The tax seizure of a dissident American newspaper

It looks pretty certain by now that Metroland is dead. The Capital District arts weekly with a political bent hasn't published an issue since October. Its offices were seized by the government for tax delinquency. In its mix of national and local stories Metroland was probably the most anti-establishment in the region, though that really isn't saying very much. It was the paper most likely to be critical of the U.S. government regardless of which party was in charge, especially when it came to foreign policy. It was the paper most likely to endorse Bernie Sanders for President, unless the Green party came up with someone better. There's some sort of irony in taxes being the downfall of the paper most likely to advocate more taxes on the rich, but that's not why I bring this story up. What I want to point out is that Metroland was what we can comfortably call a dissident publication that was shut down, in effect, by the government for violating the law.  Were Metroland published anywhere but in the U.S., Canada or western Europe, and were it shut down under the exact same circumstances, people would immediately speculate that the action was politically motivated, that the government was cracking down on a journalistic gadfly or a brave critic, and that freedom of the press in that country was in danger. In the actual case, however, not even the publisher of Metroland makes such an argument on the paper's behalf or against the U.S. government. He knows too well that business has been bad for print media for the last decade or so. In the U.S., then, the forcible closure of an independent element in the media is no cause for alarm, nor should it have been. That does not mean, as you may think I imply, that there's never anything fishy when governments close down independent media by taking them to court. But it does mean that we should avoid coming to the knee-jerk conclusion that something is always fishy when such actions are taken. The end of Metroland does not prove any conspiracy against independent media, but proves that media are not above the law. That should be true everywhere, and if you're going to question other countries' laws (other countries' leaders may be another story) you may as well ask why media shouldn't enjoy some sort of tax-exempt status, or even state subsidies, to guarantee a diversity of viewpoints in public discourse. No nation will ever do that; the media is as accountable to the market everywhere as it is to the law. Freedom of the press everywhere has limits; that's why freedom of speech is always dissent's last resort before violence. Media must answer to a bottom line, but the courage to speak truth to power is priceless.

Is Sanders selling out?

Another begging letter from Senator Sanders came in today, but he isn't begging for himself this time. Instead, the Vermont independent wants us to donate to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. As others have noted, the Democracy has a shot at retaking the Senate next year if only because far more Republican than Democratic seats are being contested in 2016. If the election were held today, I dare say that Democrats might get wiped out entirely because of the hysteria over the Syrian refugees -- and no one should question that there is hysteria amid the reasonable skepticism -- but conditions may be more favorable next November. Sanders tells us the same things President Obama or former Senator Clinton might tell us, starting with the commonplace that Republicans are no damn good. That just about sums up his argument, and that's kind of funny if you think about it, since the "Republicans are evil" argument is a favorite of those in the Democratic party who'd like to see Sanders abandon his campaign for the presidential nomination. It's the favorite argument for all those who've been saying for the past three or seven that we should do our duty in 11/16 and vote for Hillary Clinton. Another argument they favor is that anything that weakens Clinton, like an aggressive challenge during the primaries, will only improve the Republicans' chances. I don't mean to suggest that Sanders shouldn't say that Republicans are evil, or that they "just don't care" about what's happening to the nation and world, or that they want to "turn back the clock" to a less egalitarian time. It just occurs to me that there's something missing to Sanders's argument, the very something that justifies Sanders's own challenge to Clinton.

The message of the Sanders campaign is that it's not enough to have a Democratic candidate, and that it matters what kind of Democrat gets nominated -- that the likes of Clinton are part of the problem, and a specific problem with the Democratic party. Does he apply the same analysis to the Senate? You can't tell from this begging letter. He cites three actual or possible candidates by name, including former Sen. Feingold of Wisconsin and campaign-finance reform fame, but the letter itself is an implicit endorsement of every 2016 Democratic senatorial candidate, many of whom, obviously, are yet to be determined. How many Senate Democrats actually support Sanders for the presidential nomination? The answer, according to Wikipedia, is none, while 38 out of 44 have endorsed Clinton. Rep. Tammy Duckworth, whom Sanders endorses in the begging letter for the retiring Sen. Reid's Nevada seat, has also endorsed Clinton. Can Sanders depend on these people to support his particular agenda in the unlikely event of his election as President? Recall that his position within the party is tenuous. He seeks the presidential nomination while remaining an independent Senator who chooses (or is allowed to) caucus with the Democrats. Perhaps composing a begging letter for Democratic candidates is one of the prices he pays for that privilege. Sanders supporters should read the letter with care, since it carries no promise whatsoever that the campaigns Sanders asks them to subsidize will produce Senators in his mold. Perhaps he assumes that they'll all have to endorse them if he beats Clinton in the primaries, and probably they would endorse him. But should he get elected, all bets will be off. And for that reason, what Sanders is touting now is a bad bet. Perhaps he values his caucus privileges too much to call for candidates more likely to support him all the way, but the people who plan to vote for him in the primaries should also plan to vote for such candidates, whether he says so or not.

The refugee crisis and the clash of individualisms

You should know this by now because you're told it often enough: Republicans are the party of individualism, Democrats the party of collectivism and statism. Yet it should be obvious, whatever you think about the U.S. taking in refugees from Syria, that the Democrats, represented by the Obama administration, are taking the individualist position by resisting demands, amplified after last Friday's attacks on Paris, to refuse Syrians entirely, or to allow only Christians while rejecting Muslims. In this case, the individualist position is "We mustn't assume that every Syrian refugee is an undercover terrorist, and we shouldn't allow the majority to suffer because some might be terrorists." Why don't the Republicans recognize this? Rather than jump to the conclusion, "They've never been true individualists, but only tribal bigots," let's recognize that, as always, there are two kinds of individualism in conflict in American politics, rather than a battle between individualism and collectivism. Call it a conflict between "individual liberty" and "human rights." One side is concerned mainly with removing limits on what individuals can accomplish or how much they can accumulate. They want to make sure the individual can be all he can be. The other side is concerned simply with making sure individuals stay alive as long as they can and suffer as little as possible. This side appears collectivist to the other side because their commitment to everyone's survival implicitly limits what any individual can earn in a competitive world. That commitment to what may look like mere survival may appear contemptible from the "individual liberty" standpoint. How can the "human rights" view be individualist if it puts individuals in a state of dependency on the state, as the Syrian refugees are believed likely to become? The answer is that the "human rights" view doesn't equate individualism with autonomy in the same way the "individual liberty" view does. If one side implies that a life with limited autonomy is not worth living, the other rejects the implication. There's an irreducibly hedonist element to the "human rights" position in its desire to minimize suffering and want that can be seen in the readiness to take in refugees, while the "individual liberty" stance is more existential, for want of a better word, in its concern for autonomy and, perhaps more crucially, its contempt for life as an end unto itself.  That accounts for the indifference of avowed individualists to the plight of refugees, but what of the distrust? It may have a similar root. While "human rights" presumes that each and every individual person is an end unto itself and thus automatically entitled to respect and protection, and further presumes that each person is innocent until proven guilty, "individual liberty" sees individuals as something people become by choosing autonomy (or "personal responsibility"), and may not recognize individuals until they distinguish themselves from the rabble whose mere existence is of no concern to them or, worse, a burden they prefer not to carry. "Human rights" sees a mass of people whose self-evident needs are self-evidently compelling, while "individual liberty" reserves the right to ignore them or, if necessary, repel them.

