After the Future

Are You Feeling the Optimism?

I have to say that a remarkably intimate, yet expansive, community of thought seems to be forming across television, film, and the Internet. There's a rather quiet, yet intense, movement of thought and expression building. It focuses not so much on any particular ideology ("right" or "left"), but on a common, critical-mass thirst to dispel the deception, irrationality, and utter hubris that has been corroding our proud country for what seems like an eternity.

An undeniable intellectual and social confluence is rapidly gaining momentum and solidarity. This solidarity is amazingly organic, not hierarchical -- its only guide is the sixth sense of skepticism, outrage, and, yes, reason. It transcends party. It is oceanic, atmospheric. An intellectual, moral, societal, and psychological gestalt as ancient as humanity itself, kept underfoot by a long winter, but indelibly germinating once again with the thaw.

It is literally everywhere now. The voices of blindness and rage cannot shake me anymore. I haven't felt such hope in a very long time. Letter from DCLaw1 sent to Glenn Greenwald

Despite the pessimistic brooding that often characterizes my posts on this blog, I am ever hopeful.  I'm just not an optimist. Being an optimist means that you believe things always work out for the best, and I don't believe that. I believe that the good is not something that just happens or that truth is just there for the taking.  Both have to be striven for, that neither comes easily, and that complacency necessarily leads to regression and delusion.  You might describe that as a theological position backed by millennia of human experience.

So I, too, sense what DCLaw1 is talking about.  But is this developing consensus born of a saying No or a saying Yes?  I think it's the former, and out of a No there's not much to work with that helps you to move forward.   A No is only good for resisting being pulled backward.

I don't know that our age is better or worse than any other.  I think what makes it difficult is its end-of-an-age characteristics, which make it so difficult to frame a collective sense of future possibility to which sane people can all say Yes. And when the sane people in a society have nothing to which they can say Yes, their society is vulnerable to the forces of insanity and the Yes that comes so easily to them.

For while the forces of common sense and sanity at this time have no Yes to inspire and organize them, the forces of insanity do. That has always been the appeal of the far right in modern societies.  Fascism offers people the possibility of saying Yes that gives them a sense of meaning and purpose.  Yes to the nationalist identity embodied in the political state.  Yes to the strong Leader. Yes to traditionalist values. Yes to the struggle to crush the foe. The great strength of the fascist right is its celebration of the Will and of its love of power, its hatred for weakness. The enormous potency of the political right lies in its ability to tap into the fears and grandiosity of a confused citizenry. When the citizens feel lost, purposeless, adrift, they are attracted to anyone who will give them a sense of national purpose and meaning.

Every society is vulnerable to those factions within it that are in one way or another subsumed by the will to power. America is not immune from their influence.  Indeed, huge swaths of the American population are quite receptive to it.  If we have learned nothing in the last 6+ years, we should have learned that, and what counterforce have those who would oppose it?  What Yes do they have that will inspire them to resist it?  The insane right is organized and aroused; the forces of sanity and common sense are disorganized and complacent, and their democratic habits are being slowly eroded.

I think that there are also huge swaths of the American public that are attuned to the kind of thing that DCLaw1 points to. I think there is a growing consensus of revulsion about what the Bush administration represents and how much damage it has caused.  But is revulsion enough to counter it with an alternative?  It's one thing to say No to the kind of insanity that is the driving force behind this administration, but that force isn't going away.  It's part of the warp and woof of our national character, and it can be countered only by a Yes by that other part of our national soul that seeks to move forward together into a a positive future.  My pessimism at this moment lies in my inability to see how this consensus about a No can be organized into a Yes potent enough to counter the implacable forces that otherwise drive us to the right. 

These forces on the right evolve and adapt.  I don't think we'll be seeing brown shirts and swastikas, or the like.  Brian in a response to my previous post sent an interesting quote from Michael Lind that makes the point:

The United States may well experience episodes of authoritarian government in the future but these are unlikely to resemble the mobilizing, chauvinistic dictatorships of interwar Europe, all marching bands and banners. Dictatorship in the United States would most likely be demobilizing, seeking to keep people in their homes, rather than putting them on the streets or in uniform. An American dictatorship would clothe itself in constitutional and legal forms; it would cultivate an aura of nonpartisan technocracy and business expertise, not a feverish cult of the genius-leader and the masses. An American Fuehrer would not rant and strut, but crack jokes and adopt the relaxed, ironic, 'cool' style of a television host.

I believe in the long run all shall be well.  It's the short run that worries me. Nevertheless, I am willing to admit that my failure to see the counter in the short run to these rightwing forces could be due a lack of imagination or perceptiveness on my part.  Maybe something will emerge from the mood that DCLaw1 points to. I truly hope so. But in the meanwhile I think the prevailing attitude among Americans is that what Lind describes "can't happen here."  My attitude is the opposite--that it is inevitable that it will happen here unless we find the will and imagination to frame a Yes that will counter it. If readers can envision an alternative Yes scenario, please share it.  Saying No is easy.  Saying Yes is really hard.

On the Erosion of Democratic Habits

I think it's worth putting the link to Naomi' Wolfe's article "Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps" here for the record.  Her points are similar to one's I've been making, but it's pulled together in a useful way that I think is worth reading.  I particularly liked these paragraphs:

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

We're not talking about a coup or a putsch.  It's about the gradual erosion of our democratic habits. It's about the slow process of normalizing the horrific.  We elected George Bush after learning about Abu Ghraib and knowing what his administration has done in Guantanamo.  It's about the precedent set by his hundreds of signing statements.  It's about provisions in the Patriot Act that even lawmakers are unaware of.  It's about the loss of habeas corpus. It's about dozens of other little things that we aren't paying much attention to. These things don't affect most Americans directly, and so they shrug and go mow the lawn.

