Admit Islamophobia and You're Fired

The conservatives are going to be right about this one, I think: in an excess of political correctness, National Public Radio has fired longtime correspondent Juan Williams for admitting to a degree of Islamophobia during an appearance on The O'Reilly Factor. Williams is a regular sort of house progressive for Fox News, and was debating O'Reilly about the Islamophobic comments the host himself had made as a guest on The View last week when he admitted that he felt uncomfortable riding in airplanes with Muslims. He then went on to transcend his emotions and criticize O'Reilly for generalizing about Muslims in more overtly offensive fashion -- the right-wing talker had said that he opposed the "Ground Zero mosque" project because "Muslims" had destroyed the World Trade Center, but apologized later on The View.

Based on the excerpts from the O'Reilly-Williams exchange published by MSNBC, Williams was clearly talking about his own feelings and not actually generalizing about Muslims in an accusatory fashion. But the Council on American-Islamic Relations missed the distinction and accused Williams of saying that all Muslims on airplanes were security risks. Meanwhile, MSNBC makes it sound like NPR was looking for an excuse for dumping Williams, having disliked the implication that he somehow represented the radio network on Fox News.

Predictably, some reactionaries, already resenting the network's "liberal bias," are using the Williams affair as an excuse to pressure Congress to withdraw funding from NPR. That's excessive, but this is clearly a case in which political correctness deserves criticism. Williams himself appears to have made the correct distinction between gut feelings and public policies that should not be determined by gut feelings, while CAIR appears to have taken the unrealistic position that no one should even admit to gut feelings in public. While the state should still presume individual Muslims innocent until they give material cause for suspicion, nothing short of thought-control can force all individuals to make the same presumption, and nothing short of censorship can compel them to keep their suspicions quiet.

If I may be allowed to generalize, too many Muslims are thin-skinned. I won't attempt to speculate on the reasons, though I will acknowledge some understandable anxiety about the possibility of hate crime, but Muslims often seem to be more intolerant of perceived insults than any other group of people on earth. Few people other than Muslims seem so ready to answer perceived insults -- even unintended ones -- with violence. In this country, some people would resent Muslims for their thin-skinnedness (i.e. "political correctness")alone, before you add history and current events to the equation. In the U.S., we may still dream of brotherhood as children, but most of us are reconciled to the fact that many of our fellow citizens will never like us, for political reasons if not for anything else. We are able to live together regardless of mutual dislike by refusing to resent the fact. Muslim Americans are understandably resentful of the suspicion aimed at a once-model minority only recently, but suspicion and dislike are not crimes. Muslims themselves should avoid generalizations: not everyone who looks crossly or worriedly at you is going to beat you up or burn your mosque. Not everyone who admits to nervousness in the presence of observant Muslims is their enemy. I have no way to know whether CAIR's complaints influenced NPR's decision to fire Williams. But if I were part of CAIR, I wouldn't care to claim credit for it. Today's news won't make any American respect Muslims any more than they did before; I hope it won't make them respect them any less.

To judge Williams for yourselves, take a look at the complete transcript on this site of his dialogue with O'Reilly.

Turning Inclusive Debates into 'Reality'

The aftermath of Monday's inclusive New York gubernatorial debate, which spotlighted all seven candidates who'll appear on the November ballot, raises questions about the need for balance between inclusiveness and seriousness. The talk of the night and day after the debate, when not focused on the two major-party candidates, focused on James McMillan, the flamboyant candidate of the "Rent is 2 Damn High" party, who was said to have stolen the show with his eccentric appearance and mantric insistence on the driving issue of his campaign. For some observers, McMillan's performance proved that inclusive debates were a bad idea, since his time took away from whatever they considered the crucial questions of the race. A disillusioned Carl Paladino, who had insisted upon an inclusive debate, decided afterward that the format was "terrible," apparently because he expected all the other candidates to join him in attacking Andrew Cuomo. Some, notably Charles Barron and Howie Hawkins, embraced the task, but Paladino seems to feel that any time spent not attacking Cuomo at Hofstra was wasted time. He reflects an attitude expressed in many places that the subject for debate Monday should have been the front-runner's qualifications for office, not the full range of options for the state's political future. Meanwhile, even people who applauded the debate's inclusiveness could be troubled by the focus on McMillan at the expense of more credible independents like Barron, Hawkins and Warren Redlich. But to express reservations about McMillan (or Kristin Davis) begs the question of anyone's qualification to dismiss a duly accredited candidate as frivolous or a crank before a larger audience of voters gets to judge. We don't want some censorious counterpart of Iran's Guardian Council to decide whether people otherwise qualified are actually unfit (by what standard?) to run for office. But if the joint appearances we call political debates are to be meaningful, shouldn't there be a way to insure a more substantive discussion of the issues and choices facing the electorate?

