Granfalloon Junction

Three Scandals or One?

2005-11-06T22:07:00.000-08:00

In the fifth year of George W. Bush's presidency, three great storm clouds have come piling up from the recent past to converge in the present, and throw the deepest possible shadow over the future.

The first cloud is of course the scandal surrounding the disclosure of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, in connection with which the Vice President's Chief of Staff, I. Lewis Libby, was recently indicted, and the President's own closest advisor, Karl Rove, remains in possible legal jeopardy.

The second cloud is that which swirls around the question of whether the Bush administration knowingly distorted intelligence in making its case for war against Saddam Hussein, thereby creating the impression of an imminent threat where none existed--a question recently given new life by, among other things, Sen. Harry Reid's bold use of Senate Rule 21 to force the majority to undertake a promised, but never-delivered, Intelligence Committee investigation of the matter.

The third cloud shadowing the Bush presidency is one that first appeared on the scene with the Abu Ghraib revelations in April 2004, and that has gained new urgency from such events as the disclosures regarding prisoner abuse by Capt. Ian Fishback of the 82nd Airborne, and the recent revelation of a CIA-run network of secret prisons abroad.

The betrayal of Valerie Plame, the distortion of pre-war intelligence, the torture of prisoners: Each of these scandals has, by itself, the potential to damage the Bush presidency deeply enough, that nothing short of an internal coup--along the lines of what Howard Baker did for Ronald Reagan's second term in the wake of Iran-Contra--will save it.

Is there anything of substance connecting the three scandals? Do they share a common root?

That we cannot know--at least not yet. For each of the three scandals is surrounded by its own firewall. Mr. Libby, as John Dean recently remarked, is the firewall for Mr. Cheney--or, at least, what Patrick Fitzgerald's five indictments allege to be Libby's systematic program of deception is acting as a barricade to prevent Mr. Fitzgerald from following the trail of Valerie Plame's exposure wherever in the administration it might lead. If Mr. Libby knew that George W. Bush would not be in a position to extend to him, in the event of a conviction, the same courtesy that George H. W. Bush extended to the Iran-Contra conspirators, this might concentrate his mind more on his own fate. But Mr. Bush seems unlikely to let Mr. Libby feel thus abandoned, so long as the firewall stays in good repair.

The situation is even less promising in the other two cases, for there we have no special prosecutor to test the resilience of the firewalls. On the question of torture, it is true, Sen. McCain is making himself troublesome to the administration and its loyal defenders in the House majority. But Sen. McCain is asking only that the administration disavow torture from now on. He has 90 votes in the Senate for that, but he does not have 90 votes for getting the administration to come clean about who is responsible for the torture that has already happened. On that question, the firewall is probably manned by reliable majorities in both houses.

Sen. Reid, meanwhile, has certainly shown that the Senate minority is not without weapons of its own, and he has successfully deployed one of these to compel at least a formal resumption of the stalled-then-abandoned investigation into the politicization of pre-war intelligence. But Sen. Reid's arsenal cannot contain many more weapons like that one, and the majority knows this. Moreover, his Rule 21 gambit succeeded largely through the element of surprise, and the majority is unlikely to be taken unawares a second time. It remains to be seen whether his threat created enough fear to force from the majority more than token adherence to the promise of completing a genuine investigation into how intelligence was used (and misused) in the run-up to the war.

Under these circumstances, it will hard enough for any one scandal to be traced to its ultimate source, much less for the links between any two, or all three, to be disclosed. If I were to guess, I would say that all roads, in the end, lead back to what Col. Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, has called the "cabal" centered around Dick Cheney. At least, it very much looks as if the "Team B" mentality, with which the Vice President has long been associated--contempt for regular military and intelligence institutions and procedures, belief that real power should be in the hands of parallel institutions staffed by trusted hawks-- has dominated the administration's foreign policy agenda. It might fall to historians, more than to contemporaries, to test that intuition.

Whatever the actual connections between them, however, these three embarrassments are now crystallizing into a unified scandal more powerful than any since Watergate. And as in Watergate, the disparate elements of super-scandal are held in concentric orbits by the inescapable gravity of a war gone bad--or rather, of an administration's failed wager concerning such a war.

Nixon wagered his presidency on the idea that he could extract the country from Vietnam by drawing down troops while unleashing more and wider-ranging violence on the enemy. This was the real "secret plan" to end the war, on the promise of which he had campaigned. The draw-down would placate a home front that had, at the very least, lost faith in the government's predictions of imminent success. The redoubled destruction, meanwhile, would make the North Vietnamese pliant at the bargaining table, out of fear of what "crazy" Nixon would do next.

Nixon lost that wager because neither the Vietnamese enemy nor the American people responded as he had hoped they would. The former proved endlessly resilient, and the latter proved unwilling to overlook that fact--or to forgive Nixon for not having reckoned with it. The more obvious it became that the wager had been a bad one, the more Nixon staked on it, lashing out both publicly and clandestinely at all those who raised their voices in protest at the ever-rising losses. Watergate is the name history ultimately gave to the secret portions of that organized lashing-out.

George W. Bush placed his own wager in the spring and summer of 2002. The spontaneous upwelling of national unity following 9-11 had given him an unprecedented amount of what he likes to call "political capital," and he was determined to use it to make even more. But Bush's political capital of 2002 was, like Nixon's of 1969, highly leveraged. Bush was betting that a splendid little war would silence critics who pointed to the absence of an imminent threat, or of a connection between Hussein and the perpetrators of 9-11, or of substantial international support. Even more, regime change in Iraq, charter member of the "axis of evil," would transform the War on Terror into the political equivalent of World War II--and Bush himself into a sort of right-wing FDR.

Like Nixon, Bush's initial wager was consumed by the uncertainties of war. And like Nixon, he has responded to bruising losses by throwing good coin after bad. It was bad enough to have exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq in order to get us into the war; it was worse yet to let panic about the war's course take over administration policy, driving it to an increasingly flagrant and widespread use of torture abroad, and an increasingly ruthless program of character assassination of the war's critics here at home. The former gave us Abu Ghraib and the other torture scandals, the latter gave us the exposure of Valerie Plame as a means to bury Joe Wilson.

One of the things that set Watergate apart from the typical Washington scandal was how what began with the disclosure of a seemingly small-bore bit of political skullduggery--the famous third-rate burglary--ultimately precipitated the unveiling of an entire political demimonde of force and fraud underlying the Nixon presidency.

In that respect, it is starting to look like 1973 all over again.

GOP Governing Philosophy

2005-09-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

The original intent of Federal disaster assistance is to supplement State and local response efforts. Many are concerned that Federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective State and local risk management. Expectations of when the Federal Government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level. We must restore the predominant role of State and local response to most disasters. Federal assistance needs to supplement, not supplant, State and local efforts.

Having Federal assistance supplement, not supplant State and local efforts is, most likely, going to be one of the more difficult measures aimed at responsibility and accountability that this Administration will have to work through.

-- Joe M. Allbaugh, Bush crony and unqualified political hack, who preceded equally unqualified political hack Micheal Brown (his ~~former college roommate~~ good friend and handpicked successor), as director of FEMA, testifying before Congress in 2001.

Shorter GOP governing philosophy: Don't do anything right for the people, it only encourages them.

Harold Meyerson covers the longer version here.

UPDATE: The Shrill One is on the case as well. Best line: "Why did the administration make the same mistakes twice? Because it paid no political price the first time." Or, to translate for the benefit of Washington journalists, "pointing the finger," now, means saving American lives, the next time these jokers have to deal with a national emergency.

SECOND UPDATE: It seems that even the normally somnambulant New York Times editorial board has taken to sounding something like the Executive Committee of the Liberal Conspiracy that wingnuts always imagine it to be: "Political patronage has always been a hallmark of Washington life. But President Bill Clinton appointed political pals at FEMA who actually knew something about disaster management." The Times editorial board, comparing Bush unfavorably to--Clinton? Maybe the apocalypse really is upon us.

Excuses, Excuses (and Lies)

2005-09-03T23:54:00.000-07:00

Josh Marshall reads the WaPo article describing how the White House is engaged in a full-scale effort to shift blame for the slow, woefully inadequate emergency response to Katrina onto the backs of state and local officials. Apparently, the original "Who knew?" excuse just wasn't cutting it, so now they're rolling out this new and improved model. Or as Josh puts it:

Now at least we have the storyline. The Bush administration wasn't caught sleeping on the job while New Orleans went under with a gutted FEMA run by a guy who got fired from his last job policing horse shows. In fact, according to the new White House storyline, the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans didn't ask for help quickly enough. And the White House was powerless to act until they did. Apparently they couldn't even reschedule the president's vacation until the locals got the right forms signed.

Unfortunately for the career of this latest excuse, AmericaBlog is ready with this reality check, drawn straight from the White House's own August 27th press release on "Federal Emergency Assistance for Louisiana," which reads, in part:

The President today declared an emergency exists in the state of Louisiana...

The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population...

Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency...

The 27th was the Saturday before Katrina hit. So which is it? Was the President overstepping his constitutional authority on Saturday the 27th? Or is the White House currently engaged in a campaign of organized lying to cover up the federal government's mismanagement of a disaster relief effort it was duly authorized to coordinate?

UPDATE: Over at TPM Cafe, nascardaughter has dug up the actual legal criteria that govern DHS/FEMA involvement. There's little doubt they were met in this case. No more excuses, indeed.

SECOND UPDATE: (Via Atrios) Pamela Leavey at The Democratic Daily reads the same WaPo article that Josh did and finds that, despite its overall critical tone, it contains at least one uncritically recycled, baldfaced lie from an anonymous Bush administration official, to wit:

As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.

Pamela Leavey conclusively demonstrates that this claim is utterly false, simply by linking to both the official state declaration of emergency [PDF], dated the 26th, and the letter Gov. Blanco sent to Bush [PDF] on the 28th, informing him that a state emergecy had been declared, and asking him to make the appropriate federal declaration (which, as we have seen, he subsequently did, on the 27th).

This raises the questions: Why did the Washington Post reporters and editors accept, at face value, and then publish, in their newspaper, a plainly politically self-serving, anonymous leak from an administration official, rather than doing the very minimal fact checking that would have been required to determine that the leak was a baldfaced lie? And: What is the WaPo going to do now, to redress such a flagrant instance of journalistic and editorial malpractice?

I won't be holding my breath.

Epidemic of Real Journalism Continues to Rage in Wake of Katrina

2005-09-03T22:59:00.000-07:00

Headlines on the Washington Post homepage, September 3, 2005, 11:00 PM PST:

Thousands Await Help, While Feds Shift Blame

What Went Wrong: Disarray at the Top Despite 9/11

The latter article, in particular, by Susan B. Glasser and Josh White, is unflinching in calling failure by its proper name, and calling bullshit on official ass-covering.

Okay: Who are these people and what have they done with the gentle courtiers of the Washington press corps?

Who Knew?

2005-09-01T22:24:00.000-07:00

I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.

President George W. Bush, Interview with Diane Sawyer
ABC's Good Morning America, Sept. 1, 2005

It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as ifthey were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented airconditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.

But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead onthe city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however--the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level--more than eight feet below in places--so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million peoploe were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't--yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City.

Joel K. Bourne, Jr., "Gone With the Water"
National Geographic Magazine, October 2004

In Bush's defense, I guess you could say that the National Geographic story was a sort of "historical document." Oh wait--they used that one already, didn't they?

UPDATE: Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff is also on message. Unfortunately for him, it seems that the mainstream media's tolerance level for baldfaced lying has finally been breached (or was it just overflowed?) by the category five BS coming out of official Washington this week, resulting in a veritable flood of actual journalism, as evidenced by this CNN lede:

Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur.

But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years.

Do You Know What it Means?

2005-08-31T22:54:00.000-07:00

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
And miss it each night and day
I know I'm not wrong, the feeling's getting stronger
The longer I stay away

Miss the moss-covered vines, tall sugar pines
Where mockingbirds used to sing
I'd love to see that old lazy Mississippi
Hurrying into Spring

The moonlight on the bayou
A Creole tune that fills the air
I dream about magnolias in bloom
And I'm wishin I was there

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
When that's where you left your heart
And there's one thing more, I miss the one I care for
More than I miss New Orleans

Words By Louis Alter
Music by Eddie DeLange
Recorded by Louis Armstrong, 1947

More here and here, from Syntax of Things, and also here, from fauxreal, over at Moon of Alabama. All of which I submit, in place of an argument, against the sort of thinking that could come up with a response like this.

Wes Clark on Iraq

2005-08-29T21:29:00.000-07:00

Gen. Wesley Clark has followed up his excellent Washington Post Op-Ed ("Before It's Too Late in Iraq"), as well as the interesting online discussion that ensued, with his first guest blog post over at TPM Cafe. The main subject in all three cases is the General's proposed "success strategy" for Iraq. My own summary of the first day's commentary by Cafe habitués--the good, the bad and the silly--is here.

