After the Future

Desperate Housewives & The Big Lie

I didn't watch the show last year, but I've tried to catch it when I can this season.  The character who interests me most is the widowed housewife, Bree. Is the subplot about her relationship with George the writers' attempt to make a political point? 

Bree is a good, likable person and a model of conventional correctness. She is the type of woman on whose head no hair is ever out of place.  She is conservative and formal but in an attractive, cheerful, and optimistic way.  And while I don't know that I would call her repressed, she is someone for whom external form is primary, and instinct and intuition is secondary, which is another way of saying that she has no common sense. She does things by the book.  And when you don't pay attention to what instinct/intuition tells you, you get slammed pretty hard somewhere down the line when things fall apart or get blown apart.

This is particularly evident in her inability to see what everyone around her sees about George, the man she agreed to marry. He's creepy, and now we're finding out he can be out-of-control crazy. He is not what he appears to be, and  Bree has worked as hard as she could to avoid dealing with the evidence that contradicted how she wanted to think of him, which correlates with the carefully controlled image George has worked equally hard to project. Bree has no common sense because she refuses to trust the information that her nose has given her, which is the stink of an egregious fraud, and her son, friends, and the rest of us look on in bewilderment and frustration as we witness a good, decent woman act so cluelessly.

I don't know whether the writers consciously chose 'George' as Bree's fiance's name to make the political point, but Bree's mindset is one that GOP political strategists understand and know how to exploit.They understand that for many people form is cognitively primary and substance secondary. They understand that for many, if not most Americans, having "character" means to appear to one's neighbors as one who behaves consistently in a traditionally defined socially acceptable way.

The Republicans understand better than the Democrats that people make political judgments based on symbolism and imagery more than they do based on facts. They understand that people make political judgments based on the officially presented narrative, and that there is a cognitive-dissonance dynamic that makes it very difficult for them to acknowledge the evidence that might lead to an alternative narrative, even if the alternative narrative more coherently explains the facts.

They understand that for many Americans their sense of order, meaning, purpose is so invested in the official presentation of reality, that they create powerful filters that prevent them from seeing what is obvious to others who are not so invested in the official narrative. And they persist in their commitment to the official version of reality until the evidence to the contrary becomes overwhelming. And just as Bree in the show is now realizing that her George is not what he presented himself to be, so now are the many Americans who bought into the official presentation of their president George discovering that he is not what his handlers presented him to be.

Now left-leaning types suffer from this cognitive-dissonance syndrome in another way, but we're talking about Bree here, and she models the GOP version of it.  The GOP tacticians understand that most people want to feel good about their country; they want to believe their government; they want to believe that their elected officials (if they're Republicans), while possibly flawed, are basically good people trying to do the best job they can. They want to be positive and forward looking.  They want to be optimistic patriots, and they feel nothing but aversion for the kind of cynicism, which, in their view, typifies the mentality of the left. The GOP strategists prey on the natural inclination of most normal people to accept the the official version of reality, and to see anything else as weirdness, cynicism, chaos, depravity.

This is why the Big Lie works so effectively. People want desperately to believe in the official version of reality, and the big liars know this. The big liars know that these desperate Americans need the official version of reality to believe in because the only alternataive to it is disorder and barbarism. And it doesn't matter to them whether the forms are empty or not--the conventional forms are the last bulwark against social chaos. And they don't want to deal with the fact that the forms are being manipulated by cynical politicians to provide a cover for their barbaric purposes. They will do whatever they can to remain in denial about that until the evidence for their barbarism becomes overwhelming and irrefutable.

Powerlust, sex, and greed are three drives in the human soul that have enormous power, and they are in their perverse, unconstrained manifestations the source of most of the barbarism that afflicts the world today. We need each of these pychological drives to live life well. Healthy ambition is what gets things done; healthy sexuality is the song in our hearts, and the need to be self-reliant and to work to provide a decent standard of living for oneself and one's family is at the basis of human dignity and self-respect. But in America we are confused; we seem to have lost our bearings. We don't know where to draw the line between what is healthy and what is excessive. And the party running this country right now is driven by powerlust and greed in a way that in my view is unprecedented in my lifetime. They present a traditional-values facade to hide the perversity of their policies.

I am not a cynic. I'm a Christian, and Christians by definition cannot be cynics. That does not mean they have no common sense.  Christians have no monopoly on common sense, but they do have a very realistic understanding of the mixed drives that provide the architecture of the human soul. We know how a good thing can go bad. And we know, along with the prophets of old, that power corrupts, and that people in power are therefore profoundly vulnerable to its corrupting effects. 