Inclusive debates require some revamping of the debate format to avoid the conditions under which the Hofstra event will likely be the only and thus inevitably disappointing occasion when any of the candidates confront one another. If we want to commit to debates as essential to informed voting, every accredited candidate -- those with automatic ballot lines and those who meet the petition threshold -- must commit to a sequence of debates.

How should the sequence work? For those who think that the only proper debate format is one-on-one, the ideal might be a round-robin format in which each candidate faces off against each of his or her rivals one at a time, so that Paladino, Barron, Hawkins et al each get an individual shot at Cuomo but also have to debate each other along the way. The likely flaw in this approach is the likelihood that most voters won't bother tuning in for any debate in which the Democrat or the Republican candidate isn't involved.

An alternative debate schedule might incorporate some of the principles of so-called reality (i.e. "unscripted") TV, particularly the principle of audience elimination as practised on American Idol. In this format, all accredited candidates would appear in an inaugural debate -- which, to be fair to all participants, should be longer than subsequent encounters. Afterward, registered voters would be encouraged to call in or log in and determine which candidate would be eliminated from the later debates.

A candidate could be eliminated in one of two ways. It could be done simply by eliminating the candidate who gets the fewest positive votes from viewers, or viewers could vote expressly to eliminate a most-disliked candidate. Either method is vulnerable to abuse by irresponsible voters. The popularity-contest model runs the risk of what those with a little historical memory will recognize as a "Sanjaya" effect, in which transgressive jackasses conspire to promote an objectively unqualified yet perversely entertaining candidate. In our present context, the worst-case scenario could be Howard Stern fans or other trolls pooling their votes for McMillan after every debate until he made the final round. It might not improve his chances of actually winning the real election, but it would go a long way toward discrediting this debate format. On the other hand, if we have the audience vote against a candidate, we can anticipate that the first person eliminated would most likely come from one of the major parties, thanks to collusion between acolytes of the other major party and independents or pure trolls. While hardcore critics of the Bipolarchy might not object to such a result, it would most likely undermine the credibility of the remaining debates until viewers grow more accustomed to independents dominating the spotlight. In either case, the possibility of viewer/voters not behaving objectively is a cause for concern, but since that's never stopped us from having elections, we probably shouldn't worry too much when the stakes are lower. We might make the stakes higher for the candidates themselves by linking participation in the debate series to a self-imposed limit or outright renunciation of campaign advertising, but the viability of that idea is probably a subject for another time.

Money doesn't buy elections, but does it buy politicians?

David Brooks's latest New York Times column is his attempt to dismiss concerns over the amount of money being spent on campaign advertising this year. His contention is that, beyond the most local level, money won't make a difference in any election. It's actually an argument against the effectiveness of campaign advertising, however. Brooks doesn't believe that campaign ads change people's minds, nor that a deep-pocketed candidate can buy enthusiasm through advertising when it doesn't already exist. He trots out the usual examples of John Connally in 1980 and Phil Gramm in 1996, which demonstrate only that the richest candidate doesn't always win, not that riches make no difference. His main point is that "money follows passion but doesn't ignite it." Money alone, he insists, can't create a successful candidacy from nothing.

Brooks also attempts to vindicate campaign donors, including those who donate anonymously to independent groups. These people aren't trying to buy elections, Brooks claims. "The donors give money because it makes them feel as if they are doing good and because they get to hang out at exclusive parties," he suggests, "In the end, however, money is a talisman. It makes people feel good because they think it has magical properties." The only people who don't feel good about campaign donations, he concludes, are the sour-grapes losers in the "political class" who find money an easy scapegoat.

The columnist's vague psychoanalysis of campaign donors misses the point of most complaints against money in politics. The deplorable fact of our political moment is not that money spent on campaign ads can buy an election, but that every politician who isn't a self-made multi-millionaire is dependent upon some fundraising apparatus during an election campaign. The centrality of the supposedly meaningless TV ads to every campaign forces politicians into a state of dependency that would certainly have troubled the Founders and Framers. If they were worried about the economic dependency of voters, imagine their concern over the economic dependency of elected officials. In their own time they knew an evil precedent in the Kingdom of Poland, a nearly-unique electoral monarchy where foreign money in the form of direct bribes to noble electors corrupted the process and fatally weakened the nation. Money may circulate differently here and now but politicians can't help but feel their dependence upon the fundraising process itself as it claims more and more of their attention while in office. As long as we accept the possibility of a difference between good political ideas and ideas that draw money, the role of money in politics should trouble us, regardless of who actually wins any given contest. For Brooks to dismiss our concerns and excuse the fundraising culture as an exercise in self-actualization is irresponsible to the point of frivolity. He assumes that people will simply tune out the ads, and his column advises us, "Don't Follow the Money," but the trends are too disturbing to ignore.

