politics. They depended, perhaps naively, on notions of virtuous frugality and simplicity to restrain greed. I wonder sometimes whether they'd reject as completely as some suspect a scheme to check wealth by diverting it to unimpeachable social goods like health care. We can guess, but we can never know the answer. But they left us a mechanism that empowers the people to figure such matters out for themselves and shape policy accordingly, and "natural rights" have no veto on that process. They're fine for purposes of intellectual argument, but anyone who thinks they're the last word on any subject has a lot of thinking yet to do.
27 July 2009
"Keep the cars coming."
The newest information about the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates renders the situation even more absurd. The quote above comes from the 911 line transcript; they are the words of the arresting officer, uttered after a middle-aged man who depends on a cane to get around proved "uncooperative." They follow the officer's acknowledgment that Gates had shown identification confirming his identity. Unless Gates had been doing research in the line of gamma radiation, I doubt whether his obvious anger could have threatened the officer. Nevertheless, backup was called and Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct, which still seems to consist of a failure to show proper deference or respect for authori-teh in a situation where either would be insulting to a homeowner.
More absurd yet are the excuses offered, through the medium of an attorney, by Lucia Whalen, Gates's accuser. Some of her clarifications are useful. It turns out that she is a housekeeper rather than a resident of the neighborhood; at least that's my assumption from the comment that she works there. Whalen is more determined than the officer, perhaps because she stands on shakier ground, to prove that she's no racist. She claims that she did not "profile" Gates, and the 911 transcript bears her out to the extent that she describes the supposed burglar as possibly Hispanic.
Whalen is "by no means the entitled white neighbor," her attorney argues. Better yet, the lawyer insinuates strongly that her client shouldn't even be considered white. Whalen, we're informed, "has olive-colored skin and is of Portuguese descent." While I'm as ready as anyone to concede that "whiteness" is a social construct and a form of caste rather than race, I'm still sure that numerous Portuguese-Americans will be stunned to learn that they're not white. I suppose that Whalen and her counsel implicitly accept the "if you're not white you can't be racist" proposition, but the beef with profiling isn't only that it's something whites do to non-whites. The oppressive aspect of it for black men is that everyone does it to them. Leaving aside the specifics of this story, for Whalen to try to squirm off the hook by disclaiming whiteness is pathetic. But the President shouldn't hold that against her. He ought to invite her to the White House for a beer along with Officer Crowley and Professor Gates -- if only to avoid appearing sexist.
More absurd yet are the excuses offered, through the medium of an attorney, by Lucia Whalen, Gates's accuser. Some of her clarifications are useful. It turns out that she is a housekeeper rather than a resident of the neighborhood; at least that's my assumption from the comment that she works there. Whalen is more determined than the officer, perhaps because she stands on shakier ground, to prove that she's no racist. She claims that she did not "profile" Gates, and the 911 transcript bears her out to the extent that she describes the supposed burglar as possibly Hispanic.
Whalen is "by no means the entitled white neighbor," her attorney argues. Better yet, the lawyer insinuates strongly that her client shouldn't even be considered white. Whalen, we're informed, "has olive-colored skin and is of Portuguese descent." While I'm as ready as anyone to concede that "whiteness" is a social construct and a form of caste rather than race, I'm still sure that numerous Portuguese-Americans will be stunned to learn that they're not white. I suppose that Whalen and her counsel implicitly accept the "if you're not white you can't be racist" proposition, but the beef with profiling isn't only that it's something whites do to non-whites. The oppressive aspect of it for black men is that everyone does it to them. Leaving aside the specifics of this story, for Whalen to try to squirm off the hook by disclaiming whiteness is pathetic. But the President shouldn't hold that against her. He ought to invite her to the White House for a beer along with Officer Crowley and Professor Gates -- if only to avoid appearing sexist.
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