David Matthews

Barack Obama made a calculation that signing off on a very bad deal with Republican nihilists to raise the debt limit would be a lesser evil than a US government default on its debt. It is conceivable that he is correct. Just how much harm the deal will do remains to be seen, and we will see. One word that should never be used in connection with the agreement that was reached: compromise. Only a scoundrel or a halfwit could call this compromise.

The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Republicans are willing to destroy the government if they do not get what they want. Not a few among them believe destruction of the government is their mandate.

Is there a single woman or man of integrity and honor among Republicans in Congress? If there is, she is keeping a low profile these days.  Unfortunately, the nihilists represent the views of their constituents, who make up a sizable portion of the population. They want not good government but an end to government. They would have a world that is war of all against all,  nature red in tooth and claw, each man for himself, women and children too, and the devil take the hindmost. The country as it now stands is ungovernable.

The coming years will be a bad time to grow old in this country. It will be a bad time to become ill. It will be a bad time for breathing clean air and drinking clean water. It will be a bad time for parents to educate their children unless they can afford private school. It will a bad time to be anything but a rich son of a bitch.

David :: Jul.31.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: 4 Comments »

Sometimes we get lucky. Finding myself at loose ends and generally unmotivated on a Saturday afternoon, I cast about for a film. Midnight in Paris and The Tree of Life merit repeat viewings, but not so soon after the first, and nothing else playing at the usual run of theaters I frequent struck my fancy.

I knew nothing about The First Beautiful Thing beyond that it is Italian and playing at Living Room Theaters, a venue that typically offers top-notch films. No doubt I could have found a review or several online, but I never got to that. As it turns out The First Beautiful Thing is a small wonder, a sweet story about family, estrangement, and reconciliation, by turns heartbreaking and heartwarming, filled with life and love. The plot develops through cuts between present day and past, dating back to 1969, in a series of flashbacks to a middle-aged man’s memories of childhood (a review I came across refers to these as the memories of his mother, Anna, but I took those scenes to be viewed primarily through his eyes, not hers).

In the present Bruno is a discontented man who in his youth wrote poetry that showed some promise, but the promise came to nothing. Now he teaches English at a vocational school in Milan and indulges in a fondness for drugs that goes beyond the merely recreational, although he is probably correct when he insists he is not an addict. His life is not even a notable failure, just ordinary, which is worse. He tries to foul up his relationship with his girlfriend, Sandra, because he believes he is not good enough for her. Fortunately for Bruno, Sandra really is too good for him, caring for him despite his moodiness, introversion, and inability to express his feelings.

Bruno’s sister Valeria tracks him down and fetches him to Livorno to visit Anna, who has cancer and only a short time to live. Valeria carries the weight of her mother’s illness and an empty marriage to a vapid, vacuous, somewhat self-important man with whom she fell in love as a teenager. Brother and sister take their unhappiness out on each other with constant bickering. Over time, through childhood memories and coming to terms with their mother’s condition, their hard attitudes soften and the bond between them comes to light no less for Bruno and Valeria than for the audience.

As a young woman Anna was a beauty, unassuming, even a bit bashful, and seemingly unaware of her considerable charms. The family’s life takes an unconventional turn on a rainy night when she is kicked out of the house by her insecure, hot-tempered husband in a rage of unfounded jealousy. Anna takes the children and seeks refuge with her sister, who is decidedly unsympathetic to Anna’s plight, for reasons that become clear later when we learn that the sister was dating the husband when he met Anna, who was the prettier of the two and, as the sister puts it, more modern, by which she refers to attitudes about sex. Refusing to be cowed by her sister’s abusive litany of her failures and shortcomings, Anna storms out.

The family ends up that night in a cheap hotel where Anna is befriended by a paparazzo, whose lady friend of the evening is just leaving. Later the paparazzo takes her a party he attends more as tolerated crasher than invited guest and introduces her to the host, an upper-class , married gentleman who is at once smitten. The upper-class gentleman gets Anna on as an extra in a film starring Marcello Mastrioanni and puts her and the children up in a small cottage. Things inevitably go awry. Anna mangles her line of dialogue. The children are falsely accused to damaging the property where they are staying. The father/husband and sister disrupt the movie set during filming and abduct the children.