France: Entitlement in the Flesh

Americans across the national ideological spectrum are likely to scoff at the sight of French citizens rioting in the streets to protest a proposed advance of the age of eligibility for retirement benefits from 60 to 62. The (by French standards) conservative government of Nicolas Sarkozy has determined that such generous benefits are no longer sustainable, and an objective analysis of longevity might back up advocates of advancing the retirement age in any industrialized nation. The change is up to the national legislature and from what I understand it's a done deal, with the mobs in the street unlikely to terrify legislators into reconsidering. While an objective case could be made for this particular change, the protesters aren't necessarily wrong to see it as a first step in a Sarkozy scheme to reduce the French welfare state until he deems the nation safe for "American-style capitalism." Entitlements, as many an American will tell you, may be incompatible with such an economic system, but the French protesters may be more interested in a civilized society than with maximizing wealth creation for an entrepreneurial class. Theirs isn't necessarily an unsustainable viewpoint. In simplest terms, the only legitimate reason to have a nation-state is to keep the people within its borders alive and in enjoyment of what the majority deems a decent standard of living. Civilization itself, as I've written before, is an entitlement claim, whether it's based on natural law, the general will, or some other abstraction. Anyone who wants anything different from the strong simply taking what they want from the weak, or a gang taking what they want from an individual -- anyone who claims a right to keep something they could not keep by pure force in a state of nature -- is making an entitlement claim. The French protesters represent entitlement in relatively raw form. They reject accommodation with alleged economic realities because they have a shared notion of civilization that takes priority over debatable economic considerations. The age of retirement isn't necessarily the ideal battleground to fight for their sense of entitlement, but there may be real battles yet to fight -- and not just in France. While some Americans will look at scenes in Paris and sneer at the tantrums of spoiled dependency, I can't help viewing the same scenes with a certain sense of envy. If some tea-drinking Congress of the future decrees an end to American entitlements, and Americans don't protest the way the French are now, will that be because Americans are more reasonable, because they're more conditioned to take "personal responsibility" for their futures, or because they're simply more passive -- or bigger cowards?

The Return of the Repressed: A History of Glenn Beck's History

In last week's New Yorker, historian Sean Wilentz investigated the intellectual roots of Glenn Beck and discovered a historical phenomenon he could not fully account for. The centerpiece of Wilentz's "Confounding Fathers" is a quick study of the works and thought of Willard Cleon Skousen, a reactionary Mormon academic whose writings have been touted by Beck and boosted to the upper ranks of Amazon best-seller lists. Skousen, a onetime FBI man who alienated J. Edgar Hoover, was a practitioner of what Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style," with strong affinities with the John Birch Society. Like the Birchers, Skousen believed that an American establishment of financiers and politicians were collaborating with the international communist conspiracy to impose "one world government" and all its evils upon mankind. Beck is reportedly most impressed by Skousen's tome The 5,000 Year Leap, which claims that the U.S. Constitution was a divinely-inspired endorsement of laissez-faire principles. Wilentz exposes the quality of Skousen's scholarship by turkey-shooting his assertion that the Founders themselves established "In God We Trust" as the national motto when it didn't even appear on coins until 1864. From Skousen, Beck inherits a belief that American decline began with the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912, followed closely by the creation of national income tax and the Federal Reserve. Beck and his audience hate Progressivism in general, whether practised by Wilson or Teddy Roosevelt, because it's the original instance, in their minds, of government (or an academic elite) telling people how to live.

Curiously, Beck's intellectual lineage intertwines with Bill Clinton's. Skousen, Wilentz notes, published a book called The Naked Capitalist, a conspiracy-mongering critique of "the world's secret power structure." What Wilentz doesn't mention is that Naked Capitalist was inspired, albeit unwittingly, by the work of Harvard historian Carroll Quigley, unorthodox despite his credentials for speculating and attempting to substantiate the role of "secret societies" in American history. Clinton has acknowledged Quigley, who taught one of his classes, as an important influence, though that implied no endorsement of his secret-society research. Quigley himself repudiated Skousen's interpretation of his work, especially Skousen's conclusion that the "secret power structure" actually subsidized the international communist conspiracy. It's all on Wikipedia, folks; make of it what you will.

For Wilentz, Beck's revival of Skousen's canon signifies a dangerous revival of Birchite paranoid conservatism, more than 40 years after Richard Nixon and William F. Buckley purged pseudo-intellectual extremist elements from the Republican leadership and think-tank establishment. The four-year reversal from Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat in 1964 to Nixon's narrow victory against a liberal Democrat and a reactionary independent in 1968 represents Buckley's triumph in Wilentz's account. Ronald Reagan, who first seemed suspiciously susceptible to or tolerant of Birchite influences, actually carried on what Wilentz calls the pragmatic conservative approach. But by 1994 the Buckley-Nixon-Reagan Republican consensus was crumbling, a new extremism arriving with the Contract With America. Now, Wilentz worries, no one in the Republican party or the conservative movement is showing the "forthright leadership" to stand up to the paranoid reaction exemplified by Beck and the books he promotes. Fear of the Tea Parties' influence over primaries, he implies, has stilled the tongues of the remaining responsible, pragmatic Republicans.