Anybody who knows this is automatically skeptical about the official version of reality. Skepticism is not cynicism. And a healthy skepticism about the official narratives presented by those in power is just common sense. And anybody who has any common sense wants to support a system that safeguards against those who have power and wealth from getting more and from dominating the system. 

Because, you see, power and wealth have this addictive quality; there are many people who cannot have enough of it, and we must always be vigilant about those who have been smitten with these addictions. For such people it doesn't matter how much power and wealth they have; they always need more. And if left unchecked, like the desperate junkie forced into mugging people to get his next fix, they will do whatever it takes to satisfy their addiction. Wherever there is power and money, you will find this kind of person nearby. A place like Washington is a magnet for them. And the problem is that when the power junkies own the court house and the jail house, ain't nobody who can put them in jail. 

In Iraq it doesnt matter that most Iraqis are decent human beings who want a normal life, because they don't set the agenda. The same is true in Washington.  There are many good, decent people in both parties, but they are not the ones setting the agenda. The power-and-wealth addicts are. They hide their addiction, of course. They are perhaps in denial about it themselves. But the rest of us are co-dependent with them, we enable their compulsive, addictive  behavior every time we give them a majority in congress.   

And that's why it is so important that the Democrats regain control of Congress in 2006.  Not because the Democrats are better human beings than the Republicans, but because the corrupting effect of unchecked power of the Republicans must be stymied. The Republicans have to know that they cannnt act without impunity. They cannot control themselves; we shouldn't expect them to. 

Rest in peace, Mom

My mother died this morning. She's had Alzheimer's for four or five years now, and we knew it was coming.  Nevertheless it's still a shock when it happens.  She was a great woman, having raised seven kids, six of them boys. It's hard to imagine how it could have been done and yet to have remained sane.  And she was.  She had such prodigious reserves of patience and kindness, deeply spiritual, fiercely loyal in that feisty Irish way--always in your corner no matter what.  How do you sum up a life such as hers?  By their fruits, you will know them, and she was fruit-full in so many ways, and on so many levels.

Murtha and American Survivor's Guilt

If you haven't seen it, check out this video clip of Jean Schmidt, the woman who recently just barely beat Paul Hackett, the anti-Bush Iraq War veteran, in his bid for a seat in the House.  Essentially she calls John Murtha, a vet from the Korean and Vietnam wars, a coward for his proposal that the U.S. withdraw its troops from Iraq.  She was shouted down by the Dems, as she should have been. We're at a point now where all the "cut-and-run" rhetoric is just plain crazy.  We have to figure out the sane thing to do.

A couple of months ago I was deeply moved by the tragic story of two fathers and their ninth-grade daughters who were hiking in the Cascade mountains near Seattle. One of the girls while swimming in a river there got caught in a downcurrent near a waterfall. Her father jumped in to save her, and he was also caught in the downcurrent. The other father then jumped in, and he was caught as well. All three drowned leaving one of the girls alone on the river bank. 

Does anyone reading this believe that the girl should have jumped in to try to save her father?  Does anybody believe that if there were another adult there, he should have jumped in? I hope not. And yet does anybody believe that if anyone were in that poor girl's position, he would question for the rest of his life whether he should have? That's the definition of survivor's guilt. Making the sane decision, but always feeling that you made the wrong choice. It's normal human psychology in such a situation. It's not a good feeling. We'd rather not have to have it. We'd much rather a scenario in which were able to have done something actively to effect a more positive outcome. But sometimes it just isn't possilbe, and you have to face facts sanely. Thank God that girl had enough sense not to jump in to try to save her father. The rest of her family and all of her friends are so grateful that she made the sane choice.

I think that we Americans are in a position similar to anyone left standing on that river bank.  We are moved by the nobility of those who have sacrificed their lives trying to do what they believed was the right thing, but  there comes a point where further sacrifices are futile. We don't honor the dead by pointlessly adding to their number.

This was a war that I never supported. Once we entered Baghdad, I thought we had a responsibility to leave the place better than we found it. I never trusted the Bush administration's motives; I never believed the war's neocon architects really cared about the Iraqi people.  I never thought, therefore, that they had the mentality to make a decent job of it there. This would have been an enormously difficult undertaking for even the most competent of administrations to have undertaken. But you had to hope for the best, and I did. It's clear now that the Bush people never had a chance.

Our problem is that we have the wolf by the ears.  We can't hold it forever, and we can't let it go. We need help, and this administration has put itself in a position in which nobody wants to give it. His administration is neither liked nor trusted, and now it isn't even feared.This is why the sensible thing would have been to put Kerry, creep though he is, in office. He would have had at least some chance of developing a multilateral solution there--we're not the only ones who have an interest in stabilizing the region. But Bush has no chance.