Realism and Democratic Foreign Policy

2005-08-20T19:18:00.000-07:00

John Ikenberry has an interesting and useful post up at TPM Cafe that touches on the relationship between "liberal" and "realist" schools in international relations theory and current orientations among Republican and Democratic policy makers. It struck me as a useful corrective to the utterly obsolete view that Dems are the stary-eyed idealists, and Republicans the hard-headed realists, when it comes to questions of power and foreign affairs. Anyone who still thinks this is the case, has been asleep for the last four years.

My comment elaborating on the point is here. Cafe denizen Dan K's thoughts on the matter are also worth checking out.

The World's Best Bassless Rock Band Hearts Fender Amps

2005-08-10T21:11:00.000-07:00

Guitar Player has an interesting interview with Sleater-Kinney about their new, apparently quite heavy album (The Woods), in the course of which Corin Tucker gives her vintage Fender Showman some major props:

GUITAR PLAYER: Corin, how do you manage to fill up so much low-frequency space without being a bass player?

TUCKER: My ’65 blackface Fender Showman is the absolute best amp for holding down the bottom end of the sonic spectrum in this band. That amp is the key to the versatility of my sound. It’s super heavy, flexible, and it has a really low, bassy sound.

If I were a marketing VP at Fender, I'd cut Corin a hefty check right now. You can't buy PR like that. In fact, as it turns out, lead guitarist Carrie Brownstein is into Fender amps now too. She's also got a mean collection of pedals:

GUITAR PLAYER: Carrie, what’s your setup?

BROWNSTEIN: I was using a Vox AC30 up until we recorded the new record, when I switched to a ’64 blackface Fender Super Reverb because I wanted more versatility. The Vox is overpowering. It’s very loud on stage, and although it has a grittiness that I love, the midrange is really pronounced. I feel like the Fender fills out the highs and lows a little better, and it’s a much warmer amp than the Vox.

My main guitar is a 1972 Gibson SG, and I also have a ’78 Guild with a Bigsby. The Guild is kind of brittle and “garage-y,” and the SG has a real warm sound. As far as pedals go, I have a Maestro fuzz, a Boss BD-2 Blues Driver, a Z.Vex Super Hard On, and a Roland AD-50 DoubleBeat—which produces some of the most blown-out fuzz distortion I’ve ever heard.

GUITAR PLAYER: The Super Hard On is an ironic pedal name for a female guitarist.

BROWNSTEIN: Yeah. Every time I set that one up on stage it prompts endless jokes from the front row.

George W. Bush, Philosopher

2005-08-03T23:41:00.000-07:00

Kudos to John Cole over at Balloon Juice, for parting company with Bush so decisively over the latter's massively stupid (or massively cynical--take your pick) endorsement of the teaching of so-called "Intelligent Design" alongside Evolution. Says Cole:

Intelligent Design in a religion class--fine. Intelligent design in a philosophy class--fine. Intelligent Design in science classes? Not fine.

That's a pretty sound position. I would like to add, however, that the proper place for "Intelligent Design" in a philosophy class would not exactly be a place of honor, either.

The argument does indeed have a philosophical pedigree, and a pretty long one at that. But it is chiefly remembered, these days, as one of the arguments that Hume blasted to smithereens over two centuries ago, leaving behind a smoldering pile of intellectual rubble. In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume puts the Argument from Design in the mouth of Cleanthes, and gives the most devastating criticisms of that argument to Philo, the skeptic.

Cleanthes tries to maintain that the material world, with its fantastic combination of order and complexity, somehow proves the existence and character of its Creator. Philo correctly identifies this as an anthropomorphic argument from analogy (just as the human mind is the author, or cause, of such artifacts as buildings and watches, so too the Divine Mind must be the Author, or Cause, of the natural order as a whole, of Being). He then proceeds to shatter the analogy with a barrage of counter-arguments, the two most powerful of which are:

1. That the Argument from Design commits the fallacy of composition--of assuming that what is true of a part (of creation) must be true of the whole. It assumes, without warrant, that the human mind is to the material on which it works, as God is to the cosmos. But, as Philo says, "What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?" Why should the part of creation that is the human mind, in its relation to the limited number of things that can be considered that mind's artifacts, be treated as the template for the way causality works in the world at large?

2. That the Argument from Design is arbitrary in stopping where it does (with an ideal/mental world being the cause of a material world), because, if you take its premises seriously, there is no reason that an ideal/mental world should not itself have a cause. And with that, you have an infinite regress (turtles all the way down): "Have we not the same reason to trace that ideal world into another ideal world, or new intelligent principle? But if we stop, and go no further, why go so far? Why not stop at the material world? How can we satisfy ourselves wihout going on ad infinitum?"

The perception of the world as a glorious design that bespeaks the hand of its Designer is, like the perception that human beings both do and don't fit harmoniously into this design (both are and are not made for it), so commonplace that it seems to be almost a part of human nature. But it is not, for that reason, a proof of, or argument for anything--least of all for the existence of a creator, or the methods of creation. And the minute one tries to make it a proof, one ends up discrediting the very thing one was trying to establish. (Putting an end to that kind of thing is one way to describe the philosophical project Kant undertook after Hume--so the story goes--awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.)

Every Frog March Begins With a Single Step

2005-07-11T22:42:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time in coming. Twenty-one months ago, in one of my rare fits of optimism, I wrote the following about the Plame affair:

During the Clinton years, we got used to more-or-less constant pseudo-scandals -- great waves of public disgrace signifying nothing. These were of course topped off by a single, authentic scandal. But even that exception proved the rule, as the story of one very public middle-aged man's entanglement in a very private moral snare was overwhelmed by the sheer size and volume of the scandal machinery deployed to exploit his personal failing for partisan gain.

So it comes as something of a shock to be confronted with the real thing, probably for the first time since Iran-Contra, and it's perhaps understandable that most journalists have had a hard time getting their bearings. They are, after all, out of practice handling the real thing. But that is where we are.

After some initial confusion (much of it intentionally sewn by administration apologists) the basics of the story are now completely clear for all to see: At least two top White House officials repeatedly disclosed the identity of an undercover CIA officer, in probable violation of federal law, in order to punish and/or discredit an influential critic of the administration's Iraq policy.

Early efforts to tone down the story were doomed by the facts: According to several sources, the CIA officer in question is apparently a career spy who has worked under the deepest level of cover. Her work focused on the very issue (WMD proliferation) that the administration hyped as their rationale for speeding to war in Iraq, and the CIA itself has formally notified the Justice Department that national security was in fact compromised by the revelation of her identity. The officials who revealed it were both highly placed and quite deliberate in their efforts to get the story out. Finally, there is nothing remotely routine about this particular kind of leak (that of a covert officer's identity) -- least of all originating from the White House.

I do not see how this can now stop short of high administration officials being questioned under oath (and probably under the gaze of television cameras) about their involvement. Because the Democrats do not control any of the relevant investigative machinery, it is possible that the day of reckoning may be put off for a while. (If Bush holds on to win reelection, '04 may prove to be his '72.) But once the process begins, the incentives for more disclosures -- whether anonymously to the press (Deep Throat) or publicly to the investigators (John Dean) -- is likely to become overwhelming.

Will it bring the administration down? This depends on how much of a house cleaning (if any) Bush is willing and able to do, and how soon he does it (if at all). The longer he waits, the worse will be the eventual revelations, for the closer they will come to the presidency. At the limit of recklessness (or assuming there is already an evidentiary trail that leads straight to the top, one that is too well established to permit of erasure), the administration will bring itself down -- exactly as Nixon's did.

I am pretty sure this is the beginning of the end.

In retrospect, I ought to have closed with Churchill's old line: "This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning." For that's what the original Plame revelation has proved to be: the end of that first phase of the Bush administration's grand snow job regarding the Iraq war, during which no potentially fatal public mistakes had yet been committed in the effort to cover up the fundamental chicanery of the whole project.

By that schedule, we might only now be reaching the beginning of the end -- the phase when the normally-somnabulent Washington Press corps rouses itself, shakes off its collective professional stupor and begins to realize that, on this matter (as indeed on nearly everything touching the Iraq war), they have been played for fools. At least that is what Garance Franke-Ruta and Kevin Drum think, while both Digby and Yglesias are, for different reasons, quite a bit more pessimistic.

Franke-Ruta and Drum have on their side the fact that today's blistering White House press gaggle, following upon the Newsweek revelation (that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper's source) triggered a rare trifecta of homepage headlines in both The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as an actual piece of critical journalism from the often-obsequious AP.

I, too, would like to believe that this one good day portends many more to come -- that the floodgates of critical press scrutiny will at last swing wide. But I fear that Yglesias is probably right:

"The issues here, fundamentally, run much deeper than the subjective attitudes of the press corps vis-à-vis the White House. It has to do with the conception of journalism as primarily a stenographic activity, concerned with duly recording official statements and, perhaps, balancing those statements with contradictory quotations from official or quasi-official members of the opposition."

For the time being, therefore, I am pinning my hopes, not on any sudden change in professional self-conception on the part the Washington press, but rather on Mr. Fitzgerald, his Grand Jury, and his subpoena power. Until and unless the Democrats can win control of the House in '06 (so far still an unlikely prospect, given the system of incumbent protection), this is the only game in town -- and by far the most likely source of continuing pressure on the press to begin probing the manifold web of lies whereby the country was led down a pre-determined path to unprovoked war.

And that, let us never forget, is what the Plame affair is all about. It is the most prominent of many loose hanging threads which, if pulled sufficiently far, could unravel the entire dark, knotted history of what Mark Danner has called "the secret way to war." As Danner reminds us:

Whether or not the Downing Street memo could be called a "smoking gun," it has long since become clear that the UN inspections policy that, given time, could in fact have prevented war—by revealing, as it eventually would have, that Saddam had no threatening stockpiles of "weapons of mass destruction"—was used by the administration as a pretext: a means to persuade the country to begin a war that need never have been fought.

The crime behind the crime, in other words, is perhaps the highest crime the executive of a democratic country can commit -- namely, deceiving his own people in order to make war, not for their necessity, but at his pleasure.

For the leak of Plame's identity was a naked attempt by the White House to discredit Joe Wilson's public airing of his finding that the Niger uranium story -- so instrumental to the Bush case for war -- was transparently false. As Josh Marshall and others have reminded us, behind the attack on Wilson's public unmasking of the Niger yellowcake hoax stand the forged documents themselves -- the ones that launched that hoax to begin with. And, we might add, alongside those documents sits the putative "evidence" of the aluminum tubes that proved not to be appropriate for uranium enrichment, and all the tall tales of "curveball" regarding Iraqi WMD, not a single one of which proved to be true.

The attack on Wilson was not simply an ad hoc response, however ruthless and possibly even illegal, to a particularly troublesome administration critic. It was instead part of a systematic cover-up of the process whereby, in the words of the Downing Street Memo, the pre-war "intelligence and facts" had been "fixed around the policy" of regime change in Iraq.

This, and not simply the legal culpability of Karl Rove in this single incident (bad as that is), is the real quarry here -- just as the real quarry in Watergate wasn't mere legal culpability for the famous "third-rate burglary" but an entire mechanism of force and fraud aimed at supressing domestic opposition to the continuation of a bitterly unpopular war, deceitfully and unjustly begun. And Nixon of course did not launch his war, but rather inherited it; the Bush administration is, in this respect, like the worst of Johnson and Nixon combined.

Only time will tell if a quarry of that size can be brought to bay without an opposition party being in control of at least part of the federal government. But I tend to think that it can not be. So even if this is the beginning of the end, we still have a long, long way to go before we reach that end.

City Air Makes Free

2005-07-08T02:00:00.000-07:00

On a day when every decent person in the world is a Londoner, London Mayor Ken Livingstone speaks for all of us:

I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion, or whatever.

That isn’t an ideology, it isn’t even a perverted faith - it is just an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder and we know what the objective is. They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other. I said yesterday to the International Olympic Committee, that the city of London is the greatest in the world, because everybody lives side by side in harmony. Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved and that is why I’m proud to be the mayor of that city.

Finally, I wish to speak directly to those who came to London today to take life.

I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others - that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail.

In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.

They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.

American Patriotism

2005-07-04T20:42:00.000-07:00

For his Independence Day post, Billmon writes a moving elegy for American patriotism, half-disguised as a repudiation of it. The disguise isn't very convincing. Only someone for whom the American idea still exercises a powerful attraction would bother to write words like these:

But hatred and revenge are patriotism's curse, not its justification. When Lincoln spoke of "mystic cords of memory" and urged his countrymen to put their common heritage ahead of their political divisions, he wasn't appealing to their tribal loyalties, but their loyalty to an ideal: democratic government under the law. If American patriotism has any claim to be an exception to the general run of blind national chauvinism, it has to be found in that idea. If America is to be an exceptional nation, one worth glorifying above all others, it has to be because of the quality of her justice and the strength of her democracy -- not because of the language she speaks, or the God she worships or the color of her skin. And not because of her material wealth or military power or imperial ambitions. Least of all those.

