After the Future

Controlling the Narrative: Economics

"The field is getting much more empirical," he tells me matter-of-factly. (Christopher Hayes quoting economist Jesse Shapiro in "Hip Heterodoxy") 

You mean economics wasn't empirical before?  Would never have guessed.  Haye's article is worth a read, and the discussion of it at TPM Cafe is worth some time as well.  It's worth it to get some sense of where economics is at this point in time, but also in thinking about some basic issues in the sociology of o knowledge.  What people think with certainty to be true very often, perhaps even most often, has less to do with evidence than with underlying, mostly unconscious belief system.  This is an ongoing argument I've been making in post you can find here and here.  But I was struck how the so-called heterodox economists are making pretty much the same argument.  For instance this passage from Thomas Palley's response to the Haye's article:

...[G]ood intentions can still produce bad outcomes, and in economics the problem starts with what I term the “science myth.” Economists subscribe to a belief that they can access truth through mathematical modeling, econometrics, and now lab experiment. This meta-view implies only one point of view can be correct. However, the reality is the scientific method can never prove things as true: it can only falsify. Moreover, the complex nature of social reality means the facts (which are themselves the subject of debate) can often be consistent with different theories. That means a truly scientific economics has to accept the co-existence of other theories, including heterodox theories, because they cannot be rejected on scientific grounds.

The science myth is one pillar of exclusion. A second pillar is the sociology of knowledge, which concerns how social forces affect knowledge production. That sociology applies in economics, though economists live in a state of denial about this because the sociology of knowledge sits so uneasily with the science myth and the idea of truth.

Economic ideas have a profound influence on real world outcomes, which means powerful social interests will seek to control what gets accepted as knowledge. Furthermore, economists are themselves members of society and will therefore be influenced by what currently passes as knowledge. On top of that economists are motivated by their own economic self-interest, which means they are willing to produce knowledge that their customers want. - be they investment banks, business think-tanks, or the IMF and World Bank. Moreover, since cognitive dissonance makes it hard to produce knowledge you do not believe in, that willingness to produce easily merges into belief. Consequently, for all of these reasons, economists can be quite comfortable producing knowledge that supports the economic interests of the rich and powerful (see The Knowledge Police in Economics).

The science myth then provides a tight cover for this knowledge. Those who gate-keep the profession, letting some ideas in and excluding others, can do so with clear conscience. Indeed, because they subscribe to the science myth most economists are blithely unaware of their gatekeeping and resentful when it is pointed out. That is because rather than seeing themselves as gatekeepers. they see themselves as truth-keepers exercising appropriate quality standards. This is one lesson from the closing of the heterodox economics department at the University of Notre Dame and its replacement by an orthodox neo-classical economics department. Finally, it is doubly difficult to expose the science myth and its mind-closing effects because the general public also believes it.

None of this is a conspiracy theory. Instead, it just reflects the way the social world works – but that is something society should be aware of. Economists are ordinary people and subject to social influences and pressures that work to include some ideas and exclude others – but this is not a matter of truth vs. error.

This is as succinct a description why people who think they "know" the truth, really only believe it.  Now anybody who has read this blog over time knows that "believing" is not a bad word in my lexicon.  My argument is not that believing is inferior to knowing, but that we hardly know anything and that most of what we think we know is really only belief buttressed by social authorities, be they economic, cultural, or political.  Controlling the narrative means controlling what the social authorities deem to be "truth".  And as Palley points out, the social authorities have their own agendas, and often those agendas are not even something they are consciously aware of. 

So the challenge for us is not to develop criteria for proper knowing, but rather for proper believing.  Believing is "practical" and as such is empirical, provisional (always open to revision), common sense based, and suspicious of rigid orthodoxies and of the people who promote them.

More later.

Jesus Camp

This Pentecost weekend I saw the documentary about Becky Fischer's camp for shaping young evangelicals into the righteous army who will take back America for Christ.  I don't think I was bothered so much by the religious aspects which, to be frank, were not that different from some of the indoctrination I received in Catholic schools and retreats as a kid--it's the politcs that should worry us.  Becky Fischer could very well be a nun of the old school, had she been raised in the Catholic system.  That being said, I never felt harmed by by my upbringing and education,  and learned to distinguish what was nonsense from what had the ring of truth, and I have no regrets or resentment about it. I'd prefer it any day to the textureless, amorphous culture of narcissism that my high school age son is growing up in. He has a far more difficult set of issues to deal with than I ever did.  My guess/hope is that the three kids profiled in the film, particularly Rachael, will be fine.  They have too much spirit to be crushed by the system--what doesn't kill you, etc.

I look at the kind of religiosity depicted in "Jesus Camp" as the product of a subculture that has taken tried-and-true methods to acculturate its young into the tribal lore, and as with any acculturation process, parts of it can be pretty crude. And as in the army, the process is designed to insure that the least intelligent and least gifted get banged into minimally acceptable shape while usually rewarding the gifted with a more sophisticated and complex understanding of how things work. 

That's at least the way it used to work with the Catholics.  So as Catholics we had our boot camp drill sergeants like Becky Fischer, but we were also exposed to people who were genuinely good and wise, people who inspired you not just because every thought came out of the manual, but because they absorbed the manual and transcended it.  They saw the limitations, had a sense of irony about them, but understood their necessity in order to maintain a sense of group cohesiveness and identity.  I suppose if I hadn't been lucky enough to meet such good and wise people, I would have been far more resentful of my upbringing.  But I see the crude stuff as the least significant element in my education.

I don't know a lot about the evangelical world, but I imagine its a lot like the Catholic world--at least how it used to be when it was a world.  Such a world when it functions as something apart from the mainstream culture, usually gets stereotyped by its worst representatives rather than its best, and that's the way it will always appear to those outside of it.  I didn't find any of the adults in this film particularly attractive or admirable, but it would be unfair to think that a creepy guy like Ted Haggard, or James Dobson, or Jerry Falwell, or Pat Robertson are as good as it gets within this world. But unfortunately they are its public face.  And they are pretty loathsome from everything I've observed about them,  and I wish that their repudiation by the saner, wiser, evangelicals got more publicity. Maybe that will come in time as the emerging church movement more fully emerges to replace the corrupt Christianist structure that now seems so dominant.  But in the meanwhile we live in an age where the worst are full of passionate intensity, and the best, well, they're kind of in shocked confusion seeing what's happening while having no effective program to counter it.