Wilentz describes something important that happened starting in the 1990s without really attempting to explain it. The paranoid, conspiracy-mongering elements whom Buckley and Nixon had driven to the fringes in the 1960s now seem poised to become the Republican mainstream. How did that come about? Are there demographics to explain it? My own guess is that it's become impossible for a new Buckley to become the kind of intellectual or cultural gatekeeper the original man supposedly was. There are too many channels for the works of Skousen or other Birchers to circulate through away from establishment surveillance in the Internet Age. It may be a related development that people are probably less willing to defer to whatever intellectual prestige a modern Buckley might possess. Our era has empowered autodidacts by making available to them the widest range of texts from which they can select those that best confirm their prejudices. Buckley could keep the crackpots out of National Review; now it's hard for anyone to keep them off the comments pages of websites. More people have access to Birchite literature now than did 50 years ago. Whether this material's greater accessibility has changed people's minds or whether a change in the national mood has assured its greater popularity is a subject for new historians to contemplate.

Inclusive debates 'waste' small minds' time

Andrew Cuomo and Carl Paladino, the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor of New York, have agreed to share a stage at Hofstra University with five independent rivals for an inclusive gubernatorial debate tonight. Appearing alongside the Bipolarchy candidates will be Charles Barron, the Freedom Party candidate, Kristin Davis of the Anti-Prohibition Party, Howie Hawkins of the Greens, Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is 2 Damn High Party and Libertarian candidate Warren Redlich.

The debate announcement has compelled Troy Record city editor James V. Franco to notice the alternatives to Andrew Cuomo he had ignored in his previous column last week, when he claimed that Paladino's apparent implosion left the state without alternatives to "the same ole' Albany" represented by the Democrat. You might expect Franco to express relief upon discovering that more choices exist. Instead, his attitude toward the five independents is unapologetically contemptuous. Since the five "have no chance at winning anything," Franco concludes that "the debate's format is an exercise in futility" that "doesn't do the voters any good." That's because, even though "all six long-and no-shots [will take] pot shots at Cuomo,...we're not going to hear Cuomo's ideas questioned and challenged by candidates who have their own real ideas about fixing Albany. Rather, precious time will be wasted talking about legalizing prostitution [by Davis, presumably] and rent prices in New York City [McMillan, obviously]."

Howie Hawkins and Warren Redlich in particular will be shocked to learn that they have no "real ideas about fixing Albany," while Davis and McMillan may ask who James Franco is to decide what the meaningful issues are in the gubernatorial campaign. Franco's diatribe exposes him as a reactionary interested only in an ideal debate between Cuomo and anti-Cuomo. He claimed last week that he wanted someone who could have "shaken things up" in Albany, and had rooted for the ostensible outsider Paladino for that reason, but outsiders, whatever their potential for shaking things up, have remarkably limited appeal for Franco when they lack the Republican brand name. Only by becoming part of the establishment, apparently, can an outsider hope to shake the establishment up.

Franco repeatedly (if grudgingly) acknowledges the independent candidates' right to recognition as equals to the Bipolarchy candidates. But every acknowledgment leads into a dismissal of the Hofstra debate. "Yes, each of the candidates did get the required number of signatures to appear on the ballot and as such should be afforded the same opportunities as any other candidate," he states solemnly, "but the debate is going to be one waste of 90 minutes." An inclusive debate will be a "circus," or "entertainment rivaling the depth of a sit com."

The joint appearances we call "debates" today often are circuses, but comparing them to sitcoms may be too generous as estimate of their entertainment value. Lincoln and Douglas would have agreed to sneer at the format, which has reached the point of degeneracy when candidates are required to answer certain questions in less than one minute. The debate process should be reconsidered -- a round-robin format of one-on-ones might be the ideal. Franco proposes that New York State "adopt a commission to establish a debate's parameters -- kind of like they do with presidential debates." That can mean only one thing: excluding independent candidates from high-profile media events until they reach a popularity threshold most likely attainable only through high-profile media exposure. He'd restrict debates to those candidates who have what he'd consider a realistic chance of winning, when debates should ideally help give every candidate a more realistic chance. Franco's attitude is spiteful and defeatist. He clearly felt, for who knows what reasons, that Paladino was the only real alternative this year. Convinced now of Paladino's failure, he seems to think that the rest of us shouldn't have alternatives either.

The Unknown Idiot of the Week

He stood outside a Dunkin Donuts yesterday during one of those walkathons to support breast cancer research, and had apparently done some walking himself. He wore the pink ribbon. His face was painted pink. He wore an American Cancer Society sweatshirt. He was smoking like a chimney. Politicians and pundits have a long way to go to top that.

Bipolarchy Believers 'Mad as Hell' at Self-Limited Options

Charles Krauthammer may be an ideologue, but he isn't blind. In his latest column he's just dubbed Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor of New York, as the "most suicidal candidate" of 2010 for his habit of embarrassing himself and appearing as a bully or a bigot. That may be a signal that the reactionary pundits are ready to write off the Buffalo businessman who rode a tide of tea to victory in the GOP primary. Whether they agree with Paladino's views on homosexuality or not, they seem to feel that, by raising the topic and returning to it, the candidate has made a fatal blunder and distracted the public from the issues that ought to have ensured his election.