Pat Buchanan and I agree on very few things, but he wrote something many years ago that I can endorse wholeheartedly: "America was a great country before she was a rich country." In many ways a greater country, I would probably add -- not because she was poor (if you've seen real poverty, Third World poverty, you know there's nothing to admire about it) but because she stood a little less apart from the rest of humanity, and had to rely a little more heavily on the promises inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, rather than power of her aircraft carriers, to impress the world.

It's hardly surprising, of course, that such ardent patriotism will occasionally wish itself out of existence, as when Billmon prefaces these remarks by saying, "I'm not a big fan of patriotism, at least not as most Americans understand the word. Patriotism is just another word for nationalism...." No, it isn't, and the long passage I just quoted proves that Billmon knows it isn't -- as does that anguished qualifier, "at least as most Americans understand the word." This is not a repudiation, but a stifled plea for renewal.

Nor is that mood anything new. The truest American patriots have often been close to the edge of despair -- and often enough over it. And since the standard raised at our birth was nothing less than a promise of the extraordinary made ordinary -- of that rarest and most fragile of historical flowers, political liberty, made the common possession of all human kind -- the so-to-speak objective case for despair has always been strong. James Baldwin once said that he could not possibly dispute what Malcom X was telling his followers about the reality of race in America -- that any alternative to the future being offered by Malcom had to begin with the acknowledgment that he was speaking a long-supressed truth about the American past and present.

Any country, moreover, that had a birth knows it can die and therefore, as Stanley Cavell once remarked, "feels mortal." In other words, both America's existence and its identity are always subject to doubt, and the one because of the other -- hence its unquenchable need for, and suspicion of, dissent. Hannah Arendt, writing about the crises of the Republic at the bitter end of the sixties, once called dissent "the hallmark of free government" because "one who knows that he may dissent knows also that he somehow consents when he does not dissent."

The social contract, in other words, is no mere harmless abstraction here, but a considerable existential-political burden. As Mark Danner recently put it, "Finding yourself forced to see the gulf between what you are told about the world... and what you yourself can't help but understand about that world -- this is not always a welcome kind of vision to have." Americans are a people whose founding and subsequent history forces such a vision upon them. And since we are so often unequal to that vision (how could we not be?), we will often be found refusing it, with modes of refusal that run the gamut from the merely ridiculous to the astonishingly destructive.

But, from time to time, we do embrace the vision, without reservation or evasion. And at such times, we admit to ourselves exactly what Billmon (almost) says: that without a dedication to enacting the ideal of "democratic government under law," there would be no such thing as American patriotism -- and then our love of country really would amount to nothing better than one more tribal nationalism among others, no more to be admired, and (because of our enormous power) far more to be feared, than most. And this outcome, of course, is one possible destination for America, and one that always has its advocates among us. American patriotism, we might say, is never a given for us, but rather a possibility we must continually struggle to keep alive.

That, at least, is how I read the following words of Lincoln's, given before Independence Hall in Philadelphia, in February of 1861, as this greenest of presidents elect was making his way to Washington, to assume the leadership of a Republic teetering on the brink of Civil War -- a war over the question of what it means to be an American:

Mr. Cuyler:—I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here in the place where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live. You have kindly suggested to me that in my hands is the task of restoring peace to our distracted country. I can say in return, sir, that all the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which originated, and were given to the world from this hall in which we stand. I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. (Great cheering.) I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here and adopted that Declaration of Independence—I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army, who achieved that Independence. (Applause.) I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. (Great applause.) It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. (Cheers.) This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. If it can’t be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle—I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it. (Applause.)

Now, in my view of the present aspect of affairs, there is no need of bloodshed and war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in favor of such a course, and I may say in advance, there will be no blood shed unless it be forced upon the Government. The Government will not use force unless force is used against it. (Prolonged applause and cries of "That’s the proper sentiment.")

My friends, this is a wholly unprepared speech. I did not expect to be called upon to say a word when I came here—I supposed I was merely to do something towards raising a flag. I may, therefore, have said something indiscreet, (cries of "no, no"), but I have said nothing but what I am willing to live by, and, in the pleasure of Almighty God, die by.

Does Gen. Abazaid Know Something We Don't?

2005-06-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

Absolutely I think this war [in Iraq] has made us safer. Look, we are fighting the same people in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and our partners are fighting the same people in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that brought us 9/11. We should never lose sight of that.

-- Gen. John Abazaid, Commander of U.S. Central Command, on Face the Nation, June 26, 2005

The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides' hatred of the United States. But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.

-- The 9/11 Commission Report, section 2.5, July 22, 2004.

Lt. Col. Frederick P. Wellman, who works with the task force overseeing the training of Iraqi security troops, said the insurgency doesn't seem to be running out of new recruits, a dynamic fueled by tribal members seeking revenge for relatives killed in fighting.

"We can't kill them all," Wellman said. "When I kill one I create three."

-- "Officers Say Arms Can't End Iraq War" by Tom Lasseter, Knight Ridder Newspapers, Monday 13 June 2005

The [Congressional and intelligence] officials said the [CIA] report spelled out how the urban nature of the war in Iraq was helping combatants learn how to carry out assassinations, kidnappings, car bombings and other kinds of attacks that were never a staple of the fighting in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet campaigns of the 1980's. It was during that conflict, primarily rural and conventional, that the United States provided arms to Osama bin Laden and other militants, who later formed Al Qaeda.

The assessment said the central role played by Iraq meant that, for now, most potential terrorists were likely to focus their energies on attacking American forces there, rather than carrying out attacks elsewhere, the officials said. But the officials said Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries would soon have to contend with militants who leave Iraq equipped with considerable experience and training.

-- "Iraq May Be Prime Place for Training of Militants, C.I.A. Report Concludes" by Douglas Jehl, The New York Times, June 22, 2005

Does Gen. Abazaid claim to know something that the 9/11 Commission didn't? Like, for instance, does he know of the existence of evidence that al-Qaeda was operating in Hussein-controlled Iraq before our invasion? If so, he should really consider sharing this evidence with someone.

Or perhaps he doesn't really know of any evidence that would counter the 9/11 Commission's conclusions, and isn't really saying that al-Qaeda was in Iraq before we invaded, but is instead citing some version of the so-called "flypaper" theory, according to which the Iraq war is helping us to win the war against jihadist terror by drawing foreign jihadists into Iraq where we can kill them? In that case, does Gen. Abazaid know something that Lt. Col. Wellman and the CIA don't know? Because, according to them, it sure sounds like we're making more terrorists than we're killing.

Or does the General know of some exotic system of logic according to which the way to really solve a problem is to first make it much worse, and then struggle for years to recover from the effects of having made it worse?

How To Negotiate With Terrorists

2005-06-26T01:02:00.001-07:00

Let the Bush administration show you how: The increasingly indispensible Times of London has the story and Billmon has the first extended commentary. Here's the gist:

After weeks of delicate negotiation involving a former Iraqi minister and senior tribal leaders, a small group of insurgent commanders apparently came face to face with four American officials seeking to establish a dialogue with the men they regard as their enemies.

The talks on June 3 were followed by a second encounter 10 days later, according to an Iraqi who said that he had attended both meetings. Details provided to The Sunday Times by two Iraqi sources whose groups were involved indicate that further talks are planned in the hope of negotiating an eventual breakthrough that might reduce the violence in Iraq.

As Billmon points out, this is a good thing. We already knew, from both the top U.S. commander (Gen. George W. Casey) and the chief U.S. military spokesman (Brig. Gen. Donald Alston) in Iraq, that a military solution of the insurgency was out of the question. We also knew, from Gen. Abizaid's recent testimony before Congress, that the insurgency has lost none of its potency in the last half year, and that it is now buttressed by a greater number of foreign fighters than ever before. We also learned, from a classified CIA report whose existence and contents were leaked to the New York Times, that the insurgency is proving to be a training ground for foreign terrorists, similar to what Afghanistan provided in the 80's and 90's, but with a potentially even more dangerous emphasis on urban warfare.

Given that the most our armed forces can accomplish is to maintain the current military stalemate, while Iraqi politicians negotiate a constitutional settlement that bleeds off sufficient Sunni support to undermine the insurgency; and given that speed is of the essence, since the longer it takes the politicians to do this, the more American troops will die (at the rate of over two a day), and the more foreign terrorists will get trained for eventual urban Jihad in their home countries; -- given all that, negotiations are probably a wise and (dare I say it?) realistic thing to be doing.

It's clear from the details of the Times story that a principal aim of the U.S. negotiators is to try to convince the insurgency's leadership to in effect give up the Zarqawi group. At the moment, the insurgency leaders are primarily demanding a timetable (in the 1 to 5 year range) for a full U.S. withdrawal. The outlines of a possible deal seem to be coming into focus -- one that would purge the hard core of foreign terrorists from the insurgency, and guarantee an end to the occupation, but without necessitating an immediate U.S. withdrawal that would leave the fledgling Iraqi state helpless. Of course, neither side is ready to sign onto anything like such a deal yet, but the path to it has been opened.

All in all then, this news looks like a genuine cause for hope. But, of course, it is also an occasion for richly-deserved ridicule.

Because, in the first place, it is the White House itself that has assiduously refused to distinguish between any type of insurgent activity, on the one side, and terrorism, on the other, and that has insisted on labeling the entire insurgency as simply "the terrorists." And, in the second place, it was only a couple of days ago that President Bush's top political and policy advisor Karl Rove was publicly denouncing liberals for being soft on terrorism (specifically, for desiring a non-military reponse to 9-11 -- an obvious lie), so soft in fact that they would rather harm our own troops than let them fight the enemy (not just a lie, but an indecent slander).

And now here is the Bush adminstration, doing the very reality-based thing of trying to split the insurgency by appealing to the relative moderates within it, to those with limited, concrete, non-nihilistic political goals, against the true Jihadis. It is a good play, but one that, if the shoe were on the other foot, if it were being recommended by Democrats, would call down on their heads a veritable torrent of denunciations and fiery imprecations from every corner of rightwingerdom. And so we are now entitled to ask the following question of those same right-wing pundits:

Where is the outrage?!

Last Throes

2005-06-21T21:32:00.000-07:00

The New York Times finally picks up on a story that Knight Ridder Washington Bureau first reported over a week ago: Sunni insurgents in central Iraq are getting better at killing U.S. troops. How? By building a better Improvised Explosive Device (IED).

The insurgency continues to adapt to U.S. countermeasures faster than we can come up with new ones. Now that armored Humvees are finally getting to Iraq in significant numbers, the insurgents are starting to deploy IEDs with shaped charges capable of piercing such armor. And now that our forces are jamming radio signals to foil detonators made from cell phones and garage door openers, the insurgents are turning to infrared detonators that are impervious to radio jamming. Most disturbing of all, these adaptations aren't just keeping the insurgency lethal -- they are actually making it more lethal than ever before.

The result? IEDs now account for 70% of U.S. casualties, and the death toll from IEDs reached a new high in May and June. This, in turn, helps account for why the U.S. death toll is currently running at 2.13 per day in the period since the Iraqi elections -- as against 1.89 per day in the period between the "end of major combat operations" [sic] and the "handover of sovereignty" [sic]. All of which, in turn, helps explain why (as the increasingly indispensable Knight Ridder service also reported about a week ago) top U.S. military officers in Iraq are now openly saying that the insurgency cannot be ended by military means.

Maybe this is the kind of complication that the head of MI6 had in mind when he expressed his now famous worry that, "There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." In any case, if these are, as the Vice President would have it, the insurgency's "last throes," I'd hate to see what the damn thing looks like in the full bloom of health.

How to Bribe a Member of Congress

2005-06-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

Special San Diego edition. Sweetheart defense contract deals, real estate speculation as a form of money laundering, and our very own Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R - Escondido). The San Diego Union Tribune has the scoop, and Josh Marshall has the executive summary. My favorite Cunningham line: "I feel very confident that I haven't done anything wrong." Um, Duke, if you didn't do anything wrong, wouldn't "feeling confident" about it be beside the point?

The Grammar of Life

2005-06-12T22:26:00.000-07:00

I thought that the strongest passage in this post by Majikthise, offering a philosophical defense of the pro-choice position, was one that came almost as an aside, in a footnote:

We don't ordinarily describe a woman as a mother until she gives birth to at least one live baby.

That strikes me as entirely correct, and extremely pertinent, but it is undercut by what Majikthise says in the very next sentence:

It's interesting how the anti-choice bias permeates our language.

I have always been struck, on something like the contrary, by the myriad ways that ordinary usage undercuts the strict "pro-life" position, and tends rather to call attention to the overwhelming significance of birth, in marking the beginning of a person's life. Majikthise gives what amounts to one example of this, but coming up with many more is trivially easy:

-- When we ask someone "How old are you?" we do not ordinarily expect that person to respond by giving the years since her conception (or quickening, or viability).

-- To mark a person's passage through life, we do not ordinarily celebrate days of conception (or quickening, or viability, but I won't keep repeating that part). We celebrate "birthdays."

-- When we tell a person's life story (or when someone tells us theirs), the event with which it ordinarily begins (perhaps after some "family background") is that person's birth, and not (unless he is Tristram Shandy) his conception.

-- We often ask people "Where were you born?" We do not ordinarily ask them, "Where were you conceived?" nor even expect them to know the answer to such a question -- although, in a certain kind of company, it can be odd fun to speculate.

