David Matthews

I have grappled with my take on the Occupy movement pretty much from its inception. One might think it would be a no-brainer to embrace mass demonstrations calling for reform of the financial system and an end to the redistribution of wealth upward. Perhaps it should be. Yet I have reservations, and they have grown with events of the passing days and weeks.

At the outset Occupy’s renunciation of leadership and disdain for concrete proposals, detail, a program, accompanied by far-fetched comparisons to the Arab Spring, gave me pause about what should have been the heartening prospect of widespread rejection of laissez-faire fundamentalism and dismissal of the empty myth that political wisdom and responsibility is ipso facto to be found in the center. Paeans were sung to a naïve anarchism endorsed by earnest individuals convinced they were part of something unique in the history of humankind. Even those who should know better seemed willfully oblivious to the courtship of incoherence and nihilism inherent in generalized protest against whatever comes to mind, shades of young Marlon Brando in The Wild One, who when asked what he was rebelling against, replied, whadda you got? Energy, enthusiasm, and idealism take us only so far. Granted, I ought not be too critical. I have been there, convinced of the rightness of my cause and purity of my heart, not a doubt in my military mind, when “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”

Occupy’s enthusiasts credit the movement with educating the public and raising awareness about an economic system gone wrong. I believe this misses the mark by just a bit. It is not so much a matter of raising public awareness as of raising the awareness of the political and media classes that people understand perfectly well that the economic system has gone way off track and more than a few among them are outraged about it. That much Occupy has contributed, and it is no small matter. The size and staying power of Occupy demonstrations across the country have gotten the attention of entrenched power. Now where do we go from here? Will Occupy’s chosen tactics, to which the movement thus far stubbornly clings, help or hinder us in getting there? Even Portland’s Willamette Week, hardly a mouthpiece of the establishment, offered more than muted criticism of Occupy with two articles appearing in this week’s edition.

Occupy Portland had countless moments of beauty, absurdity and anger. In the end, it was downright ugly.

The 39 days of occupation in Lownsdale and Chapman squares began as an idealistic statement of protesters seeking economic equality and social justice.

Within days the camp became a tent city for the homeless and mentally ill, dominated at times by trouble-seekers and drug dealers. The protest camp turned two city parks into a putrid smear of mud.

But Occupy Portland also accomplished a great deal. In a way that labor unions, academics and writers could not, the organizers raised this city’s awareness of an economic system gone devastatingly wrong. (Corey Pein and Nigel Jaquiss, Chaos to Checkmate, Willamette Week, 11/16/2011)

The Occupy movement set out to bring attention to poverty, homelessness, big banks, Wall Street and other social ills that pitted the rich against the rest of us.

It began Oct. 6 when an estimated 10,000 people marched through the city, and a small group took up residence in Chapman and Lownsdale squares. In its final hours, 38 days later, Occupy Portland saw about 4,000 people stage a rally in the early morning of Nov. 13 to prevent police from clearing away the hundreds of tents in the camp.

In between, however, the Occupy Portland leadership became mired in process and debate while the camp became a haven for the homeless, drug addicts and violent street kids. The leaders never found their public voice, nor a direction in which to take their cause. (Hannah Hoffman and Aaron Mesh, The Fall of the 420 Hotel, Willamette Week, 11/16/2011)

One strain of Occupy Portland’s thinking was voiced during a discussion between Mayor Sam Adams and Occupy members on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud:

Occupy’s Ilona Trogub suggested there was value in the encampment’s disruption of downtown business as usual.

“You have to understand what we’re doing is an extremely heavy process. It’s going to take some stepping aside from people who don’t have the energy to be in the movement but who need to be supporting it. People need to be uncomfortable with what’s going on outside their houses first, and we are bringing attention to that,” Trogub said. (April Baer, Occupy Portland and Mayor Adams Have Words, Oregon Public Broadcasting News, 11/15/2011)

The sentiment expressed by Trogub is in accord with the tenor of too many Occupy actions, which whether by design or through want of design suggest the delusion that the movement’s aims will somehow be advanced by making life more difficult for ordinary people going about their daily affairs.

Meantime, the left sees the Occupy phenomenon through rose-tinted glasses, the mass movement always just around the corner once the people come to their senses and see where their interests lie. By way of example, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, enthusiastically proclaims progressives on the move (Progressives on the march to take over Congress, Washington Post, 11/14/2011):

Wisconsin lit the spark, as workers, students, teachers and farmers occupied the state’s capitol in February and launched recall elections that sobered conservative Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his legislative allies. Occupy Wall Street turned that spark into a conflagration that swept the nation. Last week, in Ohio and Maine and even Mississippi, voters overwhelmingly rejected efforts to trample worker rights, constrict the right to vote and roll back women’s rights.