After a miserable period at the aunt’s apartment, Bruno contrives a desperate escape, and he and Valeria are reunited with their mother. Whatever happens in a life lived always on the margins, Anna rebounds, buoyed by her love for her children and a vibrant spirit. She suffers but is never laid low by despair. Not so the adolescent Bruno. Introverted, studious, always reading, he exists in a state of near-constant embarrassment brought on by his unconventional mother, their unconventional life, and of course Valeria, who is guilty mostly of being a younger sister.

As an adult Bruno is marked by a sense that his life embodies the failure of ordinariness. His is a character that is at first appealing but grows on us as we witness its mix of gently comic ineptness and underlying decency. Typical are his ineffectual attempts to score drugs, as when he feels out his nephew, a kid with a punkish haircut who plays in a band, only to have the nephew reassure him, not to worry, Uncle, the band is antidrug, not exactly the response Bruno is going for.

Virzì imbues this gentle, sweet film with a melancholy and humor that are exquisite complements to one another, and he balances that with just enough melodrama to give it some edginess that wipes away all trace of anything cloying or false. Sorrow and grief kindle love, the blossoming of unexpected relationships, and the instinct to embrace life epitomized by Anna and slowly but in the end passed on to Bruno and Valeria. The First Beautiful Thing does not bowl us over in the manner of the great films. That is okay. There is always a place for a story deftly told with characters about whom we come to care.

David :: Jul.24.2011 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

There are ample grounds for criticism of Barack Obama’s presidency. He got off on the wrong foot by drafting his economic team predominantly from Bill Clinton’s stable of deregulating fiends (see Did Barack Obama Win the New Hampshire Republican Presidential Debate? at The Strange Death of Liberal America: “What he desperately needs to do is to get rid of Geithner and company and get a new economic team—his own, not Bill Clinton’s. They are dragging him down and the sooner he realizes that the better.”). Obama’s instinct seems to be to react rather than to lead. Time after time he has yielded to the Republican narrative instead of articulating an alternative. I am speaking here in generalities. We could make our own lists of specific bad moves that have annoyed and frustrated us.

But—and this an immense “but”—Barack Obama is not the problem. Calling for his head on a platter, as some of my progressive friends are wont to do, gets us nowhere; whatever we think of Obama, the shortcomings and failures of his presidency pale by comparison with the devastation that will come down if the Republicans win the White House in 2012. The hard reality is that the votes are just not there in Congress to get better outcomes than Obama has gotten. Even during his first two years in office when the Democrats held majorities in both houses, the Republicans held sufficient votes to gum up the works on any progressive legislation. We might feel better about him had Obama adopted a different tack, but it is not likely the results would be appreciably different.

Obama inherited an economic crisis of historic magnitude and two wars of which the best that can be said is that Iraq was ill-advised and the grounds for invasion a pack of lies and Afghanistan wretchedly managed, even if one accepts that it was legitimate in the beginning as a response to the attacks of 9/11. This was coupled with an opposition determined to make him a one-term president. There must be honorable women and men of conservative inclination across the country and in Washington with whom we can reasonably disagree on policy and principle. If they exist, they are too cowed by Republican Party extremists, typified by the Tea Party, to speak out. They remained silent while the vilest calumnies were leveled against the president’s honor, integrity, patriotism, and even his legitimacy to hold the office. They remain acquiescent while discredited myths of supply-side economics are resurrected, evidence of climate change is blithely denied, public-sector employees are blamed for the nation’s fiscal woes, etc., so on and so forth, ad nauseam. Recalcitrance is a cardinal Republican virtue, just as compromise is a liberal virtue, which puts liberals at a distinct disadvantage. This is what Obama faces.

The president’s readiness to adopt Republican talking points on the deficit and the debt limit can be infuriating (see Our Republican President?). Washington Post economics columnist and MSNBC contributor Ezra Klein laid out the administration’s thinking on its approach to these issues ((In debt talks, Obama moves to the right. But Republicans won’t go there with him, Washington Post, 14 July 2011). I do not wholly buy it, but it is an argument that can be made. The following excerpts will give you an idea:

You can’t spend till you cut: The deficit is sucking the oxygen out of everything else in Washington. It’s powerful not just as an issue in and of itself, but also as a response to any significant investments the administration might propose. . . .

It’s your only shot at stimulus . . . not much, but it’s better than nothing. . . .

It’s a way to control the timing: If you strike a deal that lasts 10 years, you can backload the savings to protect the recovery over the next three or four years. If you don’t strike a deal, Republicans are likely to take out their frustrations on the 2012 appropriations. . . .

Getting President Obama reelected is important . . .

Deficit reduction is good economic policy, both now and later . . .

Now the extent to which deficit reduction is good economic policy, especially in the short run, hinges heavily on how it is done. Cutting government spending amounts in large part to putting people out of work. These are not people getting rich on your taxes and mine. Most of them are not particularly well paid. Many, like most of us, are ordinary people doing their jobs as best they can and doing their best to care for themselves and their families. The economy is not creating jobs in the private sector to which they can move. Unemployed, these former government workers will consume less. Tax revenues at federal and state levels will decline. How will this help the economy?

To break it down to a “them” and an “us,” as if an intrinsic conflict of interests is at work, is wrongheaded and pernicious. We are all part of the country. I would wager the government workforce has pretty much the same percentages of conscientious, dedicated, and talented individuals along with slackards, dunderheads, cretins, and crooks in its makeup as the private sector, and possibly fewer greedheads because the real money, even for crooks, is in the private sector, allowing for exceptions like Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, who have done remarkably well for themselves in and out of government.

The following passage by Harold Meyerson, another Washington Post columnist, is a bit beside the main point of this essay, but Meyerson makes an important point by way of explaining the fanaticism, manifest in inexorable opposition to anything Obama proposes, even when he adopts a position once taken by Republicans, that grips a significant portion, though still I hope a minority, of the country and perhaps the bulk of the Republican Party.

Republicans, to be sure, have long waged a war on government, but only now has it become an apocalyptic and total war. At its root, I suspect, is the fear and loathing that rank-and-file right-wingers feel toward what their government, and their nation, is inexorably becoming: multiracial, multicultural, cosmopolitan and now headed by a president who personifies those qualities. That America is also downwardly mobile is a challenge for us all, but for the right, the anxiety our economy understandably evokes is augmented by the politics of racial resentment and the fury that the country is no longer only theirs. That’s not a country whose government they want to pay for — and if the apocalypse befalls us, they seem to have concluded, so much the better. (Debt talks reveal the Republicans’ apocalyptic war on government, Washington Post, 12 July 2011)

The admirable conviction that honorable people of different persuasions can work together to reach accord for the good of the country, and that doing so in a spirit of compromise does not mean they have betrayed their principles, is at the heart of Obama’s approach to governance. I would not want him to abandon this conviction. One thing I would like is for him to call out the other side a bit more, as he reportedly did this week with Eric Cantor, maybe channel some Harry Truman. As Truman put it, “I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.” More of that from Obama might not give us any better immediate outcomes, but it could lay the groundwork to move the terms of the debate to a more productive place.

David :: Jul.16.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: 3 Comments »

Semi-Ambivalent Middle-Aged Male Lament #25
by Ric Vrana
Edited and with drawings by Ceylon Anderson
Published at the Independent Publishing Resource Center, Portland, Oregon, April 2011. 34 pp.
Available for purchase at St Johns Booksellers, Portland, Oregon

I should state at the outset that I bear no animus toward Ric Vrana for that little incident at the film festival last February when while waiting for the film to begin I found myself engaged in delightful conversation with a Czech woman seated next to me until he arrived, whereupon she graciously insisted on finding another seat in the crowded theater so I could sit with my friend. No, nothing could be further from my thoughts as I consider the merits of the poems that make up this little collection. She said she knew the film’s director.