I'd think of Becky Fischer as just an interesting American character, if it were not for her political agenda. I can understand why someone like her would freak secular types out, but I didn't see anything about her that would make me think she's not a basically decent person.  Sure, she's got power issues.  And she's delusional about the righteousness of her cause.  But there's nothing particularly evil about that. A lot of people are--just think about some bosses you've had. 

The disappointing thing about Becky and the other adults was that they represent a kind of religiosity that is all will and no wisdom or discernment. They don't appear to have transcended the manual, nor do they seem capable of any sense of irony about its limitations. And so their kind of religion is stunted in it's being so scripted and simplistic. And when you combine that with a toxic combination of willfulness and lack of discernment, it doesn't matter how righteous the cause in theory, it leads to a destructive end. 

Their project is no different in its social psycholgoical essence than that of the Revolutionary Guard in China during its cultural revolution or the sans-culottes during the French Revolution.  Nothing has more potential for  destruction than an undiscriminating, rigid, political idealism, no matter what its underlying justifying myth, no matter whether it leans right or leans left, or whether it is religious or secular. The Becky Fischers of the world are not frightening because of their religion. The ideational superstructure is far less significant than the fear, resentment, and willfulness from which her politicized theology has arisen and which impassions it. And secularists, and all the rest of us, are quite justified in being at least a little freaked out by it.

The Supplemental Bill (Two Updates)

I've been trying to understand both sides of this argument, and for the life of me it just seems to come down to the Dems willingly allowing themselves to be outspinned. Maybe there's something I'm missing--if so, someone fill it in for me--but when Dick Durbin, a guy who voted against the original war authorization, gets on the Senate floor and says that he can't vote against this bill because it will hurt the troops, I'm just flabbergasted.  How is insisting that we bring the troops home from an unwinnable war hurting the troops?  How is postponing the inevitable not hurting the troops?  Why do the Dems get the blame but the president's veto is not seen as blameworthy?

How does an unpopular, discredited, weakened president at a time when most of the country has turned against his war win this argument?  Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but that the Dems allowed the vote on this bill to be framed in such a way that voting No was a vote to hurt the troops seems to me to be the height of political inanity. How is it that at this juncture the pro-war faction still has such power to frame the terms of the debate?

I don't buy the argument that setting a timetable is poor military strategy.  Whether we set one or just decide precipitously to withdraw, it's going to be a mess either way. And we're going to have to do one or the other sooner or later, so why not sooner? If it's later, as it was in Vietnam, when that day comes, we'll look back to May of '07 and ask ourselves why we let this horror drag out so long.  What did we gain from doing so?  How many more lives and billions of dollars will we waste during that time? Why didn't congress stand up to the president?

I understand the argument that the Dems didn't have the votes to overturn the veto.  I understand the cynical political calculation that it favors the Dems to keep letting the president and the GOP own the war.  I understand that it would have required some political discipline on the part of the Dems not to blink in what would have been a tough game of chicken with the president. But why is the assumption that this weakened president would have won?   

Update:  I just came across this comment by rogerwg at TPM Cafe.  It makes my point about timetables and their consequences a little more clearly:

The problem is, of course, the idea that it is better to drift than to plan a withdrawal. In actuality, if you don't plan how to play an endgame, it will play you. The only way that you can almost guarantee a withdrawal disaster is if you don't plan the withdrawal over a significant period of time. A year is a pretty good marker. That is why the capitulation was and is such a disaster - it was a vote for drift. The bill's design, with or without compulsory timetables, was actually the only way that a withdrawal can be effected that won't be a disaster. Drift has already had a terrible effect on making U.S. territory unsafe - the danger coming, contra Bush, not from Iraqi Al Qaeda but from the humming camps in Pakistan, gathering money and recruits due to Iraq. Drift can't but have a disastrous effect on internal politics in Iraq - without any benchmarks, every side feels that they have most to gain by being most intransigent. And, of course, by not planning the withdrawal long before it happens, the drift strategy all but asks that withdrawal be forced upon us. It is like the pro-war people think that end of this war will be a nice surprise party - hey, we love you americans, here are some bases for you to stay on and attack our neigbhors, who of course happen to be closely connected to our leadership, and we are going to have a ticker tape parade, with flowers and candies, as you march home.

So: the war will end, and if you don't plan the end of the American participation in the war, you are inviting anarchy and a disastrous exit.
Those who don't want us to 'discuss" withdrawing are like superstitious people who don't want to mention death in a sick room - or call the doctor. They are, in other words, irrational cowards. Hitching a war strategy to them is a bad bad idea.

It's all about jockeying for who's going to take the political blame for this fiasco; neither party is primarily concerned about what's best for the Iraqis or for the American troops.

Second Update: This from Greenwald Saturday morning that helps explains the illogic of Dick Durbin's justification of his Yes vote:

Is it any wonder that Americans reached the completely irrational conclusion that to de-fund the war is to endanger the troops? Not only were Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman saying this, so, too, were most leading Democratic war opponents.

Thus, it was perfectly natural for Americans to assume that if virtually everyone -- including war opponents -- agreed that de-funding was the one measure that should not be considered, then there must be something truly dangerous and radical about it. Since virtually everyone rejected it as an option, it became toxic, and even most Americans who want an end to the war no matter how it is achieved turned against defunding.

So Alter is correct that Americans became convinced that de-funding constitutes troop abandonment. But that does not excuse what the Democrats did here, because the principal reason that Americans became convinced of that myth is because Democrats themselves embraced and propagated it. And now that myth lies cemented at the center of our political debate, and as a result, the most effective Congressional weapon for ending the war -- the one the Founders designed for that purpose -- has become politically radioactive, all based on a ludicrous notion that literally has no basis in reality.

This has long been the principal flaw of Democrats and it has not changed. They are both fearful and incapable of defending any position unless, from the outset, they are assured, by their conniving and principle-free consultants, that most Americans already agree with it. The idea of forcefully articulating a view in order to change public opinion -- such as explaining why de-funding is a perfectly valid option like all the others for ending the war -- never occurs to them.