None of the above is meant to sway anyone to one side or the other in the refugee debate. Some people may have reasons to reject refugees, and others reasons to demand unconditional acceptance of them, without reference to the continuum of individualism. That still leaves us with the seeming paradox we started with: those who most loudly avow themselves individualists refuse to recognize refugees as individuals, while those alleged to despise individualism seem more inclined to treat refugees as individuals rather than an undifferentiated "other" or "enemy." Recognizing this probably shouldn't decide one's position on taking in refugees, but it's worth remembering the next time some people boast of their belief in the individual and individualism, should you wish to ask who the real individualists are.

Are you a Progressive?

George Will has taken a break with his feud with Bill O'Reilly -- they've been arguing over O'Reilly's claim that the assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan hastened the President's mental decline -- to cast a contemptuous glance at a controversy on the Yale campus over potentially insensitive or emotionally harmful Halloween costumes. It does sound pretty contemptible, but I'm not sure whether Will's right to blame it on progressivism. His argument is that progressivism as it has evolved in the U.S. is inimical to free expression. Since this obviously begs the question of what, exactly, Will means when he says "progressivism," the columnist has helpfully attempted to define the term. I'll give you his definition in full, and then I'll break it down into individual components:

If you believe, as progressives do, that human nature is not fixed, and hence is not a basis for understanding natural rights. And if you believe, as progressives do, that human beings are soft wax who receive their shape from the society that government shapes. And if you believe, as progressives do, that people receive their rights from the shaping government. And if you believe, as progressives do, that people are the sum of the social promptings they experience. Then it will seem sensible for government, including a university’s administration, to guarantee not freedom of speech but freedom from speech. From, that is, speech that might prompt its hearers to develop ideas inimical to progress, and that might violate the universal entitlement to perpetual serenity. 

"Human nature is not fixed, and hence is not a basis for understanding natural rights." While there obviously is a "human nature" of a biological sort or else we couldn't separate human beings from other species, what Will means to claim is that progressives deny that unchanging moral or ethic claims follow from human nature. Will's own position, presumably, is that we can deduce from an understanding of our nature as humans a "naturally right" social order, or that nature (or "nature's god") confers an inalienable sovereignty on each individual that entitles individuals to resist encroachment upon it. Since God has proven a poor guarantor of human rights, presuming that you attribute them to him, Will must mean that man is the guarantor of his own rights as a matter of instinct, the rights being natural, even though his intellectual tradition argues that the true natural rights are discovered through reason rather than instinct.

"Human beings are soft wax who receive their shape from the society that government shapes." You may be a progressive if you believe this, but I don't know if anyone believes that government exclusively shapes both society and individuals, as Will implies. I am not aware that progressives reject the idea of "civil society," that there are institutions independent of the state (but not of laws) that are crucial in defining each person's identity. As for the rest of this claim, unless all of Will's erudition and ideology are innate, then he has been shaped from outside, though this doesn't mean that there can't be resistance to the shaping from inside, or a complementary self-development as people learn to reason.

"People receive their rights from the shaping government." Practically speaking, rights require a guarantor, and given likely disagreements over assumed natural rights the only effective conferral of rights comes from the only effective guarantor, the government. Governments must determine what rights are in society rather than in any state of nature to which individualists or ideologues might appeal.

"People are the sum of the promptings they experience." Again, I doubt whether any self-styled progressive believes such a thing. They more likely believe that the human mind is capable of analytical and even creative reason, but they're also likely to believe that these are inescapably responses to experience rather than phenomena generated in a "natural" vacuum.

Yet even if I agreed that the ideas listed by Will were progressive beliefs, or if someone actually chooses to affirm them all, I don't see how this leads to Will's conclusion that progressives would want government to guarantee "freedom from speech." Will has made a strawman of the premise that progressives deny intellectual autonomy. His "progressives" are tantamount to totalitarians, and maybe there is a certain trivial totalitarianism on college campuses today. But as I must wrap quickly this evening I'll conclude that on the subject of progressivism, much less progress, George Will is full of crap.

Terror returns to Paris

As I write I'm listening to an English-language French news channel for the latest updates on multiple gun and explosion attacks in Paris tonight, including an ongoing hostage situation at a concert hall. Since I started listening the estimated body count has grown from six to thirty, with more expected. There's some inexplicable hesitation to label this a wave of terror attacks -- but just now one of the reporters spoke of a "coordinated terror attack." It certainly doesn't look like multiple coincidences. There will probably be little doubt about who did it, too. After all, since so many French people declared themselves to be "Charlie" last January, they were bound to be targeted by the same forces that targeted the actual Charlie Hebdo newspaper. By now, I think, little actual provocation is necessary for such attacks as Paris is seeing tonight. In the age of ISIS, or the days of Daesh, terror is how would-be caliphates assert themselves. The people of Paris are as eligible targets as the people of Beirut who were blown up by IS affiliates yesterday, presumably to punish them for the Lebanese Hezbollah militia's support for the Assad government in Syria, or those Russians who most likely were blown up by a bomb over Egypt on board their passenger plane. And now the death estimate is up to 40 in Paris, and there may be a hundred hostages in that concert hall, and yet another shooting is being reported. I suppose you can still interpret all this as an understandable if not excusable demand to leave some part of the world alone, but who thinks that the perpetrators of all these attacks will behave differently if let alone or, worse, allowed to win? It's most likely too late to solve the problem simply by withdrawing -- and I mean not just the U.S. or the west but every foreign power -- from one part of the world. Most of the world agrees that the Caliphists, to suggest a new term, should not be allowed to win, on the assumption that they'll behave no differently toward the rest of the world if they do win. But a lot of us aren't as serious as we should be about that priority. There's still no agreement, whether between Americans and Russians or between Sunnis and Shiites, over what horse to back against the Caliphists. But if all of the above want to crush the Caliphate in its cradle, then everyone has got to get behind Assad in Syria, whether they like him or not, and behind the Iraqi government. The U.S. didn't ask Stalin to renounce Communism or hold free elections during World War II, after all, and however bad Bashar al-Assad is, he's not as bad as Stalin. There's a chance that this little rant may prove irrelevant to what's happening in Paris tonight, but it's worth repeating just the same.