A day before our local paper ran Krauthammer's column, local columnist James V. Franco declared himself "mad as hell" at Paladino as well as the political scene he hoped Paladino might fix. Franco is especially disappointed that Republican has gotten bogged down in cultural issues because he saw Paladino as the only real hope on the horizon for reform and fiscal responsibility.

In my mind the man had some promise — a businessman who has never held public office and who promised to shake things up in Albany. And if there was any place in the world that needed a good shaking up, it’s Albany and it will take a Paladino or someone like him to do it....He might be a bit on the nutty side, but at least Paladino would have shaken things up. Despite his reform rhetoric, I just don’t see Attorney General Andrew Cuomo doing much shaking up of anything.

"With Cuomo," Franco adds, "I fear it will be more of the same ole’ Albany." He despairs not only at Paladino's apparent self-destruction, but the parallel degeneration of the Tea Party movement that lifted him to his present prominence.

In my mind anyway, the Tea Party wasn’t a bunch of extreme right wing nut jobs it was a bunch of people sick of being taxed to death and sick of government intruding into every aspect of our lives. It had nothing to do with social issues.That foundation, so to speak, has been distorted in part by whacky candidates who picked up the banner, in part by the media sensationalizing everything and in part by the entrenched politicians who realized the Tea Party people don’t really like them much and if enough people join the cause they might lose their job. I’m talking about both parties too, not just the Democrats. Republicans don’t much like the Tea Party people either. But, then again, there is little difference between the two anymore.Regrettably, the Tea Party now is about witchcraft and masturbation, thanks to Delaware Senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell, and grinding homosexuals in Speedos thanks to Paladino.

With the Tea Parties watered down or grown cold, and Paladino virtually discredited, Franco sees nothing on the horizon but "high taxes and big government and being mad as hell." Regrettably, he published this confession of hopelessness after I'd personally informed him that there was at least one other candidate who advocated fiscal conservatism, who was (to my knowledge) not entangled in social issues and (ditto) not a short-tempered punk. That would be Warren Redlich, the Libertarian candidate. I won't be voting for him next month, but given the state of the New York Republican party with Paladino as its figurehead, I consider it a public service to those "mad as hell" about taxes, bureaucracy, etc., to let them know that they still have a way to register their opinion without feeling embarrassed. The only embarrassment I can imagine coming with a vote for Redlich would derive from the silly notion that voting for the person who best represents your views is "wasting" your vote if that candidate has "no chance" to win. People who feel that way ought to feel embarrassed, but they should blame themselves, not Redlich -- and that goes for people who hold their nose to vote for Cuomo when their hearts and minds are for Howie Hawkins, the Green candidate. Paladino was never the only hope for fiscal conservatives; they never have an only hope as long as Libertarians run candidates. Republicans are their only hope only if they think exclusively in Bipolarchy terms. If they can only think that way, they deserve to be hopeless. And if that leaves them "mad as hell," it's worth my time to remind readers yet again that those three beloved words were the slogan of a madman.

What Are Anti-Elitists Against?

For Anne Applebaum the last straw was Christine O'Donnell's campaign commercial, in which the controversial Republcan nominee for U.S. Senator from Delaware boasts to viewers that she didn't go to Yale and thus was "one of you." The author and columnist is exasperated at the disdain shown for academic accomplishment during the backlash against the Obama administration, but it hasn't entirely surprised her. In an article for Slate she points out that the phenomenon had been predicted, seriously or not, half a century ago by a British writer. In his scenario, the replacement of the British monarchy and aristocracy by a pure meritocracy is followed closely by a populist uprising against meritocracy, the people apparently resenting earned privilege more than unearned privilege. American sociologists, meanwhile, have been predicting such an outbreak in our country, allegedly meritocratic already, since at least the 1970s. With the rise of the Tea Parties, Applebaum believes that the moment is upon us. That forces her to ask why people should resent meritocracy more than aristocracy, if indeed they do.



Her initial conclusion has an ad hominem quality to it: meritocracy is resented because those outside the "elite" know that they're absolutely excluded by an objective lack of qualifications.

The old Establishment types were resented, but only because their wealth and power were perceived as "undeserved." Those outside could at least feel they were cleverer and savvier, and they could blame their failures on "the system." Nowadays, successful Americans, however ridiculously lucky they have been, often smugly see themselves as "deserving." Meanwhile, the less successful are more likely to feel it's their own fault—or to feel that others feel it's their fault—even if they have simply been unlucky.