Americans tend to look at these little moments of erosion as isolated incidents and fail to see the larger pattern.  They tend to think that Bush is so politically weak right now that he can't possibly do more harm.  But whether or not Bush himself is still dangerouss, he has laid a foundation for future authoritarians to build on.  All it will take is another terrorist attack to push us over the edge.  American democracy is far more fragile than most Americans want to believe.

So here's the thing.  In a fallen world the powerful instinctively seek to dominate the less powerful. Societies inevitably segregate into factions that either possess power and wealth serve those who have power and wealth. Democracy is not the natural social state; it's maintenance requires the collective spiritual will of its citizens. Feudalism in any of its various forms is the way of the world if vigilant citizens don't strenuously resist the gravitational force that pulls them toward it. And this force is the master/slave dynamic I wrote about last week. 

It is possible to transcend it, and democracy is one social form that seeks to institutionalize that aspiration in the political sphere.  But those institutions suffer continuously from these forces that seek to erode these institutions at their foundations.  We Americans have currently a democracy only in a minimalist sense.  Our institutions in the political sphere have become less responsive to the will of the people as they have become more responsive to the will of well-funded, highly motivated, and well organized factions who care not a whit for the common good, only for promoting their own interests.

I think our political regression is linked to a lack of spiritedness in the cultural sphere which in turn is linked to how the economic sphere shapes our lives.  We haver very little control in the economic sphere.  Most of us are not free and self-reliant economically, and that encourages a slavish, security-centered mentality.  Most of us lack deep spiritual convictions regarding the destiny toward freedom that is at the heart of the human project, so we go along whatever path seems easiest, safest in the economic and political spheres.. Complacency and drift come naturally to us, and I accuse myself of this as much as I do anyone else. The forces of gravity, the forces that seek to pull us back and down are so strong.  It really does take an extraordinary act of commitment and will to resist them.  But I believe it's precisely in our resistance to those forces that we discover most deeply the spirit that makes us human.

Credibility and Credulity

"I'm not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody that has 9 percent approval ratings."

Thank you, Harry Reid, for finally stating the obvious.  The attitude of the entire country now should be to afford no credibility to anything these liars say. Every time I listen to the news and hear some new comment or accusation coming from Bush or Cheney, I wonder why it's even reported as if it's serious news, as if anything they say is an honest man's opinion, as if at this point what they say means something.  It's no longer news because nothing these people say can be believed.  The news anchors should report on administration statements only with air quotes and a tone of supercilious irony.

Like that's going to happen. Irony will be an impossibility for the MSM so long as they are incapable of recognizing how complicit they are with the people in power they report on.  The Jessica Lynch/Pat Tillman business brings that fact into a dramatically stark light.  By way of Greenwald, here's WaPo's Vernon Loeb's understanding of how he was manipulated by his government sources to publish the breathless reprort of Lynch's rescue even though he knew it was completely and utterly a fabrication:

Vernon Loeb, who wrote the story with another reporter, Susan Schmidt, calls their sourcing solid. He concedes, however, that the tale could have benefited from stronger and more prominent caveats about the sketchiness of intelligence reports. "My lesson learned is I should have been more cautious in the way I wrote this story," he says. "But, having said that, I would have written the story anyway." . . . .

But he and Post Managing Editor Steve Coll say they have no reason to doubt that their April 3 story accurately reflected the information contained in those reports--even if the reports had inaccuracies. "We had multiple sources because multiple people were reading the same intelligence report," Coll says.

Are they serious?  They'd publish the story anyway?!  Have they no perspective on themselves.  Are they too blinded by their own sense of eminence to acknowledge that they were conned?

Both Greenwald and Somerby should be read this week if for some reason you still think our press cares more about the truth  than about its perqs.   Also watch Moyer tonight.

The Decider as Master

Bush fires those who are disloyal. Those who are subservient and loyal are never fired, no matter their level of incompetence or corruption. Roughly a month ago, Chuck Schumer went on CNN's Late Edition and called for Gonzales' resignation and, in response, Lindsey Graham said: "I think the fact that Senator Schumer asked for him to step down means he won't."

That is how Bush works. If someone demands that Bush take action, he will petulantly refuse simply to demonstrate that he does not comply with anyone else's will. He is The Decider, nobody else, and nothing is more important than for him to demonstrate that. And loyalty to the Leader is valued infinitely higher than either integrity or competence, which are not remotely required for positions in the administration. . . .

In Bush's mind, the greatest sin is admitting error, or capitulating in any way to the Enemy. Firing Gonzales because Chuck Schumer demands it or because editorialists insist that there was wrongdoing here is exactly the opposite of how Bush behaves.  Greenwald

I am the President.  I am the Decider.  I am the Master.  I do as I will, not as others will me to do. With Bush I really do think that it is this primitive and this simple.  Even Rumsfeld's firing is likely more linked to his wavering on the question of the administration's approach to the Iraq War than to outside pressure to fire him. 

Bush's posturing regarding Gonzales illustrates what I was talking about in yesterday's post: Never submit. To submit is to lose face.  To submit is dishonorable.  In some situations this kind of defiance is an admirable trait, but it's not when it means to persist in egoistic delusion. The difference between virtue and madness is in knowing when to bend and when to stand firm.  Bush seems to have no capacity to make the distinction. I don't know if he's crazy, but at the very least, he has the emotional maturity of an adolescent, and in a sixty-year old man, that's not good.

