David Matthews

George Bush inherited a budget surplus from his predecessor. One would think that the deficit hawks, Paul Ryan, Republicans generally, blue dog Democrats, would have insisted on using that surplus to pay down the national debt. Instead, they gave us the Bush tax cuts, the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with no pretense at paying for any of them. They oppose attempts to better regulate, or even to regulate at all, the ruthless banking and commercial interests of our 21st-century oligarchs, whose machinations helped bring on the recession that contributes to the debt in a variety of ways.

The political and social battle is only in part about the debt, and perhaps a small part at that. It is more about the role and nature of government and just what it means to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. There are deep fissures within the country and a chasm between the two major political parties on these matters. No consistency, foolish or otherwise, is the hobgoblin of our collectively small mind.

The divide is great and maybe unbridgeable. On the one side are those who believe that the federal government has a role in domestic affairs to address concerns that because of their nature cannot be adequately addressed by us as individuals or on the state and local levels. On the other are those convinced with a conviction that borders on religious zealotry that the unfettered marketplace by its nature sorts it all out for the greatest possible good if government will only get out of the way. The former is a diverse, disunited, and often cranky bunch comprising traditional conservatives and liberals, endangered species both, and a smorgasbord of those of more leftist orientations, while the latter group is more cohesive in its embrace of radical libertarian and laissez-faire principles, albeit with some tension between the religious right and the more purist libertarians.

The choice is not between government and freedom, as libertarians would have it. Nor is it a self-evident truth that government always fouls up and the market always gets it right. Rather there is the issue of power, of which government is but one locus. Government can get things wrong even when acting from the noblest of intentions, it is subject to corruption and co-optation by powerful  interests, and we must always struggle to make government a force for the common good and general welfare in fact as in principle, but government’s flaws and abuses should not blind us to recognition that unnchecked, arbitrary power, whatever its source, public or private, is the foe of the common good and of liberty.

The GOP “path to prosperity” articulated by Paul Ryan is dedicated to unraveling the Constitution and neutering the federal government by depriving it of the ability to finance its operations or enforce its laws and resolutions, except for the military and national security apparatus. This vision is a miserly, desiccated one in which life is all about economic self-interest and the marketplace is the sole measure of human worth and dignity.

What now passes for a conservative worldview is shaped not by Edmund Burke or Russell Kirk  but by a giddy, sophomoric infatuation with the writings of Ayn Rand, whose influence Ryan has cited as the reason he got involved in public service. Writes Jonathan Chait of Newsweek, a magazine that is not exactly an instrument of the left:

Ayn Rand, of course, was a kind of politicized L. Ron Hubbard—a novelist-philosopher who inspired a cult of acolytes who deem her the greatest human being who ever lived. The enduring heart of Rand’s totalistic philosophy was Marxism flipped upside down. Rand viewed the capitalists, not the workers, as the producers of all wealth, and the workers, not the capitalists, as useless parasites.

John Galt, the protagonist of her iconic novel Atlas Shrugged, expressed Rand’s inverted Marxism: “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.”

In 2009 Rand began popping up all over the Tea Party movement. Sales of her books skyrocketed, and signs quoting her ideas appeared constantly at rallies. Conservatives asserted that the events of the Obama administration eerily paralleled the plot of Atlas Shrugged, in which a liberal government precipitates economic collapse. (Chait, War on the Weak)

Randians may object to the comparison to L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction hack who founded scientology. It makes for a good one-liner but is somewhat beside the point. The quotation from Atlas Shrugged speaks for itself. We can make a pretty good guess where Rand’s followers see their place on the pyramid.

Ryan’s allies and running dogs among the self-styled centrists have praised his courage for at least presenting a budget plan to deal with the federal debt, but as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. puts it:

There is nothing courageous about asking for give-backs from the least advantaged and least powerful in our society. It takes no guts to demand a lot from groups that have little to give and tend to vote against your party anyway.
 