The cover illustration for Ric Vrana’s Semi-Ambivalent Middle-Aged Male Lament #25 is a drawing of a smiling, naked, Buddha-ish figure brandishing a six-pack of PBR. The back cover has another drawing of the same laughing figure in the midst either of a backward tumble or a drunken sprawl. Together they call to mind the story of the eighth-century Chinese poet Meng Hau-ran.

Meng Hau-ran was a famous drinker. A government official once offered to introduce him at court, where he might get a position as a court poet.

But when the time came for him to go, a friend happened by, and they fell to drinking and talking. “Hadn’t you better be on your way?” asked the friend after a while.

“Oh, why bother,” replied Meng. “My job is to drink and enjoy myself.” (Greg Whincup, The Heart of Chinese Poetry, Doubleday (1987), p. 53).

I can scarcely imagine Ric Vrana as the court poet at any court, although I have seen him hold court many a night at open mics in basement bars, his poems marked by humor he directs as readily at himself as at others and the moral conviction of one for whom the idealism of his youth was never a thing to be left behind as he somehow balanced professional career, devoted parenthood, and a creative drive that has not flagged with the passing years. From “On My Terms”:

squandered innocence
maintained integrity
(not that anyone believes me anyway)
burned wood, money, time, the flag,
walked against the light
decided to hell with a god
that demands worship
to hell with a state
that demands allegiance

Drank a noon cocktail
took a long lunch
wrote one and a third
poems.

Vrana’s style is generally conversational, at times imagistic, accessible, and prosaic, in the manner of much contemporary American poetry. The style relies heavily on the poet’s capacity for wit, humor, and a keen eye to lift it from the realm of the mundane to be something we call poetry and not just prose with a ragged right margin. Vrana has these qualities in abundance. He is a maestro of humor who takes dead aim at our quirks, foibles, and general human foolishness.

Gregory Corso liked to say that humor is a kind of butcher with which you can get rid of a lot of garbage, a concept that Vrana grasps with a sure instinct. In “Cell Phone” he delivers ironic commentary on our abject servitude to technological toys, while in “Need a Dawg, Man” he is a bemused raconteur wryly describing an encounter in a bar with a young woman whose greeting, “You’re the man,” turns out to be a come-on to get him to take her uptight border collie off her hands.

His observations are honest, sharp, and never merely casual, as in the description of a poetry reading in  ”You Know Who You Are”:

Here we all are subversively
gathered in a group without being paid,
without getting college credits,
digging the poetry scene,
living in a country that stays inside the lines.

Culture is mostly Entertainment here.
We mainline it electronically,
consuming it at home because,
after all,
parking is just so hard to find
. . .

There follows a brief digression, which the poet acknowledges, along with acknowledging that he has lost his audience:

sitting there waiting your turn to speak,
to speak outside the lines.
But now I could say anything.
Even drop a Greek or Biblical reference,
or just leave the vague impression I did.

There’s that old guy up there again, going on . . .
What’s he talking about, protest?
Is this the sixties or something?
Love?
What’s that rat fucker got to tell me about love?

“Part of the Poem” is a poem whose subject is a clever analysis of itself, or maybe just an amusing parody of an analysis.

This is the part of the poem
that begins with a punch, some
line or two with rhythm, some
vivid imagery to draw you into a
Venus Fly Trap opening.

The next few lines initially rush
on to some metaphor or other
but it’s likely I’ll
axe it in the first revision so
it could start out being anything like
wind chimes crashing in a storm
—scratch that!

In the next stanza the narrator contemplates imposing a certain structure by breaking the poem into stanzas with the same number of lines in each.

I used to think this helped me think
but now it’s mostly to please my favorite critic
who loves to attack my “slavish devotion to form”.

All of which is prelude to

ramp up to the big finish
insert a fucking gratuitous
swear word or maybe pull
some non-sequitor surprise
out of my ass.
You may now applaud.