Redefining socialism, continued

Like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Prof. Eric Foner of Columbia University styles himself a democratic socialist. Unlike Sanders, who unselfconsciously suggests that Americans could learn about democratic socialism, and learn not to fear it, from European examples, Foner argues that American democratic socialists should look to American traditions for examples and inspiration. In an article that went online shortly after the first debate of the 2016 Democratic presidential contenders, but has only just seen print in the November 16 Nation, Foner chides Sanders, in a more-or-less friendly fashion, for making democratic socialism sound like some foreign import. During the debate, when asked how a self-described socialist could win an American presidential election, Sanders said he would point to "countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway" as examples of democratic socialism in action, showing Americans "what they have accomplished for their working people" Foner agrees that "we can learn a few things from them (and vice-versa)," but argues that basing a campaign on that premise will get Sanders nowhere, since "most Americans don’t know or care much about Scandinavia." Instead, Foner advises, Sanders should "talk about our radical forebears here in the United States, for the most successful radicals have always spoken the language of American society and appealed to some of its deepest values"

Who are these radical forebears? Starting with Thomas Paine, Foner runs through a pantheon of abolitionists, populists and progressives expansive enough to cover Democrats like Franklin D. Roosevelt. Going through the list, Sanders might ask whether any of Foner's heroes actually were socialists. Foner's answer seems to be that it all depends on how you define socialism. There seems to be a movement, if not a competition, afoot to redefine socialism. A few weeks ago we had David Brooks -- a Republican! -- attempting an anodyne redefinition of socialism as putting "society" at the heart of politics, or something to that effect. More audaciously, Foner argues that socialism has already been redefined for all American intents and purposes. "[T]he term today refers not to a blueprint for a future society," he writes, "but to the need to rein in the excesses of capitalism, evident all around us, to empower ordinary people in a political system verging on plutocracy, and to develop policies that make opportunity real for the millions of Americans for whom it is not." Still more audaciously, Foner suggests that this isn't even a redefinition. "This is what it meant in the days of Eugene V. Debs," he claims, "Debs emphasized [that] socialism is as much a moral idea as an economic one—the conviction that vast inequalities of wealth, power, and opportunity are simply wrong and that ordinary people, using political power, can produce far-reaching change." Foner implies that no particular change matters as much as that there is change; any incremental improvement short of socialism as the concept was understood for generations will do so long as capitalism is "reined in," and to the extent that capitalism is reined in, the people are empowered, if not to the extent Debs actually envisioned. At a minimum, as long as plutocrats can lose an election, the people are empowered and capitalism is reined in. No further blueprint is needed.

Foner doesn't really let Debs speak for himself. Writing in 1904, Debs compared the agenda of his Socialist party to that of the trade union movement: "[W]hile the union is limited to bettering conditions under the wage system, the party is organized to conquer the political power of the nation, wipe out the wage system, and make the workers themselves the masters of the earth." The goal of democratic socialism, understood to mean socialism dedicated to achieving power through elections rather than by violent revolution or coup d'etat, is "to conquer the capitalist forces on the political battlefield; and having control of the machinery of government, use it to transfer the industries from the capitalists to the workers, from the parasites to the people." As one of the most honored American historians and holder of one of the most prestigious faculty chairs, Foner certainly knows what Debs stood for, even if Debs's heyday comes a generation or two after Foner's field of study. But for Sanders' instruction Foner argues that "It was Debs’s moral fervor as much as his specific program that made him beloved by millions of Americans." I'm not sure the program and the moral fervor are as easily separated as Foner claims. I'm more certain that if neither Foner nor Sanders can endorse Debs's agenda, neither has any business calling himself a socialist, whatever adjective they modify it with and whatever moral fervor they retain. Each might object to that verdict, but if they did I'd have to wonder why. Wouldn't it make life easier for both of them? As it is, I wonder why they want to call themselves socialists? Do they know something about the American people that I don't? Do they see an opportunity for personal advancement that I don't? Since I don't see a grass-roots hankering for socialism of any sort for them to exploit, I have to suppose that for reasons of personal history they need to kid themselves, even if they're hardly kidding anyone else.

What's the matter with Missouri?

Expect a backlash, if you can't already see it and hear it on the Internet or the radio, following the resignation of the president of the University of Missouri under mounting pressure from black students and sympathizers culminating in a threatened strike by the Columbia campus's SEC football team. Expect anger from whites, since the president was targeted not for sins of commission but sins of omission: an inadequate and purportedly insensitive response to a sequence of racist or racially-charged incidents on campus and in the state dating back to the Ferguson incident. What I hear already is that those uppity black bastards are forcing their will on the rest of us again, that the football players should have had their scholarships revoked, etc. Beneath all of this is the fearful question: what do they really want? What do they want from us? The answers should be obvious. They want zero tolerance of race hatred. It appears also that they want indoctrination (though we probably can just call it "education") against racism. More controversially, they seem to want some indoctrination/education on the concept of "systemic racism," towards which the university president, in the closest he came to a sin of commission, appeared to express some skepticism. "Systemic racism" is the current label for the argument that racism is something different from race hatred, that racism requires power, and that ending racism requires some redistribution of power to an extent that remains unclear. Putting it another way, the "systemic racism" argument is an argument for collective responsibility, refusing to the majority of whites the privilege of blaming racism, and placing the burden of ending it, exclusively on the most blatant rednecks of the old confederacy. No one has accused the university president of making cruel jokes or even of condoning the fecal swastika that seems to have been the final straw for black activists who take for granted that the symbolism was directed primarily at them rather than Jewish students. But those activists and their supporters in the athletic program believe that nothing short of radical change can end racism as they perceive it, and radical change in this case means a change at the top. Tell them that they're just too thin skinned for their own good and you'll probably be told that that's your privilege talking. They're asserting a right to be thin skinned, a right not to tolerate slurs or the supremacist attitudes behind them. Like it or not, whites aren't the only ones who get to be angry in this country. Black people (and a lot of their friends) are as mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. You can still look at it as an overreaction, as it objectively is. You can still believe that the president didn't deserve to lose his job over it, though that's a question of accountability. You can look for some proof of black hypocrisy to crow over or make excuses with. But that leaves it up to you to explain what can be done to end racism to everyone's satisfaction, unless you'd rather explain why no one should demand its end.