Applebaum also sees that there's more to anti-elitism -- and outside of her timeline, an earlier generation called it anti-intellectualism -- than simple envy. She cites Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Thomas of the Supreme Court, who denounces an "elite that thinks it knows better than we know." This is the anti-elitism I've seen for the last two years. What makes someone elitist to the reactionary mind isn't education alone, or even education itself, but the perceived presumption that education entitles the alleged elitist to "tell us how to live." Someone with the same degrees who espouses libertarian principles and praises the innate know-how of the common man wouldn't be resented as much, I presume.



Anti-elitism isn't entirely a matter of envy or resentment. Part of it has to do with the instinctual sense that people can get on without "book learning," and the corollary suspicion that too much book learning actually detracts from the common sense that comes only with hands-on experience. Mark McDonald, one of the readers who commented on Applebaum's article, expresses this viewpoint:

The anti-elites do not resent hard work, education, etc., they just hate that these Ivy League are all the same and really not that impressive. This has nothing to do with upward mobility. It has to do with the incompetence of the elite and their inability to lead. Democrats used to use the same nonsense. Have you not been alive long enough to know this Anne? Sometimes a bunch of people reading the same books assigned by the same professors at the same universities become like all other elites in all previous sociieties: inbred and out of touch; and this despite their sometimes humble backgrounds.

Andrew Fisher, another respondent, seconds this viewpoint somewhat:

People tend to equate "education" with being intelligent,smart, more aware etc. It just isn't so. I voted for Jimmy Carter in '78 [sic] because he was "smarter" than Reagan and had been more effective during the debate. Reagan's first 100 days changed my views forever. We need leaders who are committed to a ideal.

Another factor in anti-elitism is arguably inherent in democracy itself, at least as understood in the U.S. Our understanding of the concept comes from Thomas Jefferson, who asserted in the Declaration of Independence that government derives legitimacy from "the consent of the governed," without qualifying either consent or governed in any way that explicitly imposes an intelligence test on anyone. Jefferson himself put restrictions on whose consent was needed, but they weren't meritocratic in any way, except to the prejudiced minds of his time. But while he thought that the franchise belonged to those who had a stake in society in the form of property, people today believe that everyone has a stake in government because government influences all our lives. If it affects us regardless of our educational attainments, those shouldn't decide our ability or right to influence government. These observations may beg the question of whether democracy is actually the ideal form of government, so long as you believe that "objective" national or global interests require that measures be taken regardless of majority will. Some people will never accept that premise, whether on moral grounds or a failure of conscientious imagination. Some will always insist that the national or people's interest is whatever the people say it is, while anything else is an elitist imposition on everyone else. As long as we have democracy, these arguments will be part of the debate. Why they are argued more forcefully at times like the present, rather than why they're made at all, may be the more important question to ask right now.

A philosophy of partisanship?

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic, where he's allowed to pontificate as a "Washington Diarist" on the back page of most issues. In the current issue, he complains of "the strange soullessness of this thoughtful man," referring to the President of the United States. Wieseltier speculatively attributes that perceived soullessness to the President's supposed belief "that he is the beginning" and his apparent dismissal of the past as "a long era of errors." Obama, in Wieseltier's view, is a creature of his time, a time characterized by an "idiotic belief in the complete transfiguration of human life in our time, in the final banishment of opacity and obscurity, by means of data and the quantification of inwardness," etc. Deploring this modernism, Wieseltier would have us keep mindful of the "ghosts" of history, whose "public role" is to "spoil the adoration of the new" with "a certain shaming force." The ghosts themselves seem to be haunted by both the anti-political mentality of Tea Partiers and Glenn Beck and the post-partisan pretensions of the President, for which the traditional term is "Mugwumpery." Wieseltier sees Obama as a politician who thinks he transcends politics, or at least partisanship, in keeping with his purported sense of "the superiority of the very latest." In short, Obama is one of those Democrats The New Republic frequently criticizes for putting on airs above the old-school horse-trading and compromising of party politics. Against such heresy, Wieseltier submits this peroration:

For there is honor in partisanship, when the differences are philosophical; and for the purposes of social change, politics is all we have. Faction is not only a reality, it is also a calling.

My own view is that once partisanship becomes philosophical, all is lost. Wieseltier is using "philosophical differences" as a euphemism for ideology, a habit of thought that ascribes philosophical (if not eschatological) significance to practical questions and conflicts of interests. Once the Framers constituted a federal democratic republic, philosophical differences were automatically minimized. The size of government does not rise to the level of a philosophical subject. Disagreements over tax rates are not philosophical, nor are debates over the necessity of regulations. All such questions were meant by Madison and his collaborators to be resolved by compromising interests, not through the refutation of some so-called theory of government by another. There are no "philosophical" differences between the Republican and Democratic parties; believing so would be giving them too much credit. Ideology, like religion, is a matter of faith, the conviction that one's side has all the correct answers in advance of most of the questions. Partisanship may be honorable when forming a party is forbidden and the partisans are honorable in the first place, and in such cases faction may well be a "calling" in the inspired sense of the word, but there is no inherent honor in the pooling of electioneering resources on behalf of ideological conformity. As for the claim that "for the purpose of social change, politics is all we have," all I ask is: how does the honor of partisanship follow from that?

