After the Future

Oust the Blue Dogs? (Updated)

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

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

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

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

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

Fein on Sunstein

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

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

The AT&T Democratic Convention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meaning as Connection

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day: M.J. Rosenberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second to None

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day: James Carse

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

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

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

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

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

Seeking a Center-Left, Main-Street Politics

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

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

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

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

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

Saving the American Idea

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

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day: Mark Steel

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

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day: Jon Swift (Updated)

Regarding the now notorious New Yorker cover:

Although liberals are often unfairly accused of being humorless, the truth is that they are so knowledgable about what makes something funny that they rarely find humor that meets their very tough standards. They are like connoisseurs of fine wine who are unable to drink anything that is not the finest vintage. When a liberal says, "That's not funny!" it is a cry from the heart from someone who longs to see something that really is funny. It's too bad the editors of the New Yorker did not consult them first before they made their ill-fated attempt at comedy.

Atrios, for example, whom many consider to be the Benny Hill of the blogosphere, but pithier, points out that for satire to be effective, it must exaggerated beyond all reason so that even a moron will know it is supposed to be funny. Only satire that is way, way over the top has even a chance of making people laugh. Subtlety has no place in satire because it could easily be taken at face value. If someone like Atrios is fooled into believing that something intended to be satire is real doesn't that just defeat the whole purpose? It would be like an episode of MASH without the laugh track, which wouldn't be funny at all because you wouldn't know when to laugh. Many liberals believe that if they don't get a joke, it stands to reason that it would probably go over the heads of most people, who are not as smart as they are. Just to be on the safe side, it would probably be better if humor were avoided altogether.

And:

I don't even understand the point of satire. If the editors of the New Yorker actually believe that Barack Obama is not a Muslim, Michelle Obama is not a dangerous revolutionary and that they do not actually burn American flags, as Remnick now claims, couldn't they have just said that? Wouldn't it have been simpler and clearer to run the illustration with a big X over it so that we knew what they were trying to say? We are not mind readers. It doesn't make much sense to say the opposite of what you mean and then attack people for being unsophisticated because they thought you were sincere. Do New Yorkers always say the opposite of what they mean and then expect you to understand? Real Americans, I think, prefer straight talkers, like John McCain, who means what he says when he tells us that he doesn't know very much about economics, can't figure out how to use a computer and believes that we will be in Iraq for 100 years.

Satire, I believe, is supposed to be funny, though I don't see how being dishonest is humorous. I think it's just sad. If the New Yorker wanted to run a humorous cover that showed Obama is not a Muslim, they could have accomplished that goal by depicting him slipping on a banana peal on the way to church. That would have made the same point and it would also have had the virtue of being funny. I don't even understand the point of satire. If the editors of the New Yorker actually believe that Barack Obama is not a Muslim, Michelle Obama is not a dangerous revolutionary and that they do not actually burn American flags, as Remnick now claims, couldn't they have just said that? Wouldn't it have been simpler and clearer to run the illustration with a big X over it so that we knew what they were trying to say? We are not mind readers. It doesn't make much sense to say the opposite of what you mean and then attack people for being unsophisticated because they thought you were sincere. Do New Yorkers always say the opposite of what they mean and then expect you to understand? Real Americans, I think, prefer straight talkers, like John McCain, who means what he says when he tells us that he doesn't know very much about economics, can't figure out how to use a computer and believes that we will be in Iraq for 100 years.

Liberals who are so upset about this--get a grip. Sure, racist Dittohead types are everywhere; they are a subset of the one out of three people who wouldn't vote for Obama no matter what. But Liberal angst about this cover grossly underestimates the intelligence and good sense of everyone else.  The best way to deal with fear is to get it out in the open and to see it clearly and name it.  This cover helps to do that and to the degree that it will have any influence one way or the other works in Obama's favor in the long run.