. . .

Republicans mistook Tea Party passion for majority opinion. Led by Wisconsin’s Walker and Republican “young guns” in the House, they drove an extreme agenda, championing cuts in taxes for corporations and the wealthy while savaging investment in public education and public health, assaulting worker and women’s rights, and, since they knew this wasn’t a popular agenda, systematically working to make it harder for students, minorities, the poor, and blue-collar workers to vote.

Voters recoiled — opening space for Progressive Majority [whose mission is "to elect progressive champions"] and its partners’ unprecedented effort for the 2012 elections. This isn’t just a partisan revival. Corporate interests and lobbies rent Democrats as well as Republicans.

Time will tell if vanden Heuvel is right, as I would like her to be, or if this is just another swing of an ever more wildly swinging pendulum. The people tend to be a fickle lot.

The movement’s demands are so general and far-reaching that they leave unclear exactly what the authorities could do that would lead Occupy to consider its mission sufficiently accomplished to stand down. The situation is comirplicated by a certain social dynamic that seems to be at work here. People have invested considerable commitment, time, effort, sweat, and in some instances blood to a cause from which they derive a perhaps profound sense of community and power in a world where community is hard come by and powerlessness a condition of existence. It is no wonder when they fiercely resist eviction from the encampments. The occupation of public spaces and sporadic disruption of daily life become ends in themselves for want of a better idea.

Maybe I make too much of all this. Maybe my reluctance to endorse Occupy says as much about me, my shortcomings, hesitancies, failures, as it does about the movement. Should we hold those who put themselves on the line with fortitude and valor accountable for the misdeeds of hooligans who act in their name? Are even the best among them doing anything more than tilting at windmills? Does the pointlessness of an effort negate conduct that might otherwise be admirable?

David :: Nov.20.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: 1 Comment »

The weekend passed without riot, rampage, tear gas, and other elements of a worst-case scenario, for which we should all be grateful, as Chapman and Lownsdale Squares were cleared of Occupiers whose stated intention was to remain indefinitely. Occupy Portland organizer Jim Oliver told Associated Press, “We have stood up to state power,” as demonstrators stayed in the park after the 12:01 a.m. deadline Sunday morning before being forcibly evicted later in the day. Here in Portland state power has generally been exercised with restraint throughout the occupation, notwithstanding sporadic incidents that should be investigated and, where appropriate, the culprits prosecuted, just as violence against police should be investigated and culprits prosecuted.

Where does Occupy Portland, and the Occupy movement generally, go from here? I do not see what will be accomplished if it comes to nothing more than finding an alternative public space to occupy. At the outset the Occupy movement presented a forum for people to take a stand against an economic system where a very few people make out like bandits at the expense of the general welfare and common good. The numbers and staying power of the movement confounded many and helped nudge the national dialogue away from exclusive focus on reduction of government spending and general dismantling of government as the solution to all that ails us. Occupy can claim that as a positive accomplishment.

The movement remains amorphous, determinedly renouncing leadership and articulation of a political platform or program. In the early days this made sense from a tactical standpoint to draw as many people into the movement as possible, recognizing that people begin breaking into factions and dropping away altogether the instant concrete proposals are advanced. The claim to speak for the 99 percent makes for a good slogan, but no one in our deeply divided country speaks for 99 percent of us on anything. (See Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology for results of a Pew Research Center study conducted earlier this year.)

Certain members of the punditocracy have tried to diminish Occupy by conflating it with the Tea Party, in what is at best a gross oversimplification of the nature and aims of both movements. What Occupy and the Tea Party may share is a sense of powerlessness. Occupy’s acts of defiance and sense of community offer a temporary, and ultimately I think illusory, antidote to that sense of powerlessness. This may account in part for the determination to continue occupation indefinitely, occupation for the sake of occupation, grimly staying put until somebody does something, while precisely what is to be done, by whom, and how, remains up in the air, or perhaps blowing in the wind.

Two interpretations of events that unfolded in Portland over the weekend:

• Occupy Portland: Eviction of downtown parks went exceptionally well, Mayor Sam Adams says
• What you missed . . .

David :: Nov.14.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: No Comments »

Jim Lehrer closed out the the Shields and Brooks segment of the PBS Newhour on Friday evening by asking Mark Shields and David Brooks for their thoughts about 9/11 ten years later. Brooks’ response was pretty predictable, Shields’ dissent pointed, forceful, and almost impassioned. Brooks, who enjoys a reputation as a genial, affable man and seems to be liked by everyone except me, was left glowering. Here are their responses in full:

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I mean, everyone has talked about the scars, the wars, the cost in life, and blood and the de-morale — low morale and the low position, America’s standing in the world. And so that’s pretty obvious.