Crybaby Carson and the politics of vetting

I caught a little this morning of Dr. Ben Carson's pathetic exchange with a CNN reporter who had dared question the veracity of the Republican front-runner's autobiography. Echoing the consensus tone of all the Republicans following last week's CNBC debate, Carson griped that there are important issues to discuss -- that is, there are issues he wants to discuss -- while the terrible mainstream media wants to bring up trivial stuff. Actually he and any other candidate is within his rights to criticize the quality of the questions reporters ask, so long as he doesn't seek to dictate the questions they should ask. But none of the Republicans are criticizing the triviality of journalism in general. The problem, as they see it, isn't that reporters are banal but -- of course! -- that they are biased. What was pathetic about Carson's chat was his claim that Barack Obama never got the vetting from the mainstream media that Carson himself is getting. The reporter moved quickly to defend herself and her profession, reminding him that they'd gone through Senator Obama's writings with a fine-tooth comb and had found that he had created composite characters for different episodes of his life. In response to this reminder, Carson laughed with blatant contempt. There's really no way for journalists to convince Republicans that they properly vetted Obama, because it's an article of GOP faith that, had Obama been properly vetted, he never would have been elected. Since Obama has been elected twice, it's self-evident to Republicans that he was never vetted properly, and it's a small leap from there to conspiracy theory. Since Obama's faults are screamingly obvious to Republicans, and have been since 2008, he can only have been elected through a willful refusal of the media to vet him properly. Yet Obama's faults, real and supposed, are well-known, because they actually have been well-publicized, to everybody. You could not watch news -- not Fox News, but news -- without hearing about skeletons in Obama's closet, from Rev. Wright to Bill Ayers, and while Fox may claim to have led the way, it cannot be argued that the other news channels refused to talk about these matters. If vetting means that potentially troubling issues with candidates are brought to light, then Obama was quite thoroughly vetted, at least as far as Republicans are concerned. They heard enough about him to know they never wanted him in the White House. They like to blame his occupancy of that building today to both the biased mainstream media and the "low-information voters" on which all Democrats depend. If anyone failed to vet Obama to Republicans' satisfaction, it's these voters, but it cannot be claimed that they didn't hear the same things about Obama that Republicans heard. In short, the Republican argument that Obama wasn't properly vetted, or that the media refused to vet him, is a lie, and that makes Dr. Carson a liar. But let's be more specific: the Republican argument -- the argument that the details that make him abhorrent to them should have discredited him generally if properly publicized -- is a lie. On the other hand, there are probably many self-styled progressives who feel, after seven years of the Obama presidency, that he may not have been as thoroughly vetted to their satisfaction as he could have been. They only have themselves to blame, though, because we know their vetting process stopped as soon as he secured the Democratic line, and the Democratic party hasn't been properly vetted by true progressives in a very long time.

The death of the angry white male?

It sounds like someone's conspiracy theory at work: the National Academy of Sciences published a report this month showing that the death rate for white Americans aged 45-54 has increased sharply since 1998, while death rates for minority groups, in some cases still higher than for whites, have been dropping. Many people in that particular demographic may already think they're being targeted for extermination, and the ones we might presume most likely to believe such a thing, the less-educated, are the ones dying the most. Self-destructive behaviors seem to explain much of the trend, from increased suicide rates to greater use of drugs from heroin to Oxycontin. This provocative analysis suggests that these people are dying with the American dream, victims of despair over their diminished economic prospects in the modern (or postmodern) economy. It might follow that they are dying in greater numbers now -- though, again, still not in greater numbers than still-poorer but improving groups -- because they're less accustomed to hard times and perhaps more traumatized at the apparent loss of a supposed birthright. Yet if sociological factors are killing poor, ill-educated whites, it can be argued that they've contributed as much to their premature deaths by voting Republican so often -- if not for sustaining the entire bankrupt two-party system -- as they have by abusing drugs, alcohol and junk food. Republicans, of course, will offer a second opinion. They will continue to blame outside forces or conspiracies from within, from a President allegedly dedicated to his country's decline to a party that allegedly would prefer to replace whites entirely with more compliant non-whites. And for many this will continue to be a comforting diagnosis, because it will mean they've done nothing wrong. But there's little point in blaming Republicans if your only remedy is voting for Democrats. Regardless of which party is in power, and regardless of what country you live in, the global economy simply doesn't need as many people as the globe holds. It's no more necessary to that economy, it'd seem, for everyone to consume than it is for everyone to work. From a libertarian perspective, this seemingly alarming trend in the U.S. may simply be nature and market forces working together to correct an imbalance. But for the rest of us, this is no time to gloat, no matter how obnoxious this demographic often seems. More educated people might give themselves credit, but the numbers may only prove that education, for now, is a competitive advantage. It does not help us set the terms of the competition, nor does it assure us that alternatives are possible. If we want an alternative, we'll need numbers on our side, and with those numbers education may matter less than common sense. Their problem may not be that they're dumb, but that they've been bamboozled by flattering pseudo-intellectuals peddling ideological snake-oil. The remedy may not require us to demonstrate intellectual superiority to such sophists. It might be as simple as telling the majority, in language they'll understand, "come with us if you want to live."

Will Russia reap the whirlwind?

The question just as easily could be "Has Russia reaped the whirlwind?" A sense of schadenfreude no doubt leads many to believe, if not hope, that the Russian passenger jet that went down with all hands and passengers in the Sinai desert last weekend was brought down by a terrorist action. While expert observers of the so-called Islamic State and allied forces doubt whether the would-be caliphate has the missiles to knock a plane out of the air at such a height, it's less implausible that a bomb could have been smuggled onto the plane. The Metrojet airline has fueled suspicion by denying that pilot error or prior technical issues could have caused the mid-air breakup and crash of the Airbus, while the Russian government refuses to jump to conclusions. I guess we should at least rule out the otherwise-predictable paranoid theory that the Putin government blew the plane up to further justify its anti-IS intervention in Syria, since had that been the plan Russian officialdom presumably wouldn't hesitate to blame terrorists. I suspect they're probably more concerned with their air industry's reputation for safety and reliability, and even more so now that one of their cargo planes has crashed in South Sudan. Back in Soviet days, as I recall, Aeroflot was a global joke just as most Eastern Bloc industry was. Today's Russia doesn't want to have that reputation again, nor do they want people to think that they're taking their lives in their hands by flying Russian for any reason. By comparison, western observers seem eager to conclude that the Sinai crash was terrorist work. Since they supposedly dislike Russia's intervention in favor of the Assad regime, presumably they don't want to egg the Russians into an escalation by telling them that the IS has murdered a few hundred of their people, and they most likely doubt that a definitive finding of terrorist guilt would terrorize the cruel and ruthless Russians into quitting their air campaign.

Schadenfreude probably factors into Anglo-American investigations, or at least a desire to tell the Russians that we told them so. Confirmation that terrorists brought the plane down probably would inspire a perverse feeling of relief from an anxious, somewhat jealous feeling that the Russians, through some mysterious advantage of authoritarianism or by virtue of Putin's mastery, and in spite of a recent history of repercussions from their pacification of Chechnya, could get away with bombing the Daesh, and rescuing their client dictator in the process, without consequences. In cruder terms, westerners and Russophobes probably feel the same way about the Sinai crash as many around the world felt, whether they admitted it or not, on September 11, 2001: that however tragic the disaster was for the innocent victims, the nation had it coming. Since few Americans, I hope, will be so gauche as to say that openly about the Sinai crash, blaming the terrorists is an indirect way of blaming the Russians themselves,  even (or especially) if we think their real offense is not attacking the IS but protecting Assad.

What do I think? I think that it's natural for the IS to take credit, whether they did it or not, but I'd need to hear more from them about how they did it before I take such knee-jerk claims as seriously as some want to. From what I've read about Metrojet it seems that private-sector incompetence and neglect can't be ruled out, but we're still too early in the investigation to rule anything out, apart maybe from crackpot theories blaming the U.S., Israel (why?), Saudi Arabia (why not?) or the Russians themselves. What the hell, let's have someone blame the Ukrainians, too. Some people have to blame somebody when shit happens the way Don Corleone was going to blame somebody if Michael got struck by lightning when he came home from Sicily. The possibility that the crash may have been an accident that not even the airline could have anticipated might be the scariest of all for many of us, since it would remind us that human will doesn't always control history.