Wed. UPDATE:  Jon Stewart last night:

The cover a such a big deal outside the relatively small circle of people who read The New Yorker only because the media's and blogosphere's negative over reaction to it. But even if the only sane response is to see this cover for the satire it is, the negative reaction to it--even among the Bill O'Reilly types--works in Obama's favor. The message that comes out of all this is that anyone who thinks that the Obamas are furtive  Islamo-terrorists is a moron. The cover did its job--that was the intent of its satire to begin with.

Of Rigged Systems

On July 1 I wrote here:

Reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland will educate those of you who didn't live through it and remind those of us who did why the new lefties of the sixties provoked the backlash that justified such a movement in the minds of many Americans. It's not that the Left was wrong about the war and race; it wasn't even that the the anger and frustration by many who opposed the war was unjustified--it was. Then as now bi-partisanship meant a shared commitment to idiocy, and that idiocy defined our national policy. It was infuriating. But the anger and frustration about the war combined with Black anger and frustration created a continuous media spectacle of riots and violent confrontations with the police that scared the hell out of most Americans, and they wanted the police to put an end to it.

Perlstein's narrative makes clear that the new lefties, no matter that they were right on the issues, developed a style of protest that was easy for Main Street to hate. They were deliberately provocative and divisive, and their tactics, rather than quicken the conscience of Middle America, provoked instead its disgust and in doing so delegitimated their cause. The New Left-driven protests assumed the illegitimacy of the Johnson and Nixon governments, but neglected to persuade the rest of the country."

The New Left understood that the game was rigged, and it sought through it's often polarizing tactics to "heighten the contradictions".  The New Lefties understood that because the game was rigged, there was no hope of changing anything through the normal channels.  Heightening the contradictions meant forcing a polarization that flushed out the true motives of the power establishment with the idea that once revealed low-information Americans would be radicalized by their disgust.  The New Left succeeded in flushing out the latent brutishness and fascism in the system into the open; it failed insofar as most Americans were ok with it.

The polarizing tactics of the New Left were wrong then, and they would be wrong now. You could make the argument that the New Left empowered movement conservatism, and is indirectly repsonsible for the situation worsening. If you can't finish the job, don't start it.  In failing to kill the beast, which was never a possibility, all the New Left accomplished was to make it really, really angry and to reinforce its defenses. But that doesn't mean that their fundamental analysis was wrong. The system was rigged  then, and thanks in large part to their failure-dooomed tactics is worse now.

The contradictions have heightened since then, but still not to a point where the system collapses for being unable to contain them. The New Left tried to engineer such a collapse, but it had the opposite effect.  And besides, no power system can be brought down until it is  too rickety to stand. What was true of France in the late 18th Century or Russia in 1917 and the Soviet Union 1989 was not true of the U.S. in 1968. Collapses don't  come from political action alone. Political actors can only give an already collapsing structure a little shove, but ultimately the system falls of its own dead weight.

Are we at the beginning of such a collapse here in the U.S.?  I don't know. Things feel pretty rickety to me, but what do I know?  And it's certainly not something that I want or would look forward to, because the suffering in this country would be great. I don't want my high-school-age son, who is still so wonderfully optimistic, spirited, and full of possibilities to have to live through such a painful period fo chaos and adjustment.  And I don't want to live through such a period, either.

I want us to find another way, and I still have some hope that some way can be found for aligning the system with real reality rather than its own contrived reality. Real reality has this funny way of asserting itself. Either you work with it, or it will work against you. But most of us, me included, prefer our delusions, and nothing changes until the pain becomes to great. The human capacity for denial is so great that things have to get much more uncomfortable before there is any collective will to do anything.  So until a majority of Americans, including the players whom the system now benefits, become truly alarmed, things will just keep on keepin' on.

In the 1930s there were factions in the power elite who were capable of making the necessary adjustments.  The country was lucky to have a pragmatist and a decent leader and communicator like FDR in the White House.  I don't know if we're headed into something like the 1930s again.  I hope not.  But if we do, better that we have FDR in the White House than Herbert Hoover.