We're past hoping for the best now. If there were any reasonable chance that this administration could make things better, there might be some sense in sticking it out. But if there is no chance that we can do anything but make things worse, we should get out. As long as Bush is in office, I am convinced that making things worse is the only possibility. Perhaps another administration could have had a chance, but we chose to keep Bush in office. As long as he's there, we are pointlessly sending our kids into the river to drown. I think that's all Jack Murtha is saying.

Just Say Anything

I haven't had much to say about the unraveling of the Bush White House.  It's amazing to think that just a year ago he was exulting in his recent victory.  In many ways I feel sorry for him.  He was from the beginning a guy who was in way over his head manipulated by Rove and Cheney for their own purposes. An empty screen with a big name on which they could project a fabricated image that unwitting Americans could buy into.

I've never disliked Bush.  I just came to hate what his presidency represented. I remember reading some of the early on reporting about him from some Texas reporters who got to know him during his years as governor.  They felt he  was very reluctant to take on this job. Too much work; too much pressure. Too much complexity.

But now that Rove and Cheney have their own problems to deal with, Bush is forced to fend for himself, and the picture isn't pretty. Reports are that he's isolating himself, and you have to wonder who really is running things now.  I never believed Bush had the capacity to do so.  It's not a question of intelligence; it's a question of character, and it's kind of nervous making if you think too much about how rudderless things are now.  How ironic that this guy was elected because Americans believed he was the strong, steady leader who would insure their security.

And so now pretty much all the White House can do is continue the big lie.  We have learned that Bush's hard-core support comes from the true-believers-non-reality-based community, and as Josh Marshall points out today, the administration will lose even the support they give him unless the big lie is kept alive:

Virtually all of the arguments the White House is now advancing [in defense of their Iraq War policies] are transparently ridiculous on their face to anyone who has closely followed this evolving debate over the last three years.

But that doesn't matter. The White House doesn't need to win any debates. What they need is for their core supporters to have something to say. Anything. And to be able to say it loudly. The one thing that would be fatal for the White House from its defenders would be silence.

I don't say this as a counsel of pessimism or futility. It's just important to understand, to know what they're trying to achieve. The good news is that most Americans have already figured this out. Clear majorities of the public now believe this president misled them about Iraq. And they'll certainly grow. The key is to press these on the specifics, why they said these things they knew weren't true.

So when we hear any of the ridiculous things coming out of the White House right now, there's no need to fight back.  If anybody believes anything these people say anymore, they are unreachable. It's all rather pathetic. The administration, which was built on a lie from the beginning is crumbling from its own inner incoherence, much the same way as the Soviet Union crumbled in the late eighties. They always looked stronger than they were. Looking at them in retrospect, it's clear that it was only a matter of time. Nevertheless, they were pretty scary there for awhile. But it is still disturbing to know that things have to unravel so dramatically for the ordinary American to see that the propaganda has no relationship to what's really happening. It's frightening to think that so many Americans are so vulnerable to propagandistic manipulation. 

Now the question is whether a robust alternative can emerge that will return the U.S. to a respected actor on the world stage who can play a role in the shaping a just, humane global order in this new century.  The Project for a New American Century has always been misguided even from the assumptions implicit in its name. I'm interested in the Project for a New Global Century. This is a challenge for which I hope a radical centrism will emerge to define the most robust, fruitful way forward.

I'm Not a Moderate

I'm a radical centrist.  Moderates are compassionate listeners and peacemakers, and they look for ways to split the difference between warring factions. That's an important role to play, but it's not taking a stand in what we need to come to understand as the radical center. (I would locate in a place different from where Arthur Schlesinger does--he's the one who coined the phrase and closer to where Michael Lind does.)

There is a tendency for moderates to have their agenda defined by whatever the argument is between the left and the right.  Being a moderate in the sixties meant being a Rockefeller republican, a position occupied now by someone like Bill Clinton. But Clinton ten years ago he was not perceived as a moderate among, but as a left-leaning socialist because of the way the discourse has been defined by movement conservatives since '94.  I mean a conservative like Joe Lieberman is thought of as a moderate these days.

Where I define the center is quite a bit to the left of Clinton, because Clinton and the kind of DLC brand of Democrat he represents has allowed itself to be dragged way right of center, and they are rightly labeled as GOP lite.

I only have a few minutes now, but I hope to elaborate on this another time.  But the characteristics of a radical centrist politics integrate the traditionalism of the right with the cosmopolitanism of the left. It seeks to integrate the interests of big money power with the interests of the powerless, voiceless, and impoverished, both in this country and across the globe.  It rejects mindless jingoism, embraces multilateralism and a global vision, while recognizing that real people live in particular places within particular cultures and traditions that must be honored.   

To synthesize is not the same as to compromise.  A synthesis is a new position that stands its own ground.  It isn't a compromise; it's a work of integration.  It has its own life, its own integrity.

The Illusion of Objective Journalism

This from an interview with Larry Beinart, author of Fog Facts:

The weakness of objective journalism is that, on principle and on what used to be sound moral principles, it does not make judgments. It says we’re not here to tell you who’s right, who’s wrong. We’re here to report the facts and, like Fox News said, “We report; you decide.” That’s the theoretical basis of objective journalism.

But if you are a PR person, and nowadays, if you are a politician, you understand the essential weakness of that. Basic reporting becomes one from column A and one from column B, and sometimes one from column C. It’s basically like ordering in a Chinese restaurant. You will call in an outside expert, but what if there is no column B? For example, at the time when we were going to go to war in Iraq, there was no column B. There was no official - no mainstream official of stature -- willing to stand up and say this is a con job. This is stupid. This is a mess. Don’t do it. Not only that -- it’s based on false assumptions, hidden facts, fog facts and lies.

There were a few people. There was a Scott Ritter, and Hans Blix. But Scott Ritter’s story got reported once, and Hans Blix’s story got reported once, and the newspapers had done their job.

Then the President made an announcement that he was still determined, because we didn’t want the next thing to be a mushroom cloud. The newspaper dutifully reported that, because it’s a Presidential statement. The next day, the Vice President made a similar statement. They reported that. Maybe some enterprising reporter called around and said: Anybody want to stand up against that? But there wasn’t anybody, so that got reported. And the next day, Condi Rice did it. And the next day, the President did it again. The day following that, Cheney did it again. They have learned to game the system. And the system, by and large, has not awakened to the fact that it’s being gamed.

The model for this goes back to when Reagan ran for President. The system got horribly yanked, and they learned it. They understood it, and they actually made a very big change. But I think at some point the media is going to start waking up and say, you know, we were gamed, and we have to learn how not to do this

This is definitely a part of what is going on, but I think Beinart is letting the media off too easily.  If the the people in the media were being gamed, they were very willing players.  They wanted the war; it excited them.  There were plenty of people from Column B, but they were all dismissed as "not serious." Robert Byrd strongly and eloquently spoke out against the war, but he was made out to be bordering on senility. Jim McDermott, the congressman from my district in Seattle, spoke out very strongly about how we were all being conned.  But he was dismissed as "Baghdad Jim." 

And what about Howard Dean? This conservative, sensible governor who speaks candidly about what he really thinks, was presented as a radical and a  loose cannon. He was perceived as dangerous because he was telling it as it is, that the emperor had no clothes. Remember how his anti war stance was the single most thing early on that made him unelectable?  Is that the American people's perception of him, or was it the perception of the media punditry?

In retrospect, these are the people who saw most clearly what we were getting into.  We didn't slip slowly into this war as we did in Vietnam. There was a point not too long before the war when most Americans were against it. There was very strong, unprecedented vocal opposition to this war during the months running up to it. Most of Europe was against it. The freakin' pope was against it. There was plenty to report on from Column B. But such opposition was dismissed by the media by caricaturing it as the same old know-nothing hippies and left-wing cranks. What is it about our political and media culture that made it so hard for any opposition to be taken seriously?  The answer is pretty obvious.

Liberal Interventionism & World War IV.

I've been meaning to get around to a discussion about the whole idea of liberal interventionism.  It's a subject that is getting some very interesting treatment at TPM Cafe's America Abroad table.  The main question is why were the liberal interventionists so wrong?  Why did they think that it was a good idea to support this war in Iraq?  Why were they so wooden in their thinking as to see it as the moral equivalence of what Clinton and NATO did in the Balkans. 

Is the task of getting rid of Saddam the equivalent of getting rid of of Milosevic?  To think so reveals the kind of obtuseness I have regularly complained about as being typical of a certain liberal, rationalist mindset. It's as if the entire matter were a question of principle and not of practical consequences.  And it's naive if it accepts the abstract justification for the war as if it were the real motive for the Bush administration's going in.  And blind as if it didn't matter that neocon ideologues were engineering this war rather than the more sane, consensus-oriented  Democrats. As one of the TPM bloggers pointed out, just think if Bush/Cheney were in office during the Cuban missile crisis. 