It will be interesting to see if he actually let's Gonzales go.  It doesn't really matter if he does. (Gates's replacement of Rumsfeld has worked out well, hasn't it?  Things are so much better now.)  Why should Bush fire him?  What motivation does he have at this point?  He doesn't have to run again.  He has no more political support to lose. He has no hope of accomplishing anything in what remains of his term.  His only goal now is to save himself from humiliation. I don't think it's possible to exaggerate how this face-saving intransigence is at the core of White House policy at this point.  It defines the common ground between what we're seeing in the President's intransigence about continuing in Iraq and in supporting Gonzales.

I see Gonzales leaving only if there's a threat that keeping him around will lead to more humiliation revelations that might be avoided if he's is thrown under the bus. Gonzales represents the tip of an iceberg of so much that the administration wants not to see the light of day. It's not clear to me that a Gonzales outside the administration will benefit Bush in a way that keeping him will.  Perhaps he and the revelations associated with him e can be controlled better if he's still kept on the administration leash. We'll see. 

 

Going Postal: Identity, Humiliation, Violence

The early indications point to Cho Seung-hui's rage having been rooted in perceived or real humiliation, and in this he shares common ground with Columbine's Klebold and Harris and Osama bin Laden. Although the specific causes are different, they all seek a remedy for having been humiliated or made to feel powerless, and they do it by resorting to massive violence. When someone is humiliated, he is made to feel diminished, that he is a nobody. This can happen to an individual, and it can happen to a group or community. The sting comes in being forced to see himself as less of a human being, as inferior or defective. For moderns and postmoderns it tends to be an individual thing, for premoderns, or where premodernism lingers in the modern world, it's very often a group thing. If the group is humiliated, the individual feels it as deeply as if it was a personal affront. (Something Richard Gere encountered in India recently.) 

It's all a part of the master/slave drama.  Hegel and Nietzsche spoke at length about it, but it's as old and primitive as bulls battling for herd dominance.  "Live free or Die," say the folks from New Hampshire; it's a gloss on the older "Kill or be killed, but never submit."  To submit is slavery and the profoundest humiliation. To submit is to care about one's life more than one's honor.  Better to be dead than dishonored and humiliated.  Understanding this primitive dynamic goes a long way to explaining suicide bombers and kids like Cho, Dylan, and Klebold.  Being dead is being about as much of a nobody as one can be. But If you can take out a few dozen (or three thousand) people on the way out knowing you will be at the center of media attention for weeks to come, who's the master and who's the slave?

This master/slave dynamic is an archetype that operates in every human soul. How it plays out depends on who's in control--the archetype or the Self.  When the archetype operates in a group, very often individuals are swept up into it and lose all sense of personal accountability or discretion.  The most horrifically violent crimes are celebrated as victories for the group.  It's ugly and nauseating to everyone outside the group mentality, but not to those inside.

So I disagree with those who say it's impossible to understand what makes somebody do something so horrifying and irrational. There is an archetypal logic to irrational phenomena like this, and the question is not about its nature, but rather about the degree to which it has taken root in an individual's or group's soul. One might say that it's the demon that possessed them. And while the typical mass murderer doesn't consciously explain his crimes by appeal to Hegel and Nietzsche, they provide an interesting phenomenology that helps us to understand it. It works in us all; it's just that in some people it takes over and obliterates Self and its moral compass grounded in conscience. 

There's nothing that will give someone who feels himself to be a 'powerless nobody' the feeling of being a 'powerful somebody' than blowing away the person or symbolic representatives of the group who insulted him.  "Happiness is a warm gun," as the Beatles sang. It's all about trying to feel powerful when in fact you feel powerless. Klebold, Harris, Cho, and Osama have that in common, and that's what makes people like them so dangerous. When you have no Self in the driver's seat, when you are possessed by the irrational drive to turn the tables, you become an implacable destructive force.

The whole honor/losing face system of premodern social systems with its duels and feuds required that one's sense of identity was completely a social construction as a substitute for Selfhood. Personal identity in such a society is primarily linked to reputation, in other words, to what other people think. If people perceive someone to be an honorable person, then he is a somebody. If people perceive him to be dishonorable, then he has "lost face." He has become diminished, and it "logically" follows that he must kill the person who has diminished him, and in doing so he restores his reputation. This is right out of the Master/Slave playbook.  To be diminished is to be a slave.  To diminish the other is to prove he is a master.

It doesn't matter if in fact he did something dishonorable. What one did doesn't matter; it's whether it's talked about in a way that diminishes his honor. If someone in a person's social circle talks about what he did in a way that dishonors him, then the honor code in such societies requires that he has to kill him. If he wins the duel, then he has more personal power than the person he killed, and honor and reputation in such a system is all about personal power. This dynamic is cognate with middle school bullies, class-based snobbery, and intellectual condescension. It's not about what's right; it's about who has the power to control the narrative.

Because history is written by the victorious, who tend to be the bullies, snobs, and intellectuals--or their hagiographers.  It's the mentality we see, that for instance  governed media coverage of the invasion of Iraq. You don't like the bully narrative? Meet me at dawn. Otherwise, shut up. Or be mocked as Michael Kelly mocked Al Gore's antiwar stance in 2002.

Duels were still common as late as the 19th century. So what has changed? Are we more civilized than people like Alexander Hamilton or the courtiers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century aristocracy? Do democracies generate social systems that undermine this method of identify formation? Or is it that we have just become lumpen, self-absorbed Last Men who care more about bread and circuses than "honor."  In other words have we all settled into a slave mentality? 

As a Christian, I obviously don't believe that the only choice lies between master and slave.  There is also the choice to become the Self, a being restored in the image and likeness of God.  Such a Self lies completely outside the master/slave system, but as a realist, I recognize how profoundly the master slave archetype shapes social reality in a fallen world. The Self in society is both self-reliant and interdependent, and the flourishing of democracy requires that its citizens be Selves in this sense.  But we see in the authoritarian mindset of the current administration the crudest kind of master slave dynamic.