Codependent with an Abusive Spouse

Gary Kamiya in Salon:

The truth is that Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors, far from being too small, are too great. What has saved Bush is the fact that his lies were, literally, a matter of life and death. They were about war. And they were sanctified by 9/11. Bush tapped into a deep American strain of fearful, reflexive bellicosity, which Congress and the media went along with for a long time and which has remained largely unexamined to this day. Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves. This doesn't mean we support Bush, simply that at some dim, half-conscious level we're too confused -- not least by our own complicity -- to work up the cold, final anger we'd need to go through impeachment. We haven't done the necessary work to separate ourselves from our abusive spouse. We need therapy -- not to save this disastrous marriage, but to end it.

He might have turned out to be awful, but we were in love with him once and chose him to be ours. Got to keep looking the other way.  Got to keep cutting him some slack.  Hey, maybe he'll change.  Maybe if we don't think about it too much it will all go away. 

I remember one of the more interesting analyses concerning why Dean lost in Iowa in '04 was because hardly anyone among the rank and file Dems participating in the caucuses then identified with Dean's being right about Iraq from the beginning.  They were more comfortable with a candidate like Kerry who had been wrong at the beginning and changed his mind later, because his changing attitude toward the war mirrored their own.  These rank-and-file Democrats didn't admire Dean because he was right when the other candidates were wrong.  His being right was not a sign of his astuteness, but of his being too radical. Better to vote for someone whose attitudes are closer to those in the pack, no matter how dramatically wrong they have proven to be.  At the end of the day, Dean didn't seem presidential because he didn't run with the pack.

Americans don't feel comfortable a candidate who is right when they are wrong.  They'd rather vote for someone who mirrors their own frailties.  George Bush, whoever he might be underneath all the hype and the imagemaking, is someone whom many Americans see as someone who is a lot like them.  Not too smart, but right attitudes and values.  He's a decent guy, and you don't throw him off the bus  no matter how bad he is for the country. 

Will Gonzales Go? (Updated)

I'm not an insider, and so my only basis for speculation is my observations of the m.o. of this administration over the last several years.  Central to that m.o. is the administration's need to operate secretly and without oversight.  Central to that m.o. is the stance that nobody is going to tell it what it should do or put any constraints on its freedom of action.  Central to that m.o. is having lackeys in critical positions who will follow orders without question. 

Its a feudal mentality in which the minor lords owe their fealty to those above them in the hierarchy, and in turn those higher up promise their protection. Gonzales's role in the administration symbolizes this fealty system, and throwing him off the bus is a greater threat to the perverse integrity of that system than other political or legal considerations.  That's the hypothesis.  We'll see if future events support it.

Add to this idea that flouting the rule of law is an integral part of this administration's  culture--it's an intrinsic part of the right-wing culture that shapes the mentality of this administration. The law is meant for others, not them, and one gets the sense that flouting it is a point of pride within this warped right-wing world. These are cowboy vigilantes who know what's right and don't need no laws to tell 'em.

It has been at least as far back as the Reagan administration's flouting the Boland Amendment during the Iran-Contra affair. The actors within this culture see themselves as so many Jack Bauers doing what they have to do to save the country from its enemies.  All the rest of us who insist on the rule of law are naive sissies who can't deal with the nasty truth that there are bad guys who want to do us harm.  It's southern plantation or big ranch logic in the minds of the Bushies, but the rest of the country buys it through a kind of high school logic.  Who do you want to protect you?  The muscular morons on the football team (Hannity), or the nerds on the debate team and chess club (Colmes)?  It's a primitive way of imagining the alternatives, but I think it accurately reflects the current state of the country's  political imagination.

Anyway, back to Gonzales: If we had a normal administration or an administration that operated within the normal legal constraints and within the traditions of checks and balances, a guy like Alberto Gonzales would never have been appointed in the first place and would never have passed the confirmation process.  But guys like Arlen Specter still seem to think we're operating under the old rules, and I think that's the basis for his thinking that Gonzales will resign rather than face a no-confidence vote from the Senate.  I question whether that's enough.  I'm probably wrong about this, buy my cynicism has reached such a heightened level, that my first response is why should a no-confidence vote change anything?  This administration doesn't care what a Democratic Senate thinks, and even if a majority of Republicans voted with the Democrats, nobody pushes George Bush around. 

Add to that the problem of replacing Gonzales with somebody who the Senate might insist has some integrity, and the administration's increased vulnerability to further indictments.  Why should Bush push Gonzales out?  My guess is that he won't do it unless it becomes clear that Congress intends to impeach the Attorney General.

Update:  This from Bush later today--

"He has done nothing wrong," Bush said in an impassioned defense of his longtime friend and adviser during a news conference at his Texas ranch. . . .

"I stand by Al Gonzales, and I would hope that people would be more sober in how they address these important issues," Bush said. "And they ought to get the job done of passing legislation, as opposed to figuring out how to be actors on the political theater stage."

More on Comey Testimony

I asked the other day if anyone knew if anyone knew of any principled conservatives who are outraged about the  Bush administration's program to lay the infrastructure for a future authoritarian regime, and I found one in Bruce Fein, a conservative and former Justice Department official in the Reagan administration. He appeared on Open Source with Glenn Greenwald and Laurence Tribe to discuss the recent Comey testimony, and he was by far the most eloquent in his condemnation of the Bush administration's undermining the constitution and the rule of law. 

If you still think this is much ado about nothing, you need to listen to a guy like Fein. There's no transcript, so I can't excerpt anything he said.  Just listen.  If you go to the Open Source link for this show, you will find several other links to commentary about the incident at the center of Comey's testimony. I think this is a very big deal, and it's a key element in the uncovering of what we have felt pretty certain is going on, but have so far been unable to prove.

While praise is owed Comey, Ashcroft, and Mueller for their purported willingness to resign if the administration went ahead with their clearly illegal plans to keep wiretapping without warrants or oversight, the whole incident raises more questions than it answers.  For instance, what had been going on before that had disturbed these officials so much that they couldn't sign off on its continuation? How bad had things gotten? Ashcroft, Comey, and Mueller are not your typical ACLU types. Second, what changed that they backed away from their threat to resign? Was it a substantive change or just a technical one to provide them with legal cover? I think it's legitimate to ask whether these officials were more concerned about defending the rule of law or about being indicted themselves should Kerry have won in 2004.

