« July 2007 | Main | September 2007 »
I've been down with an intestinal bug of some kind. Not much energy for anything. I'll be a couple of days before I'm back. Till then, chew on this:
Cheney famously said "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." He will very likely be likewise telling his little friends at cocktail parties a couple of years from now, "Bush proved congress doesn't matter." Digby
The need to “think outside of the box” has become a business cliché in the last decade signifying the need to think creatively. The phrase resonates, as all cliches do at first, because it points to a truth, which is that what we find within the box, although familiar and comfortable, is stale and lifeless. So there is the understandable desire to get out of the box to where the air is fresh and the light bright, but I don’t think it’s desirable or even possible to do without the box, for we humans cannot deal with too much reality, and the box performs an essential filtering function which keeps us sane.
But while that is true, it's important to understand that the "box" is a human cultural construction. There is nothing absolute about it, and in fact different cultures have different boxes, different ways of filtering the reality outside of it, and moderns have constructed a box for themselves that has a pretty thick filter. Moderns like to think that their filter excludes everything that is delusional, superstitious and irrational--that "reason" is the stuff out of which it is made.
But reason always serves another master, and for moderns reason serves the compulsive need to control and dominate, and to find ways to justify all the human projects that are born of the need to control and dominate. The need to control and dominate, therefore, is the ur-filter through which we see everything. It controls our politics and economic mores. It's essentially what we see in the kind of people the culture lionizes in film from the Jack Bauers to James Bonds. They may be individuals, but they are exemplars of control and domination. We think of admirable personalities as those who control and dominate and who refuse to be controlled and dominated. It really is pretty basic. Our whole idea of human value and dignity is defined by winners and losers on that scale.
Humans have always made an idol of power, but until the modern period they never lived in a world they thought they could completely control. And whether or not that's possible, it's the compulsion that is driving us toward a totalizing surveillance police state. You could say that most people are not in the grip of this compulsion, but it doesn't matter. Insofar as we live in a culture that is dominated by the compulsion for control and domination, most people accept that these kinds of controls are acceptable and they won't resist the minority who seeks to implement them.
We see in congress right now a group of people who are living inside a box in which this need for domination and control goes without question. They would not be taken seriously if they dissented. They are, with some exceptions, creatures of the domination and control model of reality. They wouldn't have arrived at their positions if they were not. Hillary Clinton is an exemplar in this respect, and that's why there's little reason to hope for much from the Democrats. Insofar as they live in the domination and control box, they are incapable of resisting the kinds of things that the more blatantly aggressive Republicans are promoting.
But however that plays itself out, one way or the other we have to find ways to punch holes in that structure and to create a new box that let's in the light and air that will allow us to live the kind of healthy, fruitful lives that have become almost impossible within the stale confines as defined by the domination and control box.
Premodern cultures, including the premodern west, provide part of the answer. Premoderns saw nature and its creatures as manifestations of the sacred, and as something they were in relationship with, not dominators of. In the medieval West the world was seen as a sacred book to be read in which were found the ideas of in the mind of God, and the task was imagined as punching holes in the roof of the box so that one could be open to the life and illumination that would flow in from heaven above. But this project also involved sealing up the floor under which the devil lurked seeking to destroy souls with an appeal to the base instincts symbolized by sex, power, and money. Those serious about their spiritual lives fled the world to enter monasteries where they took vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty, each designed to protect the soul by sealing up the floor of the box to block out the influence of those instinctual drives. Let the box be filled with spirit, and don’t let anything up from down below.
This is better than living in a completely closed system, with no holes in the roof, but it didn't work. You have to have a better strategy for dealing with the stuff that comes up from below, and simply suppressing those energies promotes "angelism." Angelism is at the root of body and earth loathing, and of an overemphasis on eternity at the cost of diminishing the importance of history. As such it is a one-sided distortion of a multi-sided human project. We need to punch holes in the ceiling, but we also need to punch them in the sides (front, openness to future; back, reverence for the past; right, communion with humans; left, communion with natural world) and the floor (the instinctual drivers sympolized by sex, power, money). It's the mix of all of these in the alembic of the soul that defines the human task. Shutting out any one of them causes severe problems. And as the Self, the individuating incarnate human spirit, grows in strength, the need for filters lessens, and the box melts away.