Wieseltier waxes poetic to finish his column: "The Beltway is a venal place, but the streets of Washington are paved with the Constitution, the Constitution is the mortar between every brick of every building, it is in the air and the light, you can find it even in a brandy glass, and it can get you through the day." That last is perhaps a telling metaphor for someone apparently hooked on old-school politics, even if he's only a hanger-on. A lot of people have nostalgia for a bygone day when pols dickered cordially over drinks, and that kind of government may still be preferable to TEAtotaling, but writers like Wieseltier have an almost too sensual appreciation of the old art, not to mention a characteristically liberal emphasis on process over result. He worries that politics is getting too dull or too coarse, but politics isn't meant to entertain us or even provide stimulating company. But a more effective politics suitable to a time that is different from the past could well be less exciting or even less sociable than what Wieseltier prefers. I'm sure he considers himself a man of moderation, but I wonder whether he's had too much of the metaphorical brandy and mistaken it for his meal.

Is 1877 in our future?

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is, both by the Governments and the rich men, and by the educated classes. This is not because the Governments, the rich men or the educated classes desire to oppress them, but because it must be so....When men are ignorant and poor and weak, they can't help being oppressed. That is so by a great natural law.

- Henry Ward Beecher, July 1877

Michael A. Bellesiles' 1877: America's Year of Living Violently is harrowing reading. Bellesiles is the award-winning historian whose reputation was ruined when critics found holes in his research for Arming America, a study that attempted to show that America had no real "gun culture" before the 19th century. 1877 is his bid for renewed respectability, based entirely on verifiable, published sources but notably published by a "progressive" company, The New Press, as if to signal an ideological slant. Reading 1877 may slant one's ideology, because it's hard to get through without feeling bloody outrage at the way ruling classes and their auxiliaries treated black freedmen, Native Americans, striking railroad workers, the unemployed, etc. Bellesiles episodically chronicles the year when Republicans sold out former slaves to their former masters in order to win the Presidency, an underpaid and understaffed army hunted down the Sioux and the Nez Perces, and the President called out more of the army to restore order in major cities amid the nearest thing to a general strike in American history. Blackening the national mood and hardening its collective heart in the face of the first wave of mass unemployment and homelessness in industrial America was a barbaric, half-baked "social darwinism" that twisted Charles Darwin's theories into a doctrine of "survival of the fittest" that even self-professed Christians like Henry Ward Beecher espoused. The quotes dug up by Bellesiles to illustrate this pseudo-darwinism are bracing stuff and make the rhetoric of 21st century Tea Partiers taste quite tepid. Bellesiles is dealing with people who didn't even believe in charity, since they thought that mass unemployment would only end when lazy, ignorant working class people had no choice but to work or starve. If they starved, it was their own damn fault, and if there was no way out of starving, they should do so without complaining. "Compete or Die" was a new commandment for these purported Christians. The starving unemployed and underpaid should "bear matters unflinchingly," Beecher said, "In losing everything else a man should not lose his manliness." We assume that the reactionaries of 2010 want to take the country back in time, but I doubt they want to go that far. They may agree with some of the doctrines of 1877 deep in their hearts, but they won't necessarily admit it to themselves. Or if you prefer, none of them have the guts or gall to say such things openly. In any event, today's reactionaries boast too often of their charitable impulses to adopt the merciless attitude of their ancestors. If the economy gets worse, however -- who knows? In 1877 many Americans probably did feel sincerely that their survival depended upon the economic decisions they made; if so, they were perhaps understandably less charitable toward those who chose wrong, or even those with hard luck, than people would be in a less desperate era. For us, 1877 is a cautionary tale of an America without either a safety net or, momentarily, opportunity for many of its people. It's impossible to say that such a situation can never recur, but we might take hope in the thought that even the worst minds of today don't approach the depths of misanthropy that one fell upon frequently once upon a time. It'd be interesting to take the author's name off the cover, give the book to a Tea Partier, and ask: "Is this what you want?" The answers would be even more interesting.

'Mama Grizzlies' and the Men Who Love Them

Much as Theodore Roosevelt identified the Progressive movement of a century ago with his own self-image as a "Bull Moose," Sarah Palin has coined a new political species by identifying herself and similarly reactionary women as "Mama Grizzlies," a presumably more savage form of the "Soccer Mom" of civilized times, or else a maternal type more suited to territory unsuited to soccer. Last week's Nation devoted a cover story to the Mama Grizzly phenomenon, caricaturing Palin and other prominent Republican femmes as the cast of Sex and the City as a GOP elephant leers admiringly. Inside, author Betsy Reed contends that MG politicians often lack a MG constituency. Right-wing women, Reed writes, are more popular with men than with women. In a theoretical Obama vs. Palin 2012 scenario, for instance, women surveyed favored Obama handily while Palin prevailed by a small margin among men, and her margin grew among white men.