The cartoon electorate

My local paper ran a cartoon on its editorial page this morning showing a mass of people divided into two disproportionate segments, representing the third of the voting-age population who actually voted in recent elections and the two-thirds majority that didn't vote. The majority shout with one voice: we don't vote because it doesn't make a difference! The cartoonist hoped to show the absurdity of the claim; the majority so outnumbers the voting minority that their potential to make a difference is self-evident, their refusal to recognize that potential self-defeating. But the cartoon itself is absurd. Can those two-thirds of the potential electorate make a difference in determining who appears on a November ballot? They might be forgiven for thinking little of their power to decide whether the Democrat or the Republican gets in this time when what they really want is something else entirely. If they're to be faulted, it should be for not knowing how to get around the party system and elect someone whom they, rather than a party, nominate. Too many are thwarted by the mere sight of a ballot and its implication that the state has decided whom you can choose from. Of course you can write in any other name, but few feel confident that others will do likewise, and any little rebellion feels pretty futile in the solitude of the voting booth. We're supposed to have a representative democracy, the democratic part being the election, but how democratic is it when the state sets the terms candidates must meet to have even the pretense of equality on the ballot? What right has the state -- practically speaking, a partisan legislature -- to set deadlines for filing or quotas of signatures for candidates, especially in our time when, in theory, a flash-mob candidacy could sweep the country, not to mention smaller constituencies, in a weekend? What kind of democracy are we, in our vaunted openness of authority to challenges, when the most popular "insurgent" or "outsider" candidates still must seek legitimacy through one of the major parties, and in doing so are pressured to renounce any right to continue their campaigns independently? In a real democracy the majority should be able to decide at any time that they've had enough of such a system and abolish it. And those who would remind me of the Constitution should recall that our charter of government was not designed to enable political parties to consolidate power, that in fact the Framers hoped to prevent such a result before some of them found parties useful. When people throughout the country say they're sick of both parties yet can't find a way to do away with them, you can blame the people if you like but you have to blame the system, too. Bipolarchy -- the codependent cohabitation of genuinely opposed but fundamentally consensual parties --  has usurped democracy in America, and apparently it was all legal. So what can the two-thirds majority do? They haven't figured out how to beat the system, and probably wouldn't all agree on what to replace it with, and since it apparently was all legal, they'd probably and understandably feel antsy about reclaiming democracy through force. So what does that leave us with? They're still there and they can still make a difference, but a cartoonist who chides them simply for not voting in a two-party election probably should be careful of what he wishes for.

On media bias

Most newspapers began as partisan propaganda organs, bankrolled by party bosses and sustained, when the right party was in power, by public printing contracts. Once publishers found that they could sustain themselves and even flourish by selling advertising space or by running popular comic strips and other entertainment features, most began to aspire to greater objectivity in reporting. The goal was to avoid the appearance of partisanship anywhere but on the editorial page. Ideology doesn't recognize objectivity, unless it presumes itself objective. Despite media pretenses, ideologues perceived bias whenever their beliefs were not confirmed or at least represented in reporting. Ideological complaints of this sort grew in vehemence beginning in the 1960s. Ironically, many ideologues opposed the Fairness Doctrine that had obliged media to give all (usually both) sides of controversial issues. This was the tip-off that fairness and balance were not what the ideologues actually sought. They praised as "fair and balanced" whatever reflected their beliefs, and whatever did not reflect their beliefs, or reflected on them unflatteringly, remained biased. Roundaboutly, self-styled champions of liberty adopted a viewpoint similar to that of the authoritarian statesmen they claim to abhor, if as yet they haven't adopted their policies toward the media. The authoritarian viewpoint is that alternative viewpoints -- presumably any private or non-government viewpoints -- are biased by definition, and most likely in an inherently subversive way. They believe, so we're told, that the media should be unbiased, which to them means, so we're told, that media should take, at the least, an uncritical attitude toward the state, i.e., the ruling party, if not an affirmative attitude of cooperation in shaping public consciousness. In the U.S., the Republican protests against debate formats determined by media outlets are another signal of a stirring authoritarian attitude in the rightist party. It will be one thing, and perfectly within their rights, if the GOP withdraws their presidential primary debates from the cable news networks altogether and finds alternate ways to present them to the public, e.g. streaming media. But if they want to get on cable they have no business dictating terms that in any way limit the sort of questions moderators may ask. As I wrote last week, it'd also be no problem if they did away with moderators, because then we might get real debates where the candidates question and answer each other. But since there's no indication that the Republicans actually want to do without moderators, their obligation is to give the moderator or moderators the freedom of inquiry consistent with their primarily journalistic role. To blame tough questions, "gotcha" questions or even puerile questions on presumed "mainstream media" bias is to assume that a natural unwillingness to serve as mere shills for party propaganda is somehow illegitimate, which is how the authoritarians of the world, not their supposed sworn enemies, are supposed to think. The more Republicans talk of dictating terms for their debates, the deeper they dig a hole for themselves -- of for the media, should they win it all next year.

The debate debate

Republicans are right and wrong to bitch about the debates for presidential candidates. If their complaint is that they aren't real, substantive debates, I'll gladly agree. It's hard to have one of those with ten people on the podium in a two-hour time slot, the length being shortened from the previous gathering at the insistence of Donald Trump and Dr. Carson. Carson continues to complain about "gotcha" questions, and while it's tempting to criticize him for ducking what others might consider tough or at least appropriate questions, let's concede, from the reports I've read, that some of the questions were trivial, and remember that substantive debates need not include questions at all, at least from moderators. Lincoln and Douglas took questions only from each other --  and from each man's perspective the other's probably were all gotcha questions -- and had no moderator during their 1858 tour of Illinois. Since a real debate has only two sides, it would be up to the Republican National Committee to arrange a round-robin format so each of the top-tier contenders, however identified, could go one-on-one before the first primary or caucus. Let each round of debates address a specific field of policy: economics, foreign policy, criminal justice, etc., and let the candidates present themselves unmoderated and unmediated. One virtue of this proposal would be to stop the Republicans in particular from whining, as several did last night, about mainstream media bias. By now I've decided that for all their bitching about the major networks acting as lobbyists for liberalism, what Republicans really want is exactly what they claim to denounce: a media like they allegedly have in Russia or like China definitely has that obediently echoes the correct ideological line. Republicans claim to want balance rather than bias, but whenever anyone challenges them they claim bias, so they must want media that will never challenge them. But since the media in this country consists of private corporations, they owe the government nothing but obedience to law, and they owe less still to the party in power. Republicans ought to appreciate that, but their characteristic desire not to be contradicted, their assumption of bias in disagreement, overrides their supposed civil-society principles in times of tension. But no worries! Do away with the moderators, stage real debates and they can't complain about bias. The only thing I would ask of Republicans is that they honor the practice of their virtual founding father and do these debates in true Lincoln-Douglas style, which would mean two men sharing the stage for three hours, one speaking for an hour at the start and a half-hour at the end, the other getting 90 minutes in the middle. Trump and Carson might protest, but the protests would only expose their increasingly obvious shortcomings. Admittedly the format would most likely expose the shortcomings of the audience as well, but self-styled conservatives should not be surprised if the present generation fails to live up to the glorious past.