Jesse Helms As the Future

Michael Lind makes the case in Salon this morning that Helms is no troglodyte who somehow survived while the rest of his cave-dwelling species died out, but  he represents the the evolutionary strain in American politics that dominates now and will continue to dominate:

Today we take it for granted that American conservatism is defined by the values of Southern conservatism -- militarism, free trade, cheap labor, religious fundamentalism. But once upon a time there were other American conservatisms with quite different value systems. There was a snooty, WASP-y, plutocratic Northeastern conservatism, which was pro-business, internationalist, mildly philanthropic and in favor of birth control for European immigrants and third-world nations. And there was Robert Taft's Midwestern conservatism, which was anti-labor, fiscally conservative, protectionist and isolationist, and is represented today by Patrick Buchanan.

Anyone observing the American political scene in 1955, when William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review, would have assumed that the future of the right lay with Taft Republicans rather than with the peculiar far-right Democrats of the Deep South. Why did the Jesse Helms right defeat the Bob Taft right and define American conservatism in the last half-century?

For an answer, I think, we have to look beyond tactics like Richard Nixon's opportunistic Southern strategy to the deep structure of modern American politics, which is defined by the toxic interaction of weak political parties with media and money. Evolutionary biologists speak of "exaptation" -- the use of an organ that evolved for one purpose for another purpose in a new environment. Wings, for example, might have developed on feathered dinosaurs for purposes of sexual display before they were used for flight.

The faux-populist corporate conservatism that evolved in the South between the world wars was "exapted" in this sense to flourish in a national politics of weak parties, big media and big money. Helms, like other ideological conservatives, rose to power outside the ranks of the Republican Party machine, with its Elmer Fuddish Northeastern and Midwestern stalwarts like Bob Michel. Helms' career illustrated the confluence of media and money. He began, as we have seen, as a right-wing radio announcer, a proto-Limbaugh. And throughout his career, and now posthumously, he was the beneficiary of free media. Whether he was denouncing Martin Luther King Jr. or Robert Mapplethorpe, Helms knew exactly how to shock the mostly liberal media into showering him with publicity he didn't have to pay for. . . .

In every respect except white supremacy, contemporary America looks more and more like the South between the world wars that Jesse Helms wanted to preserve. We have growing inequality and concentration of wealth, and an elite economic strategy like that of the traditional South that focuses on importing cheap labor, outsourcing manufacturing and exporting commodities (we supply industrial Asia with timber and soybeans). Private-sector unions are all but dead, as in the South. The political parties, as organizations, are weak, as in the South. More and more elected officials are self-funded millionaires or billionaires. Contemporary American politics, like Southern politics past and present, pits elite business-class conservatives against feeble, housebroken elite progressives who are not real threats to entrenched privilege. When, inevitably, the occasional populist protest figure like Perot, Dobbs or Huckabee appears, the affluent progressives quickly close ranks with the corporate conservatives.

Jesse Helms is dead -- but his sinister influence lives on. If you seek his monument, look around.

If after the last couple of weeks you're feeling betrayed by Obama, it's because you allowed yourself to believe that he could stand up to this Orwellian system to which entertainer water carrier types like Helms, Reagan, Limbaugh, and Coulter are best adapted. The whole point of our politics is to create a distraction that prevents real issues of public import from being debated and understood by the general public. And so in rare instances, as in the Iraq War and  the FISA controversy, where a vocal opposition arises, it doesn't matter.  Power gets what power wants.  It will just ram through its program anyway, using flimsy justifications that will create  satisfy most people and create enough doubt in others so that any resistance can be dismissed as the dyspepsia of extremists.

That's the system we have, and nothing essential is going to change until money and money-controlled media no longer dominate political discourse.  As FW's quote of Chesterton in comments yesterday points out, politics is entertainment in a decadent bread-and-circuses political culture:

It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular."

Crossfire was the perfect embodiment of this sham political fighting as disempowering distraction.  It gives the viewer the illusion that he is informed and that he has an opinion insofar as he agrees with one side or the other.  But his opinion is meaningless because it doesn't change anything.  Power gets what power wants, and, sure, you have a right to your opinion about it, but that's all it is, an impotent opinion--it effects nothing if elite power has its mind made up about it.  So while the ship is sinking,  we sit in front of the tube or in front of our computers thinking that we are doing something by getting informed or even bloviating about it. But power does as it pleases knowing it will never be seriously threatened or held accountable by the twenty or thirty percent who have a clearer picture about what's going on.