But let Dan K say it better than I can:

When I look at the dynamics that are driving the course of events in the Middle East region, I can't avoid the feeling that we are sleepwalking toward the abyss, and can't seem to wake up.  We occupy ourselves instead with arguments of distinctly secondary importance.  A fire is raging that is threatening to burn the world down.  Yet instead of arguing constructively about how to put the fire out, people are consumed instead with arguments about (a) whether it is ever a good idea to light fires and (b) who told the lies that tricked some of us into lighting this one.

The liberal Iraq-hawks, I fear, just don't get it.  The Middle East is a region in which the some of the world's most intense ideological, national, tribal and sectarian passions are superimposed over the geographical source of the basic fuel of the globe's material cravings.  Every developed and developing country in the world jealously and warily eyes events in that region, and worries about  its position in any major strategic realignment that may occur. Continued instability and power vacuums in Iraq will draw in nervous and diffident regional powers.  Conflict among those powers will produce further instability and unpredictability, and if not brought to a quick close will inevitably draw in outside powers, who will be faced with the fateful decision of joining a bloody fight for their share of the spoils as part of the winning side, or being locked out of the economy that emerges.

So the liberal and the conservative hawks have lit a fuse that may yet blow up the world.  My son, for one, is going to have to live in that blown-up world.  And yet I still don't see that concern from the liberal interventionists about the political and military poison that has been unleashed. Instead, they have retreated into a cave to lick their philosophical wounds, and to articulate ideological positions that will help to shift blame, and distinguish them from the "bad" interventionists.  And they are already moving on to the next intervention, and arguing about how to do that one right, rather than worry about cleaning up the mess they have already made.

The debate about Iraq isn't fundamentally a debate about Sierra Leone, or Rwanda, or even Darfur.  It is about Iraq and the countries closest to it: Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, and about the greedily-eyed land those nations sit upon.  With regard to the liberal interventionists who supported Iraq, is not their principles that are at issue.  It is their judgment about concrete historical circumstances, and the likely consequences of actions taken in those circumstances.

In other words, this region is the theater for World War IV. The instability in the Middle East has been severely aggravated rather than improved by our intervention there.  And that's mainly because the foolish people behind this war had no sense of what they were getting themselves and the rest of the world into.

We've opened up Pandora's box, and whether we leave or stay, the spooks we've released will not go back where they came from.  This region is going to be the source of huge problems and immense suffering  for decades to come.

The America Abroad discussion also focused on a subject that I care a lot about, which is whether "progress" is something that is real and to be hoped for.  I think it depends on how you define it, but that's a subject for another post.

Muslims in France

Right after college in the seventies I had a job as a deckhand on a charter boat that worked in the West Indies. It sounds better than it actually was. The interesting thing for me,though, was the island hopping, which gave me the opportunity  to experience the various island cultures  and to see how they differed depending on their colonial histories.  And I was struck most vividly by how dramatically the French islands differed from those colonized by the English, Dutch, and Spanish.

There was poverty on the French islands, but not the squalor and restless anger that was so evident on the other islands.  The ordinary people on the French Islands, at least the ones I had some experience of near Guadeloupe, had a kind of dignity and joy that the islanders with other colonial histories did not have. I thought I could live in a place like this.  I did not think that about the other islands. The French-speaking islanders knew who they were, and they were ok being who they were. And I wondered why this was true for them, but not the others.

Subsequently I read an explanation that made some sense to me, and if there are readers out there who want to dispute it, I'm glad to hear about it. What I have to say is hardly authoritative, but it makes sense to me.  The idea is that the French differed from the English in their attitudes toward the indigenous people they colonized in that they were cultural imperialists, not racial imperialists.  In the period after the Revolution, the French looked upon themselves as having a world-historical mission to civilize the world, which meant spreading French culture.

What mattered to the French was not so much the color of people's skin, but the willingness of those they colonized to be absorbed into the grand and beautiful thing that French civilization was. To resist was a sign of incurable barbarism. "We are not here to conquer you," thought the French, "but to baptize you into French citizenship."  And for this reason there wasn't as much of a separation between the French and the people they colonized; the typical French colonizer didn't think of the indigenous people they colonized as genetically inferior, just in need of being brought into the French family.

This of course had more to do with the way the French thought about those they colonized rather than the way the colonized thought about the French.  And it was for this reason that the Algerian War in the fifties was such a shock to the French understanding of itself--it was as if Provence declared its independence.  The Algerians were not Algerians; they were French.  How could they want to be separated from France?  How could anybody wish for such a thing?