David Brooks, Socialist?

"Basically, we've got to get socialist," David Brooks writes in the New York Times this week. That's interesting coming from one of the house Republicans of the paper's op-ed page, but Brooks is quick to say that he doesn't mean what you think he means. "I don’t mean the way Bernie Sanders is a socialist," he clarifies, "He’s a statist, not a socialist." About Sanders, at least, I suspect Brooks is correct, if by "democratic socialism" Sanders means that elected politicians will run the economy rather than the working class. Brooks, however, probably thinks all socialists, except himself, are statists, since the pejorative American understanding of socialism is that the state runs the economy. I don't know what's more audacious about Brooks: that as a Republican he just wrote that "we've got to get socialist," or that he feels free to redefine "socialist" to serve his own purposes. For what it's worth, for Brooks, or anyone who takes his advice, to be a socialist means having to "put the quality of the social fabric at the center of our politics." That translates not into greater democratic regulation of the economy but more of the moralism Brooks has been offering recently. Once upon a time socialism was identified, fairly or not, with the dread doctrines of "free love" and a desire to abolish the family as a bourgeois institution. Now, Brooksian socialism preaches "no single parents!" while advocating more charter schools. To be fair, he also advocates expanding public-sector early education programs; that's one of the "things Democrats like" he includes in his hopeful program for bipartisan "socialism." But rather than probe deeper into the idiosyncratic socialism he'd like to hear advocated by "a sensible version of Donald Trump" -- why don't you speak for yourself, David? -- I want to figure out what "socialism" really means.

Somebody had to coin the word sometime, right? And they presumably knew what they were talking or writing about, right? Well, researchers tell me that the word "socialism" is around 200 years old, and that while it first appeared in Italian, it didn't start to catch on until it appeared in French in the 1830s. A paper called the Globe started using it in a roundabout way, one writer asserting that he no more wanted to sacrifice "socialisme" to "personnalite" than to sacrifice vice for versa. I don't know enough intellectual French to know for sure, but I'd guess that personnalite translates to "individuality," if not something more like "individualism." The writer, presumably, is looking for that balance of individuality and fellowship utopians have striven for ever since. "Socialist" was being used occasionally in English by 1833; the term was identified initially with the "utopian socialist" Robert Owen, and was quickly identified pejoratively with "community of goods, abolition of crime, of punishment, of magistrates and of marriage." Community of goods, as practiced in voluntary communities like Owen's, seems to be essential to the definition. As far as I know, no such thing is advocated by Sanders, much less Brooks. For the latter, socialism may as well be the science of socializing people to be good bourgeois citizens. Looking back again, however, the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, the 1888 volume from which I take many of the quotes above, consistently identifies socialism with ownership of the means of production, etc., by "the community as a whole," not by "the state." Inevitably, socialism came to be identified with "statism," as Brooks puts it, if only because state power seemed inescapably necessary, once socialists gave up on voluntary utopian collectives, to the achievement of socialist goals. Bolshevism made matters worse by empowering a political class -- the vanguard party -- to run things for the workers' benefit, whether the workers liked it or not. Democratic socialists like Sanders are by definition more accountable to workers in their capacity as voters, but it can still be asked whether genuine socialism need be statist in the ways implied by Brooks, whether is must be hierarchically professional or totalitarian in its designs on individuals. Whatever socialism Brooks himself espouses probably isn't even half-assed, but such is our political environment today that some readers probably will conclude that Brooks, a critic of Trump and the Tea Pary, has only now confessed what they suspected of him all along.

Obama: Cops are scapegoats

Whenever there's an amoklauf in America, and whenever the President of the United States expresses his frustration with resistance to gun control measures he believes would prevent many such incidents, the example of his old home town of Chicago is thrown at him in an attempt to prove him wrong. It is said that Illinois already has fairly strict gun regulations, and yet Chicago is perceived by many as the murder capital of the U.S. To gun-rights absolutists, Chicago proves that criminals will always find ways to get guns regardless of regulations, while law-abiding people end up helpless against them. All this really shows is that the gun people are more afraid of the generic criminal than the amoklaufer or school-shooter, while the reverse is true for the anti-gun people. In any event, the President went to Chicago today to talk about guns and police. He told the police -- specifically the International Association of Police Chiefs -- that they should be on his side on gun control, since "fewer gun safety laws ... mean more fallen officers." Police are probably more afraid of the generic criminal, too, though whether they are as pessimistically confident as the gun lobbyists about the criminal's ability to find a gun if he wants one is unclear. The trouble with police in many eyes, of course, is that they profile the generic criminal with too broad strokes. The police gathered in Chicago found the President in conciliatory mode, though it appeared that Obama was losing track of the narrative. He told the police chiefs that "Too often, law enforcement gets scapegoated for the broader failures of our society and criminal justice system." That sounds like he's overanalyzing the issue. Does he really think that people in poor communities hate cops simply because they're poor or unemployed? That wasn't my impression. My impression was that people hate cops, however unfairly in general, because too many individual cops abuse their power. Obama can't deny these abuses -- he's denounced several cases in the past -- but today he shrugged them off as "bad apple" exceptions, offering an analogy, unlikely to persuade many, between police and politicians. Individual bad cops don't discredit the police as a whole, he argued, any more than individual bad politicians discredit the entire political class. But in both cases, the power that exists to be abused is at least as problematic as the potential for unworthy individuals to abuse the power. To analyze the situation in this way, however, would be "scapegoating" as far as the President is concerned. Yet he was probably going out of his way to attempt damage control after his FBI director attributed an increase in violent crime in some places to police reluctance to be caught on camera doing what they gotta do to keep the hoodies in line. This is the so-called "Ferguson effect" for which many blame Obama for having "politicized" killings there and elsewhere. His sincerity in supporting police will be doubted by some who see it, dare I say, as less than skin deep. Whether he's calling for gun control or better police-community relations, his words will be wasted on those people in both the police and private sectors who think the real solution to "failures of our society and criminal justice system" is to exterminate all the brutes or let them exterminate each other. Obama's own attitude, to the extent that it can be inferred from his remarks in Chicago, may be that the police with all their problems are still preferable to the complete privatization of law-enforcement, re-branded as "self-defense," of which many Americans dream.