I'm as guilty of the bloviating part of this process as anyone.  I'm as guilty as thinking that maybe a guy like Obama could deliver change we can believe in. I'm not arguing that it doesn't make a difference if either he or McCain is elected.  There is some latitude for action within the constraints of this system. But he's nevertheless a player in the system that in issues of central importance plays to water carriers like Helms. and his FISA vote was his signal to Power that he will carry water when the interests of Power demand it of him. I'd still rather have him than Clinton. I still think he has more of an upside than she does. But I prefer raspberry jam to strawberry. My preference in either matter has just as much political significance.

So I'm not angry at Obama.  He probably believes that he has to pay a price in the short run so that he can make a difference in the long run. But even if he believes that, the rest of us should not. This vote shows us more clearly what kind of change we can believe in.  Sorry for being such a downer, but the basic structure of power in this country dictates that people like Helms point to our future more than whatever Obama seems to point to.

28-69 (Updated)

Clinton was one of the 28, Obama one of the 69 I have to say than that whatever enthusiasm I felt for Obama's candidacy has been reduced by about 90%. I have not heard one argument on this issue that even begins to present a public interest argument that justifies supporting this bill.There are some issues you can fudge on. There are some issue about which reasonable people can disagree. But there are other issues, and this is one of them, where you have to stand and be counted. This was a huge test and Obama flunked miserably.

It was a big opportunity for him to make a strong leadership statement, and he punted. Worse. He took the hike and handed it off to a rushing defender giving him an easy touchdown. Disappointment doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about this.

But why did he cave?  That's another thing I haven't heard a convincing explanation for. I don't believer this is a calculation based on concerns about electoral politics--other kinds of insider pressure were brought to bear on Obama pushing him to flip on this issue, and he did. If Clinton were the nominee she'd likely have caved, too. Her vote doesn't matter to these interests now, so she was left to vote as she pleased. But whatever those pressures might have been, it's clear that establishment interests in this critical instance are far more influential than the public interest.  That's the price you pay if you want to play in the big time.

In any event it's clarifying.  He has made his statement, and it's looking more and more that an Obama administration is going to be perhaps svelter, but nevertheless the same old, same old. I'll let Jonathan Turley, once again, sum up what's at stake:

UPDATE: Why does it matter so much to me?  Am I over-reacting?  It shouldn't be a question if you've been reading this blog over time.  Either you are upset that the country is drifting toward and authoritarian surveillance state or you don't believe it is or you're ok with it or you don't care.  If you don't believe it, you just haven't been paying attention or paying attention to all the wrong things. If you don't care or you're ok with it, then you don't understand what the American idea stands for. It's not that this one piece of legislation is just bad in itself.  It has to be understood in the context of the accrual to the executive branch of powers that diminish the powers of the legislative branch throwing the checks and balances completely out of kilter.  We no longer have a working democracy if we have presdents who move in every four or eight years who have authoritarian powers.

It's not that I think Obama is a bad guy who will abuse the powers accrued to the executive branch by his predecessors.  It's future presidents I worry about. The hardcore right thinks long term. I'm convinced the Right is looking past this election, and could care less if McCain wins. Everybody thought the hardcore right  was crazy for backing Goldwater in '64; it didn't care when it lost--it went to work. It built the political and media infrastructure that gave it far more political power than its numbers warranted between 1980 and 2008.

The Right is willing to lose in the short run rather than settle. It knows what it wants, and its willing to do the work required to get it. If Obama is elected, it will do everything it can to obstruct any progressive initiatives he takes, as it did to Clinton, and it will be planning all the while to take over again in '12 or '16, The so-called Left in this country offers no robust opposition to this trend.  It neither has the will nor the discipline to develop a counterbalancing iinfrastructure. Too many liberals are too willing to accept such actions, despite their long-term destructive effects, because of the supposed short-term political advantages they bring.