I'm sure that's something of an oversimplification, but most of what I have come to understand about French culture since then supports it. And it contrasts favorably with the English and American attitudes toward the indigenous people they colonized, which for the most part they perceived as subhuman savages. The English tended to see the American and African aborigines as their genetic inferiors; the French saw them as their cultural inferiors, a condition easily cured by conferring French citizenship.

And this might in part explain the riots in France right now. The French are magnanimous and greet the world with open arms so long as those who come to France agree to become French. That explains the thinking behind the French ban a couple of years ago on Muslim women wearing head scarves.  If you live in France, you must behave and look as the French do. From an American perspective, this seems crazy. We have developed an almost instinctive sense of respect for the cultural habits of the different people who have immigrated here, and we wouldn't think of insisting on such a thing. We call it multiculturalism, but it's really common sense at a time like the one we're living in.

It struck me then that the U.S. for all of its historical problems with racism and nativism was far ahead of the French in having developed the basic ability to live with diversity.  This kind of cultural flexibility will be essential in the coming century as the world globalizes. The "clash of civilizations" is a regressive idea that must not be fed.  It otherwise becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We must all become cosmopolitans; it's an essential adaptation that we must all  make in a world that will be going through enormous cultural fusion in the coming century. 

What we are seeing in the Muslim world right now is like the behavior of a cornered animal knowing that its demise is imminent.  The French attitude toward the indigenous people it colonized might have been preferable to that of the English in the 18th and 19th centuries, but now it too has become dysfunctional. And the idea of preserving some kind of sacrosanct French culture in this time of enormous cultural transition is futile.  Let the Muslims and other minorities be; don't force them to assimilate.  Eventually they will give up their traditional identities and assimilate, maybe not into French culture, but into the emerging global fusion culture.

National identity is something that no longer has much of a future.  It will linger probably at least until the end of this century, and it will kick and scream and be the cause of a lot of things getting broken before it finally submits to the  inevitable reality. The task is not to cling to traditional forms but to retrieve from all the great world traditions what is essential and to integrate them into a new synthesis.

Something new will slowly emerge out of the chaos. My sense of it is that a different kind of values matrix is now developing that will have more to do with transcultural religious or spiritual beliefs than it will with traditional culture-bound religious identity. But if it's coming, it won't be here any time soon.  In the meanwhile we are going to have to contain the chaos as best we can without aggravating the understandable confusion and anger so many people feel in a transitional period such as the one we are in.

Update: I've been reading and listening to some experts about what's going on in France, and they insist it has nothing to do with Islam--that it's a problem with minorities of all sorts, not just Muslims.  Anybody know what percentage of minorities in France are from places other than North Africa?   I'd be surprised if it were more than 25%. Nevertheless, I should probably have entitled this post "Minorities in France." 

There is a politically correct thing going on here that we have to be careful about.  No one wants to  stigmatize an entire religion. I'm sure there are lots of decent Muslims who feel as negatively about the minority of Islamic extremists as I feel about Christian fundamentalists and the other extremists on the Christian right.  Neither group speaks to what is best in either religious tradition, but both groups find a kind of twisted cultural or group identity in their religious profession.  And that is something that is real and has to be taken very seriously.  The extremists might be a minority, but they are a minority with power.

As I've said before, I'm sure that the majority of Iraqis want peace and stability, but they don't have the power to overcome the minority that wants war and destruction.  It doesn't matter what the majority thinks if they don't have power.  It matters what the minority thinks if the minority has the power. 

West Wing Debate

I didn't catch all of it, but I found it to be an interesting exercise in which two fictional presidential candidates have the gloves-off debate we all long for, but which never happens because of safety rules the campaigns always insist on. It was a debate essentially between liberalism (Jimmy Smits) and libertarian conservatism (Alan Alda)--in other words between two kinds of liberals.  Traditionalist conservatism wasn't represented; neither really was neoconservatism, and those are the two forces driving policy in the current conservative administration. So in effect the whole thing was rather an abstract exercise.

This meant  a debate between a candidate in the New Deal liberal tradition who thinks government can have a positive impact in people's lives and a liberartian, which is not really conservatism.  Libertarianism is the political philosophy of the market, and there is no greater destructive force in history than the market, whose capital-driven market has no interest conserving traditional values and the traditional way of life.   Libertarianism is the opposite of conservatism, and it's one of the ironies of our current political discourse that this group, which worships the market, should be thought of as conservative.