Indeed.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that the biographical note, penned I presume by Ceylon Anderson, contains an item that, if not a typo, leads us to wonder if this might be a somewhat embellished account of the poet’s life, perhaps the product of the prodigious and irreverent, prodigiously irreverent, if you will, imagination for which Anderson is justly notorious and much beloved.  ”Mr. Vrana was expelled from Dartmouth University in 1959 for involvement with a prostitution ring. The university has sealed their report of the incident until 2020, leaving it open to speculation for another 9 years whether Mr. Vrana was expelled for soliciting or purchasing.” I believe that in 1959 Ric Vrana would have been about seven years of age, thus quite the prodigy, in all sorts of ways.

Be that as it may, the bottom line is that Ric Vrana’s poems are a delight to read. They give pleasure and convey a sense of how life is and how things are in this world. We are grateful to Ceylon Anderson for his role in bringing these poems to print.

postscript 17 July 2011: memo from the editorial desk

I should note that I did not approach this review without bias. Ric Vrana is a friend of several years standing with whom I have had the  pleasure of sharing the stage for some of the most enjoyable poetry readings in which I have participated. A video of Ric Vrana reading his poems can be found at Oregon Literary Review First Wednesday 2009.

David :: Jul.12.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »

What is the difference between President Barack Obama and philandering, triangulating, former President Bill Clinton? As best we know Obama has not betrayed his wife. What else are we to say in the wake of the President’s wholesale adoption of the Republican narrative on the economy and the national debt? Has he checked his integrity at the door to do what he believes he must to win reelection next year? Or has John Boehner really convinced him of the rightness of the Republican line that businesses sitting on immense capital reserves are not hiring because of concern over government debt and uncertainty about taxes and regulation? We might suggest that adoption of progressive proposals on tax policy would be one way to remove uncertainty about taxes, but we will leave that aside for the nonce. The notion that the main issue for the economy is what Paul Krugman refers to as “the confidence fairy” is just less persuasive than the argument that businesses are not hiring and increasing production because there is little consumer demand for their goods and services. Yet Boehner, fine wine connoisseur Paul Ryan, and their fellow running dogs and lackeys of the megarich hold as an article of faith that lowering taxes and eliminating government regulations affecting business, especially environmental regulations, will miraculously usher in a golden age of prosperity, never mind that it already is a golden age of prosperity for the fortunate few who always make out like bandits when laissez-faire capitalism is allowed to run roughshod over the general welfare and common good. It is past time to call out as the unpatriotic scoundrels they are those who put accumulation of ever more vast amounts of personal wealth before the good of their country. As crime novelist James Lee Burke’s character Clete Purcell likes to say, “You got to take it to the dirtbags with tongs, big mon.”

Lawrence Summers, with whom I more typically find fault than agreement, is right when he says now is the time for the government to pour money, borrowed at the present low, almost nonexistent interest rates, into much-needed repair and expansion of the nation’s infrastructure. Yes, by all means, let us examine every government program for efficiency, waste, and unintended, unforeseen, and undesirable consequences. We can always do better, and we may not always be able to do everything that is desirable. But more efficient government is not what Republican antitax, laissez-faire, and libertarian extremists are after.

There is a truism in basketball that you take what the defense gives you. It is said of the great Oscar Robertson that instead of taking what the defense gave him, he took what he wanted. If the defense conceded a twenty-foot jump shot, Oscar worked to get a fifteen-foot shot. If the defense gave him the fifteen-footer, Oscar worked for a twelve-footer, and he was good enough to get it. Unlike the President, the Republicans will not settle for what the defense gives them. They always go for more. We would think that a man of Barack Obama’s intelligence would have picked up on this after two and a half years. If he has, he has failed to develop an effective counterstrategy.

“We raised the debt ceiling seven times during the Bush Administration,” [Warren] Buffett told CNBC on Thursday. Now, the Republican-controlled Congress is “trying to use the incentive now that we’re going to blow your brains out, America, in terms of your debt worthiness over time.”

. . .