Another important post to understand some background, particularly the role of Jack Goldsmith is this one by Marty Lederman:

Jack Goldsmith was confirmed to be head of OLC in October 2003. He was a loyal Republican and supporter of the President. And yet almost as soon as he took office, he began reviewing much of John Yoo's handiwork, and found it lacking. Barely two months into his new job, for instance, Goldsmith called the Pentagon and told them that they must immediately cease relying on the critical Yoo Opinion that formed the basis for the Department of Defense's abusive interrogation policies in Iraq and elsewhere. (I've reviewed this fascinating story in detail here.)

Here's the thing.  It's one thing to have the tools to do the job needed to fight terrorists, but that has to be weighed against protecting the country from future abuses by our own government.  If we so readily allow our constitutional protections to be taken away, the threat of the occasional terrorist attack will be the least of our worries. We won't be living in America anymore.  We'll just be another police state.

Authoritarian Watch: Comey's Testimony

Here's the NYT report, and here's Greenwald's take on it:

Comey repeatedly stated that it appeared that Ashcroft was not even oriented to his surroundings. Compare that to Tony Snow's disgustingly dismissive defense yesterday of the behavior of Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales: "Trying to take advantage of a sick man -- because he had an appendectomy, his brain didn't work?"

But more revealingly, just consider what it says about this administration. Not only did Comey think that he had to rush to the hospital room to protect Ashcroft from having a conniving Card and Gonzales manipulate his severe illness and confusion by coercing his signature on a document -- behavior that is seen only in the worst cases of deceitful, conniving relatives coercing a sick and confused person to sign a new will -- but the administration's own FBI Director thought it was necessary to instruct his FBI agents not to allow Comey to be removed from the room.

Comey and Mueller were clearly both operating on the premise that Card and Gonzales were basically thugs. Indeed, Comey said that when Card ordred him to the White House, Comey refused to meet with Card without a witness being present, and that Card refused to allow Comey's summoned witness (Solicitor General Ted Olson) even to enter Card's office. These are the most trusted intimates of the White House -- the ones who are politically sympathetic to them and know them best -- and they prepared for, defended themselves against, the most extreme acts of corruption and thuggery from the President's Chief of Staff and his then-legal counsel (and current Attorney General of the United States).

Does this sound in any way like the behavior of a government operating under the rule of law, which believes that it had legal authority to spy on Americans without the warrants required for three decades by law? How can we possibly permit our government to engage in this behavior, to spy on us in deliberate violation of the laws which we enacted democratically precisely in order to limit how they can spy on us, and to literally commit felonies at will, knowing that they are breaking the law?

It's encouraging to learn that among conservatives there are some who are willing to stand up to power on principle, but the frightening thing is that a rightwinger like Ashcroft is to the left of these thugs, and one of them now has his job.

We're a Right-Leaning Country

Center right at best. But that's in the cultural sphere, not necessarily in the political sphere. This is a reality that the progressive netroots seems not to grasp.  They talk themselves into believing that on the issues most Americans support them, and in their heads most Americans might, but in their guts they don't.  It doesn't matter how high the intellectual wattage of progressive policies, intelligent policy has very little to do with the way politics get done.  Most people vote with their guts, not their heads.

I think that a more radical forward-moving politics could be promoted by factions whose cultural values are more conservative. It's a similar logic to the old truism that Nixon could warm relations with China while a lib like Hubert Humphrey could not. 

But the broader point is that traditional populist politics has always had conservative cultural values coupled with left leaning politics.  The problem for American politics lies in that this populist configuration, while traditionally the province of the Democrats was lost by the Dems in the 70s when the party tacked left on cultural values. The Republicans saw the opportunity, coopted the populist cultural narrative by articulating a scorn for coastal liberal cultural values while promoting the interests of Big Money.  The Democrats have been at a loss trying to tack right on political issues while staying left on cultural issues, and as a result alienating the ordinary folks in the middle on both counts.

I've been saying for years now that we can go forward only by retrieving authentic traditional values (as contrasted with zombie traditional values),  and it's clearly an idea whose time has not come.  But my basic premise has been that many intelligent Middle Americans who, even if they don't read or think through the issues very thoroughly, would be very receptive to a serious critique of American economic and power arrangements and a traditional populist remediation of those arrangements, if it could be presented in an idiom that doesn't come across as the product of pointy-headed, elitist, secular intellectuals.  It's certainly beyond my pointy-headed powers to package such a critique and program, but I think that eventually something like this will emerge. Although it is nowhere in sight at the moment, I think that such a political/cultural constellation is inevitable.  And nothing much of lasting value will happen until it does.

The point is that secular liberals, although they have a significant influence in the cultural sphere, still compose only about 15% of the American population. We are a culturally conservative society, that's not going to change, and if we accept that as a given, secular progressives will never have the committed support they need to make much happen in the political sphere. Their program will be too easy to neutralize so long as most Americans feel ambivalently about it. 

Take health care as an example. You can argue the details, but I am convinced that a single-payer healthcare system along the lines of the Canadian system is the sanest, most practical approach, but there is simply no broad-based political constituency to make creating such a system in the U.S. plausible.  Something has to be done, and  changes are coming in the next cycle, but we'll most likely come up with a patchwork remediation of the current irrational system that will create as many problems as it solves. 

I could be wrong about that, but I think that in our current fragmented political environment little more is possible--even with Democrats in the White House and with congressional majorities.  I think we can reasonably expect legislation that will not be as absurd as the Medicare Prescription Bill, but we'll have a bunch of bills dealing with different aspects of the healthcare system along those lines.

Something has to emerge out of the radical center if there's any hope of developing a culture-wide consensus for desperately needed change in the political and economic spheres. There's a part of me that hopes that Obama might be the kind of guy to get the ball rolling in this direction, but he can't make it happen by himself.  No one individual or political faction can do that. Not much can happen until the culture is ready for change, and right now it just isn't.  Obama could be the guy who rises to the occasion to be the leader the nation wants if some crisis  precipitates the need for a radical adjustment.  It's interesting to think how different things would have been had he or someone like him been president in the aftermath of 9/11. What a disastrously blown opportunity. It's heartbreaking to contemplate it at this late date.

Who Are We?

I have to say, I'm still reeling from the shock of learning that 48% of Americans are de facto creationists.  It drives home a point I've been making all along, which is that action in the political sphere in a democracy is subsidiary to attitudes in the cultural sphere.  If you want change in the political sphere, it has to begin with work in the cultural sphere. 