I would just emphasize some of the positive things that have happened since 9/11 because of U.S. actions. Saddam is out. Gadhafi is out, not all because of U.S. actions. Taliban is out. Mubarak is out. There has been a change in the world. Al-Qaida has been destroyed. We haven’t been attacked again. And so I would say it’s at least a mixed blessing and that, after 9/11, the Middle East is in a period of turmoil, could turn out bad, could turn out good.

But given that that part of the world was in a decline, cultural, economic and political, the fact that there’s turmoil is potential good news. So, there is an upside to all the things that have happened since 9/11.

JIM LEHRER: Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: I disagree.

I think that to use 9/11 as a justification for going to war against Saddam Hussein is indefensible. It was indefensible then is indefensible against — war on Iraq and a war of occupation. The United States now has two wars of occupation 10 years later.

I think Afghanistan, you could certainly make the case, after the attack of 9/11, that that was necessary and required. There was a sense of national unity and solidarity and compassion that existed in this country after 9/11, which is gone. It’s no longer, no longer with us.

The United States’ standing in the world, that sense of solidarity with the United States and support for the United States after the terrible events of 9/11 has been allowed to go away. I agree with David about the Arab spring. And I think it is encouraging, and I — but I don’t think that going to Iraq is an instrument of it.

On the morning of 9/11/2001, I was preparing to head out for a job interview when my brother called to suggest I might want to turn on the television. There was an eeriness and irreality to what I saw next that endures in memory. I think I turned on the television just after the second tower was struck. Or was it moments before? Was I watching footage of the plane flying through the first tower as the network cut live to the attack on the second tower? Or did it all come after? One might think I would recall clearly what I saw and the sequence. Perhaps that I do not is in part because we witnessed those scenes as if live and happening in real time so many times that day and in the days that followed that what was live and what replay becomes blurred. Or maybe it is just faulty memory.

Almost immediately 9/11 assumed a place in the national mythos alongside the fourth of July, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War, the Gettysburg Address, to name a few. My use of the term “mythos” should not be taken to lessen the significance of these things, which are at once concrete and powerful symbols in the national consciousness. They are part what binds us together as a nation, fractured and fragmented as that nation is today.

My inclination is for the most part to steer clear of the public ceremonies and media coverage with which we have been inundated for the past week, while recognizing that the rituals being observed do matter, perhaps more so because in the contemporary world we have so few occasions for genuine national ritual. There is also a place for quiet and sober reflection, and it might be time, once the tenth anniversary of 9/11 is over, for that to replace some  of the massive public display that now marks our observance and remembrance of the day.

Along with the awful loss of life came a loss of innocence, the American assumption, always naïve, that we were somehow immune to the kind of assault and devastation from which no other place on earth is exempt. It might serve us well if our reflection on 9/11 includes the recognition that the attacks of that day were unique neither in perfidy nor in scale and that many people across the world suffer greatly at the hands of others. In this none of us are alone or unique.

To make this day an occasion for more than memory of our national tragedy, to include in it a sense of solidarity with others who also suffer greatly and unjustly, would in no way diminish our feeling for those who lost their lives ten years ago or for their loved ones who suffer that loss still. In whatever way we remember, our sincerity and depth of feeling will be measured less by outward manifestations, a flag pin on a lapel or a vow never to forget, and more by our actions and how we comport ourselves going forward.

David :: Sep.11.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: No Comments »

Paul Krugman calls the president’s surrender to Republicans on the debt limit a catastrophe (The President Surrenders):

Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.

It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.

In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.

Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo finds some positive aspects to the deal as he presents the good, the bad, and the ugly of of it (The Four Big Problems With — And Four Silver Linings Around — The Debt Limit Deal).

Finally, the blog The Strange Death of Liberal America suggests that talk about Tea Party influence on the Republican Party is misguided (Dysfunctional Republicans; Mythical Tea Party) and provides some good background on competing  claimaints to the Tea Party mantle:

The media continue to blame what they loosely describe as “the Tea Party” for the problem. Let me repeat one more time: there is no Tea Party, period. Any reporter who says there is is either stupid or lazy or both.

There are actually several potential claimants to the title of Tea Party and none of them like each other and all of them have questionable ties. All this was reported here last year. One group, the Tea Party Patriots has as one of its spokespeople a woman who owes back taxes and whose husband ran a company that recruited foreign workers for American jobs. The other, the Tea Party Express, is the creation of a political consulting firm.

The argument at Strange Death is that “[m]ore to fear–and to blame–for this mess are the shadowy figures like the Koch brothers and not so shadowy figures like Karl Rove who have been making their will felt behind the scenes.” The case made is certainly arguable.

David :: Aug.01.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: 1 Comment »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »