After the Future

Oust the Blue Dogs? (Updated)

Glenn Greenwald and DLC-spokesperson Ed Kilgore make their cases pro and con here and here. Basic argument pro: What good are Democrats if they collaborate or enable the GOP's right-wing agenda? 

Other than (arguably) the resignation of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general and a very modest increase in the minimum wage (enacted in the first month after Democrats took control of Congress), one is hard-pressed to identify a single event or issue since November 2006 that would have been meaningfully different had the GOP retained control of Congress. The Congress of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi has been every bit as passive, impotent and complicit as the Congress of Bill Frist and Denny Hastert was. Worse, in contrast to the Frist/Hastert-led Congress, which at least had the excuse that it enabled a wartime president from its own party while he enjoyed high approval ratings, the Reid/Pelosi Congress has capitulated to every presidential whim despite an "opposition party" president who is now one of the most unpopular in modern American history. It's difficult to imagine how even Reid and Pelosi themselves could contest the claim that the Democratic-led Congress, from the perspective of Democratic voters, has been a profound failure.

With those depressing facts assembled, the only question worth asking among those who are so dissatisfied with congressional Democrats is this: What can be done to change this conduct? As proved by the 2006 midterm elections -- which the Democrats dominated in a historically lopsided manner -- mindlessly electing more Democrats to Congress will not improve anything. Such uncritical support for the party is actually likely to have the opposite effect. It's axiomatic that rewarding politicians -- which is what will happen if congressional Democrats end up with more seats and greater control after 2008 than they had after 2006 -- only ensures that they will continue the same behavior. If, after spending two years accommodating one extremist policy after the next favored by the right, congressional Democrats become further entrenched in their power by winning even more seats, what would one expect them to do other than conclude that this approach works and therefore continue to pursue it?

Kilgore's response was pretty flaccid, so rather than quote him I think  commenter  to Greenwald's post Diomedes makes the better counter-argument:

Greenwald seems to me to be reflecting the attitude of many left-wing progressives, but I think it much more appropriate to remember that the voters in these congressional districts knew they were voting in conservative Democrats, liked it that way, and probably wouldn't go for a liberal if one had been offered.

Fein on Sunstein

My respect for Samantha Power's judgment has just taken a serious hit.  I've only now learned she has recently married Cass Sunstein.  Here's Bruce Fein's opinion about Sunstein:

Sunstein is perceived as a serious candidate for appointment to the Supreme Court in an Obama administration. (h/t Greenwald)

The AT&T Democratic Convention

I'm  a little slow on catching things this week, but in case you missed it:

See Greenwald's post about this here.  Also Amy Goodman here talks about the whole financing of the conventions. As Greenwald says, "What's most striking about the Convention bag -- aside, of course, from its stunning design -- is how the parties no longer bother even trying to hide who it is who funds and sponsors them."

Chances are after the negative publicity the bag is getting, the Dems will pull it by the time the convention rolls around. But it's amazing, isn't it, after all the bad feeling about the Dem capitulation on Telecom amnesty, that the Dems would be so obtuse as to allow this kind of thing.  It shows that they know who butters their bread. And it's certainly not the people who object to this kind of crass co-optation.

P.S. If you have the time, Democracy Now did a show on corporate financing of the conventions on 7/22, and the same show features Greenwald debating Cass Sunstein for his position justifying why an Obama administration should not hold players in the political class accountable for their crimes because you shouldn't criminalize policy disputes. Sunstein embodies the stereotype  so many Americans have come to loathe when it comes to an intellectualized personality that presents itself as "liberal": always looking for a way to rationalize what is so clearly wrong so as to avoid a fight on principle. It's the kind of thing that the conservative wing of my family loathes about Democrats, and it is quite understandable that they should feel that way.  Listen to the tone of Sunstein's voice--it's the voice of a man who has been co-opted, someone who uses his prodigious intelligence, whether consciously or unconsciously, to defend a dangerously corrupted status quo.

Greenwald in repsonding to Sunstein's mealy-mouthed rationalizations says this:

You know, I think this mentality that we’re hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless and so distorted over the past thirty years. You know, if you go into any courtroom where there is a criminal on trial for any kind of a crime, they’ll have lawyers there who stand up and offer all sorts of legal and factual justifications or defenses for what they did. You know, going back all the way to the pardon of Nixon, you know, you have members of the political elite and law professors standing up and saying, “Oh, there’s good faith reasons not to impeach or to criminally prosecute.” And then you go to the Iran-Contra scandal, where the members of the Beltway class stood up and said the same things Professor Sunstein is saying: we need to look to the future, it’s important that we not criminalize policy debates. You know, you look at Lewis Libby being spared from prison.