Or put another way, cultural attitudes define the limits of what's possible in the political sphere.  That's why social engineering projects never work.  The so called enlightened elite cannot force the unenlightened to change their attitudes.  They try it from time to time, and the results are the Terror in France or the kind of purges that followed the Russian revolution.  And the changes never stick.  The idealistic dream of a better society quickly devolves into nightmare.

Real change, if it is to be lasting and healthy, cannot be a top-down kind of thing.  It has to work from the bottom up, and I guess that's why I find that 48% number so daunting.  It's not the particular belief that bothers me so much as its implication that almost half of America is nuts, if by nuts you mean refusing to deal with reality, which in this instance is the fossil record. Biological evolution is not that hard a concept to grasp, It's taught in all high schools,  it shouldn't be that offensive to religious-minded people, and yet 48% of Americans don't buy it?  With a culture this broken, is it any wonder that our politics is so intractable and discouraging?  If so many people can just say they don't believe in biological evolution, it's as if there's no basic framework that defines common ground for sane discussion. 

I take solace in the idea that we can account for this phenomenon as the symptoms of a decadent socieity.  As I've pointed out before, decadence isn't a pejorative term, just a descriptive one.  It describes the transitional time between an old thing dying and a new thing being born.  The last major decadent period in the West was the 1300s while the culture was shifting from the late middle ages to the early modern.  I don't know that what we're undergoing now is as major as that, but the twentieth century bears a lot of resemblance to the fourteenth.   During a decadent period, there is no widely recognized legitimate cultural or spiritual authority, and anything goes.  But it's temporary.  Perhaps we can only say No in such a climate--a No to the worst excesses of power and greed. Eventually there will be something to which we can say Yes, but it's not there to work with yet.

Americans & Evolution

A recent Newsweek survey presented people with three explanations for the origins of human life: that humans developed over millions of years, from lesser to more advanced forms of life, while God guided the process; that God played no hand in the process; and that God created humans in their present form.

The first option is a sort of hybrid creation-evolution endorsed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during the debate; "I believe in evolution," he said. "But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon . . . that the hand of God is there also."

The second option is evolution as explained by science, and the third summarizes the idea of creationism.

Nearly half the sample, 48 percent, said the creationism option was closest to their beliefs, and 30 percent chose the hybrid option. Just 13 percent of the sample chose evolution alone as the best approximation of their view of human development.

Those results have been mirrored in a series of Gallup polls that have asked nearly the same question at several points over the past 25 years.  Cilizza in WaPo by way of Somerby.

If you asked me twenty years ago what I thought the relative percentages would be, I'd say, 66% in the hybrid camp, 20% in the Darwinian Camp, and 13% in the creationist camp. If you asked me yesterday before reading this article, I'd have predicted more in the Creationist camp--maybe 33%, but never 48%.  That number is astonishing and depressing. I am a Teilhardian on evolution, so I suppose that would put me in the 30% hybrid camp. (I think that Darwin accurately explains the mechanics, of evolution, but that mechanics aren't the whole story.) The !3% of pure Darwinians doesn't surprise me, although it's a little lower than I would have predicted.  But the hybrid 30 and the Darwinian 13 combined are only 43% to the Creationist 48%.  I don't quite know what to think about that.

Update:  Just read in our local paper an interesting article about sports and religion.  I think that when people show the sane face of religion, it should also be given some pub.  Some excerpts:

Religion's place in sports has long been controversial. Introducing into a locker room belief systems intended to unify athletes hailing from diverse backgrounds can lead to problems. And more than a few people -- including sportswriters -- roll their eyes derisively when athletes use postgame interviews to "give all glory to God." To certain minds, that feels self-serving, a disingenuous way for athletes to announce "I'm a great person and God loves me."

The UW athletic department might have the highest concentration of Christians in our secular city. So this was a good venue to explore the sports-faith intersect.

So, it follows that putting representatives of these parties into a lecture hall, calling it a forum on religion and sports and having them explain themselves would produce a mixture of two things: 1) Boredom; 2) A lot of hooey.

It wouldn't include, say, Huskies linebacker Dan Howell, a Christian, announcing that, yes, he believes atheists can teach people of faith about morality: "It's very possible to be moral and good without faith."

I don't think the people at this forum fit into that 48%. 

 

Authoritarian Watch: Boston Legal

By way of Sullivan. If you haven't seen this clip from Boston Legal, I think it catches the outrage we should all be feeling.  I also like the way it calls out the Democrats to be more outspoken about what has happen to us.

Earlier in the week there was some discussion about restoring habeas corpus as a rider on the defense department authorization bill.  I don't particularly like the idea of its just being unobtrusively restored as if it were never taken away, but it might be the most practical way to get it done.  Matt Stoller has links for email addresses to key congresspeople to lean on to push this strategy.  Glenn Greenwald had a good post earlier this week recounting the sordid history of the MCA and the repsonsibility that Dems have to do something about it.  God knows we can't expect much from Republicans, although you think Republican principles would demand it.  But since the Republican Party has become dominated by Southern reactionaries, traditional Republican principles count for little or nothing.

The blog commentary I'm aware of that laments the loss of habeas corpus has come from the liberal side of our political landscape.  Does anybody know of principled conservative sites (besides Sullivan) where there has been a push to restore it?

The Blog/MSM Divide

You should be sure to read Digby's piece here parsing the Beltway mind as represented in an epochal piece written by Sally Quinn, who was so appalled that Bill Clinton should behave the way he did in her town.  It's part of a larger theme developed by Greenwald and Somerby to which I've referred in early posts.  All three are trying to get their arms around the astounding self-delusion that permeates the Beltway media mind and also to explain why they are so affronted by blog criticism.

Greenwald describes the divide between the MSM and bloggers this way:

The blog-media dividing line is not about ideology or temperament, at least not principally. The dividing line, more than anything else, is one's view of the Beltway political and media culture -- is it (a) basically a healthy and constructive system filled with good, capable and decent people which just needs some reform here and there, or is it (b) fundamentally broken, corrupt, barren, devoid of any vibrancy and integrity and real purpose?

National journalists, because they and their lives and careers are so integrally woven into that system, instinctively believe the former. And that, more than anything else, renders them incapable of fulfilling the core journalistic function, which is to report on our government adversarially and to view it as a target of scepticism. They are far too integrated into it and dependent upon it to do anything other than view it as intrinsically good and therefore reflexively defend it. And that is true no matter how many foreign outside-of-the-Beltway excursions David Broder courageously undertakes. They are spokespeople for the royal court of which they (and typically their spouses and friends and close associates) are such a critical part.

And that's why they were so receptive to George Bush when he arrived in Washington.  I can think of no other reason why they gave him a pass while at the same time they savaged Gore the way they did. Digby about their attitude toward Clinton and then Bush:

Yet, [during the Lewinski business] even while they ostentatiously ranted and wailed hysterically with anachronistic notions of bourgeois American values, they still carried on as if the White House and the nation's capital belonged to them instead of the American people, which is the very definition of elitism. What an achievement! The very rich and powerful (but we won't talk about that) "bourgeoisie" now had to save degenerate "Middle America" from itself.

When the equally phony George W. Bush came to town it was love at first sight, and why wouldn't it be? Here you had a man whom these people could truly admire --- a rich man of the bluest blood, born into one of the most powerful families in America who nonetheless pretended to be some hick from Midland Texas. He took great pride in his phoniness, just as they did, and they all danced this absurd kabuki in perfect step for years each pretending to the other that they were all "just regular guys."

Gore was a blue-blood, too.  But he wasn't "regular."  He was too wonkish, awkward, and something of tree-hugger.  He was one of the family, but  the one who you're a little embarrassed about because he didn't best represent the family's values.   And he was tainted by association with the redneck interloper from Arkansas. George, on the other hand--well, he's was their kind of guy.

Recently the Republican John McKay, the Seattle U.S. Attorney who was recently fired by the Justice Department, said of Alberto Gonzales that he was surprised by his testimony.  He wouldn't have expected something so obviously dishonest from him.  He thought he was a good guy. The presumption among members of a certain class is that people of their class are what they represent themselves to be, and Gonzales represented and continues to represent himself as a boyscout type from the Rotary Club. Yesterday after saying he "knew" that neither Bush nor Cheney were involved in the the US Attorney firings, he was asked how he knew.  And all he could say was something along the lines of 'I know they wouldn't do such a thing.' 

It's country club ethics.  We're all good guys and so long as we're part of the club, we would never think that any of the other members would do anything really wrong.  And  Gonzales is implicitly accusing his questioner of broaching club etiquette to even suspect Bush and Cheney of any wrongdoing.  They're good people.  They're sincere.  They have the interests of the country at heart.  Why are you questioning their integrity?  That's against club rules. And even if it turns out that they did something technically illegal, there was undoubtedly a good reason for it.  Look how many members of the club immediately came out calling for Libby's pardon. He's a good guy.  He's one of us.  But here's the thing.  The Beltway is not in Bedford Falls; we're in Augustan Rome.  Digby again:

Here you had the most powerful people in the world identifying themselves with Bedford Falls from "It's A Wonderful Life" when the court of Versailles or Augustan Rome would be far more more apt. The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking. Thirty years after Kraft's epiphany, this decadent world capital that had recently seen the likes of Richard Nixon's crimes and John F. Kennedy's philandering (and corruption of all types, both moral and legal at the highest levels for years), were now telling the nation that they themselves were small town burghers and factory workers upholding traditional American values. And even more amazing, the rest of America was now morally suspect and needed to be led by these purveyors of Real American values.

And so the club rules explain to a certain extent why politicians are so deferential to one another, but it also explains why journalist have fallen into the same trap.  They've become part of the club as well, and it's against the rules to ask impertinent questions. Here's a story from Robert Parry's book Lost History, which illustrates the point:

How quickly the investigative space was closing down hit home to me on March 10, 1987. I had been asked to attend a dinner at the home of bureau chief Evan Thomas in an exclusive neighborhood in northwest Washington. The guests that night were retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who was one of three members of the Tower Commission [set up by Reagan to investigate Iran-contra], and Rep. Dick Cheney, R-Wyo., who was the ranking House Republican on the congressional Iran-contra committee.

At the table also were some of Newsweek's top executives and a few of us lowly correspondents. As the catered dinner progressed and a tuxedoed waiter kept the wine glasses full, the guests were politely questioned. Scowcroft, a studious-looking man, fidgeted as if he wanted to get something off his chest. "Maybe I shouldn't say this but," he began with a slight hesitation. He then continued, "If I were advising Admiral Poindexter and he had told the president about the diversion, I would advise him to say that he hadn't."

I quietly put down my fork. Not fully cognizant of the etiquette of these affairs, I asked with undisguised amazement in my voice: "General, you're not suggesting that the admiral should commit perjury, are you?" My question was greeted with an embarrassed silence around the table.

Scowcroft hesitated as if contemplating his answer. But Newsweek editor Maynard Parker came to his rescue, tut-tutting my impertinence. "Sometimes," Maynard boomed, "you have to do what's good for the country." From around the table, a chorus of guffaws ended the uncomfortable moment. Scowcroft never answered my question. (By way of A Tiny Revolution)

It's so easy to forgive a member of the club when the good of the country is understood to be identical with the interests of the Club.

We're living at through an interesting historical transition in information availability.  On the one hand you have corporate consolidation of the the older forms of print and electronic media while on the other hand a huge variety of information sources proliferates on the internet.  How does one decide what are the credible sources? As consolidation increases, the credibility of the information coming from the corporate media decreases.  As a former admirer of the New York Times, I can hardly bring myself to read anything in it anymore.  I don't trust it or its underlying agenda that filters its organizational perception of the world. It and famous news organizations like it are only first-class in their own corporate imagination of themselves. And the David Broders who represent the club mentality of the older corporate media, are increasingly being recognized as reporting not reality but their own clubby biases.

So what will credibility mean in the new information world?  I don't think it's that hard to imagine.  Certain writers and news organizations will emerge and they will earn reputations for trustworthiness based on their track records.  That's how it should be. 

I don't think that bias is in and of itself a problem, so long as readers are aware of the nature of that bias.  There are healthy and unhealthy forms of bias. Healthy biases come from experience.  I have a bias against the boy who cries wolf even if in this case he is telling the truth, and it would defy common sense not to.  I am biased against this administration because I find myself incapable of believing anything that any of its representatives says because it has proven itself time and time again unworthy of my trust. 

I could also say that I was biased against the administration from the beginning based on my experience and knowledge about how the GOP operates.  My biases proved to be healthy. The behavior or the Republicans in this administration is consistent with the same people who brought us Iran/Contra and the absurdity of the Clinton impeachment.  The biases of the  Beltway elites, on the other hand, proved to be egregiously unhealthy and delusional.   And all of those who were so egregiously wrong about everything regarding the war and the Bush administration are still in postions of influence.  Their wrongness hasn't hurt their club standing in the least, because everybody in the club was wrong.

So does bias does not necessarily lead to distortions of perception.  It would defy common sense to say so.  To not have such a negative bias toward this administration, while maybe forgivable in 2000 was not in 2004. And I think it's fair to say that anybody who voted for Bush in 2004 was suffering from an unhealthy bias insofar as it blinded him from the truth about this administration for which the damning evidence at that time was overwhelming.

So I think that the credibility of what anybody writes has to be based on the track record of getting it right over time.  Robert Parry, Glenn Greenwald, Josh Marshall, Bill Moyers, Seymour Hersh in my opinion are among the best to have emerged so far.  They are not partisan hacks, but they are partisans of common sense. And communities of discourse will develop around what I hope will emerge among those biased according to the logic of common sense, not the clubby biases of the MSM power elite.

Hate Speech is Hate Speech

Liberals prefer to ignore this comparison, insisting that there is something authentic and artistic about hate speech coming out of the mouths of millionaire black men as compared with millionaire white men. I disagree. While the social contexts that produce such speech are obviously quite different, the desensitizing effect it has on cultural communication is the same. Both talk-radio and gangsta rap represent women as legitimate objects of sexual violence. Both teach white men to regard nonwhites as subhuman. Both invite verbal and sometimes actual violence against gays and Arabs. If we seek to eliminate one, we can hardly excuse the other. If, instead, we take a position on behalf of free speech and against censoriousness and political correctness, that has to be consistent as well. Leftists have paid a significant price in the marketplace of debate in recent decades for their failed efforts to try to control the speech of those with whom they disagree. Speaking purely politically, the "political correctness" campaign has proven a kind of boomerang, undermining the credibility of those who demand it.  Eric Alterman in The Nation

I think that the key idea here is that lots of money is being made by people slinging this trash.  That aside, to make the argument that gangsta rap as the authentic voice of the ghetto is analogous to arguing that human sacrifice is ok because it was the authentic expression of Aztec culture.  There are cross-cultural standards, and human degradation is human degradation.

How the Press is Eroding Democratic Habits (Updated)

I was close to canceling my subscription to Salon, and then they made Glenn Greenwald one of their regular columnist/bloggers.  I haven't read a thing by him yet that is not in my opinion pitch perfect. While the scope of his writing embraces a broader spectrum of topics than Bob Somerby's Daily Howler does, Greenwald has been covering Somerby's beat in recent weeks (which Somerby applauds, even nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize), and his theme has been how the press has been reduced to  courtiers to power, and how this has been corrosive to our democratic habits.

This is a theme I've written about on several occasions, but Greenwald and Somerby both dig deeper to uncover the underlying connections and money trail that has promoted this sorry turn of events. It's all about the money and how star journalists have become millionaires whose interests lie in preserving their careers and pay checks or in aspiring to be the ones who will have such careers and paychecks.

Now most Americans see this as a class warfare argument, and this attitude was implicit in a letter Somerby reprints in response to his posts about the millionaire courtier class and their connections:

I generally love your take on things, but PLEASE STOP about the money—I DON’T CARE how rich Brian Williams is, nobody I know cares, it does not effect his work, which I find fairly steady (a compliment to today’s media giants).

I’m looking for insight, great writing, provocative criticism, NOT an obsession with the wealth of a few media barons that really goes nowhere, ever.

Here's Somerby's response:

We can sympathize with that; we think the money thing gets tiring too. But in fact, Williams’ work has been horrendous for years—he played the fool shamelessly during Campaign 2000—and nothing explains this ludicrous “haircut-style” coverage except the role big money can plays in the lives of overpaid elites. Sometimes, money makes people get dumb; sometimes, people play dumb to get it. But nothing else can explain the haircut wars—wars which have raged for the past fifteen years—other than the corrupting role being played here by big money.

We’ve offered the following construct before: This coverage is exactly what you’d expect from a multimillionaire press corps. You’d expect to get monstrously fatuous coverage, with story-lines which are endlessly tilted against the leaders of the more liberal party. We’d rather see the world differently too, but these men and women have behaved like fools over the course of the past fifteen years. In the process, they’re destroying American self-governance. And we’d have to assume that they’re playing for pay. No, they just can’t be that dumb.

There are certain things that otherwise smart and well-informed Americans refuse to understand, and among them is the way money and power work to undermine republican values and democratic habits of mind.  It's somehow out of bounds.  It's too Marxist sounding or something.  No Americans want to understand whether a politician or a journalist is sincere or a good guy, as if money and power were irrelevant.  But if you don't understand money and power you understand hardly anything about how our society works and  how it affects where we are going.

Let me close with Greenwald's quoting the late David Halberstam:

At the core of the old value system was a belief on the part of the men and women who worked in journalism that this was an uncommonly privileged life, that we did not do this for the money -- almost all of us could have made a great deal more money in some other field, but we were uncommonly privileged, free men and free women working for a free press in a free society, beneficiaries of exalted constitutional freedoms, willing, if need be on occasion, to report to the nation things which it did not necessarily want to hear.

We have morphed in the larger culture from a somewhat Calvinist society to an entertainment society, and that is reflected in the new norms of television journalism -- where the greatest sin is not to be wrong but to be boring. Because boring means low ratings. And so altogether too many people at the top in the television newsrooms have accepted the new, frillier dictates of the men and women above them in the corporations. . . .

The viewpoint seemed to be -- from their testing and polling -- that the American people did not want to know what was going on, so why bother them with unwanted facts too soon? So, if we look at the media today, we ought to be aware not just of what we are getting, but what we are not getting; the difference between what is authentic and what is inauthentic in contemporary American life and in the world, with a warning that in this celebrity culture, the forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.

