After the Future

Incompetence, Corruption, and Intellectual Dishonesty

I finally had some time to watch HBO's "Recount" last night, and it's remarkable how the events of November and December 2000 were predictive of the presidency we got. From the incompetence and corruption on the state & county level to the intellectual dishonesty at the Supreme Court.

Incompetence, corruption, intellectual dishonesty. That's pretty much the Republican brand. Anybody paying attention to McCain's campaign the last several weeks sees more of the same. He really doesn't seem to know what he's talking about, he's up to his eyeballs in K-Street lobbyists, and he just makes no sense when he talks about the economy or the war. I think it's also important to note that the Clintons differ from the Republicans in that they are more competent and not as embedded with the K-Street system, but in their intellectual dishonesty they are right there with them.

It was hard for me to imagine how anyone in his right mind could take the Bush act seriously. I feel the same way about Clinton. Both the Clintons have become a national embarrassment.  No, her presidency would not be nearly as bad as Bush's, but Bush's is the worst in American history. He'll be hard to beat for decades to come. Indeed, his administration is the full flowering of Republican incompetence, corruption, and intellectual dishonesty. The DLC and Blue Dog Democrats differ from the Republicans in essentials only in that they are likely to run the government more competently. Look at the people she has surrounded herself with. Can anybody seriously want this crowd running the White House? In what way do they offer a real change from the modus operandi of the Republicans?

Dispositional Politics

Rick Perlstein at TPM Cafe Book Club:

A big part of my approach to understanding political identity is dispositional: my sense that "right" and "left" are fundamental, and perhaps permanent, ways of being in the world, not a mere list of policy positions; that, as William Gilbert of Gillbert and Sullivan wrote in his libretto for Iolanthe, "every boy and every gal/ That's born into the world alive; Is either a little Liberal/ Or else a little Conservative." . . .

One of the things I most regret about my work in Before the Storm is that I uncritically accepted, in Joe's terms, "the Right's own account" of its own postwar history, and especially its own representation of itself as a more or less sui generis formation dating from the formation of National Review. Just as right-wing dispositions are continuous throughout American (and human history), right-wing politics is as well, even at the high tide of the New Deal era; just pick up a random issue of the the Congressional Record from the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s, and you will find perorations from Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans in no way distinguishable from a Ronald Reagan or Strom Thurmond from 1964 (or 1974, or 1984, or 1994, for that matter).

I think this is correct. There is a kind of archetypal left and right. It's the characteristic of any modern or post-traditionalist society. And while most of us fall in between, the mood of the country pushes people in the center to create majorities for the left or the right. Politics is about one side or the other controlling the mood. But why is the mood of the country controlled at times by the right and at other times by the left?

The central concern of the archetypal right is security, and the archetypal concern of the left is equality. The  right is driven by a resentment directed at anybody, whether at home or abroad, who threatens their sense of right order and stability. The left is driven by resentment directed at those who aggrandize to themselves more than their fair share. When times are good, the mood of the country leans to the right; when times are bad, it leans left. When times are good, most people don't care about inequality because they have their piece of the pie.That some people have too much is not a problem for the broad center so long as the center has enough. The center doesn't care about inequality until they see themselves as being treated unfairly. It's really pretty simple. And that's why a left politics is unsustainable in the long run: once the problem (I don't have enough) is solved, the people in the center go back to leaning toward the right.

I don't think I'm being cynical in stressing that politics of the left or the right is driven more by resentment than by idealistic aspiration. True idealists are always a very small percentage of the electorate.  Their practical role when they reach leadership positions (with the once or twice in a century exception) is limited for the most part to create a cover story that provides moral justification for immoral purposes. They themselves might be sincere in professing this ideal as their own true motivation, but such idealism is used by others to cover their less than idealistic agenda. It's as true for Jacobins on  the left as for the fascists on the right.  But to pick an example from this week,  McClellan apparently still believes that Bush wentt into Iraq to spread democracy.