We see it in the way our politics has devolved into a media spectacle devoid of any real content.  Contrast what we go through with the citizens listening to and participating in the Lincoln Douglas debates.  Now it's just about winners and losers.  In a fallen world, we all feel the pull to be winners and the shame of being losers. The Republicans have understood this in a way that the Democrats have not.  The GOP has won the branding battle in present itself as the party of strong, success-oriented winners--the Masters.  And they do this while depicting the Democrats as feminized, passive, weak dithering losers. 

The GOP understands that political success is not about taking policy positions that people care about, but by giving the electorate a screen onto which to project their own fantasies of being a winner, and in finding blank screens like Reagan and Bush, they have succeeded in manipulating the process with enormous success. The people want to bask in the glory of their leaders.  And so it is incumbent upon politicians to give the electorate that opportunity.  I doubt Karl Rove cared about Iraq the way the neoconservatives did, but he saw it as an opportunity to create a "war president" who would be precisely this kind of screen upon with we could project our fantasies of glory.  And it worked. We want to bask in the president's glory as we want to bask in the glory or our sports teams.

And when a president fails to be such a screen upon which the electorate can project its fantasies, it turns on him with a furious vengeance.  This accounts almost completely for the right wing's strategy toward Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry.  The GOP strategy was to emasculate them, humiliate them, do whatever it took to make them look like weak losers.  It's at the heart of the swiftboating of Kerry.  They had to take away his one strength, and they succeeded brilliantly. This dynamic also explains the hatred many people felt toward Bill Clinton. They felt diminished by him. The Republican strategy to humiliate him worked to make many Americans feel humiliated as well.  A lingering premodern tribalism causes some people to identify with their political leaders in this way and to feel that the politician's shame is theirs as well. 

Our presidents are not just human beings we hire to do a job; they are our surrogates in the struggle for collective prestige. Think about how the war in Iraq was covered especially during the early months. It was a huge sporting event with Rumsfeld as the coach, and Bush the GM. Here was great opportunity to feel like winners and to bask in the glory of our team's overwhelming victory. This has been about American grandiosity from the beginning. And reality is slapping us down for it. The humiliation of defeat is just too much to bear, we have to understand guys like Cheney, Bush, and McCain's intransigence about the war in this light. The idea that they will go into the history books as world-historical losers is a shame that people like them will avoid or postpone for as long as they can. 

And this brings us back to where we began. When human beings are made to feel humiliated, they burn with anger and resentment and want to turn the tables.  They are driven to humiliate whoever has humiliated them or their group. There are always rational justifications for the irrational things they feel compelled to do. It only seems irrational to those who stand outside the compulsion. Osama blew up the World Trade Center, Klebold and Harris shot up and planned to blow up their High School, and Cho went on a rampage killing thirty-two people. To everyone else they appear crazy, and they are. But they don't appear crazy to themselves.  It's all perfectly logical and justifiable.

But when countries go postal, it's not psychopathic.  No, it's always justified.  But are the justifications for going into Iraq really that different from Cho's rant about how others made him do it. Is it possible that this whole ugly business has been a huge  collective delusion triggered by the humiliation of 9/11? And is it so far fetched to point out that there's a similarity between the insanity of mass murderers and the administration's flailing violence toward Iraq and its desire to bomb Iran?  Is it completely off base to point out that while this policy seems completely logical and justified to those within the administration, it is still crazy, and the rest of the world sees it as such for good reason?  I don't think so. The administration is driven by the shame demon that blindly seeks  to destroy that which is the cause of its humiliation. Their so-called rational justifications for their compulsion are simply lipstick crudely attempting to cover the ugliness of their underlying motivations.

Update:  Did you see this piece about McCain:

Another man — wondering if an attack on Iran is in the works — wanted to know when America is going to “send an air mail message to Tehran.”

McCain began his answer by changing the words to a popular Beach Boys song.

“Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” he sang to the tune of Barbara Ann.

Why do we accept this as normal behavior?

 

Imus

I wasn't planning to say anything about this incident, because flaps about politically correct or insensitive speech don't register very high on my outrage meter, especially when there is so much else to get outraged about.  But the angle that interests me most about the Imus incident is why so many outrageous, demeaning things can be said in other contexts, and most people just shrug their shoulders unless the comment is made about a sports figure.

My guess is that the nerve that Imus hit or that Jimmy the Greek hit, or that Rush Limbaugh hit (in his Donovan McNabb comment) jangled the American public because it points to an ugly subtext of white resentment about black dominance in sports. Oh sure, blacks are better than whites, but that's because they are thugs, or were bred differently, or have been given special affirmative action passes.

And it's for this reason that I think the outrage is justified because one of the few places where the playing field  is most nearly level is in sports.  And it's symbolically  important for American to believe that nothing matters except how the athlete performs on the court or the field.  And decent Americans, when they get a whiff of the kind of petty resentment of good 'ol boys like Imus and McGuirk, are rightly sickened.  Those Rutgers women and their coach proved they were anything but the kind of thugs that Imus and McGuirk wanted to believe them to be.  Imus was exposed for the petty, resentful, small little man that he is, and it's right that people would want to turn away in disgust.

Should Imus have been fired?  I think that the networks and sponsors have good reason not to be associated with this kind of good 'ol boy resentment.  I sure wouldn't want to be. 

There are a ton more petty little men and women sick with bilious resentment who have their constituency and the support of sponsors and networks. Cretins like Limbaugh are concerned that the speech police are going to come after them next, but I don't think it's going to happen so long as they reserve their vile commentary toward politicians.  It's apparently ok for Coulter to call Edwards a faggot, but it isn't ok to call a 19-year old student athlete a whore.  Black rappers can get away with it so long as they demean just black women in general rather than anybody in particular. And that's probably the way things will remain.  There are lines, and Imus crossed one. 