Nevertheless, I think the Alan Alda character came across very well in the debate, at least in the part I saw, and I would give him the debate on points. Smits had his moments, but I found his arguments weak. The argument that Smits should have made and didn't is that the market runs according to the laws of the jungle.  And the eat-or-be-eaten rules of the jungle always lead to the powerful dominating the weak. And when government does not prevent them, the powerful always look to increase their hold on power and control of the system.  Tha'ts the way of the world.  The whole spirit of American democracy was to create a system in which that would not happen. It is at a critical point in its history now in which that project is very much in danger of collapsing.  Some argue that it already has.

Smits should have argued that we need big government not as a paternalistic institution to keep us as children, but as the only instrument powerful enough to counter the enormous power of capital.  The American creed holds that those who work for their wealth deserve it, but that's a myth that has little to do with the realities of capitalism since the Civil War.  Groups that have power hold onto it and they don't give it up unless forced to.  And since the Reagan administration the powerful have been using to reinforce their hold on power. They have an interest in reducing taxes, but not on reducing the power of government to shore up their own power.

The argument that Smits and Alda should have had last night should not be about whether government is good or bad, but about how power in this country should be distributed and the role government plays in serving the needs of power--the power of the few or the power of the many.

Alito Confirmation as a Bellwether

I have not yet formed an opinion one way or another about Alito as a man or a judge.  It could be that ultimately the issue for me will not be whether he is fit to sit on the supreme court; he well might be.  Rather the issue for me is one of balance, and I do not favor a court in which the balance shifts in the direction of Scalia and Thomas. 

It could be that the country would be well served if he replaced either Scalia or Thomas, but that's not what's before us.  He will be added to the court with both those men, and that could be a very disturbing development.  The question is not whether or not he is a good man and a qualified judge, but whether his taking a seat on the court will be good for the country.

Alito's fate, therefore, unlike Roberts', will have little to do with his technical qualifications.  Like Roberts, he appears to have them in spades, but timing is everything.  He will be caught in the crossfire of the political battle lines now forming in which Democrats, sensing the president's weakness, will mount a virulent attack on his  nomination if for no other reason than to demonstrate their growing muscle.  His fate will depend completely on which side has more muscle.

There has been a shift, but will be interesting to see whether this shift has progressed enough for the Dems to have enough muscle to block this nomination. So this confirmation battle will teach us quite a bit about  how far the power has shifted in the last year.  If they filibuster Alito's nomination, I don't think they need fear the so-called nuclear option in the way they did in the spring.  The GOP is on its heels now in a way it was not then.  Or is it?  That's what we'll find out in this confirmation process.

I hope the GOP has been weakened, but I could be wrong.  I thought it was terribly weak a year ago in the runup to the '04 election, and I still find it astonishing that the Dems could not defeat this callow, vulnerable man.  But things have changed in the last year, and what was visible to those of us who have opposed Bush from the beginning is coming into view for a growing majority of  Americans. 

An awful lot of Americans who bought into Bush's media persona as the strong, steady leader are seeing now that he is not that, that he is a fraud.  His approval ratings are abysmal and falling. He's in the bunker, and he is forced to rely on the rabid right for support. His blunder with the Miers nomination has brought this into the foreground. Blumenthal makes the point this morning in Salon:

His nomination of his White House legal counsel Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was an acknowledgment of his sharply narrowed political space. Bush believed he could thread the needle with her because her record was unknown. While the Republican masses supported him, the Leninist right staged a revolt. In Bush's cronyism and opportunism, they saw his deviation. He was the disloyalist. With the prosecutor's indictment imminent, Bush withdrew Miers and caved. Broadly unpopular, he could not suffer a split right. His new nominee, federal Judge Samuel Alito, a reliable sectarian, is a tribute to his bunker strategy.

Will the Alito confirmation be one in which the Democrats effectively brand him as an extreme-right ideologue?  If they do, will moderate Republicans in the Senate see that it will be in their best interest to break ranks with the president and senate leadership?  I don't know, but if it plays out this way, it will be a sure sign that the political winds have shifted toward the Democrats. 

The importance of the Alito confirmation has more to do with its being a bellwether of such a political shift, and both sides understand this.  Much more is at stake here than was in the Roberts' confirmation. And I suspect the reason that Bush went with Miers before he went with someone like Alito is because it's a fight he'd rather avoid. He sees it as one he could lose, and if he loses, he's really done. This is shaping up to be a vicious, vicious dog fight.