Reed considers possible explanations for the gender disparity. While she entertains the idea that conservative men are simply turned on by relatively attractive politicians like Palin (or pundits like Laura Ingraham), she also notes that women as a whole still prefer activist government and welfare-state programs to the rugged individualism presumably espoused by the MGs. The gender disparity got me thinking on my own track about the prominence of strong, self-reliant female archetypes in pop culture, from superheroines in comic books to Angelina Jolie's superspy in Salt. Feminists have applauded this trend (while often deploring the continued eroticization of heroines) as preferable to the old archetype of the helpless damsel in distress. But the popularity of the superwoman archetype, and the MG as her political counterpart, may reflect not only the abandonment of patriarchal patronization and its presumption of female incompetence but an abdication of traditional male responsibility along with any sense of collective interdependence. That is, guys may dig superchicks, and may dig Palin and other MGs, because they can feel that they don't have to do anything to take care of them. The contemporary pop-culture superwoman is arguably an icon of self-reliance for men who feel no instinct or obligation to support anyone.

Such an analysis may go against some observers' gut feeling that the MGs themselves uphold "patriarchal" values as creatures, in many cases, of the Christian Right. That element isn't as sexist as many suspect, however, if women like the MGs can get nominated in the first place and depend on CR support. Whether patriarchal traditionalists are enough to get any MG elected on a state level is also debatable. If we see MGs like Meg Whitman, Sharron Angle or Christine O'Donnell win elections next month, it may be men who think the way I describe above who put them over the top.

The President Double Dips

Checking my mailbox this morning I was amazed to find inside not one but two begging letters from the President of the United States. He wants me to give redundantly to both the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The DNC letter makes a more forceful case and comes with a charming suitable-for-framing snapshot of a pensive President with the legend, "I value your ongoing support" and a scrawl distinguishable only by a big B at the beginning. It's also a longer letter and addressed to me by name, while the DSCC is mistakenly addressed to "Dear Fellow Democrat."

Both letters make the same point that Obama inherited a collapsing economy from the Bush administration and make the same cute argument against giving the car keys back to the party that drove the vehicle into the ditch in the first place. In the DNC letter, however, the President appears to have taken Michael Tomasky's advice to tie his policies to patriotic appeals. At the very least, he dares suggest that Republicans have been unpatriotic during the economic crisis.

When our country is suffering, we can't be Democrats or Republicans first. There's just no time for political games. We must be Americans first -- period. But it seems the Republicans don't share my commitment here. They've gone on record saying: 'We've made a political decision. We stood to gain nothing from cooperating.' They knew things were going to be bad. But they figured if they did nothing and just let Americans keep hurting, the other side, the Democrats, would take the blame. Well, they've done their best to gum up the works; to make things look broken; to say no to every single thing. They made it all about politics.

This line of argument is grimly amusing to those who remember how Democrats whined recently when they thought that Republicans had questioned the patriotism of dissidents. Now as then, like it or not, many in the opposition are motivated by principled objections to the administration's policies. Do you really think that any congressional Republicans actually believe that Obama's policies are correct, yet resent them only because he's a Democrat? They resent him as a person because he's a Democrat (for starters) but their opposition to his policies is as much ideological as it is unconditional. A Republican has every right to ask what makes Obama's program "American first" rather than "Democratic first" other than his occupancy of the White House. A case can be made that Republicans are unpatriotic because their ideology places the individual right to become a billionaire over the well being of all the American people, but to say they're unpatriotic simply because they're partisan is simply cynical so long as the government itself is partisan.

It's easy to make a case out of giving Congress back to the Republicans -- it should be easier than it seems to be for Democrats, at least. But that doesn't dictate an obligation to vote for the Democrats unless you buy totally into the logic of the American Bipolarchy. Since I don't, I have to advise the President that he should save that paragraph for speeches to voters rather than letters begging for money. Since he makes such a convincing case against the Republicans (again, it isn't as hard as it looks), I'm inspired to do my part for good government by stating here and now that no one should vote for a Republican candidate this year. Since American politics is reactionary in nature, I believe I can be more useful arguing against Republicans than for Democrats. I don't need to tell people who don't like Republicans to vote for Democrats instead. They can vote Green or Libertarian or Constitution or Socialist Worker for all I care, as long as they don't vote Republican. If no one votes Republican, it won't matter who actually wins, because it won't be a Republican. How's that for lesser-evilism?

Third Parties and Independent Media: Not Quite a Perfect Fit

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carl Paladino: The Man of the Hour

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

The Nobel Peace Prize and Global Accountability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever Happened to Doug Hoffman?

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

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

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

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

So Much For Those Libertarian Tea Partiers

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

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

Tempest in a Nevada Teapot

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

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

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

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

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

"Paladino," Mr. Peepers answered promptly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



How to optimize government?

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

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

Why Do Americans Kill?

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

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

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

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

A Nietzschean interpretation of American Politics?

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

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

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

Idiot of the Week: Rick Sanchez

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

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

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

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

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

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