Patrick Lynch, Propaganda Minister of the Police State

Patrick Lynch is the president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association of New York City. He was re-elected earlier this year after gaining national attention for blaming the assassination of two cops last December on the Mayor Bill DeBlasio's stand against police brutality. He's back in the news today for giving Quentin Tarantino some free publicity for his new movie. Looking to build up more street cred, the director of The Hateful Eight participated in an anti-brutality march last weekend and gave a speech in which he declared himself on the side of "the murdered," i.e. the victims of excessive police force. For this, Lynch has denounced Tarantino as a "purveyor of degeneracy," though to be fair, he may have formed an opinion of the man's movies before last weekend. Going further, Lynch has called for a boycott of The Hateful Eight -- a western about a bounty hunter and his female prisoner surrounded by suspicious characters -- to show disapproval of the filmmaker's "Cop Fiction" about excessive force. In America the boycott is the weapon of the weak, and I suppose Lynch has just as much right to boycott something because he doesn't like what it stands for as anybody else. But I can't help feeling that it's just a little different when you call for someone to be punished, economically or otherwise, for criticizing the police, even if you sincerely believe the person is misrepresenting you or, worse, lying. It's also just a bit hypocritical to demand that Tarantino be held to account for his words when you, speaking for police, refuse to be held accountable to public opinion for anything. Earlier this year, when cops were criticized for roughing up a black man, who proved to be a former tennis star, in a case of mistaken identity, Lynch -- and what a name that is for a cop! -- sneered at "arm-chair judges," telling them (and us), "If you have never struggled with someone who is resisting arrest or who pulled a gun or knife on you when you approached them for breaking a law, then you are not qualified to judge the actions of police officers putting themselves in harm's way for the public good." By this standard, civilian lawyers and judges were unfit to try the Nazis at Nuremberg if they'd never fired a shot in wartime. But lest someone think I've broken a rule of internet discourse, let's make this as simple as possible. Policemen are public servants. American policemen are public servants in a democratic republic. That means everyone is qualified to judge them. It is our prerogative to say how they should react when guns or knives or toys or wallets are pulled on them, or when young black men, or just plain black men, or young men, or poor men, appear on scary streets. Criticizing the police is one case when liberal society is right to insist that people be able to speak without fear of any form of reprisal. If we accept Lynch's logic and his premise that only cops are fit to judge their own actions and the circumstances in which they occur, then we concede that the police don't just enforce the law but make it. The police are supposed to enforce the will of the people as enacted in law, but too often it looks as if they prefer to enforce their will on the people, those who dare to criticize as well as those who fail to comply. Lynch's is the logic of a police state in which exclusive expertise puts police beyond public scrutiny. That such a person is the chosen representative of New York City police is telling if not damning -- but then again, maybe he's so good at collective bargaining that the rank and file will forgive his asshollering. That doesn't mean we should.

The Presidential Party

Aren't Democrats supposed to believe that the future is theirs? Matthew Yglesias doesn't. In fact, he worries about an opposite destiny. On the Vox website he warns of the party's fundamental weakness at the local level, as well as a baffling complacency that leaves Democrats seemingly indifferent to the fact that they have no realistic chance of reclaiming the House of Representatives for the foreseeable future. He blames the problem on increased ideological rigidity among progressive Democrats, an absence of any impulse to compromise with constituencies who could help them win congressional seats. He seems basically to be saying that progressives need to compromise on social/cultural issues like gun control and gay rights. The way Yglesias explains it, there's a pro-business, anti-tax, anti-regulation constituency in every state that's guaranteed to vote Republican. Relying on this base, Republicans are actually more flexible than Democrats, Yglesias claims, when it comes to nominating candidates who are relatively moderate on social issues. In the northeast, for instance, the GOP will choose candidates "who either lack hard-edged socially conservative views or else successfully downplay them as irrelevant in the context of blue-state governance." Since every state has that pro-business, anti-tax, anti-regulation constituency Democrats can't hope to reach, they have to be more accommodating on cultural issues if they hope to win over people -- let's call them populists -- who resent the rich and identify with the working class but don't identify with "progressive" values. Democrats have trouble following this strategy, Yglesias suggests, because they depend increasingly on "non-labor national progressive donor networks [that] are inherently populated by relatively affluent people who tend to be emotionally driven by progressive commitments on social or environmental issues." Worse, many progressives seem to have a constitutionally illiterate belief that only the Presidency matters. They'll learn differently, Yglesias warns, when they eventually lose the Presidency, but they ought to start rebuilding before then.

This isn't the only note of alarm I've heard among Democrats lately. Some are troubled by the fact that the front-runner for their presidential nomination is nearly seventy, while her strongest rival is older still, while most of the Republican contenders are considerably younger than current front-runner Donald Trump, suggesting that the GOP is getting fresh blood from Congress (Cruz, Rubio, etc.) and elsewhere that Democrats are not. It would be more surprising in our time, however, if one of the major parties wasn't predicting its own imminent doom. Republican control of the House probably looked as unassailable in 2000 or 2004 as it does now, and as Yglesias himself notes, all it took was an unpopular Republican President to tip the balance the other way. The problem is, Yglesias doesn't want to wait until the Democrats "bottom out" because he fears the consequences of undivided Republican government for both progressives and economic populists.

Nor will Yglesias's alarm sound new to many Democrats. The debate over whether they must choose between economic populism and a more expansive progressive agenda is old news that many don't want to hear anymore because it always sounds like you have to pander to the angry white male and for his sake ignore the demands of other demographic groups. To hear it all again must be all the more irksome after many Democrats assured themselves after 2012 that demographics were on their side, but what goes unspoken in Yglesias's article, yet is probably implicit, is that the permanent pro-business, anti-tax, anti-regulation constituency in every state, if not in every district, is going to include more people whom Democrats expect to take their side automatically as a matter of identity. After all, if economic populists aren't automatically progressive, why should progressives who define themselves in sociocultural terms automatically be economic populists? Meanwhile, Yglesias implies more clearly that there will always be a cohort of poor voters who still "cling" to their conservative culture -- the people accused of false consciousness since before the turn of the century, who explain "what's the matter with Kansas" because culture seems to count for more than economics with them. We can expect many more familiar arguments and laments if it looks like Clinton (being realistic) will get clobbered next year, and they'll continue until the wheel of fortune to which both major parties are bound lifts Democrats up again and pulls Republicans down, unless the populists and progressives in the Democratic party break from each other and break the wheel once and for all.

By the sword

While the observation has never justified their resistance to gun control, gun-rights absolutists are correct to note that there are violent impulses in human societies and cultures, if not in human nature itself, that won't be suppressed entirely by the elimination of firearms. This was proven again today in Sweden, where a sword fetishist attacked a school and wounded several people, two fatally so far, before he was shot to death. In this case the answer to a bad guy with a sword was good guys with guns who happened to be lawfully delegated police officers. Inevitably some will say that the two fatalities would not have died had someone at the school had a gun. The logic of this, it seems, is that the more people have weapons, the less likely anyone is to use them. The logic seems faulty given the "suicide-by-cop" mentality of many mass-shooters. Such people are hardly more likely to be deterred by the prospect of "suicide-by-civilian," unless your assumption is that they'd be deterred by the thought of not getting an adequate body count before they go down. That assumption in turn depends on whether body count is essential to the blaze of glory with which so many madmen want to leave this world. Just as inevitably, people will argue sarcastically for a ban on swords, just as they've argued for bans on knives, automobiles and any object that can be held responsible for multitudes of deaths each year. Their sarcasm can be taken more seriously once a sword lobby emerges to assert their constituents' right to kill with their weapon of choice, or when car owners organize to assert their right to run people over. The debate over gun rights has gone beyond the question of whether guns or people kill people. It should be recognized as a political struggle pitting one side that above all else asserts a right to kill against another that denies that claim even under the circumstances the first side considers most advantageous to itself, i.e. self-defense against crime. The essence of that debate is unanalogizable, just as the abortion debate is, rendering the gun-keepers' reductio ad absurdam arguments fallacious. But the truth with which this article started remains: gun culture may feed the lethal impulse in our culture, but it's not the sole source. Around the world, we've seen the damage people can do without guns -- a guy in Japan went on a sword rampage a few years ago, and more recently China has seen waves of mass knife attacks -- and we should concede that there's no longer something uniquely American about the impulse to kill people en masse for purely personal reasons. That doesn't excuse the gun fetishists and vigilantes who exacerbate the problem by advocating for lethal self-defense, but it does mean our work won't be done should they be silenced. What more will it take to eliminate those fatal mixtures of fear, alienation and entitlement that make people killers? We may not have the answer now but we need to keep asking the question.

Diversity of opinion in authoritarian and capitalist media

Reading Leslie Savan's cry of alarm in The Nation over reports that MSNBC will get rid of a lot of its progressive TV hosts in an effort to steer itself back toward objective news reporting, I was reminded a little of Russia. Part of the case against Vladimir Putin as an "authoritarian" leader is that he has gradually driven dissenting opinion off television, whether by intimidation, selective prosecutions, denial of licenses, buyouts by friendly oligarchs, etc. Reportedly Putin isn't as concerned about other media, but wants to make sure the most popular medium avoids an adversarial stance toward him. You hear the same stories about alleged authoritarians everywhere. Apparently it's crucial to their consolidation of power to control television. Conversely, the existence of adversarial or plainly partisan TV channels or networks is considered minimal proof that a nation has a free civil society. People who may have no use for Fox News at home more or less argue that no nation is free unless it has an equivalent of Fox -- or of MSNBC if the regime is at all "conservative." Implicit in all this is a belief that the state has an obligation to guarantee opposition parties, if not all political points of view, access to mass media. But there seems to be no real guarantee of MSNBC's status as a "progressive" channel. Decisions to change its content, while retaining its most popular prime-time progressive personalities, are motivated by displeasure with low ratings and a desire on the part of new management to make MSNBC look more like NBC, at least for part of the day. No act of authoritarian repression has taken place, yet should a Republican win the Presidency next year there's no guarantee that cable subscribers will find a rallying point against the new regime. As Savan points out, there are alternative progressive cable news outlets, but they're all small compared to MSNBC and far fewer people have access to them. Ironically, Russia's English-language news channel RTN was probably the furthest left of all news channels, at least in its coverage of the U.S., on my cable system until the system dropped it in favor of Al Jazeera America, most likely having decided that the former was more "anti-American" than the latter. It would seem, then, that capitalist countries can no more guarantee significant TV exposure to truly dissident opinion than authoritarian countries. If Russia is an authoritarian country because you can't find anyone on TV saying Putin is a bum, what is the U.S.? You can point to Fox News now that a Democrat is President, but if there's no voice of opposition equal to Fox both in vehemence and availability when we have a Republican president, what will that say about us? Why wait to judge? What does it say about us if a channel that advocates somewhat strongly for not-even radical change, the nearest thing we have (and probably not so near) to an anti-establishment news network, and hence presumably an essential element of civil society, is subject to the whims and winds of market forces? If the standard for a free society is that dissent is guaranteed a place in the mass media, and MSNBC, or more accurately its progressive opinionators, are not guaranteed a place -- for such a guarantee would grant them immunity from the market forces currently threatening them -- then by that standard we aren't as free a society as we think.

Sanctuary, Sanctuary!!

How much are Democrats depending on the Hispanic vote next year? To restate the question, how much do Democrats believe that their success depends on Hispanic votes? The answer may explain today's procedural vote in the U.S. Senate, through which the Democratic minority blocked Republican legislation that would reduce the federal money going to self-described "sanctuary cities," those municipalities large and small that withhold cooperation from federal efforts to arrest and deport illegal immigrants. I don't mean to suggest that only Hispanics, or only ethnic groups with large first-generation cohorts, could support such a measure. Many self-styled liberals and progressives of all races support the sanctuary-city concept. Some take the dogmatic position that "no one is illegal" or deem it hypocritical that the heirs of the uninvited immigrants of 1492 and beyond want to dictate who can come here next. Some see the defense of the undocumented as morally equivalent to resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act. As far as I can tell, the consensus now is that 19th century cities and citizens who denied aid to federal proceedings against alleged fugitive slaves, and who sometimes fought slave-hunters and assisted fugitives in escaping local jails, were moral heroes despite defying federal law and exacerbating sectional tensions. When Republicans (and many populists irrespective of party) protest that sanctuary cities are lawless, it sounds to many progressive ears like the protests of slaveholders. Just as the slave was credited with a human right, prior to law, to escape slavery, so the immigrant, especially when portrayed as a refugee, is credited with a human right to seek a better life wherever he can find it that overrides even the will of the sovereign people and their representatives. It sounds fine and noble in progressive circles but it's a tougher sell elsewhere, if only because the undocumented immigrant doesn't enjoy the presumption of innocence, much less moral superiority, granted by many to the fugitive slave.

Despite the multitudes of runaways who came north via the Underground Railroad and other means, the archetypal fugitive slave was a heroic individual, a full American in fact if not in law, while the immigrant, especially when he's Hispanic or one of the now-dreaded Syrian refugees, is perceived as part of a faceless, foreign-sounding horde whose arrival threatens to destabilize communities. Ultimately, while people can imagine a human right to escape from slavery, and a corollary moral imperative to shelter such escapees, it doesn't follow analogically that there's an equal human right to flee a destabilized, impoverished country, much less a local prerogative to shelter such refugees if a paramount representative government denies them shelter. It's arguable that the prospective refugee has some obligation, as a citizen of his homeland, to stay on and set things right, rather than assume helplessness and flee, while the slave, by comparison, need not be obliged to kill his owner and take over the plantation if he wants to be free. So long as slavery is deemed unjust the slave is entitled to the route of least resistance; whether the citizen of an impoverished or oppressed nation is similarly entitled is less certain. This is certainly too abstract for the most visceral opponents of sanctuary cities, but how do you answer them when they accuse those cities of lawlessness, especially after some of the same people who applaud sanctuary cities were quick to condemn the lawlessness of Kim Davis, the clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky who refused marriage licenses to homosexual couples on alleged divine authority, and still more of them routinely affirm the primacy of central government over localities on questions of marriage rights, voting rights, etc? If one person's "conscience" can't trump law, why should someone else's? I don't raise these questions to justify a crackdown on sanctuary cities, but to warn people that such questions will be raised, so that defenders of sanctuary cities had better have better answers ready than their knee-jerk appeals to pity or swipes at bigotry. Maybe Democrats feel so certain of the sufficiency of Hispanic and progressive support that they feel no need to answer rather than insult those who question their position. That could be a mistake, and it might be a fatal one in 2016.