And now you have an administration that—we have a law in this country that says it is a felony offense, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, to spy on Americans without the warrants required by law. We have a president who got caught doing that, who admits that he did that. And yet, you have people saying, “Well, there may be legal excuses as to why he did that.” Or you have a president who admits ordering, in the White House, planning with his top aides, interrogation policies that the International Red Cross says are categorically torture, which are also felony offenses in the United States. And you have people saying, “Well, we can’t criminalize policy disputes.”

And what this has really done is it’s created a two-tiered system of government, where government leaders know that they are free to break our laws, and they’ll have members of the pundit class and the political class and law professors standing up and saying, “Well, these are important intellectual issues that we need to grapple with, and it’s really not fair to put them inside of a courtroom or talk about prison.” And so, we’ve incentivized lawlessness in this country. I mean, the laws are clear that it’s criminal to do these things. The President has done them, and he—there’s no reason to treat him differently than any other citizen who breaks our laws.

Meaning as Connection

The meaning of meaning and all the semiotic theory developed over the last 150 years is more than I feel capable of getting into, so I would like just to work with a simpler more seat of the pants understanding of what makes our experience meaningful.  The key word is “connection,” and how things connect in any number of ways.  When we see a connection or make a connection there is meaning.  When we don’t see it, there is meaninglessness.  The discrete elements in our experience are meaningless to us unless or until they fall into a meaningful pattern in which each element is connected to the other in a way that makes sense.  

We read a poem for instance, and the meaning eludes us; the words don’t make sense. We know the meanings for each word, but they don’t connect with one another in any meaningful way; it seems to be quasi-gibberish on first reading.  We try again, still nothing, no connection, then perhaps several times more, and it hits us and the words vibrate not only with their interconnectedness among themselves but with something in us that comes alive in response to them.  Or is it that something awakens in us that has given the words their meaning? That constitutes the meaning of the words in a way similar to the way that the poet constituted them.  Reading is not a passive activity; it is a creative one; it is a meaning-constituting activity.  But the meanings are not arbitrary; they are not just what I capriciously decide the poem means.  My experience of the poem’s meaning is the experience of something in me that lies dormant as it lies dormant in the poem, a potentio that has become actus.  What is in me is stimulated by my encounter with the poem but it is not simply given by the poem.  The meaning doesn’t come alive until by an act of will I awaken it in my struggle to understand what the poem means.  

You have been acquainted with someone for a long time—a classmate, a coworker, a neighbor—and because there is nothing apparently extraordinary about her in any way, she is just a part of the environment, someone who’s just there. As such she means very little to you.  Then one day something happens; she reveals herself in some way. Maybe a kind word or she overhears something you say that interests her and she comments on it or perhaps she says something that interests you. You make a connection, you suggest going out for a coffee, and this person becomes meaningful for you in a way that was not possible before. You were always connected in potentialis; it was not until that moment that it was made actus.  

Meaning comes from the way words connect with other words.  The way people connect with one another, the way memory connects us with our past and imagination with our future. Meaning has a cognitive aspect but also a feeling aspect, and both contribute to the experience of meaningful connection.

Quote of the Day: M.J. Rosenberg

I worked on Capitol Hill for 20 years and I can tell the difference between a staff driven politician and one who knows what he's talking about. The staff driven pol (McCain is an example) is always capable of the big blunder. He does not mix up Shiites and Sunnis because he "misspoke;" he really doesn't know the difference. Same on the economy, he studies a memo and works to assimilate it. But there is no depth.

The sad fact is that most of our politicians are like that. On the Arab-Israeli issue, all they know is that they need to sound pro-Israel. So they end up mouthing the most superficial pieties. They are afraid to talk about the Palestinians because they might say the wrong thing.

They pander and pander, knowing that they won't get into trouble by just sucking up.

That explains why McCain is coming off as such an imbecile. Anyway, read more here to see why Rosenberg thinks Obama is different. I agree; he is different--and that's why he is so refreshing to anybody with even a little bit of intelligence and knowledge about what is going on. But it is really quite amazing to think that it's possible to be elected cycle after cycle without really knowing or understanding the consequences of what you're doing when it's in an area you don't specialize in.

So for instance, you have to wonder why decent guys like Sherrod Brown and others voted for the Military Commissions Act.  The answer: you can probably chalk it up to a dynamic like this--he hadn't a clue what he was voting for. He was just following the advice of a staffer who cared only about the political calculation.