And there is nothing daring about a conservative Republican delivering yet more benefits to the wealthiest people in our society, the sort who privately finance the big ad campaigns to elect conservatives to Congress.
 
Ryan gives the game away by including the repeal of financial reform in his “budget” plan. What does this have to do with fiscal balance? Welcome to the Wall Street Protection Act of 2011. (Dionne, For moderates, no more fence-straddling on the budget)

In Chait’s summation:

Ryan’s plan does do two things in immediate and specific ways: Hurt the poor and help the rich. After extending the Bush tax cuts, he would cut the top rate for individuals and corporations from 35 percent to 25 percent. Then Ryan slashes Medicaid, Pell Grants, food stamps, and low-income housing. These programs to help the poor, which constitute approximately 21 percent of the federal budget, absorb two-thirds of Ryan’s cuts.
. . .
The class tinge of Ryan’s Path to Prosperity is striking. The poorest Americans would suffer immediate, explicit budget cuts. Middle-class Americans would face distant, uncertain reductions in benefits. And the richest Americans would enjoy an immediate windfall.

What is to be done? I do not pretend to have an answer to that question. I do know that it is not enough to just talk to each other on our blogs or through twits or to click “like” on a Facebook post excoriating Republican policies or to advocate the jejune tactics employed by anarchists at G8 summits, though I also believe that talking to one another is one of the ways we might begin to articulate a new vision of what it might be in the 21st century to live a good life, a fully human life, in something of the Aristotelean sense. I am also convinced that Paul Ryan’s vision of that good life is on a horrendously wrong track.

David :: May.31.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: No Comments »

As surely as night gives way to the dawn, Christopher Hitchens could be counted on to rear up on his hind legs in high dudgeon in reaction to Noam Chomsky’s semi-coherent raving about the killing of Osama bin Laden (Hitchens, Chomsky’s Follies; Chomsky, Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death). The two old warhorses never pass by an occasion to joust with forces of darkness, in Hitchens’ case, his erstwhile colleagues on the “paranoid anti-war ‘left,’” and for Chomsky, the United States government as a source of evil in this world.

On this one Hitchens is more convincing than Chomsky, who risks becoming something of a left-wing version of Newt Gingrich as a fount of bombast. The comparison with Gingrich is not altogether fair to Chomsky, a man of considerable learning and intellectual achievement, though we give Gingrich his due as an accomplished self-promoter who seems to have deluded even himself into believing that he is the smartest person in any room he is in, as David Brooks once put it, if memory serves.

Chomsky accepts the premise that Osama bin Laden should have been treated as suspect in a criminal case, innocent until proven guilty in a fair trial, as if this were an a priori given, not to be questioned, then insists there is no evidence that bin Laden bore responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, airily dismissing bin Laden’s “confession” on the grounds that it is as if Chomsky were to “confess” he had won the Boston Marathon. Bin-Laden “boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.” The first proposition is arguable; the blithe dismissal of evidence and bin-Laden’s claim of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks is just silly.

Like Gingrich Chomsky is given to demonizing his opponents. “Uncontroversially,” he says,

[George Bush's] crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s and he [Bush] is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially “the decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

These charges may be uncontroversial in the circles in which Chomsky travels, but if so, he does not get out and about much. Bush, Cheney, and others who justified, ordered, and carried out torture should be held to account for their actions, and it is right and proper to go after Barack Obama for sweeping this bit of mess under the rug out of domestic political considerations. However, all of this is at least somewhat controversial, again, except perhaps within certain small circles, as is the notion that the U.S. is responsible for the bitter sectarian conflict in the Middle East. U.S. policies and actions have exacerbated sectarian tensions and conflicts but are hardly their source.

The kind of hyperbole involved in comparing the crimes with which Chomsky charges Bush and the crimes bin Laden acknowledged amounts to a sideshow and distraction that contributes nothing to examination and discussion of substantive issues, such as the need to come up with an adequate conceptual framework to describe the encounter between the West and the more or less loose network of groups associated with al-Qaeda that endorse terror as a means to their ends. Neither the war nor the law-and-order metaphor provides an appropriate categorization or adequate approach to address the threat posed by groups that have taken credit for and celebrated the killing of many innocent people, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and no doubt even some atheists among them.