-- Tombstones and other ceremonial markers, when they have dates on them, ordinarily give, in addition to a date of death, a date of birth, not a date of conception.

-- We do not ordinarily expect there to be a "funeral" to mark a miscarriage, nor do we ordinarily speak about a miscarried zygote or embryo or fetus the way we would about someone at their funeral, e.g., as "the deceased," "the loved one," and so on.

-- When we ask "How many are there in your family?" we do not ordinarily expect zygotes or embryos or fetuses to be counted, although it is quite ordinary to hear something like "and one on the way," or "and soon to be one more."

In addition to looking at ordinary usage in this J. L. Austin sort of way, it can also be quite useful to do some modest Heidegger/Nietzsche type of linguistic operations on heavily freighted terms such as these. For instance, I think it is philosophically (and morally) significant that the use of the word "conception" in this context is much more abstracted from the primary and direct human experience out of which it arose, than is the use of the word "birth," and that, if we trace both words back to their most primitive meanings, we find that only one of them is directly and aboriginally associated with the beginning of a unique human life.

"To conceive" comes from the Latin concipere, whose root meanings describe commonplace acts such as to take in (or up), to receive, to catch. From those humble beginnings, the verb was carried over into many other realms, including purely mental operations such as imagining or understanding, as well as both mothering and becoming pregnant. It's easy to imagine how the latter two meanings arose: The root meanings describe acts that could easily be related metaphorically, not to the beginning of life, but to (part of) the (hetero-)sexual act, in particular as seen from a female point of view -- hence the association, by extension, with both mothering and pregnancy. The association with the beginnng of a unique human life, however, is nowhere to be found in the word's long history.

"To be born" comes from Scandanavian roots, by way of Middle English, and seems to have always meant what it means for us -- the act or event of coming into the world, of being seen, as it were, for the first time. The Latin equivalent, nasci, likewise has as its primary meaning to be born or begotten. Other meanings include to rise or dawn; to start or originate; to be produed by spontaneously; to come into existence or being; to spring forth or grow; and, simply, to live. Note the striking absence from these meanings of any imagery associated with parental figures or originating causes, and the exclusive focus on the being which (or who) is making its first appearance, its beginning in the world.

To conceive, we might say, is something that is done (in both its biological and other senses) by those who are already in a position to make a beginning of their own. It is the taking in of the seed that is necessary for that beginning. A philosopher might call this seed an intuition; an artist might call it an inspiration; a biologist or a farmer would probably be thinking of more literal inseminations.

To be born is something else entirely. It is (to borrow a little from Hannah Arendt, who was borrowing from Augustine) the actual beginning of something new in the world. And if it happens to be a human birth, it is the begnning of one who is himself or herself a beginner -- one capable of beginning things anew. It is then the appearance in the world of an original who is also, potentially, an originator.

In sum, there is something in language, deeper even than the legacy of patriarchal institutions, that resists every attempt to divorce the beginning of personhood from that momentous first appearance in the world, as one unique being among others, that we call birth.

Kinsley Misses a Memo

2005-06-12T12:05:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum get this one exactly right: Michael Kinsely's op-ed piece in this morning's L.A. Times ("The Left Gets a Memo") is a puzzlingly self-contradictory attempt to discount the significance of the Downing Street Memo.

Depending on which paragraph of Kinsley's column one reads, the Memo's revelations -- that the Bush administration had decided on war in advance of going to the U.N., and that such a diplomatic effort was being urged by the British as a way to create the legal justification required for their own participation in that war -- are either an overblown part of a "paranoid theory," or else so obvious that "you don't need a secret memo" to know that they are true.

But Kinsley's column looks even more foolish in light of the latest leaked memo, the one Kevin called our attention to yesterday, namely the Cabinet Office briefing paper that was circulated to participants in the same meeting, the minutes of which the Downing Street Memo records. Two paragraphs from the London Times own coverage of the newly leaked document stand out:

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

The briefing paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it. [emphasis added]

So here is the London Times saying that the new memo is evidence that Bush and Blair are lying right now, in real time, about what really took place back in 2002, and that the President and the PM had agreed, at least in principle, on an unprovoked war to remove Saddam Hussein in April 2002. And, indeed, a look at the opening paragraphs of the briefing paper itself strongly supports such a reading:

1. The US Government's military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace. But, as yet, it lacks a political framework. In particular, little thought has been given to creating the political conditions for military action, or the aftermath and how to shape it.

2. When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for action to eliminate Iraq's WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted.

3. We need now to reinforce this message and to encourage the US Government to place its military planning within a political framework, partly to forestall the risk that military action is precipitated in an unplanned way by, for example, an incident in the No Fly Zones. This is particularly important for the UK because it is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action. Otherwise we face the real danger that the US will commit themselves to a course of action which we would find very difficult to support.

I wonder if the meaning of these words is plain enough for Kinsley's taste? To my eyes they seem to say rather plainly that:

The PM pledged his support in April 2002 for a war whose purpose was the removal of Saddam Hussein from power;
That he however attached certain conditions to this support, some of which, in the event, were clearly met (the shaping of public opinion), and some of which, just as clearly, were abandoned mid-stream (the exhaustion of the diplomatic option of using UN inspectors to disarm Saddam); and
That the PM's inner circle was deeply concerned that the Americans were in such a hurry to get to the battlefield that -- unless they received sufficient British prodding -- they might not get a legal justification in place before the shooting started, and that the U.K. would then be drawn into an undisguised war for regime change, which would be legally and politically unsupportable for the British government.

Whether or not the cutting-short of the inspections process, and the launching of the war on the basis of UNSCR 1441, without an additional resolution authorizing force, satisfied the legal and political requirements of the British government, is of course subject to interpretation -- and a lively debate among British politicians. What isn't, I think, subject to interpretation is that the Americans wanted a war to remove Saddam, whether it could be legally and morally justified, or not, and that the British, who did care about justifiability, were playing catch up.

It could also be argued, I suppose, that the new memo supports the theory that, had the British withheld their support, the war might have been averted. Perhaps yes, perhaps no -- we will probably never know, as I suspect the British didn't know, but could ultimately only guess, like everyone else in the world, at the depth of Bush's determination to go it alone, if need be. But in any case, this hardly diminishes what the new memo confirms: Justification or no justification, the Americans were set on making war to change the regime in Baghdad. It merely means that their intentions might still conceivably have been frustrated -- which is precisely what hardliners like Cheney feared might happen if the UN route was taken.

In the end, of course, Cheney needn't have worried: Success in meeting one of Blair's conditions in particular (namely, the shaping of public opinion -- at least in the US and the UK) made up for any failure in meeting the others. The Bush/Blair team's success on this front was, in all senses of the word, spectacular: They managed to convince a majority on both sides of the Atlantic that, in effect, the UN inspectors' work could only be trusted if it shored up the case for war -- since the "right" answer about Saddam's possession of WMD had become, by then, a foregone conclusion. Given that "reality," why lose valuable time waiting around to find out what the inspectors might say?

But perhaps Mr. Kinsley believes that a more innocuous interpretation of these new revelations is possible? Or perhaps he concurs with the London Times' sinister reading of them, but thinks that the American people have already absorbed the news that they were (and are still being) lied to by their President about when and why he decided to make war Iraq? Or indeed perhaps -- to judge by today's column -- he believes both of these things simultaneously?

The Bush Sag is Overdetermined

2005-06-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

Depending on whose polls you believe, President Bush's approval/disapproval ratings are either just barely above the worst numbers he's ever had, or else they've just hit a new low.

What could be the explanation for this "conundrum," as Alan Greenspan might put it? Let's try out some theories:

Perhaps Americans are worried because the all-volunteer Army fell short of its recruitment goal in May, for the fourth month in a row, this time by 25% -- after having lowered that goal by 16%. [Link]

Or maybe they are disturbed by that fact that, despite an extensive effort to reduce the risk to our troops in Iraq from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), the insurgency seems to be getting steadily better at using them to kill American soldiers trying to get from point A to point B. [Link]

Or else it might be that people are growing more skeptical about our ability to train enough Iraqis to replace the American forces there -- especially after hearing about Iraqi army units that sing ballads to Saddam Hussein, and Iraqi national guard units that refuse to take training from U.S. troops at all, for fear of being assassinated when they return to their homes. [Link] [Link]

Or maybe it's not the Iraqi news so much as the sour economic news, like the fact that every time the pace of job creation seems to be picking up, it subsequently tanks -- as it did in May. [Link]

Or perhaps people are getting nervous about the economy because the trade deficit is ballooning again, putting us on track for beating out 2004 as the worst year ever. [Link]

Or maybe, like Alan Greenspan himself, they're puzzled about the ever-narrowing gap between short and long term interest rates, but more worried about it than he is, because they know that, if this keeps up, we'll eventually reach an "inverted yield curve" -- one of the most reliable harbingers of a recession. [Link] [Link]

As you can see, there are many plausible candidates for the underlying cause of the decline in Bush's popularity. In such cases, it is rare for a single theory to to explain the phenomenon completely. On the contrary, indeed: Managing to get yourself reelected, only to plummet in the polls within six months of your second inauguration, probably requires screwing up on multiple fronts simultaneously.

The Bush sag is overdetermined.

One Step Closer to Disaster in Iraq

2005-06-09T20:50:00.000-07:00

On a day that cost the lives of four more American soldiers, Iraq takes one more step toward open civil war.

To understand what is going on, it helps to remember (or learn) that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is a very important figure in the new Iraq. He is: the head of the Shiite coalition that controls a majority in parliament (the Iraqi Alliance); the leader of one of the two major parties in that coalition -- namely, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI); and the former leader of SCIRI's armed wing, the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade -- in which capacity he succeeded his brother, Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, who was assassinated in Najaf in 2003. He is, in other words, probably the second most powerful man in Iraq at the moment -- deferring only to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most senior and revered Shiite cleric.

What happened is this: At a conference marking the second anniversary of the Badr militia's establishment inside Iraq, the Shiite Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and the Kurdish President (and Peshmerga militia leader), Jalal Talabani, got together with their host, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, to praise one another's militias, and to announce that those same militias (specifically, the Peshmerga and the Badr Brigade) should be allowed to continue to exist in the new Iraq, and should moreover be used in operations against the (largely Sunni-based) insurgency.

American officials have openly opposed the continuation of the militias, or their use in the counter-insurgency. It seems likely, however, that retention of the Peshmerga was a non-negotiable demand for Kurdish participation in government (since it is the ultimate guarantee of their independence), and that the Shiites resolved, perhaps partly in response, to retain theirs as well. So the political stars have aligned to give the new Iraq, in addition to a Sunni insurgency, two private armies -- one for Shiites, and one for Kurds. If one were aiming to start an all-out civil war, this wouldn't be a bad way to arrange for it to happen.

The Times coverage mentions that the statement of support for the militias was intended to rebut Sunni criticisms of them, but fails to note, as Knight Ridder does, that many Sunnis are convinced that Badr death/torture squads are already operating inside the Iraqi army and police.

A Reform Agenda for the Democrats

2005-06-05T23:30:00.001-07:00

Here are a few modest items the Democrats should consider, if they are serious about proposing a powerful reform agenda for the next midterm elections:

The Executive Summary:

End pork-barrel spending by eliminating the use of the "legislative rider"
Restore fiscal sanity by making (structurally) balanced budgets mandatory
Secure, by constitutional amendment, the right to vote in presidential elections
Link radical tax simplification to restored tax progressivity
Equalize the treatment of earned income and (amortized) capital gains
Link continued support for free trade to the passage of single-payer health insurance

The Long Version:

1. End pork barrel spending. This one will be tough, since both parties are deeply culpable in it, incumbents are dependent on it for rewarding local notables and campaign contributors, and it provides much of grease for the many wheels that must turn to pass bigger pieces of legislation. But the public interest case against such spending is ironclad: It is, almost by definition, spending directed at private or partial interests. There may be some ceremonial attempt to dress it up with a public purpose, but the spending itself is always targeted so as to benefit a narrow constituency. Rousseau made the case long ago--no act can be just for the whole community, that treats a mere part of it directly. Such acts lack the generality that legitimacy demands. They also, of course, erode political responsibility. Influential constituents are effectively paid off, helping to ensure that they and others will not judge the performance of the representative by asking themselves public questions about that performance--questions about whether this or that action was good for the whole constituency.

But how to break the hold that such spending has on congress--and more to the point how to convince a deeply skeptical public that either party is truly prepared to do so? The mechanism responsible for most of this kind of spending is the legislative "rider"--the spending amendment tacked onto a larger, and necessary appropriations bill. (Such riders are also often used, these days, to subvert regulations on behalf of special, local interests--especially corporate interests in the extractive industries seeking "relief" from environmental laws.) The line-time veto was supposed to be the cure for the legislative rider, but, first, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, and, second, the line-item veto probably would have encouraged the president to pare the pork very selectively--favoring legislative friends and punishing foes. Better to attack the problem at its source.