Corporations & the Commonweal

William Greider has an interesting piece about retired IBM exec Ralph Gomory's ideas about multinational corporations and the public interest.  Gomory is a free-trade heretic, and he supports the common-sense idea that free trade is not a simple win-win as free-trade enthusiasts insist.  He has written a book entitled Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests--in collaboration with William Baumol, former president of the American Economic Association, that makes sophisticated arguments that might undermine the current Bob Rubin free-trade orthodoxy to which most Democrats currently genuflect. 

Read the whole article here, but I've exerpted some paragaphs to identify key elements to which Gomory points for finding a policy solution, namely insisting on balanced trade and enforcing it with caps:

Neither of Gomory's fundamental policy reforms--balancing trade or imposing discipline on US multinationals--can work without the other. Both have to be done more or less at once. If the government taxed US multinational behavior without also capping imports, the firms would just head out the door. "That won't work," Gomory explains, "because you will say to the companies, 'This is how we're going to measure you.' And the corporations will say, 'Oh, no, you're not. I'm going overseas. I'm going to make my product over there and I'll send it back into the United States.' But if you insist on balanced trade, then the amount that's shipped in has to equal the amount that's shipped out by companies. If no companies do that, then nothing can be shipped in either. If you balance trade, you are going to develop internal companies that work the way you want." Public investment in new technologies and industries, I would add, may not achieve much either, if there is no guarantee that the companies will locate their new production in the United States.

Essentially, Gomory proposes to alter the profit incentives of US multinationals. If the government adds rules of behavior and enforces them through the tax code, companies will be compelled to seek profit in a different way--by adhering to the national interest and terms set by the US government. Other nations do this in various ways. Only the United States imagines the national interest doesn't require it.

This principle that government can use regulation and the tax code to rein in corporations to promote the public interest was established in the U.S. during the New Deal, and renouncing this principle has been at the heart of the Libertarian/GOP program since at least 1980.  But if government isn't going to stand up to corporations who have no interest in the public interest, who will?

If some Libertarian happens to read this post and thinks that politicians should leave business alone, please make your case, and I'll be happy to argue it in the comments.  I realize that the issues are complex when it comes down to particulars, but to me it's utterly baffling that anybody could argue  as a matter of Libertarian principle that allowing corporations the freedom to do as they please without reference to the public interest serves the public interest.  Halliburton's recent announcement of plans to move its headquarters from Houston to Dubai is textbook, and it's nauseating.

But that's the way things work in corporate think these days.  Was it always that way?  It was in the late 19th century, but changed during the New Deal era from the thirties through the seventies, for which Gomory is nostalgic:

Gomory's vision of reformation actually goes beyond the trading system and America's economic deterioration. He wants to re-create an understanding of the corporation's obligations to society, the social perspective that flourished for a time in the last century but is now nearly extinct. The old idea was that the corporation is a trust, not only for shareholders but for the benefit of the country, the employees and the people who use the product. "That attitude was the attitude I grew up on in IBM," Gomory explains. "That's the way we thought--good for the country, good for the people, good for the shareholders--and I hope we will get back to it.... We should measure corporations by their impact on all their constituencies.

"So in my utopian dream, we decide what we want from the corporations and that's how they make a profit--by doing those things. Failing that, I would settle for the general realization of this divergence and let people argue it out."

Some older CEOs and board members at least listen to him sympathetically. "They have grandchildren," he says. "They wonder too what's going to happen to our grandchildren. You can't get a vote around the corporate board table about, Is this good for the grandchildren? But you can talk to them and they'll worry about it and say, Well, maybe we need to do something.

And if they don't, the American public should by insisting on these basic changes through the political process.  Am I optimistic that this will happen?  A lot depends on who Americans elect to congress and the presidency in '08. If we let the GOP back in, there's no hope.  If we elect Hillary, possibly educable, but I'm not optimistic.  Guys like Edwards and Obama--guardedly optimistic.  It will depend on what kind of congress they'll have to work with, and that will depend on Americans and  people in the MSM overcoming their thrall to the conventional wisdom that laissez-faire Libertarian policies regarding corporate behavior somehow benefit us all. 

Or even if polls showed that they were convinced, would they have the will to do anything about it? Will congress?  The next four of five years will indeed be critical for determining the kind of lives our grandchildren will have.

Bacevich on the End of the Republic

I haven't read a thing yet by Andrew Bacevich that hasn't been right on. Please read this entire article entitled "The Semiwarriors," which does as concise and insightful a job as I know to describe how we arrived in our current predicament.  He ends with these paragraphs:

Democrats bemoan the failures of the Bush Administration, and with good cause. Yet none of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of checks and balances. In this regard, the views of Republicans and Democrats align precisely. The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them.

In Washington and in national politics more generally, the Schlesinger Rule remains sacrosanct. Named in honor of the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr., eminent historian and on-again, off-again enthusiast of presidential activism, the rule goes like this: When the other party does it, it's an abuse of power; when my own party does it, it's dynamic leadership.

The press plays the role of enabler. Having had a field day recording President Bush's triumphal procession from one spectacular blunder to the next--with Iraq, Katrina and now Walter Reed vying for top honors--reporters can't be bothered to assess the implications of these gaffes. They are already turning to the next Big Story: handicapping the imperial succession. Is it Hillary's turn? Will Obama's allure last? Can McCain and Giuliani sell themselves to the Christian right? For as long as members of the media can recall, the presidency has been the biggest story in town; they have a vested interested in preserving it.