The Right understands power and how it works. The Left since the sixties just doesn't. As I've written about frequently in this blog, the scary thing about the last eight years is the way a foundation has been laid for some future authoritarian. The PAA is another important segment of that foundation. Do you think an Obama administration is going to dismantle it? Russ Feingold on Countdown today is optimistic that it will. We can hope, but where's the evidence?  His capitulation on the PAA suggests otherwise.

The Fundamental Task Is Cultural Not Political

The parameters for the possible in politics are determined by the culture's spiritual infrastructure.  Both political liberalism and conservatism offer nothing because they are both products of an obsolete (or decadent) cultural configuration. The forms remain, like cadavers, but spirit and life are long departed from them.

Along thesle lines read this very good short piece on the spiritual failure of consrvatism by Claes Ryn in American Conservative. I think he's spot on with regard to William Buckley's missing superficiality.  He was smart, but not particularly profound:

Modern American conservatism did not take to heart the insights of its most perceptive minds. Those who came to set the tone in the movement as a whole, William F. Buckley Jr. prominent among them, were political intellectuals. It seemed to them that dealing with the moral-spiritual and cultural foundations of civilization was not the most exciting and pressing need. The political intellectuals drew attention and respect away from efforts whose relevance to politics was not immediately obvious. That advanced philosophy and artistic imagination might over time do more than politics to change society did not even occur to most of them. Other than politics, what most interested them was economics. Some paid lip service to philosophy and to what Russell Kirk, following Edmund Burke and Irving Babbitt, called “the moral imagination,” but the humanities seemed worthy of little more than a polite nod.

The problem, simply put, was lack of sophistication—an inability to understand what most deeply shapes the outlook and conduct of human beings. Persons move according to their innermost beliefs, hopes, and fears. These are affected much less by politicians than by philosophers, novelists, religious visionaries, moviemakers, playwrights, composers, painters, and the like, though truly great works of this kind reach most minds and imaginations only in diminished, popular form.

Yet the conservative movement did not direct its main efforts toward a revitalization of the mind, imagination, and moral-spiritual life. There it relied on shortcuts. In the area of ethics, for example, it assumed that churches would handle the job. But the churches, too, had been deeply influenced by the general moral, intellectual, and aesthetic trends of society. The god worshiped by many was a figment of a polluted, sentimental imagination. The so-called evangelicals did little to break out of their accustomed intellectual poverty. Roman Catholics formed a core within post-World War II conservatism. Their church had more than superficially resisted major destructive trends in Western society. But as conservative intellectuals they, too, cut corners. For the most part avoiding an advanced engagement with philosophy and the arts, they were satisfied with upholding “orthodoxy,” which they did with Protestant-like earnestness.

The kind of intellectual, aesthetic, and moral-spiritual renewal that might have transformed the universities, the arts, the media, publishing, entertainment, and the churches never quite came off. Without a major reorientation of American thought and sensibility, conservative politics was bound to fail.

That being said, it's one thing to recognize what was needed to have transformed cultural life; it's another thing to actually make it happen. I suspect that Buckley and others took the short cut because they simply didn't have any ideas robust enough to effect such a transformation. Buckley's conservatism, as a result, was more about using political power to defend an empty shell, than effecting any political/cultural transformations. As such conservative politics never had anything to offer except a saying No to the excesses of secular liberalism.  It was an empty No filled, if anything, with a grumpy anti-modernism at best and at its worst filled with toxic resentments and powerlust .

Effecting such transformations is not simply a matter of human will and determination; grace is the fermenting agent without which nothing good comes. Grace abounds, and people are living the life of grace in innumerable ways--but on the social periphery. In the center there's nothing anymore to conserve. The creative destructive power of capitalism swept away everything worth keeping there. That's the chief irony of pro-capitalist Buckleyan conservatism that I'm wont to point out from time to time. But the main thing for us now is to embrace that we are wandering in the wilderness.  There's no going back to Egypt, but it's simply unclear when the time will be right finally to move into something more promising.