Democrats should pledge to do three things:

* Stop all attempts to attach riders of their own to appropriations bills. This is comparatively easy to give up anyway, when you are out of power, but the gesture is an important one from the public's perspective. People are far more likely to believe you are sincere about forcing all politicians to give up some goodies if you have already given them up yourselves.

* Reintroduce the strictest possible "germaneness" rules in both houses (currently the Senate is the worst offender), as soon as Democrats are once again in the majority. The publicly-circulated drafts of these rules should contain provisions requiring super-majorities to overturn them. Even such provisions can be abolished by a narrow but determined majority that wants to bring the riders back, of course, but they put one more stumbling block in the way of such a majority and the more, the merrier.

* Support a constitutional amendment banning the practice for all time. Democrats have, and the whole, been loathe to propose constitutional amendments to accomplish what amount to relatively mundane legislative purposes. Such tactics smack of grandstanding and can easily be used to cover up an intention to do nothing substantive in the meantime. We should get over it. The amendment signal is one of the most effective that a party can send, for it can serve as a powerful wedge, even for a party out of power. The Donkey needs to learn from and emulate, not scorn, successful Elephantine strategies.

2. Restore fiscal sanity. A balanced budget amendment once seemed more trouble than it was worth -- a hamfisted approach to a complex problem. But no more. The fiscal madness of the present regime knows no bounds and it must be stopped cold. There is no way for a party out of power to even begin to fight for this in the context of the budget process, and there is great danger that if it is confined to a mere list of the opposition's legislative priorities, it will not be taken seriously by anyone in the media, and therefore make no impact on the public mind. Reviving this old PR weapon and turning it against the GOP -- but this time backed by a real commitment to enacting it -- is just the ticket.

The amendment's permitted exceptions to budgetary balance should be very strictly defined: Only *declared* war, or official economic recession (as defined, say, by the National Bureau of Economic Research) should justify new borrowing, and then only with the concurrence of both houses of congress and the president. Since both war and recession can have lengthy aftermaths that might justify continued deficit spending, that should be permitted as well, provided congress and the president continue to certify that there is residual need.

More importantly, the amendment should require scrupulous accounting of the amounts involved, meaning that the deficit spending should be authorized under a separate, special appropriation, containing spending for the permitted purposes only. And that spending authority, being essentially temporary in nature, should be subject to more frequent renewal than normal appropriations -- say, once every quarter. This would have the extra advantage of encouraging economic stimulus that is as immediate and direct as possible, while the combination of a required declaration of war and the quarterly appropriations would restore to congress some of its lost institutional responsibility for foreign policy matters.

By being the ones to put this back onto the public agenda, we can frame the debate in such a way that it leaves ample room for (and even encourages) the kind of Keynesian fiscal policies that Democrats have long known are sometimes necessary to combat economic downturns. Meanwhile, the requirement of structural fiscal balance would both cement the popular image of the Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility (fostered under Clinton but dissipated somewhat since we have been out of power) and force the GOP to abandon its policy of slowly starving popular middle class entitlements it cannot destroy through frontal assault, while rewarding upper-income taxpayers with endless giveaways of borrowed money. What could be better?

3. Secure the right to vote in presidential elections. This is one that has almost no hope of passage, due to resistance by the smaller states, but that is bound to have widespread popular appeal once the stakes are made clear. Since the bulk of those states are among the staunchest Republican strongholds, and since the case for reform is overwhelming, the Democrats have little to lose, and much to gain. Small-state conservatives will scream bloody murder, but they will also have to put themselves on record as opposing the principle of one person, one vote, and the idea that the American people have a right to select their own president for themselves. All the historical resonances of the great struggles to expand the franchise will be called up, and we can honestly say that the purpose of the amendment is to secure once and for all one of the most sacred things in a democracy--the people's confidence in the integrity and meaning of their ballots.

As matters now stand, there is no right to vote for president of the United States. The ascendant interpretation (since Bush v. Gore) holds that the legislatures of the several states could, in principle, appoint their electors in any way they see fit. Meanwhile, the scrutiny occasioned by two close elections in a row have revealed what a mess our presidential balloting process is, with a bizarre patchwork of better and worse systems that Bush v. Gore would surely invalidate as an unconstitutional violation of equal protection--had that decision not arbitrarily declared itself without authority to serve as a precedent. Lastly, partisans of both sides now have ample reason to distrust the way the electoral college distorts the popular vote: Bush won the former in 2000 despite losing the latter, while in 2004 a swing of a bit more than a hundred thousand votes in Ohio would have put the shoe on the other foot. With the country so closely divided along party lines, we can expect to see more of the same.

It's time to end this farce, before it leads to a genuine constitutional crisis. The Democrats should propose a very simple constitutional amendment, modeled after the Seventeenth, along these lines:

The President and Vice-President shall be elected by the people of the United States. The electors shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of members of the House of Representatives.

The presidential ballot shall be conducted by a uniform mechanism, to be determined and overseen by a Federal Election Commission composed according to the statute in force when this amendment was proposed, and to be implemented with all deliberate speed.

This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any President or Vice President chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.

4. Link radical tax simplification to restored tax progressivity. Republicans are getting set to exploit a confusion they have worked hard to foster--between tax simplification and the reduction of progressivity. Democrats need to severe these two issues in the public mind, and the way to do it is simple: turn the Republican framing of the issue on its head.

The Democratic party should go on record as supporting the complete elimination of all non-standard personal income tax deductions, save two. The two are, obviously, home mortgage interest and state and local taxes. Eliminating the latter is a clear violation of federalism--and one that would hurt Democrats (in high tax states) more than it would Republicans. Eliminating the deductibility of home mortgage interest may make abstract economic sense but, I suspect, is politically fatal. Millions of Americans have made their most important investment decision (in effect) on the basis of that deduction. Killing it would probably devastate the housing sector in the short term, and would certainly piss off legions of homeowners and aspiring homeowners. We don't want to go there.

But everything else is fair game. The key to making this a just set of changes, of course, is retain, and even enhance, the progressive structure of marginal rates. Keep the proposal revenue neutral, but use higher top brackets, a bigger standard deduction, and an expanded ERTC to shift as much of the burden as possible off the shoulders of everyone making less than $200,000 per year.

This is reminiscent of the Kerry plan in the use of that cutoff, but it should be a real simplification scheme. Besides the marginal rate structure, only four components would remain--the (higher) standard deduction, the (higher) EITC, and the deductibility of state and local taxes and home mortgage interest. All the rest of the code, goes. Make sure the resulting bill is small enough to print as a sidebar in a major daily newspaper.

5. Equalize the treatment of earned income and capital gains. Okay, so it's not that simple. We also need an answer to the question of what to do about capital gains. Millions of Americans confront this when dealing with a home sale (though there is not much for them to worry about under current law) as well as with the treatment of retirement income.

Obviously, existing tax sheltered investments have to be grandfathered in. It wouldn't be fair to change the tax treatment of Roth IRAs, let's say, for funds already invested there.

But the treatment of capital gains going forward needs to be put on a clearer and more reasonable basis--one that everyone can understand, one that encourages national savings, and one that is fair to taxpayers who don't have a lot of (or any) capital gains to worry about.

The easiest way to accomplish all this is to amortize capital gains tax rates over the life of the investment. In a nutshell, a taxpayer who realized capital gains would pay at the rate that corresponds to their average annual gain. The calculation is trivial: Divide your total gains by number of years you've held the asset. Add this to your current year taxable income. Consult the tax table to get your effective rate. Done.

It will be objected that adding the average annual gain to current year income could introduce all sorts of distorted incentives. First, decisions about when to sell would hinge on finding a tax year when other income was lower than normal. This doesn't seem like much of a distortion though--it is basically a slight additional incentive to sell in a year when you aren't already flush. If it were the other way around, then we might have a problem. More seriously, one could argue that the effective base rate in the year of sale is likely to be much higher than the average of earlier years, since taxable income was probably less during those years. That's true, and if it becomes a serious objection, then a slightly more complex calculation would be needed, whereby one would have to find that average taxable income, and add the average gains to it instead of to current-year income. This still seems pretty simple: Add up all taxable income for the period of the investment, divide by the number of years held, add the average annual gain from the investment itself, look up the rate, done.

Obviously the main advantage here is that capital gains are treated just like earned income (taxed at the same rate) and, at the same time, massive incentives are created for holding lucrative investments for the long haul--as well as disincentives for liquidating them quickly. It's hard to imagine that kind of investment bias in favor of long time horizons doing anything but good for the economy, on balance.

6. Link support for free trade to single-payer health insurance. Under Clinton, the Democratic party began to take some serious steps toward acknowledging the Law of Comparative Advantage--that expanded world trade is not zero sum, and that it can benefit both Americans and the millions of foreigners it helps lift out of poverty. This dose of neoliberal seriousness about the realities of wealth creation was overdue. But there is also no denying that expanded trade puts enormous economic and social pressure on constituencies the Democrats still consider part of their natural base, especially workers in industrial manufacturing. And if those same groups don't always reciprocate by giving Democratic presidential candidates overwhelming support, that may in part be because they don't perceive Democrats as offering a serious alternative to slow death by foreign competition. It is probably the case that the national party's support for free trade has cost Democratic candidates at all levels some opportunities to credibly attack their Republican opponents as callous and out of touch with manufacturing workers' real concerns. What to do?

The usual Democratic and progressive response has been to link continued support for free trade policies to expanded labor and environmental standards. This is admirable in intention, but it is probably not nearly a serious enough response to the way expanded trade is reshaping the economic landscape for American workers. Fighting a rearguard action on behalf of embedding such standards in trade agreements is likely to run up against the hard reality that many of our trading partners' competitive advantage consists entirely in cheaper labor and greater willingness to accept higher levels of environmental degradation in the short run, in exchange for faster wealth creation. A serious, as opposed to a cosmetic effort to raise labor and environmental standards probably just translates, for the foreseeable future, into opposition to expanded trade. This sets us at odds with (some of) the conditions for rapid wealth creation in developing countries, and forces us to tack continuously against the prevailing winds of economic change here at home. Globalization is not going away, but the effort to humanize it by exporting our social standards to national economies unready to assume their burdens, is probably doomed to failure. So, to ask it again, what to do?

The core problem is that the benefits and costs of expanded trade are unfairly distributed within our national economy. More opportunity for some (e.g., those working in rising industries and enjoying cheaper imports) is purchased at the expense of much more economic insecurity for others (job losses, downward pressure on wages, vanishing benefits). The country as a whole may benefit, but too many of us get hurt along the way.

This is a job for what the welfare state does best--the socialization of economic risk. Job training for displaced workers is fine, but that is at best doing something for the losers in the game. What we need are policies that help everyone weather economic storms. The fact that those policies will be relied on more often or more heavily by workers displaced by trade need not, and shouldn't, set such workers apart from the rest of us. After all, no one really knows what industries will be next to wind up on the short end of Schumpeter's "creative destruction" (as evidenced by the somewhat surprising recent surge in the outsourcing of highly skilled software programming jobs).

It is crucial that the argument here be made in a moral register: Expanded trade benefits the country as a whole (by further enriching both us and our trading partners, whose prosperity is important to us for moral and national security reasons). But exposing ourselves more and more to the world market also means making our economy even more dynamic than it already is. And that means more risk for everyone. Since the country as a whole is enjoying the fruits of this transformation, it is only fair that the country as a whole should pay the price of the ticket as well. It would be immoral to force certain groups and individuals to bear all the costs, just because they happened to be unlucky enough to be doing a job that economic logic says is more efficiently done elsewhere. This a matter of communal responsibility -- if we are all going to win from expanded trade, then we have to treat everyone like winners, and not create a class of outcasts that we shun and forget about.

In order for this to lead to something more than rhetorical flourishes and more two-bit retraining schemes, it needs to be done on a big scale. Imagine a grand bargain: The Democratic party pledges itself to the most dogmatic adherence to free trade principles (and this means the elimination of all subsidies as well as a negotiated end to all tariffs) in exchange for a firm commitment to single-payer national health insurance, based on the universalization of Medicare, but financed out of the general fund (i.e, from the progressive income tax), rather than payroll taxes. No single aspect of economic risk is so threatening to most Americans than the loss of health insurance. No single cost of employment is so onerous to employers. Relieving both burdens would go a long way towards ameliorating the loss of "good jobs" to outsourcing (since "good jobs" often mean in practice jobs with benefits, the key one of which is health insurance) and encouraging the rehiring of workers who need new jobs.

We would need a mechanism to link the two commitments to one another, since there is no chance of accomplishing all this in any one legislative package in any single congressional session. One way to do it would be to offer the GOP a public pact--agree to support single payer, and we will agree to support every free trade measure that comes up for a vote. What could be fairer?

Now of course they won't go for it--not least because the GOP's own commitment to free trade is not especially popular with much of its white working class base. But that simply means that the Democrats will have handed themselves a powerful potential wedge issue, one potentially capable of forcing pro-business Republicans to choose between their interest in expanded trade and their ideological aversion to socially shared risk. In the meantime, the Democrats would have both an economically and a morally rock solid position on trade. They could honestly say--we stand ready to do the right thing for America, but it won't be the right thing, unless the other side is willing to meet us half way. Having taken that position, they should then loudly proclaim it on every occasion they can. This puts the onus where it belongs, on the most directly interested advocates of expanded trade, to agree to a fair distribution of the costs and benefits.