But in their contempt for politicians and journalists, Americans should not be too quick to let themselves off the hook. Any serious effort to reduce the presidency to its pre-imperial proportions would imply rethinking the premises of US foreign policy, based on self-aggrandizing assumptions about American wisdom, competence and prerogatives and about the capacity of others to manage their own affairs. Given our chronic inability--or is it unwillingness?--to see the world as it is and to see ourselves as we really are, such a reassessment seems exceedingly unlikely. In an age of the citizen as consumer-spectator, Americans care enough to complain, but not nearly enough to act. Long live the emperor.

We've developed the mentality of an empire without really choosing to become one.  Read the rest of the article to see how Bacevich traces this evolution starting in January of 1933:

In 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt became President, the District of Columbia was merely a seat of government and the United States was still a republic. When FDR's successor left office twenty years later, Washington fancied itself the center of the universe, with the United States now the self-anointed Leader of the Free World. As Cullen Murphy observes in Are We Rome?, a mordantly funny essay filled with arresting observations, this transformation of status fostered large delusions: "that the world is small, that society is malleable, and that the capital's stance is paramount." To reside in the imperial city was to believe that "assertions of will can trump assessments of reality: the world is the way we say it is."

If Public Opinion Mattered

In Iraq, for instance, a firm timetable for withdrawal would be initiated at once, or very soon, in accord with the will of the overwhelming majority of Iraqis and a significant majority of Americans. Federal budget priorities would be virtually reversed. Where spending is rising, as in military supplemental bills to conduct the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would sharply decline. Where spending is steady or declining (health, education, job training, the promotion of energy conservation and renewable energy sources, veterans benefits, funding for the UN and UN peacekeeping operations, and so on), it would sharply increase. Bush's tax cuts for people with incomes over $200,000 a year would be immediately rescinded.

The U.S. would have adopted a national health-care system long ago, rejecting the privatized system that sports twice the per-capita costs found in similar societies and some of the worst outcomes in the industrial world. It would have rejected what is widely regarded by those who pay attention as a "fiscal train wreck" in-the-making. The U.S. would have ratified the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions and undertaken still stronger measures to protect the environment. It would allow the UN to take the lead in international crises, including in Iraq. After all, according to opinion polls, since shortly after the 2003 invasion, a large majority of Americans have wanted the UN to take charge of political transformation, economic reconstruction, and civil order in that land.

If public opinion mattered, the U.S. would accept UN Charter restrictions on the use of force, contrary to a bipartisan consensus that this country, alone, has the right to resort to violence in response to potential threats, real or imagined, including threats to our access to markets and resources. The U.S. (along with others) would abandon the Security Council veto and accept majority opinion even when in opposition to it. The UN would be allowed to regulate arms sales; while the U.S. would cut back on such sales and urge other countries to do so, which would be a major contribution to reducing large-scale violence in the world. Terror would be dealt with through diplomatic and economic measures, not force, in accord with the judgment of most specialists on the topic but again in diametric opposition to present-day policy.

Furthermore, if public opinion influenced policy, the U.S. would have diplomatic relations with Cuba, benefiting the people of both countries (and, incidentally, U.S. agribusiness, energy corporations, and others), instead of standing virtually alone in the world in imposing an embargo (joined only by Israel, the Republic of Palau, and the Marshall Islands). Washington would join the broad international consensus on a two-state settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which (with Israel) it has blocked for 30 years -- with scattered and temporary exceptions -- and which it still blocks in word, and more importantly in deed, despite fraudulent claims of its commitment to diplomacy. The U.S. would also equalize aid to Israel and Palestine, cutting off aid to either party that rejected the international consensus.

Evidence on these matters is reviewed in my book Failed States as well as in The Foreign Policy Disconnect by Benjamin Page (with Marshall Bouton), which also provides extensive evidence that public opinion on foreign (and probably domestic) policy issues tends to be coherent and consistent over long periods. Studies of public opinion have to be regarded with caution, but they are certainly highly suggestive.

Democracy promotion at home, while no panacea, would be a useful step towards helping our own country become a "responsible stakeholder" in the international order (to adopt the term used for adversaries), instead of being an object of fear and dislike throughout much of the world. Apart from being a value in itself, functioning democracy at home holds real promise for dealing constructively with many current problems, international and domestic, including those that literally threaten the survival of our species.  Noam Chomsky at Tomdispatch

But public opinion only matters when it's aroused. Majorities are meaningless unless they are organized toward achieving certain goals.  Hardly any of the things that Chomsky lists above are issues that most Americans are particularly aroused about--even the war.  They vote in a Democratic majority, and they are powerless to do anything because the Democrats feel they can't be perceived as defunding the war. And for this reason public opinion is given a polite nod then otherwise disregarded. 

We'll be in Iraq until Bush leaves office.  And while most Americans are aware that our current healthcare system needs to be dramatically changed, there is not the will to do anything about it that matches the will of the insurance companies, doctors, drug companies, and others who have a stake in the current sytem and motivation to resist change. 

Public opinion is given far too much credit.  In our system, it accomplishes nothing, and is easy for politicians to regard until it gets aroused.  So challenge is how to arouse it.  The right wing knows how to do it:  scare us all to death with false threats.

Evangelical Fission?

I found Frances Fitzgerald's piece in the New York Review interesting for trying to parse out some of the complexity that lies behind the word "evangelical."

Christian right activists, most of whom are themselves evangelicals, claim credit for these votes. Further, the activists tend to speak as if they represent the evangelical community as a whole, and because they have made their voices heard, many nonevangelicals believe that they do. For many Americans, the very word "evangelical" conjures up a vision of people railing against liberals, secularists, homosexuals, and the teaching of evolution in the public schools. But such a view is inaccurate. Evangelicals are hardly identical with the Christian right, and moderate evangelical leaders have recently been making the distinction clear by publicly airing their differences with the right and challenging its positions on political issues.