That, in somewhat simplistic terms, is the model that I am working with. I lay it out here as a point of reference for future posts. It's at the heart of everything I say about politics, as suggested in the paragraphs above, but it's also at the heart of my thinking about the culture, which is an evolving spiritual work of steadily punching more holes in the box. As I've said before, our politics is a function of the kind of souls we have, and our souls are shaped by culture, and culture is shaped by the kind of filters that let in reality or close it off. The culture shapes the box, and insofar as our box now is constructed out of the compulsive need for domination and control, our politics will be all about domination and control. Nothing changes in the political sphere until fundamental changes occur in the cultural sphere, and that requires fundamental alterations in the filter system.
The cultural project is long-term, and our political crisis is short term. And that's the source of my pessimism for the short run. In the long term, I think we'll figure it out. I worry, though, about what's in front of us in the next couple of decades. It seems inevitable that we will have to learn the hard way. But our responsibility is to do what we can do, individually and together.
I've started re-reading The Brothers Karamazov. Alyosha (and Dostoyevski himself) has always been the model for me of the model of the filtering system most appropriate for our time. More on that as I get into the book more.
Alberto Gonzales would be my poster boy for the special twist this administration has given to Arendt's "banality of evil." Gonzales is the empty shell of a human being true evil requires to accomplish its purposes. He is a smiling cipher who repeatedly allowed himself to be used all the while thinking, I'm sure, he did no wrong--he merely did what he was told, did what was expected of him.
I'd say good riddance if there were any possibility that someone with more integrity and honesty could replace him. That can't happen because there's too much at stake for this administration in keeping DOJ under its thumb. The administration will find ways to game the system with recess appointments or other strategies to play out the clock. Gonzales would not have been allowed to leave if the administration thought itself vulnerable to being forced to appoint someone with integrity. Would James Comey meet the integrity standard? Hard to say. In any event, I hope I'm proved wrong on that as with so many other things I write about here, but doubt it.
Readers put me on to a very interesting book with this title by Robert Inchausti. He says in his intro that the the public perception of Christianity is that it
is inherently reactionary, unconsciously wedded to class, race, and gender prejudices, bound by foundational metaphysics and littered with outworn superstitions. . . . This book attempt to correct this error by taking a hard and sustained look at those macrohistorians, social activists, and avant garde novelists whose unique contributions to secular thought derive from their Christian world views. . . .
This new breed of theoretically savvy Christian humanists are not apologists for the status quo, but subversive--inherently suspicious of worldly power and actively working for a more just world. For them, the postmodern culture critics Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida got it only half right. Yes, the Enlightenment project was narrowly conceived, but that doesn't mean that the best alternative to it is an even more theoretically self-conscious hyperrationalism.
He goes on to say that the writers he examines argue for a return to an eschatological perspective on human existence in which "myth--as the mode of simultaneous awareness of multiple causes and effects--remains at the heart of human self-understanding, and, properly understood, is capable of renewing our culture and transforming the Enlightenment disciplines from the inside out."
Long time readers of ATF will recognize these as precisely the themes that underlie almost everything that I write here when it comes to religion and culture. And like me, Inchausti is not just interested in the meaning of "subversive" only in the political sense, but more fundamentally in the epistemological sense. He argues, as I have been trying to do, that our fundamental experience of the world is profoundly distorted by the rigidified habits of mind formed by Enlightenment rationalism and the materialism that has followed inevitably from it. One's politics follows from his or her metaphysics and epistemology, which everyone has, whether her or she is conscious of them or not.
Breaking this habit is the great theme of Barfield's Saving the Appearances and is addressed by Inchausti in the first chapter where he discusses Blake, Goethe, Kierkegaard, and others who understand the problem and have struggled to find a way to solve it. As Barfield argues, Christians and other modern believers live in a world shaped by these materialist mental habits just as much as secularists do. The challenge, therefore, is not to make Christianity make sense on Enlightenment terms, which is always a losing proposition, that diminishes the mythopoetic power the Christian faith, but rather to subvert Enlightenment rationalism by shattering its materialist assumptions and habits of mind for which mythos as a mode of cognizing truth is an impossibility.
This is no easy task, but it's something I'll get into in a more developed way in the coming week, leaning heavily both on Barfield and Inchausti.