Such a stance would have enormous educational value. The "grand bargain" aspect would attract plenty of press attention, giving the Democrats the opportunity to make their case about why expanded trade and shared risk go together.

How to Make a List of Evil Books

2005-06-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum (to his great intellectual and human credit) has trouble entering into the spirit of Wingnut mockery. In trying to come up with a counter-list with which to mock the Human Events hit parade of harmful 19th and 20th century books, he fails to appreciate that the original list was, itself, a pure mockery.

That list set outright quackery (Mein Kampf, Mao's Quotations) -- books one forces oneself to read, if at all, purely out of historical interest, to better understand the events they so disasterously influenced -- alongside some certifiable classics (The Communist Manifesto, Beyond Goood and Evil, Keynes' General Theory), plus some distinctly more minor classics (Kinsey, Friedan), any or all of which might be found among the furniture of a well-educated mind, and which remain readable for their intrinsic value as books.

The mockery comes, of course, from having selected all the non-quack books from among those that various segments of the left would have some sentimental attachment to, or identification with. Once one understands this modus operandi, it is actually quite easy to reproduce an equally-mocking counter-list.

The formula is simplicity itself: Take one piece of vile and dangerous quackery, then add one minor classic beloved by adherents of the conservative movement. Repeat as often as desired. Bonus points if the conservative-beloved book actually has a fair amount of enduring, redeeming value. Let's try a quick exercise in the application of the recipe:

Hitler's Mein Kampf
William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative
de Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind
Thomas Dixon's The Clansman
Whittaker Chamber's Witness

And so on and so forth, until you have the number you need -- ten, twenty, a hundred, whatever it may be.

It's understandable that the formula is a bit uncomfortable for a good liberal to apply, even when mockery is the intention. Most liberals probably realize that most good books, like most good ideas and words, are a little rank. Part of what makes a book a classic -- something worth reading past its historical pull date -- is its ability to continue prompting new questions, and giving new answers, for new generations of (very different) readers. In that process, there are bound to be accretions of interpretation that are mutually incompatible, even hostile. But the classic keeps getting read anyway.

For instance: Nietzsche made the Human Events list, and J.S. Mill got honorable mention. Mill's On Liberty (the book cited) is a foundational text for modern liberalism, while most liberals won't have much direct political use for anything of Nietzsche's. But those same liberals might still be inclined to admit him as one of the greatest philosophers of the last two centuries, and read him with avidity and pleasure (perhaps as the greatest exponent of Emersonian ideas writing in German, for instance).

So Kevin, back to your list-drawing board. But, this time, remember: Try just this once to think more like a Wingnut.

Patriotism vs. Nationalism

2005-06-03T22:58:00.000-07:00

Responding to a Matthew Yglesias post that also caught my eye, Digby nails one:

...I suspect that what people really want from liberals is not patriotism, but chauvinism, one important facet of which is characterized in this context by the belief that your national culture and interests are superior to any other. (Our vaunted "exceptionalism" is not made up of a whole lot more than that simple definition.) And, yes, some liberals do not sign on to that, for good reason. Because it's bullshit. And America, the home of mutts from all over the world, the give-me-your-tired-your-poor immigrant nation, should be more aware of the shallowness and idiocy of this than any other country in the world. It's not as if we are Germans trying to preserve the fairy tale of a thousand year Reich. It's one of the good things about not being European, with all that baggage --- or would be if we thought about it for half a minute.

This doesn't settle the issue Yglesias raised, of course. But I do think it opens the issue up in the right direction.

The issue is this: What do we do about the fact that the equation of patriotism with mindless nationalism is deeply entrenched in today's conventional wisdom? There is obvious cause for celebration here, if you happen to be a movement conservative, since criticism of the present order of things is, indeed, an integral part of what it means to be liberal or progressive in any sense. Lefties, therefore, who are forever criticizing this or that aspect of American life, will always sound "unpatriotic." The equation dictates that their very lack of satisfaction -- their lack of recognition of America's unsurpassed greatness -- translates directly into a diminished love (or even an active hatred) of their country.

That the left so often finds itself fighting from a conservative standpoint these days only shows that the right is now bold enough to attempt to undo the fruits of past progressive changes, not that left and right have fundamentally changed ideological places. There certainly have been changes in what we might call the ideological temperature of the two sides of the spectrum. But the left, however weakly, is still more likely to want to use government power to redress the inequalities that are generated as a natural byproduct of capitalist development. Fighting for equal liberty remains, in a profound sense, what "the left" is for -- why we so much as have a left -- as Michael Walzer recently reminded us.

To return to the main point, I don't think Yglesias and Digby really disagree that the patriotism/nationalism equation is both wrong and deeply entrenched, and that something needs to be done about that. But purely on the level of tactics, Yglesias seems more willing for Democrats to try and conform themselves to the equation (at least rhetorically or stylistically), while Digby seems to think that tactic has, and will continue to backfire, until we find a way to break the equation itself.

If that is a right reading of their relative views, then I'm with Digby on this one. Precisely because a true lover of this country will always want to see it made better -- to see its enormous promise increasingly fulfilled -- we must shatter the notion that love of country requires the feeling of national superiority or preeminence. Indeed, I would go further and say that we need to do all we can to fashion and promote a competing alloy of sentiment and principle -- that to be a sound lover of one's country is to seek out, and be able to see its flaws, as much as to enjoy and celebrate its blessings.

We need to do this both because it is the right thing to do (such a feeling of uncritical superiority is ultimately incompatible with the kind of love that seeks the good of the beloved), and also because there is no way we could convincingly give the appearance of a party that is comfortable with equating chauvinism and patriotism, without actually becoming such a party -- and thereby losing the will or capacity to change things for the better, even should we happen to win back power. We would then have fooled only ourselves. The substantive philosophical question and the tactical political question are, in this instance, but two sides of the same coin.

Not Dead, Not Even Past

2005-06-02T23:09:00.000-07:00

Billmon has the toughest, most cynical, but also by far the best post I've read yet on the self-revelation of Mark Felt as Deep Throat. See Sore Throat for the whole text. Here is a quick summary of the main points, plus a longish quote that deserves wider circulation:

Against the nostalgic trend in much left-of-center blogging about Felt's coming out (as in: Too bad we don't have our own Deep Throat to expose the Bush White House's secrets!) Billmon points out that we have had, in fact, no shortage of whistle-blowers and truth-tellers, anonymous and otherwise, over the last four years, and that most of the major media have responded no more (and perhaps somewhat less) half-heartedly than they did to the initial Watergate revelations.

He next points out some highly pertinent institutional reasons why none of this whistle-blowing and investigative work is likely to lead to justice being done for the multitude of crimes and misdemeanors racked up by Bush and company -- highlighting the significant degree to which the Bush regime is more heavily insulated against scrutiny and criticism than Nixon's could ever hope to be. The American people have had, he insists, "plenty of opportunities to learn the filthy truth about this administration and this war," but, in their majority at least, have refused those opportunities. And he's right: even more than was the case in Vietnam/Watergate, the most damning secrets are the open ones.

Billmon concludes with three paragraphs that make for hard reading, because of their bitterness, but necessary reading too, because the indignation behind them is a democratic and patriotic emotion in desperately short supply these days:

What the health of the Republic requires, in other words, may not be a new crop of leakers and whistleblowers, or a fresh young generation of Woodwards and Bernsteins -- or even a more independent, aggressive media. What it may need is a new population (or half of a population, anyway), one that hasn't been stupefied or brainwashed into blind submission, that won't look upon sadistic corruption and call it patriotism, and that will refuse to trade the Bill of Rights for a plastic Jesus and a wholly false sense of security.

That's a much taller order than asking the Gods to send us another Deep Throat -- or even a Luke Skywalker. It's also not an easy thing for liberals, with their old-fashioned faith in democracy, to face: That the Evil Emperor might have a majority (a narrow one, but still a majority) on his side. But a truth isn't any less true for being politically unpalatable.

Which is why right now it's easy for me to imagine Richard Nixon, looking up from the inner circle of hell and lamenting his immense bad luck in being elected to the presidency 30 years too soon.

Indeed. A paranoid person might even think of the secret (but hardly hidden) political history of the last 30 years as a systematic effort to see to it that the remaining vulnerabilities of an executive controlled by the extreme right -- the vulnerabilities that permitted Nixon's downfall -- were all removed, one after another; an effort to ensure that, the next time they had a shot at presidential power, there would be no turning back from where the conservative movement has, since its inception in the late forties, always wanted to take the country.

Nixon disappointed them, in part because of his ideological deviations (often they were just sensible compromises with contemporary political reality), but mostly because of his failure to hold onto power. As Billmon points out, one party rule in congress, along with the presidency's enhanced war powers, and a greatly expanded facility in the use of both secrecy and propaganda, have given the right the tools to protect their leaders, once in office, in a way that movement conservatives circa 1974 could hardly have dared hope for.

So instead, I would add, they turned on him -- but only after it became clear that he was a goner. Nixon had spent his whole career building up credibility with the extreme right, so he could afford a few deviations from the party line -- even major ones like detente and Sino-American rapprochement. But he could not afford to lose his grip on power, which is exactly what started happening in an accelerated way in the lead-up to the 74 mid-term elections. In the end, even his resignation couldn't stave off a devastating series of political blows in 74 and 76.

The right never forgot that shellacking, and you might say that it determined, as a collective entity, never to let it happen again. In addition to the institutional matters Billmon cites, a highly organized and well-financed ideological effort to make the premises of right-wing politics into the new, post-Vietnam/Watergate conventional wisdom, succeeded beyond all expectations, forging a new, post-liberal consensus -- if not on the details of public policy, then certainly on the symbols of popular anxiety and the targets of popular resentment.

Perhaps just as important, the winds of history were at the conservative movement's back -- with the largely one-party white South shifting its regional loyalty, year by year, election by election, from the original defenders of their uniqueness (the Democrats), to their new-found ones (the Republicans), a shift that probably reached its apogee until the 94 mid-term election.

In short, Billmon has been one of the few major bloggers who have dared to consider that we have not so much fallen from the heights of Watergate, as that we have advanced that much further along the downward trajectory Watergate helped define.

Watergate Hauntings

2005-06-02T00:59:00.000-07:00

I joined the new community blog fest over at TPM Cafe today, essayed my first comment (to a post by Josh Marshall) and then followed that up with an initial blog entry, the title of which is reproduced above, and the content of which is reproduced below. Clicking on the title should take you to the original over at TPM Cafe.

I'm not sure about this whole double-posting business. For now, at least, I'm going to confine what I post over there (meaning, my "reader blog" page at TPM Cafe) to items like this one -- essentially extended commentary provoked by something I read specifically on the TPM Cafe site. And -- again, for the time being -- I'll cross-post those same items here as well. We'll see where this goes and whether all the extra furniture moving is worth the trouble. Anyway, here's the post:

I posted a comment today to Josh Marshall's Fair and Balanced post, regarding media reaction to the revelation of Deep Throat's identity, and whether that reaction tells us anything about where we are now, politically or journalistically.

I suggested that maybe the consulting of Watergate-era thugs for their opinions on Felt, and the shift in the use of anonymous sourcing from a tool of investigative journalism to one of (in effect) court politics, have a common root our not having ever quite acknowledged, as a country, what Watergate did to us -- or rather what we did to ourselves in those years.

The picture I had in mind is one I think a lot of people still share -- that of Watergate as having been a time when "the system worked." And if that is your picture of what Watergate ultimately meant, then surely the media and political present looks like a pretty steep drop by comparison.

My thought was that maybe this drop (or at least its steepness) is largely an illusion. Maybe the "system," in the case of Watergate, "worked" just enough to stave off constitutional disaster, but the outcome of those events left us far more profoundly diminished than most of the stories we tell ourselves about Watergate would encourage us to believe.

I wanted to check my impressions, so I went googling around a little, and came across these remarks by Bill Moyers, circa 1989, in which he, too, tells the "system worked" story of Watergate. But he then sharply contrasts that story with the story that had become Iran-Contra, which was at the time still in its drawn-out denouement. Says Moyers:

The lessons of Watergate were clear: the Constitution worked, and presidents tampered with it at their peril. Now the lessons of Iran-contra are also clear. We have learned this: that a president who lies to Congress and to the people will feel free to joke about it. A vice president who lies to Congress and to the people will be elected president. A White House aide who lies to Congress and to the people will be hailed as a hero until the time for a reckoning comes. High State Department officials who lie to Congress and to the people will still get news space as credible sources, huge fees for lobbying in Washington, and ambassadorships. An administration, in short, that lies to Congress and to the people is the accepted order of things. And a Constitution designed to prevent exactly that order is a mere scrap of paper.

At a minimum, this suggests that, if there has been a drop in political and journalistic standards since Watergate, that drop happened quite some time ago. It is not a phenomenon of the present administration (I do not say it has not been made worse by it).