“We had debt at 120 percent of the GDP, far higher than this, after World War II and no one went around threatening that we’re going to ruin the credit of the United States or something in order to get a better balance of debt to GDP.” (James Sunshine, Buffett: GOP Threatening To ‘Blow Your Brains Out’ Over Debt Ceiling, Huffington Post)

David :: Jul.10.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: No Comments »

The election of President Obama in 2008 sent a powerful message to the world that the US is capable of radically changing course when it recognizes that it is on the wrong track. But the change was temporary: his election and inauguration were the high points of his presidency. Already the reelection of President Bush had convinced me that the malaise in American society went deeper than incompetent leadership. The American public was unwilling to face harsh reality and positively asking to be deceived by demanding easy answers to difficult problems. (George Soros, My Philanthropy, The New York Review of Books, June 23, 2011)

This suspicion of the public authorities, periodically elevated to a cult by Know Nothings, States’ Rightists, anti-tax campaigners and—most recently—the radio talk show demagogues of the Republican Right, is uniquely American. It translates an already distinctive suspicion of taxation (with or without representation) into patriotic dogma. Here in the US taxes are typically regarded as uncompensated income loss. The idea that they might (also) be a contribution to the provision of collective goods that individuals could never afford in isolation (roads, firemen, policemen, schools, lamp posts, post offices, not to mention soldiers, warships, and weapons) is rarely considered. (Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, The Penguin Press (2010), p. 31)

I’ve been pissed off about Republican economic policy since I was a pup. Lately, I’m a little pissed off that Obama doesn’t seem to want to try to counter it. I’m not giving up on him. Hell, what’s the alternative? I hope that in his second term he’ll call the bastards out. (email from an old college buddy, 6/10/2011)

The President, members of Congress, and pundits alike are fond of invoking the American people when making the case for their policies and programs. The American people do not believe the problem is that they are taxed too little but that the government spends too much. The American people believe the wealthy should pay their fair share in taxes. The American people do not believe that cuts in Social Security should be part of a plan to balance the budget.

Is there any such thing as the American people? What is the American people but at best a convenient fiction or rhetorical device and at worst gross hyperbole? The notion of an American people implies at least a common ground and shared sense of purpose that we are hard-pressed to find in the social and political landscape of our time?

Our fractured and fractious Congress represents a fractured and fractious electorate. This is not a uniquely modern development. It is inherent in the system the Founding Fathers bequeathed us, as noted here by historian Bernard Bailyn:

The whole of the Constitution, The Federalist made clear, was a great web of tensions, a system poised in tense equilibrium like the physical systems Newtonian mechanics had revealed. Administration within and among departments of free governments, [James] Madison wrote, will have both the “means and the personal motives to resist the encroachments of the others . .  . Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The organized competition of “opposite and rival interests” that is built into the Constitution, he believed, reflects “the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.” Pressures exerted at one point would activate rebalancing responses elsewhere; and it was in this mechanism of tense equilibria that Madison placed his hopes of protecting minorities from the impact of majoritarian rule.

If for [Alexander] Hamilton the main problem was to convince a reluctant people that creating a centralized power complete with an army, commercial regulation, and taxation was both necessary and safe, for Madison the principal and much subtler problem was how to protect minority groups and individuals from the domination of majorities in control of a powerful, freely elected government. On the face of it, the problem was unsolvable: both legislative majoritarianism and private rights were ultimate values in free societies, and surely they contradicted each other. How could they coexist? One or the other would have to prevail: a choice was inescapable. But Madison refused to choose between them, and struggled to resolve the dilemma. (Bernard Bailyn, “The Federalist Papers,” in To Begin the World Anew, Alfred A. Knopf ( 2003), p. 121).

Madison refused to choose between them, and struggled to resolve the dilemma, a dilemma that remains unresolved, perhaps in principle insoluble, except by the kind of makeshift  compromises, seldom more than partly adequate, that have marked the nation since its inception.