There's a difference between being and idealist and being a fool or a fanatic. You have to be in some bizarre dissociated state of denial to really believe that at this point Iraq was primarily motivated by the idealistic idea to spread democracy, but a lot of people do, and maybe even George Bush himself does. But the obvious truth is that Americans supported the war not because it was an opportunity to spread democracy but  because of their security fears regarding the threat of terrorism. They bought the propaganda, at least at first, that invading Iraq was the government's way to keep them safe.  And the obvious truth is that the government would never have invaded Iraq if the only reasons were either to fight terrorists or to spread democracy. Israel was a factor, but it was always primarily about controlling the oil. I think most people understand that now, even if McClellan still does not.

Is Olbermann the Hannity of the Left?

At Time's "Tuned In"

Contra Olbermann:

. . .Olbermann is edging ever-closer to self-parody, or, worse, predictability. (As soon as the Clinton gaffe broke, blog commenters were wondering how ballistic he would go, and he obliged, and how.) Even if we concede his argument—that Clinton was at best callously and at worst intentionally suggesting she should stay in the race because Obama might be killed—every time he turns up the volume to 11 like this lately, he sounds like just another of the cable gasbags he used to be a corrective to.

Posted by James Poniewozik

Olbermann is exactly the same as Hannity or any other extreme partisan. They both get offended at the drop of a hat. I mean that literally, incidentally. I'm sure there is an actual hat somewhere that, if dropped, would offend one and bring joy to the other.

Posted by KH

I am a liberal Democrat who lives in suburban NYC. Keith is an embarrassment to us liberals. He has turned into a left wing version of Anne Coulter/Rush Limbaugh. When I mocked those so called right wing pundits, I always was proud to say that those of us on the left were above those games. Olbermann has brought us down even further than he perceives Senator Clinton to have done.

Posted by samka

Pro Olbermann:

Many see clearly that the Clinton nomination rationale is being given legitimacy the same way the Iraq War was given legitimacy by the MSM.

Especially in light of Scott McClellan's affirmation that the MSM let down the country by not doing its job with a critical eye to truth vis a vis Iraq, I imagine journalists who value their word, like Olbermann and Mathews, are determined not to be dragged into another tissue of lies - not spin, just plain lies.

Olbermann may be passionate, but he does not make up things out of thin air. He is left and unashamed - it's about time we had a chance to hear a strong, articulate cable voice on the left.

Like most viewers, I taken in a bit of everyone who is gabbing on all the cable channels. The folks at MSNBC are sustaining a who demographic of disenfranchised folks who have tolerated the media manipulation of the Bush-Clinton White House long enough.

Give us our moment, please…I'm sure things will eventually swing back the other way.

We value Olbermann because he had the guts to speak out when every one else played it safe and helped lead us into one fine mess via Bush.

Yes, he was incensed by Clinton's RFK remarks. I, myself, had my stomach flip and the blood drain out of my head when I heard them…if Hillary doesn't realize that the RFK assassination remains the tenderest of issues, she is really disconnected.

You don't remember the horror of a beloved figure dying unless your purpose is to lament that loss.

Posted by Stormy Malone


Or look at the recent "controversy" reported by the Associated Press over whether NBC News' reputation as an objective news outlet is being tainted by virtue of the "liberal" commentators MSNBC features. Nobody questioned whether CNN's objectivity was imperiled by featuring the likes of Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs, nor, for that matter, did anyone raise these questions about NBC when, for years, MSNBC shows were hosted by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Joe Scarborough and Michael Savage.

But a single unapologetic Bush critic appears on the TV -- Keith Olbermann -- and this rarest of occurrence suddenly leads to controversy over whether the "respectability" of television news can survive while allowing a single "liberal" voice to be heard. The New Republic's Isaac Chotiner just wrote that he's been watching MSNBC "for the novelty of seeing outspoken liberals on television." What rational person can sustain the "Liberal Media" myth when seeing real liberals on the TV is a "novelty"?