But given the persistence of the "system worked" picture of Watergate, I would read Moyers' remarks quite a bit more ironically than that. For if the institutional fail-safes that "worked" during Watergate had already utterly failed us in the Reagan years, then why in the world would we expect them to function during the reign of Bush the Younger?

It seems at least as persuasive to turn it around and say something like: The outcome of Watergate beguiled us (that is to say, of course, that we beguiled ourselves with the outcome of Watergate) into thinking that the system had worked, when in fact, certain terribly dangerous red lines were crossed, without anything like a full public acknowledgment that this had happened. Despite the magnitude of the events and revelations, there was no equivalent of a "truth and reconciliation commission" whose conclusions all could, and really would have to share as a condition, in effect, of considering the institutions of the Republic repaired and renewed.

To be sure, the Ervin Committee hearings gripped the nation, and proved a sufficient venue, in the end, to undo a presidency before its bearer could undo any more of the Constitution. But that success (like the journalistic triumph of Woodward and Bernstein and the Post) turns out to have been a very different kind of a thing than posing (much less answering) the question that really needed to be asked by the citizenry of its institutions, and of themselves, namely: How did it come to this?

So we took away (instead of something like truth and reconciliation) our familiar, comforting picture of the system having worked. And we continue to be shocked every time it subsequently seems very much not to work -- in fact, to fail miserably -- either by failing to punish genuine scandal (Iran-Contra), or by ginning up false scandal (Whitewater), or by surppressing so much as the possibility of a scandal, when the plain facts all but scream that possibility in our ears (the selling of the Iraq War).

Memorial Day Thoughts

2005-05-30T15:41:00.000-07:00

As he has done before, Gary Trudeau summons the most honest and moving tribute to the previous year's fallen soldiers.

I am told there are people who find this kind of thing insufficiently patriotic (or even unpatriotic) -- in something like the way, I suppose, that there are still people who can't, or won't let themselves see the power and beauty of the Wall that Maya Lin created at Constitution Gardens.

To this kind of thing, I still think some lines from Hemingway's Farewell To Arms that I quoted in my very first post on this blog provide the best possible rejoinder:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Meanwhile, back in the political present, Wesley Clark's Memorial Day radio address for the DNC hit, I thought, just the right notes: unwavering support for the troops; a blunt insistance that they (all) be given the material as well as moral support they need, both during and after their service; and above all the recongnition that the one thing both the troops and the country they serve need and deserve most, is political leadership that uses it's volunteer military wisely and sparingly, and not as a cheaply-bought and easily-replaced substitute for having a clear and coherent foreign policy for protecting the nation.

Speaking of old soldiers and the price paid for lack seriousness in making foreign policy: Here is a brief reminder (from last January) of why David Hackworth will be so sorely missed:

Considering the hits we keep taking in our global fight against terrorism, I'm gearing up in '05 to go up against the Pentagon's increasingly out-of-control campaign to keep us all conned. The cover-ups track too often with more names added to the U.S. casualty list.

So here's my New Year's resolution: to keep countering Pentagon lies with the truth until enough concerned citizens demand that Congress set up a congressional investigative arm to formally expose the liars and hold them accountable.

For almost six decades, I've borne witness to scuzzy machinations that had little or nothing to do with America's national security. And because of them, I've watched my beloved country become enmeshed in far too many blood-splattered military misadventures only because they were good for Pentagon business. I've seen trillions of dollars allocated for gold-plated pork of value only to the monsters who manipulate the military-industrial-congressional complex and absolutely worthless to our gallant soldiers - the kids who end up paying the ultimate price for the madness of war.

Had a decent chunk of that dough been spent on the right stuff - supporting our troops - our warriors wouldn't have fought in Korea in 1950 with World War I gear or be slugging it out in Iraq in scrounged "hillbilly armor" and told to go to war with the Army we have and to suck it up.

If all of this sounds a bit, well, defensive for a Memorial Day post, that might say something about the way opponents of the current administration's foreign policies are feeling, in a time in which such opposition is equated, by the numerous and well-amplified attack droids of the right-wing media machine, with lack of patriotic feeling -- or (in the specific case of the celebrated Ann Coulter) considerably worse.

We are talking here, after all, about symbols of continuity, reverence and debt (the flag, the names of the fallen, the honors due them), that a naturally-fissiparous society such as ours probably needs to take particular care to separate from the standard stock of political weaponry. As my favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, put it, writing just at the crest of the McCarthy era:

If there is to be an ideal fusion of freedom with stability, of justice with order, and of democratic experimentation with tradition, it is of course necessary that the symbols of stability should not be used as weapons of the parties of privilege to preserve a traditional privilege against the will of the majority. If the symbol is to remain untarnished as a symbol of the unity of the community above party conflict and of the continuing majesty of its government, any party in the community must have the confidence that it may, upon attaining a majority for its conception of justice, be able to speak through the royal symbol. This is to say that it achieves the right to speak for the whole community, though it is only a majority of the community. There must also be a corresponding respect by the majority of the rights of the minority. Otherwise a frustrated minority may become desperate and defy this attempt at national unity.

So my closing Memorial Day thought along these lines is this: That maybe the ability to honor the fallen in a country's war, without necessarily either endorsing, or demanding the endorsement of, the motives, rationale or conduct of that war, by those presently holding political power, is one of the ways that we find out what kind of idea a particular party's idea is, or will be, when it wins.

Bobo is Visited by the Ghost of Manifestos Past

2005-05-30T00:42:00.000-07:00

I really shouldn't do this, because David Brooks really, really doesn't deserve a regular Op-Ed column in The New York Times, and linking to him only increases (if only in some pitifully fractional way) his Google ranking, making it seem like he maybe does deserve that lofty perch because, after all, see, he's provoking controversy.

Well in my case he mostly provokes nausea, but this particular column was so extra-special lame that I simply couldn't resist response. The conceit is that if Karl Marx were to rewrite his Manifesto for today's "information society" (I guess without Engels' help, but whatever), he would focus not on the industrial class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but on the cultural class struggle between, as Brooks puts the words in spectral Karl's mouth, "the educated elite and the undereducated masses."

It's mostly the standard Brooksian guilt-ridden wingnuttery about how those he famously labeled "bourgeois-bohemians" (i.e., people whose lives resemble Brooks's own) ruthlessly oppress the uneducated masses by doing things like:

Encouraging immigration (that is, letting in more uneducated masses to, as Brooks/Marx explains, "guarantee inexpensive lawn care");

Moving to well-off suburbs and letting inner-city schools go to hell (how this squares especially well with the cultural elite's infamous preference for cities over suburbs is left unanswered); and, above all,

Somehow-or-other imposing upon society a set of sexual mores that, in some unspecified way, allows cultural elites to have a lot of pre- and extra-marital sex without any bad consequences for their family structure, but that just ends up inflicting "maximum domestic chaos for those lower down." (I guess the uneducated just can't handle the extra sexual freedom -- or something like that.)

Oh, and all of this, in Brooks's version of the Manifesto, it (almost) goes without saying, has exactly nothing to do with economic factors -- especially those that could conceivably be affected by public policy (like, to pick one at random, thirty years of falling real wages and diminishing job prospects for blue-collar workers).

That's why Marx would have to recast the Manifesto if he came back to life -- get it? He would realize that the educational/cultural divide is so much more salient, now that we are an "information society," than any merely economic factors could possibly be. And he would of course also accept uncritically this distinction between educational and cultural factors, on the one side, and (merely) economic ones, on the other.

In other words, he would see the need to renounce -- well, the core of marxist social analysis. And presumably he would then become a sort of right-wing Clifford Geertz instead. Or -- if his wit, imagination and skill with a pen had eroded really badly in the 122 years since his death -- maybe he would just become David Brooks, and get a column in the Times.

Now, besides not being terribly funny (well, except for the crack about lawn care -- I have to admit I laughed at that one), there are two major, and deeply inter-realted problems with Brooks's attempt at Marx parody: First, Marx was a lot more openly (or, say, less hypocritically and guiltily) admiring of the rulling class he was aiming to overthrow than Brooks dares to be. Secondly, and for related reasons, Marx's idea of the bourgeoisie's role in modern society was not at all bound by the contingencies of the industrial mode of production circa 1848, or even by the French-inspired revoltionary political hope in which the Manifesto was written.

On the contrary, Marx's and Engels' vision of the social transformations being wrought be the asendency of capitalism in the middle of the nineteenth century both encompasses and celebrates all of the things that apparently give Brooks the vapors, sitting there in his Manhattan office, pondering the sins of educated bobos like himself, and worrying about the fate of those poor uneducated folks out in the red-state hinterlands. I mean, just listen to these guys:

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

As you can see, Brooks is pretty far off-base in thinking that old Charlie would find the new manifestations of bourgeois power (in education and cultural production) an especially sharp break with that class's past history of revolutionizing change -- or that he would shed too many tears over the resulting cultural wreckage among relatively "backwards" (i.e., less revolutionary) social strata.

In fact, I suspect that the only thing that would surprise and disappoint Karl-van-Winkle, is that it is still the bourgeoisie out front, leading the ongoing revolution of the instruments and relations of production, and that his beloved proletriat had proven such an unworthy, or unnecessary, vessel of that revolution. But that would hardly dampen his ardor for the process as such. Why, if you want to read swooning celebrations of capitalism and globalism like that from a New York Times columnist these days, you have to go to this guy.

Why We Don't Have That Many Free Citizens, And What It Would Be Like If We Had More of Them

2005-05-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

Free citizens don't grow on trees. In general, to get a lot of them, you have to cultivate them, just like a tyranny has to cultivate cowering, isolated subjects. It's much, much harder to cultivate free citizens than it is to cultivate cowering, isolated subjects. Possibly because of this difficulty, we don't even give it much of a shot, really.

To the extent that you succeeded in making free citizens, you would have a naturally quarrelsome bunch on your hands. They would be predisposed to be critical of existing institutions, practices, and standards -- including those of the various media currently designed primarily to manipulate them in various ways. They would be so to speak a self-rousing rabble.

This natural quarrelsomeness, however, would have a definite, and quite sharp limit. When it came to the conditions for the possibility of the life of a free citizen, they would feel approximately the way good Aztecs felt about the need for human sacrifice, or good Han about the Emperor's possession of the Mandate of Heaven. Any public or private power that tried to mess with -- to degrade -- those conditions, would do so at its peril.

Such free citizens would be chronic perfectionists, and therefore constantly aware of the shortcomings of the present order of things, compared to what it could and should be, with a more thorough application of the virtues of free citizens. This would give them something of a busy-body quality. There would also be a natural melancholy about them -- they would never quite feel satisfied with any particular social or political arrangement.

At the same time, however, they would tend to have a broad philosophical (or comic) tolerance for the existence of the those very same shortcomings. Though they would endlessly demand perfection from their society, they would never be so foolish, or so naive, as to expect it from anything put together by human hands, or to suppose for a moment that anything resemblng it had ever been, or could ever be achieved by creatures as cracked-about-the-head as human beings.

Sitting on the Handlebars While the Poor Man Peddles

2005-05-26T20:44:00.000-07:00

The Poor Man reads sensible conservative John Cole's sensible reflections on the fact that Newsweek's flush-the-Koran story turns out to have substantial factual and contextual support after all.

He then goes on to provide (for John's benefit and ours) a set of very useful principles he has gleaned over the last couple of years about the nature and extent of wingnuttery, the better for us to understand how that knowledge has driven him to mad, unholy shrillness. Please do read all ten, but here are some particular favorites of mine:

2) There is a natural tendency to think that all opinions have some validity, and, by carefully plotting a conservative course somewhere between two representative arguments, you can make a serviceable approximation to something you could call “truth”. This is an admirable impulse, and often a constructive one, except if one (or both) of the positions is horseshit. Then, you’re fucked.

5) If people say they are going to do something, and then they do it, and then they say they’re going to do something else, and they do that, too, and on and on, you should assume they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do. Even if they aren’t looking at you when they say it.

6) Conversely, if they consistantly tell you they are going to do things they never do, it is worth considering the possibility that you’re a big, huge, gigantic, bitch. Even if they look you right in the eyes and say “freedom” every two seconds.

As pertinent, however, as this account of the metaphysics of shrillness is, it is not nearly as funny as this dazzling bit of Yeats-inspired Thomas Friedman poetry, contributed by Poor Man commentor Phoenician in a time of Romans.

And then, one post before that one -- just so we know it's not all fun and games in Poor Man land -- he finds and quotes this magnificient rejoinder to Andrew Sullivan's continuing mindless jihad against Paul Krugman; a joinder which -- wonder of wonders! -- Sullivan actually had the taste and gumption to present as the reader email of the day on his own blog.

By all means, read the whole thing, but here is the part that, for me, has the sweet cool taste of truth after the longest of treks in the most parched of deserts:

Paul would have been called a moderate or even conservative Democrat prior to this Administration. (Read his classical essay, "In Praise of Cheap Labor," if you’re under the illusion that he’s some sort of leftist.) So would I. Paul appears strident only because he’s had the bad manners to say that people are lying when they’re obviously lying. (A prominent case in point: many of the President’s public statements about the finances of the social security system have been plain, simple untruths.) And what’s maddening to Paul, and to me, is that there’s no core of conservative principle in this Administration. A conservative devotion to free markets has been displaced by reckless spending, reckless tax cuts, crony capitalism and special interest give-aways. What "balanced" take on these issues should Paul offer?