One interesting defector from the Dobson/Fallwell/Robertson mold is Rick Warren.  And whether or not you'd ever want to become a member of his church, you have to recognize that he's an honest man trying to respond to the spirit of the gospels in a way the zombie Christianists are not:

Important support for these centrist initiatives has come from Rick Warren, the author of The Purpose Driven Life, the pastor of a huge church in Orange County, California, and, next to Billy Graham, by far the best known of all evangelical preachers. Just before the 2004 election, Warren sent out a letter to his network of 150,000 fellow pastors telling them that pro-life and pro-family issues should determine how evangelicals voted. But he sent the same network a letter urging them to put pressure on Bush to increase foreign aid, provide debt relief, and eliminate trade barriers that hurt the poor. The following year he called upon his own 22,000-member congregation to support an effort in Rwanda, backed by its government, to alleviate hunger, teach literacy, and slow the spread of AIDS.

His ultimate goal, Warren announced, was to enlist millions of Christians worldwide in the struggle against poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Like Cizik, he had gone through a form of conversion. "I have been so busy building my church that I have not cared about the poor," he told pastors in Kigali. "I have sinned, and I am sorry."[15] Warren doesn't criticize Christian right leaders, but in the past year he has scandalized them by signing the February 2006 global warming statement, by publicly condemning Bush administration policies that permit torture, by making a trip to Syria, and—worst of all—by inviting Barack Obama to speak at his second global AIDS conference. What will come of his international project is not yet clear, but simply in espousing such causes, Warren influences many evangelicals in this country.

I don't know that much about Warren, and I've not read his book.  And while the kind of Christian sensibility within which I operate is quite different from his, there is a lot of common ground. Whereas when I read about Dobson or Fallwell, there is close to zero.  They have as much to do with the spirit of Christianity as Reverend Moon and his Unification Church. They are cult leaders, not Christian leaders. I think that Warren's openness to Obama indicates that he might be a fusion candidate that will appeal to sane conservative Christians who have not joined the Christianist cult.  And that's important if we are to have a redefining moment in American politics along the lines I've been describing as 'radically centrist'.

The point of Fitzgerald's article is to point out that not all evangelicals have drunk the Christianist Kool-Aid.  Their problem lies in that no candidate has emerged with whom they can identify, who thinks about the world they way they do, and so they have voted Republican by default.  This has to change because way too many Americans are evangelicals, and they have enormous power in elections when they are aroused and organized. 

Evangelicals have a disproportionate part in what pollsters call the "God gap" between the two parties. They make up a quarter of the population—around 75 million people —and a far higher percentage of them are frequent churchgoers than are mainline Protestants and Catholics. Furthermore, the group as a whole has for a decade voted Republican in much greater proportion than the other two groups. In 2000, 68 percent of evangelicals voted for George Bush; in 2004, 78 percent of them did. Last summer, polls showed that the war in Iraq, corruption, and the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina had brought the evangelicals' approval ratings for Bush and the GOP down by twenty points in just two years. But on the last Election Day they turned out in their usual numbers, and over 70 percent of them voted for Republican congressional candidates. White evangelicals have, in other words, become the GOP's most reliable constituency, and they normally provide about a third of the Republican votes.

That 70% number is pretty discouraging, but the "default" rationale might explain it.  And it might change if a guy like Obama can present a plausible alternative.  I am far from endorsing Obama at this point, but he's certainly the most intriquing of the candidates, and I'm hoping at this point that he either won't be revealed to be something other than he presents himself to be or that he won't be destroyed by the process. I'm also not clear yet who is backing him--who the people are who will be putting the most pressure on him.

Bob Barr's Libertarian Defection

A big part of what I've been trying to think through in the course of the years now I've been writing this blog is how ideas relate to and influence our experience of reality.  Because of the severity of political crisis we're currently undergoing, most of my posts have been about political ideas. Most people don't think things through in the Socratic sense to evaluate the validity of their presuppositions.  They live their lives pretty much absorbing the attitudes and values of influential people around them.  And so political ideas are derivative of mindsets developed in the cultural sphere--ideas that are shaped by one's religion, one's ethnicity or regional culture, one's exposure to compelling teachers, coaches, or other community leaders.

Everyone lives within a system of ideas that shapes his or her cultural sphere, and it transcends individual decency. So, for example, there were lots of decent, otherwise ethical, churchgoing Southern white people who accepted the segregationist system as normal reality, gave little thought to any alternative, and dismissed criticism of it as a kind of cluelessness typical of Yankees or other outsiders.  Segregationism was an ideas system that unconsciously shaped reality and made everyone who lived in it think that it was as normal and natural as cows grazing in the pasture. It was the soup everyone in the South swam in, and you had to be an unusual white person to live there and be outraged by its injustices. 

So in my trinity of social spheres--political, cultural, and economic--the cultural is the most important, because the way an  the cultural sphere shapes an individual influences his attitudes and behaviors in the political and economic.  For people who don't think much about the cultural presuppositions of their acculturated worldview, It's mostly an unconscious influence, and its very unconsciousness makes it impossible to discuss rationally.  Nevertheless, the world as our unconscious shapes it for us is the real world.

This is true always and everywhere, and the only antidote is to examine one's naive cultural presuppositions.  Liberals think they are more enlightened than conservatives, but in my experience they're just as likely to have an unconsciously shaped worldview.  Attitudes toward abortion are typical in that respect, as are their attitudes on many other issues that they assume to be morally superior than conservative positions. There are lots of examples of it, but I was particularly struck by it when I participated in a teach-in during the nuclear freeze days of the early eighties.  I played the role of  devil's advocate in a group exercise by arguing the conservative position on nuclear disarmament.  The others in the group were for typical liberal activist types, not necessarily leaders, but people who were part of a disarmament groupthink.  I was really surprised  that when I made some typical pro-arms race arguments, like the historical success of mutually assured destruction, nobody in my group had a vigorous counter for them.  It's not something they had ever thought about or cared about.  Nuclear bombs were bad, and that was the end of it.