It would appear that we'll be hearing a lot more about how well things are going in Iraq, and how we have to give Petraeus more time. The latest is to give him till next spring, and then it will be to give him till the fall, and then even assuming a Democrat takes the presidency in Jan '09, we'll have to stay for several more years. It's not that the Democrats are painted into a corner for fear of being forever branded as the party who lost Iraq; the problem is much deeper than that. The Democrats are complicit in and dependent on the military industrial complex, and they do their part in serving their Master when asked to do so. This kind of thing is exemplified by Washington State's so-called anti-war Democrat, Brian Baird:
He sounds so reasonable, so grown-up, so serious, but it is complete b.s. and either Baird has been hoodwiinked or he is complicit in the complex's propaganda offensive to setup the orchestration of the so-called Petraeus report. The choreography and the manipulation is so predictable, as is Carlson's finding this so-called anti-war Democrat to give credibility to the campaign. How many times have we seen and heard this before?
So count me among those "extremists" who think Baird has either been conned or is a willing accomplice in the con. If Tucker Carlson were to ask me why it's so hard to admit that progress is being made in Iraq, I would respond: Progress toward what? What kind of structural progress has been made or is possible to make? Do you really believe any Baghdad-centered government has any relevance in a country that has devolved into a patchwork of city states led by sectarian warlord-led militias? Do you really believe that Iraq in the next decade can be anything more than that? Do you really think that the U.S cares about Iraqi chaos for any other reason than that it threatens the U.S. capability to maintain its bases? Do you think that if Iraq were suddenly pacified, that the U.S. would evacuate all the troops and shut down all its bases?
Or doesn't it make more sense to see that the primary military objective in Iraq is quell any military threats to the long-term maintenance of those bases? The bases are all that matters because they are essential for the achievement of the U.S.'s goal to establish hegemonic control of this oil-rich region. This has been from the beginning the neocon objective, and the neocons and the M/I complex they represent are not going to give up on that goal unless as in Vietnam they are forced to do so.
So then, isn't it clear that troop levels will not come down until enough stability is established to insure the security of those bases? And isn't the corollary also obvious that so long as things go poorly the troop levels will stay up? And is it not also obvious that the complex will come up with any smokescreen rationale to justify maintaining troop levels necessary to sustain those bases? And shouldn't we therefore expect that so long as things go poorly, as they are likely to continue to do, the American public will be told that things are getting better? And isn't that really all we are hearing from Rep. Brian Baird, anti-war Democrat from Washington?
Bush is right: this is Vietnam all over again, but we're making the same stupid mistakes following the same stupid logic. The public will be strung along for as long as it takes by the so-called moderate common sense of people like Baird, and it will not matter how long it takes, how much money is spent, or how many lives are lost. It's so depressingly predictable.
Update: The news that Pace will be calling to reduce the U.S. force in Iraq next year by almost half is an interesting development, which points to an important difference between Vietnam and Iraq: the lack of a draft. For all the money we spend on the military, it depends on people volunteering to join the army, which for obvious reasons they are reluctant to do. It will be interesting to see how the tension created by this reality in conflict with the Iraq strategic objectives described above will be resolved. The LA Times sums it up:
According to administration and military officials, the Joint Chiefs believe it is of crucial strategic importance to reduce the size of the U.S. force in Iraq in order to bolster the military's ability to respond to other threats, a view that is shared by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.
Pace is expected to offer his advice privately instead of issuing a formal report. Still, the position of Pace and the Joint Chiefs could add weight to that of Bush administration critics, including Democratic presidential candidates, that the U.S. force should be reduced.
Those critics include Republican Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, who on Thursday called on Bush to begin withdrawing troops in September to pressure the Iraqi government to move toward political compromise.Any discord among the top U.S. generals could be awkward for Bush, who professes to rely heavily on advice from military leaders. But there also is tremendous pressure for military officers to speak with one voice and defer to Petraeus and other field commanders. It remains possible that the Joint Chiefs may opt to weaken their stance before approaching Bush.
According to a senior administration official, the Joint Chiefs in recent weeks have pressed concerns that the Iraq war has degraded the U.S. military's ability to respond, if needed, to other threats, such as Iran.
The chiefs are pushing for a significant decrease in troop levels once the current buildup comes to an end -- perhaps to about half of the 20 combat brigades now in Iraq. Along with support units, that would lower the U.S. presence to fewer than 100,000 troops from the current 162,000.
But military leaders in Iraq, as well as senior officials in the White House, are pushing for troop levels to return to the prior level of about 15 brigades, or about 134,000 troops, once the current buildup is over.ut military leaders in Iraq, as well as senior officials in the White House, are pushing for troop levels to return to the prior level of about 15 brigades, or about 134,000 troops, once the current buildup is over.
Despite signs of progress in some locales, the Iraqi government has failed at national reconciliation, a new National Intelligence Estimate reported Thursday. White House policymakers argue that such weakness means they cannot dramatically reduce U.S. troop levels, at least through the end of the Bush presidency.
Who do you think will win this one? I hope I'll be surprised. But then I was suckered into believing that McCain, Graham, and Warner were going to stand up against the President on the Military Commissions Act.
Second Update: Kevin Drum shows that the overall metrics to measure progress are negative whatever selective evidence the adminsitration orchestrates to suggest otherwise.
Third Update: Gary Kamiya in Salon:
The inescapable truth is that Bush's war of choice has destroyed an entire nation -- and there is no way for the United States or anyone else to control what happens next. The increasingly shaky plight of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki shows just how unstable Iraq's cobbled-together political system is. U.S. dreams of replacing him with a secular strongman like Ayad Allawi are delusional. The war is not winnable, and there is thus only one possible rationale for continuing it, the one Bush raised: preventing an even more apocalyptic blood bath than we have already caused.
If we knew that by staying we could avert such a blood bath, we would owe it to the Iraqi people, whom we have harmed so grievously, to remain. But the fact is that no one can really predict whether our departure will cause such a blood bath. Moreover, it is now obvious that the political and sectarian schisms that could lead to it will not heal themselves. As Gen. Petraeus has admitted, it might take a decade to achieve real stability in Iraq. In other words, Bush is asking the U.S. to keep troops in Iraq, possibly indefinitely, in an attempt to forestall an outcome that might never happen -- precisely what he argues we should have done in Vietnam.
Rove's merger of politics and policy was an effort to forge a total one-party state. While he is acclaimed as a political strategist, his true innovation was in governing. He sought to subordinate the entire federal government to his goal of creating a permanent Republican majority. Every department and agency has been subject to an intense and thorough politicization. Indeed, Rove's ambitious plan was tantamount to a proto-Sovietization. Even science has been suppressed in the name of the party line, recalling the Lysenko episode. Cheney and Rove acted as the pincers of the unitary executive. While Cheney sought to concentrate unaccountable power in the presidency, Rove brought down the anvil of politics on the professional career staff. Sidney Blumenthal in Salon
There's a lot on the net about how over-rated boy genius Karl Rove was, and I am certainly not going to defend the intelligence and grandiosity of the Rove vision. Sure Rove failed to establish his one-party dominance of the system, but he laid the infrastructure for it, and don't think others won't build on it. Who's going to stop them? We've seen an evolution of these kinds of GOP tactics since the Nixon years, and Rove's tactics are just the most recent upgrade. He will be superseded by more sophisticated versions in the future.
And snide Democrats are missing the point when they use "intelligence" as some marker of effectiveness. Rove was remarkably effective, and Republican and probably Democratic political operatives have learned from Rove how far you can go, what works, and what doesn't, and they will find ways to improve and develop these methods further. Rove represents what has become in the last twenty-five years standard political procedure. What we need to fear in the future is a smarter and more knowledgeable group which has learned from the Bush-era mistakes, and also has the will to play the power game the way Rove and Cheney do. Who will stop it?
The Rove-Cheney years have taught us that you can pretty much do what you want behind a smokescreen of fear, and nobody's going to stop you. It doesn't matter if 30 or 40 percent of the electorate or the congress sees through these tactics--all you need is 51% ruled by their fears and anxieties. The smart money is on that kind of fearmongering getting its 51%+ every time. 51% is easy to find. Apparently 60% was pretty easy to find on the FISA legislation last week.
So it's not about intelligence. This administration has demonstrated how much damage can be done by rather ignorant people who think brute power is the only persuasive tactic that matters. It has demonstrated time and again what bullying can accomplish. You don't have to be intelligent to be a bully; you just need to have the will to make your opposition give in before you do, and the administration won that battle far more often than they lost it, even in recent months when they have no credibility and no support. This bullying tactic didn't work against the Iraqi insurgents who in standing up to the administration exposed the astonishing lack of substance that lay behind the administration's bully-swagger. These people are fundamentally empty and without substance. The only way to deal with them is to expose them by standing up to them. Too bad congress caves so much more easily than do the Iraqi insurgents.
Update: This James Carville article assessing Rove's career is interesting, and I think reinforces what I've said here about Rove's remarkable accomplishments. I think he and other Democrats are deluding themselves, though, if they think that Democrats have anything more than a temporary advantage because of how the Rove-GOP has turned off the under-30 electorate. Another terrorist attack will turn enough of them all into anxious, security-minded Republicans in a twinkling. Carville also doesn't speak about the effectiveness of the authoritarian infrastructure Rove/Cheney has built that will survive the Bush administration and any attempts of the Russ Feingold types to dismantle it.
I'm trying to find a way to articulate the underpinnings for everything that I write here to which any consistency my writing this blog for the last four years is owed. That may or may not be interesting to readers who have otherwise found what I'm doing here worth their time to read. But if there has been any reason to read this blog, I think that it's not because of the particular political opinions I express here, which are similar to those articulated all over the blogosphere. Rather I would hope people come here on a regular basis because there is an angle of approach to political and other issues that they don't find elsewhere.
This angle of approach is grounded in an orthodox Christian understanding of the world which is the same time attempting to understand its radically subversive truth. I'm not saying that's original--kindred spirits in the Catholic tradition from which I've learned it are people like Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, Walker Percy, Daniel Berrigan, and Thomas Merton--but I am saying that what I and these people represent is different from what is commonly perceived as Liberal Christianity. By Liberal Christianity I mean a range of Christian responses that distinguish themselves as accepting the presuppositions of Enlightenment Rationalism as the context in which to interpret Christian truth claims. Emerson, for whom I have high regard, is perhaps the prototype, and the kind of Unitarianism which he embraced as the extreme case in the kind of rational Christianity for which the assertions made, for instance, in the Nicene Creed, are impossible to believe. (I'm not interested to use the word orthodox in such a way as to define who is in and who is out, but rather simply to describe the framework within which I operate.)
So that orthodox frame is well defined for me by the essential elements in the Nicene Creed. Emerson and lots of people who are or who have been attracted to the Christianity through the gospels cannot accept the Christological statements in the creed. My problem lies not with them as individuals who are just being honest about what they can or cannot believe, but with the limitations of the Enlightenment rationalist framework that makes recognizing these creedal statements so difficult to comprehend.
To preempt some criticism here, let me be clear, I do not reject Enlightenment rationality as some kind of mistake that we must reject so that we can get back to the good old days in the Age of Faith. I am not an anti-modernist in the sense of pre-Vatican II popes (and the now current pope?) who saw modernity as heresy. I see it rather as a dialectical moment in the evolution of consciousness--an antithesis to the premodern thesis, so to say. I see the cultural phase into which we're entering as one that will find its identity to the degree that it integrates premodernity and modernity in a postmodern synthesis. In other words, I do not see modernity as something to be rejected, but rather as a cultural mentality that we must move beyond. We're already doing it, and while elements of the synthesis to come are in plain sight, they are lying like so many pieces to a jigsaw puzzle in which little clusters of pieces have been assembled, but not enough of them yet to see what the big picture will look like.
So I agree with rationalists who believe that moderns think about and experience the the world in a radically different way from those with a premodern mindset. But I disagree with them that they think about the world in a way that is superior--that premoderns are like children living in a fantasy world. It's rather more a question of focusing on and being interested in the surfaces of things rather than what lies behind them. For more on this see my piece on the Hypertrophied Eye. The medievals and all premoderns live/d in a profoundly symbolic world in which everything signified something else by virtue of its participating in a profoundly connected world in which everything like a tapestry was interwoven with everything else. The moderns came to live in the same world of symbols, but they symbols lost their referents. This is the cause of the widely acknowledged disenchantment of the world. The world is disenchanted to the degree that humans have lost the capacity to cognize what lies behind the surfaces of things. We are living in a prison of surfaces, and freedom lies in breaking through to what lies behind them.
When I was writing about this last month, a couple of commenters said that there are parts about what I write about that they sympathize with, they don't see why it has anything to do with Christianity, and that Christianity is more of an obstacle to liberation that a means for achieving it. The jigsaw puzzle metaphor might be helpful in formulating a response. I think there are lots of things going on that don't seem connected to one another which we will sooner or later see as connected. I have no quarrel with anybody who is working to put together pieces of the puzzle that will form the picture, for instance, in its upper left quadrant. His preoccupation with his task might make it difficult to understand how what he's doing is connected to someone working in the lower right quadrant. We all of us have a very incomplete picture, but I'm striving as best I can to be attentive to all the work being done which is an attempt to assemble the puzzle.