Glenn Greenwald

While understanding where the contra Olbermann people are coming from, I'm still in the "pro" camp with Greenwald and Stormy. As I wrote in my RFK Assassination post, I think that Olbermann is in danger, not of becoming a parody of himself, but of diminishing the specialness of his special comments by, yes, getting outraged at the drop of a hat. There are things to be truly outraged about, and many of Olbermann's special comments articulated very accurately the outrage I felt and heard no where else in the MSM giving it voice.  For that I am grateful to Olbermann.

Olbermann perhaps too self-consciously sees himself as an heir to Edward R. Murrow, and his lonely critical voice in the MSM perhaps gives him some justification for that claim, but it would be a shame if he were to become broadly perceived as a merely left-leaning Sean Hannity. I think that's a real danger.

Quote of the Day: Jessica Yellin

About her time at ABC News in 2002/3:

JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings.

And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives -- and I was not at this network at the time -- but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president. . . .

COOPER: You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president?

YELLIN: Not in that exact -- they wouldn't say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces. They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive, yes. That was my experience.

(h/t Greenwald Greenwald talks about similar admissions from Kaite Couric and the Phil Donahue and Ashleigh Banfield stories)

At  least Yellin is self-aware enough to understand this.  I think many big-time reporters think they are free to write about what they want, but are oblivious of why they rose to the positions they hold in the first place: they were recognized by mangement as docile corporate careerists. They were never the intrepid reporters they thought themselves to be in their own imaginations. They were people who did what it took to get ahead, and getting ahead means giving management what it wants.  Greenwald makes the same point:

Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson and company are paid to play the role of TV reporters but, in reality, are mere television emcees -- far more akin to circus ringleaders than journalists. It's just as simple as that. David Halberstam pointed that out some time ago. Unlike Yellin, Donahue and Banfield, nobody needed to pressure the likes of Williams, Gibson and Russert to serve as propaganda handmaidens for the White House. It's what they do quite eagerly on their own, which is precisely why they're in the corporate positions they're in. They are smooth, undisruptive personalities who don't create problems for their executives. Watching them finally describe how they perceive of "their role" leaves no doubt about any of that. . .

Clearly, if these network media stars think they did nothing wrong in the run-up to the war and in their coverage of the Bush administration -- and they don't -- then it's only logical to conclude that they still do the same things and will do the same things in the future. As people like Jessica Yellin, Katie Couric, Phil Donahue and Scott McClellan are making clear, these media outlets are controlled propaganda arms of the Government, of the political establishment generally. For many people, that isn't a new revelation, but the fact that it's becoming clearer by the day -- from unimpeachable sources on the inside -- is nonetheless quite significant.

Corporate control of the media conversation of public affairs is a very serious problem, and the  solution is not a Balkanized internet.  The net provides a counterbalance for those who are serious about finding out what is really going on, and many people, me included, find it very difficult to take seriously anything that the print or electronic MSM takes seriously. But insofar as our democracy and the health of the republic depdends on the attitudes and voting choices of low-information voters, the MSM matters, and they must be held accountable and shamed into more probing and effective coverage of those issues our power elite would prefer we not know about.

Liberals & Virtue

Slate has an interesting piece on Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity A Guide for Grown-up Idealists which analyses why Liberals, who in their own mind are the moral superiors to neanderthal conservatives, nevertheless offer thin gruel to the more deeply morally serious:

Why have moral values become the property of the right? Her [Neiman's] diagnosis, in part, is that "Western secular culture has no clear place for moral language, and its use makes many profoundly uncomfortable." She also connects the "rightward turn in American culture" to the reshaping of American conservatism as an intellectual rather than an anti-intellectual movement. As the principle-driven progressive politics of the '60s petered out, the American right discovered the power of ideas.

"Through organizations like the Olin Foundation, Midwestern businessmen who made their fortunes producing chemicals and telephones were sponsoring seminars in the mountains of Hungary on the nature of evil, or flying scholars to Chicago to discuss law and virtue," she writes. "As the right was completing its study of the classics, the left was facing conceptual collapse." The political successes of the right, she argues, were against a left that had abandoned high principle for identity politics—a bad idea in a world in which "everyone, everywhere, was running on moral passion." The Bush era, for her, is the culmination of a trend. In 2004, "whether voters were moved by their views about terrorism, or the war in Iraq, or abortion, what did not decide the most significant election in decades was the bottom line." Accordingly, she urges progressives to reclaim "concepts that have been abandoned to the right: good and evil, hero and dignity and nobility."

It's hard to talk about virtue, dignity, and nobility in other than merely aesthetic terms if you think that the human being is nothing more than a talking animal wandering aimlessly in a purposeless universe. People try, of course, but the attempts seem contrived or to have too little weight to counterbalane the profoundly powerful forces that move individuals and societies to embrace horrific evil.  Goodness seems so frail, so  relatively weak in the  face of the enormity of evil.

Liberal intellectuals are embarrassed by talk of good and evil; it's so un-ironic

Quote of the Day: Scott McClellan

If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. . . . In this case, the "liberal media" didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.

(From his book to be released next week: What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception)

As Colbert says, "reality has a well-known liberal bias."  Too bad the liberal media doesn't. The only thing liberal about the  MSM is its attitude about sexual issues. They are otherwise way right of center when in their attitudes about power and money.  In other words, the media represent the mores and biases of corporate America.

Profile of an Obamacan: Francis Fukuyama

In an interview with Eleanor Hall in Australia (h/t Sullivan)

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, it is a little bit difficult. In my own thinking since I have to vote in this next election, I personally actually don't want to see a Republican re-elected because I have a general view of the way democratic processes should work and if your party is responsible for a big policy failure, you shouldn't be rewarded by being re-elected.

I think of all the Republicans, McCain in many ways is the most attractive but he is still is too, you know, he comes from the school that places too much reliance on hard military power as a means of spreading American influence. I think in many ways, Hillary Clinton represents both the good and the bad things of the 1990s and there is something in the style of the Clintons that never really appealed to me and so I think of all the three, Obama probably has the greatest promise of delivering a different kind of politics.

ELEANOR HALL: That is a big shift for you, isn't it? To go from a registered Republican voter to an Obama supporter.

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Yeah, but I think a number of people are doing that this year because I think the world is different at this juncture and we need a different foreign policy and there is this larger question about in American politics, I do think that we are at the end of a long generational cycle that began with Reagan's election back in 1980 and I think unless you have a degree of competition and alternation in power, certain ideas and habits are going to get too entrenched.

See also here.

Future of the GOP II

As a way of advancing the argument I've made recently in my posts about the Futures of the Republicans and the Democrats, this New Yorker article by George Packer's  entitled "The Fall of Conservatism" makes a similar case. He begins with the story, largely told by Rick Perlstein's new sequel to his earlier Before the Storm, how the groundwork for the Reagan Revolution was laid by Pat Buchanan and Richard  Nixon in 1971:

Polarization is the theme of Rick Perlstein’s new narrative history “Nixonland” (Scribners), which covers the years between two electoral landslides: Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 and George McGovern’s in 1972. During that time, Nixon figured out that he could succeed politically “by using the angers, anxieties, and resentments produced by the cultural chaos of the 1960s,” which were also his own. In Perlstein’s terms, America in the sixties was divided, like the Sneetches on Dr. Seuss’s beaches, into two social clubs: the Franklins, who were the in-crowd at Nixon’s alma mater, Whittier College; and the Orthogonians, a rival group founded by Nixon after the Franklins rejected him, made up of “the strivers, those not to the manor born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one’s unpolish was a nobility of its own.” Orthogonians deeply resented Franklins, which, as Perlstein sees it, explains just about everything that happened between 1964 and 1972: Nixon resented the Kennedys and clawed his way back to power; construction workers resented John Lindsay and voted conservative; National Guardsmen resented student protesters and opened fire on them. . . . 