Chomsky says, “We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic,” as if our response to this hypothetical situation makes for an ipso facto repudiation of the American action against bin Laden. Were Bush to be assassinated by Iraqi commandos, the American people would on the whole react with patriotic frenzy and those in authority would lash out viciously, just as we reasonably expect bin Laden’s colleagues to strike back in any manner at their disposal, which changes nothing, because they are already pledged to strike at their foes in any manner at their disposal.

What exactly is the leader of a country attacked as the U.S. was on 9/11 supposed to do in response? We can argue about the tactics and ancillary motivations of actions taken over the past decade, but that the authorities should attempt to capture or kill individuals who planned and took credit for those attacks and affirmed their commitment to further attacks is to be expected. Whether resources allocated to the task have been expended efficiently and wisely, whether the pursuit of bin Laden and al-Qaeda has been used to justify all manner of things that are not justifiable, whether Bush, Cheney, and others are guilty of war crimes, these issues are related but tangential to the matter of whether Obama was right to order the assault that resulted in bin Laden’s death.

Further reading:

Juan Cole has long been a source of informed comment on the Middle East and American politics. His credentials as a critic of boneheaded policies undertaken by a succession of American administrations are, I think, unassailable, and his commentary strikes me as more insightful and convincing than anything from Chomsky or Hitchens. From his blog Informed Comment:

Obama and the End of Al-Qaeda:

The Arab Spring has demonstrated that the Arab masses yearn for liberty, not thuggish repression, for life, not death and destruction, for parliamentary democracy, not theocratic dictatorship. Bin Laden was already a dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War and the age of dictators in which a dissident such as he had no place in society and was shunted off to distant, frontier killing fields. The new generation of young Arabs in Egypt and Tunisia has a shot at a decent life. Obama has put the US on the right side of history in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya (where I see crowds for the first time in my life waving American flags). People might want a little help from a distance, but they don’t want to see Western troops deployed in fighting units on their soil.

If Obama can get us out of Iraq, and if he can use his good offices to keep the pressure on the Egyptian military to lighten up, and if he can support the likely UN declaration of a Palestinian state in September, the US will be in the most favorable position in the Arab world it has had since 1956. And he would go down in history as one of the great presidents. If he tries to stay in Iraq and he takes a stand against Palestine, he risks provoking further anti-American violence. He can be not just the president who killed Bin Laden, but the president who killed the pretexts for radical violence against the US. He can promote the waving of the American flag in major Arab cities. And that would be a defeat and humiliation for Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda more profound than any they could have dreamed.

Top Ten Myths about Bin Laden’s Death:

 7. Bin Laden was executed by US forces. He was not. His wife lunged at the SEALS and was shot in the leg. Then Bin Laden made threatening moves (looked as if he was going for a weapon?), and he was shot. [Having the authority to kill is not the same as being ordered to assassinate. There would certainly have been fears the house was booby-trapped or that Bin Laden had a gun somewhere on his person, so his refusal to freeze when so ordered was a serious potential threat.]

8. Bin Laden was assassinated. He was not. First of all, he was the leader of a para-statal organization that had declared war on the United States. If the US could have stormed Hitler’s bunker and taken him out, it would not have been an assassination, any more than being able to take out an enemy general on the battlefield would be. Second, the SEALs fired only when he made a threatening move, which is a form of self-defense. There is every reason to believe that the US would have preferred to take Bin Laden alive, since they could have then interrogated him about ongoing terrorism plans.

Bin Laden was Operational Leader

Also of interest:

John F. Burns, A Reporter’s Quest for Osama bin Laden, the Unholy Grail, The NewYork Times, 7 May 2011

David :: May.23.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: No Comments »