But whether people working on different sections can accept it or not, I'm advocating that the Logos provides the framework within which any such piecing together takes place. The puzzle fails as a metaphor because the Logos is a dynamic history driving force, which is better understood as unfolding over time. The pieces fall into place as the process unfolds. Trying to understand and explicate what that means is the task to which this blog is committed. If that doesn't interest you, fine. I am open to your comments and criticism, but I have to tell you that very often they sound like somebody speaking French complaining that I'm speaking Russian: Why don't you speak French? What's the matter with you? More useful to me are the comments of people who speak Russian, even if with an accent. The point is that you can't really say much that moves things forward unless you can with some degree of interest and sympathy stand within the frame within which I'm trying to develop these posts.
A final word about the creed. I see it providing a similar framework for believers as the Logos provides to the entirety of creation. It's rather like a trellis on which fruit-bearing plants grow. The trellis itself isn't important; what grows on it is. Or another way of putting it is that the Creed is like a musical score that provides a framework within which there are a wide variety of
improvisational possibilities. But the improvisations work only to the degree that they enrich and deepen the fundamental melodic line. The mistake that domagmatists and fundamentalists make is to see the trellis or the score as the important thing; it's just not. It's what we do working with them that matters. And I believe in the long run, it will be proven that people who work within such a framework can develop a strength and fruitfulness that they would not be able to do without them.
These guys have been caught contradicting themselves so often now, it's facetious. Anyway, if you haven't seen this yet, this short clip is good for a laugh. It just goes to show that that the way things were before 9/11 didn't change just because of 9/11, no matter how badly some people wanted us to think they did:
i really think every american who goes to college should spend at least one year living in another industrialized nation with universal health care.
it certainly changed me; i was a libertarian before i went to australia. being there taught me that only in america does government not work (i'm talking first-world industrialized nations here). and that's because there's a large group of conservative ideologues that refuse to allow it to work -- and in fact make supreme efforts to prevent it from working, if only to prove their theory.
it seems that american conservatives want to sabotage government purely out of spite. Commenter at TPM Cafe
That's what we should have learned after Katrina: if government officials don't believe government can work, its not working becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Government for the Bush Republicans has no purpose except to function as the bloated patronage system that we all loathe. Libertarians don't have any keener insight into the many flaws of big governments, but their thinking that the solution is to shrink it guarantees to make things worse. It's hard enough to make it work under the best of circumstances, but it can't possibly work if such a large constituency within the electorate believes it cannot work. Libertarianism is a cop-out ideology that gives people an excuse to be cynical and lazy about their responsibilities to insure that government works for them. If they don't insist on a government that is accountable to the will of the people, they will get a government that is accountable only to the will of the rich and powerful.
People like Ron Paul can decry all they want how Bush's brand of conservatism has grown rather than shrunk the government, but they fail to see that the kind of government-bloating, crony-capitalist conservatism they condemn has emerged during the Bush years as the unintended consequence of Libertarian principle. What do Libertarians expect to happen if they take away government's ability to restrict private power to pursue its interests in the political sphere?
So I'm fine to ally myself with those Libertarians who vigorously defend civil liberties and who see as daft and dangerous the arrogance of American imperial projects. But when it comes to worshiping the market as the great solver of problems the market cannot solve on its own--e.g., health care, environmental and energy problems--the more consistent Libertarians are, the more they are victims of their own second-rate thinking.
I see this as a cultural problem rather than a political one. Our cultural mentality, insofar as it is so broadly sympathetic to libertarian ideas, sets the conditions for what's possible in the political sphere. So my fear regarding universal health care is not that it couldn't work, but that there are too many Americans who do not want it to work, either because they are philosophically opposed to it or because they have a vested economic interest in its not working.
A minority of wonks and lefties want a solution that would create a sensible system here similar to the one in France. But most Americans don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but probably buy into the French, Canadian, or Australian model because the U.S. won the Cold War anything that smells at all like socialism is an evil to be avoided.) So the policy that ensues from such a configuration of cultural attitudes virtually insures that any attempt to solve the healthcare problem will be half-assed and unworkable--proving, once again, that government just makes a mess of things. No--government doesn't make a mess of things; fools do, and we Americans, in our confusion, seem too inclined to elect the fools who are guaranteed to give us messes.