Update:   See this piece contrasting the questions asked Republican candidates with those asked the Democrats last week.  For example:

Strangely, though, Giuliani wasn't asked about Kerik during last night's debate. When the Democrats debated, Brian Williams asked Barack Obama a loaded question about his ties to a controversial figure. But Rudy Giuliani's relationship with Bernard Kerik -- which could charitably be described as one of the most spectacular examples of poor judgment by a national figure in the past decade -- didn't even come up during the Republican debate. Chris Matthews didn't say a word. Nor did he ask John McCain about his role in the Keating Five scandal.

In fact, none of the Republican candidates got a single question about their business dealings, personal finances, or ties to controversial figures. Only Democrats got such questions.

It's interesting, isn't it, how Republicans make the wealth of Democrats ($400 haircuts, private planes) one of their central talking points, but it never comes up with regard to the Republicans.  Is it because we expect Republicans to be corrupted by wealth because they represent without apology the interests of the wealthy, which inoculates their corruption from charges of hypocrisy?  Is it because it seems a contradiction for wealthy Democrats to represent the interests of the non-wealthy, so they are more vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy about wealth? Is it that the only thing that Republicans can be hypocrites about is sex and family values? 

I'm not saying that the Democrats should get a pass about how money impacts them and their campaigns. I'm just wondering why the Republicans seem always to get that pass. Why can't the country get as worked up about Republican's financial corruption as much as they got worked up about Clinton's sexcapades.  If reporters were willing to dig, there would be no end of things to talk about.  Do they not dig because money has less entertainment value than sex?  Could it be that stupidly simple?  Or is it because it's not in the interests who control the media that those dirty secrets be aired because of how complicit media magnates are in that world of power and wealth.

Monday Update:  Greenwald today on the attacks on Olbermann as a liberal ideologue:

What ought to define the function of political "journalists" is that they exercise adversarial oversight over government officials. That is the only thing that makes a political press worthwhile. . . .

Olbermann's real journalistic crime is that he is too critical of powerful government officials. That is the real crux of Olbermann's commentary -- criticizing Bush officials for their abuses of power, exploitation of fear and terrorism threats for political gain, and blatant corruption. Whereas in the past, exposing abuses of power by our most powerful officials and criticizing corruption was the hallmark of a real journalist, that behavior is now considered out of bounds, the mark of an unacceptable ideologue, not a journalist.

What turns a "journalist" into an ideologue these days is excess criticism of the prevailing Beltway power structure and its most revered and important figures. That -- and only that -- is what distinguishes Olbermann from those considered to be "real journalists." The function of modern "journalists" is to serve as spokespeople for the Beltway system, to defend it, to adhere strictly to its rules of conduct.

People who have power will abuse it.  There are two institutional checks to prevent that:  the system of governmental checks and balances and the adversarial role of the press. It's neither liberal or conservative to be adversarial toward those in power. Olbermann isn't perfect, but what he does isn't liberal. I feel the same way about what I write here, and get really annoyed when it's labeled "liberal".  Olbermann is expressing the common-sense outrage of people who are justifiably outraged at this administration's abuses of power and everyday incompetence. To be appalled at what this government is doing does not brand you as a Liberal.  It's too convenient for some parties to dismiss criticisms like that as deriving from a partisan bias.

Authoritarian Watch (Updated)

Is there a line that respectable commentary cannot cross and still remain respectable. I can understand why lots of conservatives feel the malaise they do, but Thomas Sowell crosses a line with a comment like this one in National Review Online:

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup. (By way of Kevin Drum.)

He's thinking that a military coup would be salvation?!! I realize a lot of nonsense comes from the NRO, but a mainstream, serious conservative magazine feels comfortable publishing this kind of thing?  What problem does this country presently have for which a military coup is even a remotely conceivable solution? Is it just the  litany of things he complains about in the rest of his column?  Such talk makes me shiver because if he feels comfortable enough to say such a thing in his column, there are plenty of people thinking it. This kind of talk in our current environment cannot be blithely dismissed as the ravings of a marginal crank.  Sowell is not so easily laughed off.

Nevertheless, the title of his piece, "Don't Get Weak: Random thoughts on the passing scene" points to the underlying paranoia which produces this kind of mindset. In what mental universe is the U.S. weak?  If there is a sane place in the collective consciousness from which such ideas can emanate, I have no idea where it is.  But I suppose if enough people think this way, it becomes normal reality no matter how nutty it is. Do I think we are in imminent danger of a military coup?  No, but I won't feel comfortable until this kind of talk is pushed to whacko fringe and is roundly denounced by anyone who has an ounce of public credibility.

Update.  If a military coup ever occurs, it will be because of the Christianist Wing of the military in the aftermath of another terrorist attack will feel the need to protect America from the debilitating weakness from which people like Sowell think it suffers. I don't think it's possible to exaggerate what these crazies are capable of doing. Chris Hedges' book and this new book by Weinstein and Seay make the unthinkable quite plausible. The Air Force since the days of Curtis Lemay has always been particularly scary.

Second Update.  Just saw this piece by Greenwald about the WSJ op ed piece by Harvard's Harvey Mansfield laying out the justification for one-man rule over the rule of law.  In his article Mansfield actually says,  "A free government should show its respect for freedom even when it has to take it away." Ten years ago this was crank stuff. Now it's not. Something is  coming to a head here. The crisis is far more serious than most Americans think, and Greenwald is someone who gets it:

The point here is not to spend much time arguing that Mansfield's authoritarian cravings are repugnant to our political traditions. The real point is that Mansfield's mindset is the mindset of the Bush movement, of the right-wing extremists who have taken over the Republican Party and governed our country completely outside of the rule of law for the last six years. Mansfield makes these arguments more honestly and more explicitly, but there is nothing unusual or uncommon about him. He is simply expounding the belief in tyrannical lawlessness on which the Bush movement (soon to be led by someone else, but otherwise unchanged) is fundamentally based. . . .

That continues to be the central political crisis we have in this country. It is an encouraging development that Congress is exercising aggressive oversight and investigative powers, but the administration is stonewalling completely, and will continue to, because they do not recognize any duty to respond, to answer questions, to be subject to scrutiny or accountability. We live in stormy times, and thus, as Mansfield says: "In stormy times, the rule of law may seem to require the prudence and force that law, or present law, cannot supply, and the executive must be strong."

The crazies are currently running the asylum, and until this movement is rendered completely impotent, we had better remain on our toes.