I know that I'm beating a dead horse here, but that's what makes Obama's support of the PAA so unsettling: he knew what he was doing, and he knew the implications of this law's passing. 

Second to None

Former USAF lieutenant colonel William Astore has a good piece on how Americans have come increasingly to accept the militarization of their society:

But here's the question to ponder: At what price virtuosity? In World War I and World War II, the Germans were the best soldiers because they had trained and fought the most, because their societies were geared, mentally and in most other ways, for war, because they celebrated and valued feats of arms above all other contributions one could make to society and culture.

Being "the best soldiers" meant that senior German leaders—whether the Kaiser, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, that Teutonic titan of World War I, or Hitler—always expected them to prevail. The mentality was: "We're number one. How can we possibly lose unless we quit—or those [fill in your civilian quislings of choice] stab us in the back?"

If this mentality sounds increasingly familiar, it's because it's the one we ourselves have internalized in these last years. German warfighters and their leaders knew no limitations until it was too late for them to recover from ceaseless combat, imperial overstretch, and economic collapse.

The article really is a lament for the loss in America of the citizen army which has given way to the volunteer professional army second to none--or to mercenaries like those who work for Blackwater. In theory, I'm for the restoration of a drafted citizen military--I think it is far healthier for the preservation of a healthy republic. But is that in fact what we are--a healthy republic? I don't think so. 

I have an almost eighteen-year-old son, and so long as decisions about war and peace are driven by the agenda of the elite powers behind the military-industrial complex, I don't want my son's life put on the line to serve its endless-war interests. I don't want any kid impressed into service to put his or her life on the line to serve such an agenda.

So would such an agenda be more likely resisted by a citizenry that more broadly felt the pain of war's casualties? Maybe.  But if we've learned anything in the last eight years, elite power does pretty much what it wants regardless of public opinion. And elite power has every reason to believe that it can confuse and manipulate public opinion on the big issues that really matter to it. It's easy to get public opinion behind a war at the beginning, and if public opinion changes, it doesn't matter. 

We forget that a lot of people voted for Nixon in '68 because he promised to end the war. It went on for another seven years. So despite all the hooplah about the confluence of Obama's and Maliki's wanting the troops out of Iraq by 2010, I'll believe it when I see it. And will whatever troops pulled out of Iraq come home, or will they just be shifted into the quagmire in Afghanistan?

The question is not whether we stay in Iraq or not; it's whether or not we maintain a military presence and bases anywhere in the Middle East. The idea that a military presence there is necessary for our prosecution of the GWOT is absurd. Our presence there has hardly anything to do with that and everything to do with oil. Elite power gets what elite power wants, and elite power does not want to give up its military presence in the heart of the Middle East. It doesn't want to concede that it has been consistently manipulated and outsmarted by Iran, and it does not want to create a power vacuum that will be filled by China or a resurgent Russia.

From power's point of view, I suspect moving into Afghanistan is Plan B. It would have been better to set up shop in oil-rich Iraq as the neocons fantasized about it, but if you're still deployed in Afghanistan, it will be easy enough to shift back into Iraq if "conditions on the ground" worsen there.  And since conditions will inevitably worsen as soon as there is any significant withdrawal of American troops, there will always be a reason to stay or go back in.  I'll be very surprised if the ongoing war in the Middle East isn't still an issue by the time the '12  elections roll around.

I hope I'm wrong, but I'm convinced that the way power is structured in this country makes it unlikely that I am. You don't have to be some Beltway insider to understand this; you just need to observe how power operates here as it has always and everywhere operated. What most people think or say doesn't matter. It's not what public opinion wants; it's not even what influential people like Obama might sincerely want that matters; it only matters what the system that serves elite power wants.

And that will aways be true until some potent counterbalance arises to resist it. Can anybody point to such a counterbalance? And even if such a counterbalance were to develop, power knows how to co-opt it, whether crudely or subtly, if it isn't broad-based, highly motivated, and well-organized.  No such threat to entrenched power interests exists in this country even to the slightest degree.  Lots of people understand what's going on, and they can squawk about it all they want, and they will be tolerated because they have no power and pose no threat. Everyone else will buy into power's self-justifying propaganda because it's in the interests of the MSM to promote it and to reject alternative narratives critical of elite power's agenda as extremist.

I'm certain that Obama didn't want to vote for the latest FISA legislation, but he's just an individual. So I don't blame him really.  As I wrote before, I suspect it was not possible for him to do otherwise. What is his power base, really? To whom is he ultimately accountable?  The voters? Or is it rather that now he has graduated to the next level in the ecology of Beltway power, he understands that  if he is to thrive in his new station, he must do what power requires of him. He is accountable not to the people who vote for him, but to the interests of the power elite whose ranks he is now joining. 

He may not consciously think of himself that way--he would think of himself rather as a realist--but to at least some degree he has been co-opted. It remains to be seen to what degree, but that's why his FISA vote was so disturbing: it showed that he couldn't even put up even symbolic resistance to something that was so clearly wrong that power wanted . Why should we think he will resist the agenda of elite power in anything else of central importance to it? The FISA vote signaled how limited is the change we can hope for.

Bottom line: we're kidding ourselves if we think the endless war is going to end anytime soon, even if Obama is elected.  At this point it doesn't matter if we have a mercenary army or a citizen army.  Things have progressed beyond such a thing mattering anymore.

Quote of the Day: James Carse

You know, my entire career was at New York University, but I only taught the history of Christianity once. That's when one of my colleagues was not available. So I went back to my graduate study of St. Thomas Aquinas. And I loved it so much. When we got to Thomas in the class, I began to notice that the students -- most of them were Catholics -- had stopped taking notes. They stopped moving. It looked like they stopped breathing. They'd never realized that there was so much beauty behind the Catholic teaching. They thought it was about doing something right or wrong, rather than this great cathedral of language within which they could understand their very individual experiences. It struck me that what was great about Thomas is not that he was right or wrong, but that he's a poet. It's just beautiful work. It's an artistic creation of the greatest achievement. And when you take that insight and look across the traditions, you find people of very great poetic insight. The great religious figures are not philosophers, they're not historians, they're not institutional leaders in any sense. They are people who inspire the imagination and therefore deserve the word "poet." Read entire interview in Salon.

The logic of faith is not propositional, but analogic and poetic.  It invites us into greater depths and religioius language fails in the same way that bad poetry fails insofar as it validates our habitual patterns of perception and thought rather than to break us out of them.

Any great theologian has his muse--she is Sophia referred to in the Book of Wisdom. And as a poem reveals something not ordinarily understood, so do the scriptures, and the great commentators and midrashists are poets whose raids on the unspeakable seek to articulate what the scriptures in moments of inspiration have revealed to them. Great poets and theologians operate on the vertical and on the dimension of depth.  And as the capacity to operate on that dimension diminishes in the broader culture, particularly among the educated, so does the possibility to do poetry and theology or to appreciate it.  The real question is not whether the great poets and theologians speak the truth, but why the rest of us have become incapable of hearing what they say.

The wisest know that whatever they understand is dwarfed by everything they don't. If you encounter a clergyman or theologian who thinks he has control over the meanings of the Scriptures, he is a hack. He is deluded and propounds bad religion. There are only mysteries pointed to and which draw us in, and the depth of our understanding depends on to what depths we have been drawn in. Sophia beckons, and either we respond or we don't. But no judgment can be made by someone who stands outside, who has neither seen her beckoning nor hearkened to it.

If you are looking for certainty, join a cult or some politically doctrinaire ideology.  If you are interested in faith, be prepared to have your world turned upside down.

Seeking a Center-Left, Main-Street Politics

Not so easy. Digby this morning presents a fair and thoughtful presentation of the Tom Frank dilemma:

I had one of those Tom Friedmanesque taxicab moments today on my way to the airport in Austin. My driver was a very talkative African American guy from New Orleans who had no idea I was in town for a political event and just started talking about the plight of the African American family, church leaders' inclination toward rewarding themselves at the expense of their parishoners, the government failure of Katrina, the need for people to be given a fair shot early in life so they don't have to catch up etc. He used a lot of Bible verses to illustrate his points, was obviously very religious, well educated and concerned. He was just a lovely guy, open, passionate, friendly --- the kind of person who has really thought about these issues and really works at trying to figure out ways to change the status quo.

Anyway, he talked a mile a minute and I didn't say much until we were almost there when I asked him if he was excited about Barack. He smiled broadly and said, "Oh it's so wonderful to see. I never thought I would see the day. But I don't know what to do because he isn't pro-life and he believes that marriage isn't just for a man and a woman. And I'm afraid that if he gets in he's going to put Hillary Clinton on the Supreme Court and she's going to outlaw everything I believe in."

I don't really have a moral to this story. We parted ways smiling and laughing and I wandered into the terminal to cough and sniffle for a while before I got on the plane. Clearly the vast, vast majority of black Americans are thrilled with Obama's candidacy (as was this guy)and are very excited to vote for him. But for the social conservatives among them, he presents a dilemma, just as the Democrats do in general for all social conservatives. Our big tent doesn't require that you have abortions or be gay, but it does require that you do not believe the government should make laws prohibiting others from doing so. And it's pretty fundamental, definitional stuff --- civil liberties and equal rights are matters of moral belief and principles. Social conservatives just can't sign on that. Can these beliefs be reconciled under one political party?

No tiime this morning, but maybe more thoughts on this later. The solution lies in separating out concerns that belong in the cultural sphere from concerns that belong in the political sphere. (See my post "Religion and Politics" for more on that.)  For that reason, I think abortion is a bigger obstacle than gay issues in preventing the Democrats from becoming once again the New Deal center left coalition of Middle Americans it was until the sixties. It's tragic on so many levels.

Saving the American Idea

In June I put up a post entitled "Integrity and Compromise" in which I talked about how the Beltway system defeats most politicians who enter into it, and how compromise has become a word that basically describes that defeat. At the end I wrote:

The point I want to make here is that when people think about bi-partisanship and compromise, they usually have in mind the ideal situation in which reasonable people with high integrity sit down and have a principled argument about a particular issue.  In reality that hardly ever happens within the Beltway system because the people having the conversation are rarely people of high integrity or principle. They are hacks serving interests that have nothing to do with their high-minded rhetoric. Most of them are not worth listening to because their public statements are designed to obscure rather than to reveal their true motives.  So I'm interested in identifying the people who are worth listening to no matter whether you agree with them or not.  I'd be interested in a debate between Ron Paul and Russ Feingold, but not in one between Dick Cheney and Nancy Pelosi.

A couple of readers wrote in with some suggestions, and among the Republicans Charles Grassley and Richard Lugar were suggested.  But I'm wondering if there's anybody among the Republicans like former Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards, a conservative in the Ron Paul mode.  I was impressed with him in his interview on Bill Moyers last week. The whole interview is worth watching--although I have to say I found Ross Douthat, who is also part of the interview kind of creepy--but for a shorter clip to get a sense of where Edwards is coming from, take a few moments to view this one. Skip, if you can, to the 1:10 minute mark:

Yesterday I wrote that I have two expectations from an Obama presidency, the restoration of the American idea and a shift of the framework of political discourse from hard right to center left. Republicans like Mickey Edwards would probably resist the second objective, but they are totally on board with the first, and their speaking out will be essential for achieving it. He illustrates the point I've been making repeatedly that there is no left or right when it comes to basic constitutional principles, and that there is no room for compromise on constitutional principle. But we have a Congress that comprises most Republicans and too many Democrats who have abandoned their constitutional responsibilities to check the power of the executive branch.  How can we take anything they say or do seriously when they have so little respect for the American idea?

P.S. By way of Balloon Juice another conservative comes out for Obama.

Quote of the Day: Mark Steel

. . .most of America will be run by the same people no matter who wins the election -- the oil companies, WalMart, Murdoch etc. And Obama has set out not to disrupt their rule but to manage it. But the hope he's unleashed may not be so easily controlled, because change does not happen from the top down, it happens from the bottom up.

Or, as articulated by the topical American program "The Daily Show," "A disease is spreading across parts of the nation called 'Baracknophobia', meaning 'fear of hope.' But the disease is so contagious it's even spread to Barack Obama, who is becoming afraid of himself.  Read more.

Two things I hope for in an Obama presidency: First, an impassioned restoration of the basic American idea: checks and balances, rule of law, freedom valued more than security, and we-don't-torture. These are not values of the extreme left; they are as centrist as centrist can be. Obama's FISA vote suggests that his commitment to the restoration of these centrist traditional American values is ambiguous at best.  That's what was so surprising and disappointing because the need for it is so centrally important to the kind of American future he wants us to believe in. It's still kind of mind boggling to me that he could have so easily, or so it seemed, discounted both the symbolic and real significance of his flip on this issue.

Second, a change in the tenor of the conversation that moves legitimate political discourse from center hard right to center left--as it was in the period from FDR through Lyndon Johnson.  I think this is a more realistic expectation regarding an Obama presidency, and it can be done in the context of managing rather than chaniging the fundamental way in which the country is run.  It's not up to him to make things happen; it's up to the rest of us and the other people we put into office.

But he can set the tone, provide a context that creates more favorable conditions for developing the consensus necessary for real change. And his communication skills can shift the public imagination away from this toxic Reagan/Thatcher mentality that has dominated discourse for the last thirty years. Certain things become more possible if the basic framework of political discourse shifts--that's Obama's chief responsibility as I see it, and I will grade his presidency a success depending on how effectively both these expectations are met by the time he leaves office. Anything more: gravy.