Culture of Deception II

The republican party is currently driven by an alliance of religious-right Pharisees  and Jacobin neoconservatives.  While there can be some policy overlap between them, they have very different concerns.  Their similarity  lies in how they are inclined in their different ways toward self-delusion. Both are dangerous when they have power insofar as they live in their own imaginations of the world as it ought to be, because of their proclivity to use violence  to make the world conform to their delusive imagination of it.  Truth is for them not what is, but what they want it to be. 

Fareed Zakaria in his review of New Yorker writer George Packer's book, The Assassins' Gate, points to the policy implications of this mentality when people like this get into power:

Packer describes in microcosm something that has infected conservatism in recent years. Conservatives live in fear of being betrayed ideologically. They particularly distrust nonpartisan technocrats - experts - who they suspect will be seduced by the "liberal establishment." The result, in government, journalism and think tanks alike, is a profusion of second-raters whose chief virtue is that they are undeniably "sound."

This is the other side of cronyism, the justification for cronyism--he or she may be an incompetent hack, but he's one of us. "I know her heart", was  Bush's coded message to the movement conservatives who oppposed Harriet Miers.  "She's one of us. Trust me."   For Pharisees and Jacobins it's not about competence, but about being one of the elect, someone who is "sound". 

In the Bush administration this kind of thinking among the neocons erupted into a policy war with the bureaucrats/experts in the state department and the CIA, whose ideology was not 'sound'.  From Zakaria's review:

Packer recounts the prewar discussions in the State Department's "Future of Iraq Project," which produced an enormous document outlining the political challenges in governing Iraq. He describes Drew Erdmann's memo, written for Colin Powell, analyzing previous postwar reconstructions in the 20th century. Erdmann's conclusion was that success depended on two factors, establishing security and having international support. These internal documents were mirrored by several important think-tank studies that all made similar points, specifically on the need for large-scale forces to maintain security. One would think that this Hobbesian message - that order is the first requisite of civilization - would appeal to conservatives. In fact all of this careful planning and thinking was ignored or dismissed.

Part of the problem was the brutal and debilitating struggle between the State Department and the Defense Department, producing an utterly dysfunctional policy process. The secretary of the Army, Thomas White, who was fired after the invasion, explained to Packer that with the Defense Department "the first issue was, we've got to control this thing - so everyone else was suspect." The State Department was regarded as the enemy, so what chance was there of working with other countries? The larger problem was that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (and probably Dick Cheney) doggedly believed nation-building was a bad idea, the Clinton administration has done too much of it, and the American military should stop doing it. Rumsfeld explained this view in a couple of speeches and op-ed articles that were short on facts and long on polemics. But how to square this outlook with invading Iraq? Assume away the need for nation-building. Again, White explains: "We had the mind-set that this would be a relatively straightforward, manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation, and therefore reconstruction would be short-lived." Rumsfeld's spokesman, Larry Di Rita, went to Kuwait in April 2003 and told the American officials waiting there that the State Department had messed up Bosnia and Kosovo and that the Bush administration intended to hand over power to Iraqis and leave within three months.

Whatever many of the second-level neocons may have been told to believe, the whole point of this war was to make the middle east an American hegemony.  So I don't believe it was ever the intent to go in, knock out Saddam, and get out leaving the Iraqis to figure things out for themselves.  That would never have justified the cost of the invasion.  The intent was to put an U.S.-friendly government in place, most likely headed up by Ahmed Chalabi, who would implement American policies by proxy. It was Chalabi who told the neocons that the Americans would be universally greeted as liberators and that the invasion would be a cakewalk. But even here the neocons were deluded.  The picture is still murky, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that Chalabi was playing the neocons for fools as a proxy for Iran.

Libby's indictment is a loose thread in the fabric of the neocon delusion that Fitzgerald has gotten a  grip on.  I have some hope that as he pulls on it, the whole monstrous con perpetrated by the neocons will unravel.  This will be disturbing, but it will be an essential exercise if the country is to go forward. This whole outlook has to be soundly discredited so we can see more clearly. If the Jacobins of the left have no place at the discussion table,neither should these Jacobins of the right.

I am also going to write about what I think of as the antidote to the naive idealism of the Pharisees and Jacobins.  I am not with the so-called "realists", the Kissinger types who will take no action unless it promotes narrowly defined national interests.  I am for a patient idealism that understands the world as it is, and that it is not what it should be--that we can make it better--but which also understands that it cannot be forced to be better; it must choose to be better.  Such a choice is impossible for people if they are unaware that the choice exists.

PS: I'm ok with force used to protect the innocent and to protect  the efforts of those who seek to develop a free, open society.  I am not for using force to impose our will on others.  There's a big difference, and the distinction needs to be explored at another time.