The sixties, which began in liberal consensus over the Cold War and civil rights, became a struggle between two apocalyptic politics that each saw the other as hellbent on the country’s annihilation. The result was violence like nothing the country had seen since the Civil War, and Perlstein emphasizes that bombings, assaults, and murders committed by segregationists, hardhats, and vigilantes on the right were at least as numerous as those by radical students and black militants on the left. Nixon claimed to speak on behalf of “the nonshouters, the nondemonstrators,” but the cigar smokers in that South Carolina hotel were intoxicated with hate.

RFK Assassination

I look at it the same way I do the Bittergate controversy and the brouhaha about Jeremiah Wright.  I don't think these kind of remarks are worth even a 10th of the attention that they get, and this hysteria about them is in large part what is broken about our system. Olbermann's thing last night was over the top, and I think he should reserve his special comments for special occasions, like the loss of habeas corpus, the telecom amnesty con, the administration's mistreatment of our vets, or its politicization of the justice dept.  This is hardly such an occasion, and he's in danger now of trivializing whatever impact these comments might have. She has already diminished her stature to such a degree that it's as if the media is getting its shorts in such knot out of habit or because it simply has nothing better to do. She made almost exactly the same comments in March, I believe, and nobody made anything of them then.  Neither do they now deserve more than a what-else-is-new passing notice. This gaffe-gotcha game our political media play is detestable, distorting, and distracting..

We all make judgments about the candidates based on a number of factors, and a gaffe like this while unfortunate,  should play a very minor role in shaping one's understanding of who Hillary is. More important is the hawkish Beltway bullies she has chosen as her advisors, her poltical obtuseness when it came to the healthcare issue in the 90s and now in her underestimation of Obama. Her vote not only to support the war,  for Kyle-Lieberman, and her threat to obliterate Iran, her pandering, her self-absorbed sense of entitlement, her use of race and gender in this campaign, her leaning on Richard Mellon Scaife, her ridiculously self-serving arguments about Michigan and Florida--all tell the real story.  She's a hold-your-nose-and-voter-for-her hack if there's nobody better. She consistently has shown that her judgment is shaped by a formulaic political calculus. She would at best be a mediocre president. So if you want to chalk up this latest comment as just another example of her bad judgment, tone-deafness, and self-absorption, fine.  But it really is not that big of a deal.

Future of the Dems: Changing the Nation's Mood

I might be proved wrong, but as suggested in my last post, I think we have every reason to be think that Obama will be our president by this time next year. The current polling is irrelevant. Obama is so far superior to McCain by every metric and with the Republican Party in such shambles it's hard for me to believe that McCain has even the remotest chance by the time the Obama has had time to make his case to the country. It's a perfect storm for the Dems--disgust with a corrupt party that has disgraced this country and its ideals with a once-in-a-century candidate who can point a nation eager for new leadership in a different direction. 

This is the real story and historical significance  of this election, not whether a black man or a woman is elected for the first time. The GOP might be imploding, and that certainly gives Dems a short-term advantage, but their future in the long term will depend on whether it can integrate the two halves to the traditional populist vote which comprises a traditional Main Street moral sensibility with an openness to progressive economic initiatives. The populist vote is currently split: The Republicans have taken the traditional values half and the Dems the progressive economic half.  Or another way to put it is that the GOP has the populist soul in its grip, while the Dems have been trying to get hold of its head. For this reason Republicans have had an advantage insofar as they work effectively within the irrational dimension of politics, even if only in its darker precincts. The GOP has controlled and shaped the nation's mood.

The head is always in service to the various irrational impulses that arise from within the soul. The question is whether those impulses are vicious or virtuous. The GOP's meal ticket has been to disguise its greed and power agenda behind a facade of traditional virtue, and the Main Street types who haven't the time or interest to pay attention are taken in by it. And the Democrats haven't had a counter for it. Their wonkish programs have no narrative appeal that stirs the soul. And Dem tone-deafness in this respect made them incapable of understanding the nature and seriousness of the backlash that set the mood that has dominated our politics since 1980.