The political typology study recently presented by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, based on surveys conducted earlier in 2011, sorts Americans into cohesive groups based on values, political beliefs, and party affiliation (Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology). The study confirms conventional wisdom that both major political tend toward homogenous extremes, the Republicans more so than the Democrats, while throwing cold water on the fetishization of the center fashionable in certain circles of pundits and policy wonks.

With the economy still struggling and the nation involved in multiple military operations overseas, the public’s political mood is fractious. In this environment, many political attitudes have become more doctrinaire at both ends of the ideological spectrum, a polarization that reflects the current atmosphere in Washington.

Yet at the same time, a growing number of Americans are choosing not to identify with either political party, and the center of the political spectrum is increasingly diverse. Rather than being moderate, many of these independents hold extremely strong ideological positions on issues such as the role of government, immigration, the environment and social issues. But they combine these views in ways that defy liberal or conservative orthodoxy (italics mine).

The Pew typology shakes out like this:

• Mostly Republican
  • Staunch Conservatives, highly engaged Tea Party members
  • Main Street Republicans, conservative on major issues
• Mostly Independent
  • Libertarians, free market, small government seculars
  • Disaffecteds, downscale and cynical
  • Post-moderns, moderates but liberal on social issues
• Mostly Democratic
  • New Coalition Democrats, upbeat, majority-minority
  • Hard-pressed Democrats, religious, financially struggling
  • Solid Liberals, across-the-board liberal positions
• Bystanders, young, politically disengaged

Somewhat surprisingly, Solid Liberals make up the largest subgroup on both counts, at 14 percent of the general public and 16 percent of registered voters. The other subgroups among the two parties and independents range from 9 to 13 percent of the general public and 9 to 15 percent of registered voters. Bystanders are 10 percent of the general public and 0 percent of registered voters; they “largely consign themselves to the political sidelines” and for the most part are not included in the Pew analysis.

Independents are 33 percent of the general public and 35 percent of registered voters, and as the Pew study points out, they “have played a determinative role in the last three national elections.” Their numbers make them significant, but they have little in common aside from their avoidance of partisan labels. They are not a bloc but a hodgepodge.

Libertarians and Post-Moderns are largely white, well-educated and affluent. They also share a relatively secular outlook on some social issues, including homosexuality and abortion. But Republican-oriented Libertarians are far more critical of government, less supportive of environmental regulations, and more supportive of business than are Post-Moderns, most of whom lean Democratic.

Disaffecteds, the other main group of independents, are financially stressed and cynical about politics. Most lean to the Republican Party, though they differ from the core Republican groups in their support for increased government aid to the poor. Another group in the center, Bystanders, largely consign themselves to the political sidelines and for the most part are not included in this analysis.

Those who look to the center for solutions associate it with pragmatism and common-sense political wisdom not to be found among those dismissed as belonging to one extreme or the other. The Pew survey indicates, however, that “center,” even the Pew’s more nuanced designation “diverse center,” is a misnomer and perhaps outright incoherent if it amounts to nothing more than a simplistic designation for people who disdain affiliation with the two major political parties.

Alexander Hamilton could well be describing our present when he writes of the debate over the proposed Constitution:

. . . we have already sufficient indication that it will happen in this as in all former cases of great national discussion. A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose. To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and by the bitterness of their invectives. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of the danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of violent love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is too apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interests can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants. (The Federalist No. 1)

I take Hamilton to be right in his assertion that the interests of government and liberty can never be separated and his warning that the road to despotism is more often paved by demagogic appeals to the people than “zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.” This does not preclude recognition that tension between government and liberty, between legislative majoritarianism and private rights, cannot be resolved or dismissed. Where does this leave us as citizens in terms of what policies, politicians, and movements we should support? In Ill Fares the Land Tony Judt makes an impassioned and persuasive case for social democracy informed by belief  “in the possibility and virtue of collective action for the collective good,” arguing  “that government can play an enhanced role in our lives without threatening our liberties.” How though do we get there from where we now stand? Is it possible to find enough common ground to cobble together a majority social democratic coalition on even an ad hoc, issue-by-issue basis? How dire are the consequences if it is not?

David :: Jul.08.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: No Comments »