It took the great depression to knock some sense into Americans eighty years ago. Nothing seems to get done unless there's a major crisis. We seem powerless to do anything in this country unless adrenaline is saturating our brains. Politics is otherwise just about so many pigs feeding at the trough.
The Democrats have proven once again that they are minor league players over their heads when it comes to playing the game in the Bigs. Like most decent Americans they are way too trusting, and at this point to trust anything that anybody in the Bush administration says is to be foolish beyond belief.
Apparently they trusted that director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, was negotiating in good faith, and when they stretched out their hand to shake on the deal they had agreed on, McConnell withdrew his and said with a sneer, "Psyyyych."
The players in this administration are gaming the system the way Enron gamed the energy markets or the way Boesky gamed the financial markets. If you approve of what they do, you call them brilliant political tacticians. But who beyond the 28 percenters really approves this administration anymore? Nobody really does, but we go along with them out of a habit of believing they really do care about what's good for America.
It's precisely this "habit" that keeps us tied up in knots right now. Even if we don't technically approve what the administration is doing, we keep letting them do it, because we don't have any easy habitual way of stopping them. The Bush people understand this, and they have telegraphed a message to future right wingers. Future authoritarians will look back to this administration as one that might have failed in the short run, but which laid the foundation for their success.
The administration taught them that what nobody thought possible before is in fact very possible. That you can get away with almost anything so long as (1) play the fear card; (2) insist you are doing nothing unusual; (3) brand opponents as partisan, fringe, or just crazy. The players in this administration have proven that any opposition is easy to neutralize even when they have a majority public opinion against them. They realize that the empty suits in the legislature and the media are driven primarily by their own career interests and can be easily coopted, and that the few who cannot be coopted can be marginalized. They realize that most people in the country are confused, uninformed, and don't really care about what's happening in Washington, and that the broad electorate's views are shaped by the media that they have coopted.
If we've learned anything in the last six years, why are people like Giuliani and Romney taken with even the least bit of seriousness? We do it only out of habit. We have a two-party system, and these utterly vacuous people are the other party's leading candidates. We take them seriously out of habit, not because they deserve to be. And do we really expect the Democrats to return to the status quo ante before the Republican executive power grab? It doesn't work that way.
These Republicans or Democrats, with a few exceptions, are not patriots; they are conventional through and through with little or no capacity for independence of thought or for courageous stands. Whatever they are in their own fantasies of themselves, they don't care about what is good for the country except when it coincides with what is good for themselves. They are so easy to manipulate because their motives are so transparent and their actions so predictable according to the three steps outlined above. The power and wealth interests want an executive who is accountable to no one, and whether or not the Democrats exploit executive power the way the GOP has done (assuming Dems win in '08), the executive powers those interests want when they get their guy back in the White House will still be there. Has the Military Commissions Act been overturned? Do you really believe this most recent version of the FISA law will sunset in six months?
It's all about these power and wealth interests agenda to build a power infrastructure. That's what Iraq is all about as well. The U.S. won't withdraw most of the troops until it's sure that these bases can be sustained with a smaller force. Building that power infrastructure in the heart of the oil fields has been the goal from the beginning--and that means it's always been about the bases. Nothing else really matters to these interests. Neither Democrats nor Republicans want to abandon them. There will be little or no debate about that issue. They will give up on them only if they are militarily indefensible--as in Vietnam.
Update: From Kevin Drum:
THE GAME....Loretta Sanchez is my mother's representative in Congress. Here's what she told some protestors who wanted her to vote against further funding for the Iraq war:
Tuesday night Sanchez said she could not support the protesters because the $145 billion in Iraq war funding was in the same bill that would provide money to build the C-17 aircraft in California.
"I never voted for this war," she said. But "I'm not going to vote against $2.1 billion for C-17 production, which is in California. That is just not going to happen."
That's a real profile in courage. With anti-war Dems like this, I guess we're going to be in Iraq for a lo-o-o-o-ng time.
Gottal love a woman who at least is frank about her subservience to the power and wealth interests in the military industrial complex, rather than to the common good. She knows who her real boss is and that her career depends on good service to those interests. Good for those protesters to bring this kind of systemic insanity into the light for everyone to see.