Well, they are bad, and that's why I was there with them looking for ways to promote disarmament.  But I was surprised at the degree of their naivete.  Their anti-nuclear attitudes were derived simply by assimilating them more or less unconsciously from their liberal cultural milieu. My confronting them with pro-arms race arguments seemed to be the first time they ever encountered them.  Apparently they never met anybody who thought differently from them and challenged them.  They were as naively peacenik as so many southerners were naively segregationist. And so it became clear to me in a way that it hadn't before why " liberal public opinion" was perceived as so flaky and so easy for serious people to dismiss during the Reagan era.

Serious disarmament thinking or serious people who understand how the world works and yet still look for every possibility to promote peaceful, sane conflict resolutiion were  tarred by association with this larger group of flaky peace-at-any-cost types that developed in the sixties and seventies, and they became a stereotype that made  it easy for a lot of people to dismiss serious arguments for peace. I marched in the Feb. 15, 2003, protest against the impending invasion of Vietnam, and the geist of the event was very much dominated by that kind of naive peacenik mentality that makes such events seem flaky. 

Maybe there's no way around it.  But I just don't see people with these attitudes being the power base for building serious opposition to the serious threats that will confront us in the future.  Maybe I romanticize the Civil Rights movement of the late fifties and sixties before King was shot.  But it had a kind of moral seriousness that resistance movements seem to lack now.  There was a discipline, poise, poignancy present in that movement that seems lacking now. 

Anyway, I bring this all up because now because the threat that we all face is as serious now as any we have faced in our history, and there doesn't seem to be a way to organize a morally serious resistance to it.  And maybe it's not up to the so-called left in this country to do it.  The leadership might have to come from the principled conservatives who are finally figuring out that that their mostly unconscious affiliation with the Republicans during the Cheney/Bush era has meant supporting the destruction of the very basis of the traditional rule of law and the civil liberties that they care most deeply about.  This realization is not causing them to defect to the Democratic Party but to the Libertarian Party. 

Bob Barr, former GOP congressman from Georgia, and arch-conservative House manager of President Clinton's impeachment trial, is one of them.  He's interviewed in a piece appearing into today's Salon.  Here's his response to the interviewer's question asking him why he left the Republicans for the Libertarians:

...the Libertarian Party, among all of the parties out there, is the only one that is true to my core philosophy of working to minimize government power and maximize individual liberty. None of the other parties, and especially the Republican Party any longer, is at all committed to that philosophy. And secondly, my great concern, manifested especially since 9/11, is the assaults on our fundamental civil liberties by this administration. [That's] personified, for example, in the disregard for the rule of law as exhibited by the warrantless NSA [National Security Agency] electronic surveillance in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. More recently, [there were] documented abuses at the FBI in carrying out certain of the expanded powers granted in the Patriot Act, namely, national security letters. And in January of this year, the testimony by the attorney general that this administration does not believe that the fundamental right to a writ of habeas corpus is an important, fundamental, constitutional guarantee. So what we have is a party, the Republican Party, to which I was very proud to belong for many, many years, no longer being committed to a core conservative philosophy. The Libertarian Party is so committed, and I felt that at the time that it was necessary to make a change because of the seriousness of the assaults on our civil liberties.

Good for him.  If increased defections to the Libertarian Party mean the dismantlement of the Republican Party, I'm all for it. The Republican Party has disgraced itself and has lost any basis for being taken seriously by anyone who values our constitutional form of government and the rule of law. GOP representatives in congress have been lockstep collaborators with the authoritarian drift of the executive branch, and they have failed their country miserably. Any person with any sense of decency who has been publicly associated with the party, should leave it as Barr has done.

Barr is clearly a friend insofar as he is ally in the larger effort to preserve the rule of law.  And I applaud his strong critique of the country's drift toward authoritarianism from the Libertarian right because it will probably  be taken more seriously by the amorphous middle who still remain unconvinced that the republic is in crisis.

So for the time being I embrace the Libertarians as allies in the struggle to repudiate once and for all the authoritarian right whose factions now dominate the Republican Party, but once that repudiation is effected, Barr and  Libertarians like him need to be taken on by proponents of the radical center.  Libertarianism is another form of unconscious groupthink insofar as its consequences are not thought through.

The idea that small government is some ideal to be striven for is quixotic.  Bigness, for all of the problems that come with it, is necessary and is here to stay.  The important question is whose interests will it serve--the interests of corporate and other wealth-centered power factions or the interests of the commonweal. The Libertarian striving, Grover Norquist style, to limit government, only diminishes the power available to ordinary people to counter the next most significant threat to their freedom and well being--the enormous unregulated and minimally taxed power wielded by the Big Money right, which is a natural ally of the small-government Libertarians. 

If aggregated wealth can't coopt the government to work in its service as it has done with the crony capitalists driving policy in the Bush administration, the next best thing is to have a toothless, powerless government who will leave it alone to do as it pleases. The smaller the government, the fewer the limits on its power and all the easier to pursue its interests without impediment, and these interests have nothing to do with the commonweal. 

The Libertarians in seeking to tie down one monster, are simply unleashing another.  The problem is not big government, but in insisting that government be accountable to the commonweal.  That's the principle behind a subsidiarist radical centrism and the publicly accountable social democracy it strives for.  We can argue about what level of government size is appropriate in dealing with different problems that have an impact on the commonweal, but the principle that small government is an end in itself and always superior to big government is daft.