If such simple sanity can find at least a guest's place in the tent on a blog like Sullivan's, then maybe all is not lost. Or maybe, on the other hand, The Poor Man is right, and the End Times truly are upon us.

How to Lie Your Way Into a War

2005-05-25T23:07:00.000-07:00

If, on the other hand, what you are looking for is a reminder of the utter contempt with which the Bush administration lied us into war with Iraq, then Mark Danner's "The Secret Way to War" in the current number of The New York Review of Books is the place to go.

It is one of the few U.S. sources that both publishes the entire text of the so-called "Downing Street Memo" (a document so scandalous in the British context that it helped cost Tony Blair almost 60% of his parliamentary majority -- against a thoroughly unpopular opposition), and also subjects that document to a thorough review of the relevant prior and subsequent historical context.

Danner does a brilliant job, and there is absolutely no substitute for reading the entire piece, but, to give you a flavor of what you will find there, here are few interesting juxtapositions we can now make from the public record:

George Bush, October 16, 2002:

Our goal is to fully and finally remove a real threat to world peace and to America.

From the Downing Steet Memo, 23 July 2002:

The [British] Foreign Secretary [Jack Straw] said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.

George Bush, October 16, 2002:

Hopefully this can be done peacefully. Hopefully we can do this without any military action.

From the Downing Steet Memo, 23 July 2002:

C [Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

George Bush, October 16, 2002:

Yet, if Iraq is to avoid military action by the international community, it has the obligation to prove compliance with all the world's demands. It's the obligation of Iraq.

From the Downing Steet Memo, 23 July 2002:

The [British] Attorney-General [Lord Goldsmith] said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: selfdefence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMDwere linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD

And that, after some negotiation with Colin Powell, is how we got the diversionary route to the U.N. in the fall (and unanimous SCR 1441), with the high drama of compelling Saddam to permit those intrusive WMD inspections. As the Downing Street Memo makes clear, the point of those instrusive inspections -- of that ultimatum -- was of course to provoke a refusalof cooperation by Saddam, and thereby to generate the missing causus belli, and to give Bush some legally and morally coherent hook on which to hang, that October, the challenge to Iraq to live up to its international obligations -- or else face war.

Of course, just as the Administration hard-liners (above all Cheney) had feared, Saddam kept respoding not defiantly but largely compliantly to the U.N. demands, and the inspectors, for all their unprecedented acccess, kept coming up empty handed. (In retrospective, of course, there was nothing for Saddam to be defiant about, lacking as he did any WMD arsenal.)

But, no matter: since Iraq's "obligation to prove compliance with all the world's demands" had been, from the very beginning, nothing but a way to generate a justification for a war that had been decided on months in advance, it was easy enough (calling upon the considerable PR resources of the White House and the Executive Branch) to create the illusion of defiance and deceit, even where there was none.

As Danner astutely comments on how the U.N. charade subsequently unfolded:

Indeed, the inspectors' failure to find any evidence of weapons came in the wake of a very large effort launched by the administration to put before the world evidence of Saddam's arsenal, an effort spearheaded by George W. Bush's speech in Cincinnati on October 7, and followed by a series of increasingly lurid disclosures to the press that reached a crescendo with Colin Powell's multimedia presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. Throughout the fall and winter, the administration had "rolled out the product," in Card's phrase, with great skill, making use of television, radio, and all the print press to get its message out about the imminent threat of Saddam's arsenal. ("Think of the press," advised Josef Goebbels, "as a great keyboard on which the government can play.")

As the gap between administration rhetoric about enormous arsenals— "we know where they are," asserted Donald Rumsfeld—and the inspectors' empty hands grew wider, that gap, as Cheney had predicted, had the effect in many quarters of undermining the credibility of the United Nations process itself. The inspectors' failure to find weapons in Iraq was taken to discredit the worth of the inspections, rather than to cast doubt on the administration's contention that Saddam possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Oddly enough, Saddam's only effective strategy to prevent war at this point might have been to reveal and yield up some weapons, thus demonstrating to the world that the inspections were working. As we now know, however, he had no weapons to yield up. As Blix remarks, "It occurred to me [on March 7] that the Iraqis would be in greater difficulty if...there truly were no weapons of which they could 'yield possession.'" The fact that, in Blix's words, "the UN and the world had succeeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it"—that the UN process had been successful—meant, in effect, that the inspectors would be discredited and the United States would go to war.

Talk about "catastrophic success!"

Budget Deficits, The Bank of China, Interest Rates, and You

2005-05-25T22:30:00.000-07:00

Should you happen to feel the need for 750 words that clearly, cogently and concisely explain just why it is that:

long-term U.S. internest rates (including mortgage rates) are unsustainably low, and will sooner or later be heading sharply upwards;

there is consequently an asset bubble in real estate that will sooner or later burst, resulting in a major drop in overall consumer demand, and consequent downward pressure on domestic sources of ecnomic growth;

our massive structural budget deficits are thus much, much more dangerous (i.e., more likely to start crowding-out private capital formation) than currently seems to be the case; and, above all,

why all of this is likely to take place, when it happens, with the maximum amount of damage to the domestic economy, given that the Administration's only policy response to the situation is to continually jaw-bone our Chinese creditors into charging us, in effect, dramatically higher interest rates for the loans to which we have become addicted;

-- if, as I say, this kind of thing is what you are looking for, then look no further than this piece by (who else?) Paul Krugman.

Revenge of the Sith: An Attempt at a Philosophical Criticism, Part II

2005-05-23T22:46:00.000-07:00

Let me put this another way.

By venturing beyond the original Star Wars films -- whatever their charms -- Lucas set before himself a particularly challenging aesthetic problem: He had to put on film the story of a great fall. I mean, of course, the story of how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader -- with all that this particular fall entails for the fate of the Lucasian universe.

Now, given all the story elements that Lucas puts in play in Revenge of the Sith (never mind its predecessors), there are, by my count, at least three possible great-fall scenarios, that he could have chosen to tell:

A story about the fall from a virtuous politics into a corrupt politics;

A story about the fall from something much higher than politics, down into the corrupting mire of politics; and, lastly,

A story about the fall from virtue into vice, fought out entirely within a realm of will quite beyond the reach of mere politics.

Now each of these three types of fall-stories has some pretty familiar precedents in the kinds of source materials you might imagine a filmaker of Lucas's stature poking around in. For the sake of argument, let's just pick three of them more or less at random, one for each type.

First up is the purely political storyline -- the one about how a virtuous politics gets corrupted. Machiavelli is always a good source for this kind of thing, so here, as a reminder, is a brief but I hope fairly germane excerpt from his Discourses on Livy (Book I, Chapter XVIII -- not sure which translation we're dealing with):

As to the creation of the Magistracies and the laws, the Roman People did not give the Consulship and other high offices of the City, except to those who asked for them. In the beginning these institutions were good because no one asked for these (offices) except those Citizens who judged themselves worthy, and having a refusal was ignominious: so that in order to judge himself worthy every one worked well. However, this system became pernicious in a corrupt City, for it was not those who had more virtu, but those who had more power, who asked for the Magistracies, and the less powerful ((no matter of how much virtu)) abstained from asking from fear. This evil did not come on suddenly, but by degrees, as happens with all other evils: for the Romans having subjugated Africa and Asia, and reduced almost all of Greece to their obedience, had become assured of their liberty, nor did they seem to have more enemies who should give them fear. This security, and this weakness of her enemies, caused the Roman people no longer to regard virtu in bestowing the Consulship, but graciousness, drawing to that dignity those who knew better how to handle men, not to those who knew better how to conquer their enemies: afterwards they descended from those who had more graciousness to give it to those who had more power. So that because of the defects of such institutions, the good were entirely excluded from everything. A Tribune or some other Citizen could propose a law to the people on which every Citizen could speak in favor or against it before it should be adopted. This institution was good when the Citizens were good, for it was always well that anyone who intended some good for the public was able to propose it, and it was well that everyone could speak his thoughts on it, so that the people, having listened to all sides, could then select the best. But when the Citizens had become bad such institutions became the worst, for only the powerful proposed laws, (and) not for the common liberty, but for their own power, and everyone for fear of them was not able to speak against them: so that the people came to be deceived or forced into deciding their own ruin.

It was necessary, therefore, if Rome wanted to maintain herself free in her corruption, that she should have made new institutions, just as she had made new laws in the process of her existence, for other institutions and modes of living ought to be established in a bad people as well as in a good one, nor can the form be the same in a people entirely different. But because these institutions when they are suddenly discovered no longer to be good have to be changed either completely, or little by little as each (defect) is known, I say that both of these two courses are almost impossible. For in the case of wanting to change little by little a prudent man is required who sees this evil from a distance and at its beginning. It is easily probable that no one such as these springs up in a City: and even if one should spring up he is never able to persuade others of that which he intends; for men living in one manner, do not want to change, and the more so as they do not see the evil face to face, but being shown to them as (mere) conjecture.

As to changing these institutions all at once when everyone recognizes they are not good, I say that the defect which is easily recognized is difficult to correct, for to do this it is not enough to use ordinary means, as ordinary means are bad, but it is necessary to come to the extraordinary, such as violence and arms, and before anything else to become Prince of that City, and to be able to dispose of it as he pleases. And as the re-organization of the political life of a City presupposes a good man, and the becoming of a Prince of a Republic by violence presupposes a bad man; for because of this it will be found that it rarely happens that a (good) men wants to become Prince through bad means, even though his objectives be good; or that a bad one, having become Prince, wants to work for good and that it should enter his mind to use for good that authority which he had acquired by evil means. From all the things written above, arises the difficulty or impossibility of maintaining a Republic in a City that has become corrupted, or to establish it there anew.

Well, that certainly seems to provide plenty of scope for a dramatic fall! One can easily imagine a Chancellor Palpatine, or even an ambitious young warrior like Anakin, falling prey to such temptations -- and indeed the movie gestures that way from time to time.

Next up comes the storyline about how a great figure can be tempted to fall from something far higher than politics, down into its evil clutches. Here the master teacher is without doubt still good old Plato, and espeically Book VII of The Republic, in which, after Socrates has presented the famous Allegory of the Cave (explaining, rougly, the position of the true lover of wisdom in a world that seems to have little love for it) we get his narration of the following exchange between himself and his interlocutor Glaucon, who are, remember, still about the business of building their city in speech (Apologies for using the outdated Jowett translation, but it's online and free):

Then, I said, the business of us who are the founders of the State will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have already shown to be the greatest of all — they must continue to ascend until they arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen enough we must not allow them to do as they do now.

What do you mean?

I mean that they remain in the upper world: but this must not be allowed; they must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the den, and partake of their labours and honours, whether they are worth having or not.

But is not this unjust? he said; ought we to give them a worse life, when they might have a better?

You have again forgotten, my friend, I said, the intention of the legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he held the citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them benefactors of the State, and therefore benefactors of one another; to this end he created them, not to please themselves, but to be his instruments in binding up the State.

True, he said, I had forgotten.

Observe, Glaucon, that there will be no injustice in compelling our philosophers to have a care and providence of others; we shall explain to them that in other States, men of their class are not obliged to share in the toils of politics: and this is reasonable, for they grow up at their own sweet will, and the government would rather not have them. Being self-taught, they cannot be expected to show any gratitude for a culture which they have never received. But we have brought you into the world to be rulers of the hive, kings of yourselves and of the other citizens, and have educated you far better and more perfectly than they have been educated, and you are better able to share in the double duty. Wherefore each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the den, and you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus our State which is also yours will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.

Quite true, he replied.

And will our pupils, when they hear this, refuse to take their turn at the toils of State, when they are allowed to spend the greater part of their time with one another in the heavenly light?

Impossible, he answered; for they are just men, and the commands which we impose upon them are just; there can be no doubt that every one of them will take office as a stern necessity, and not after the fashion of our present rulers of State.

Yes, my friend, I said; and there lies the point. You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life. Whereas if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after their own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State.

Most true, he replied.

And the only life which looks down upon the life of political ambition is that of true philosophy. Do you know of any other?

Indeed, I do not, he said.

And those who govern ought not to be lovers of the task? For, if they are, there will be rival lovers, and they will fight.

No question.

Who then are those whom we shall compel to be guardians? Surely they will be the men who are wisest about affairs of State, and by whom the State is best administered, and who at the same time have other honours and another and a better life than that of politics?

The danger signs are pretty obvious here too, aren't they? What if the ardor of the lovers of wisdom cools, and they start to desire the rewards of power or wealth more than those of philosophy, falling into illusion themselves? Then they might use their status as guardians of justice as a mere mask for their true ambitions, and though they would have lost the thing most worth having, they would, perhaps, be well-positioned to gain the lesser prizes the shadow-play of the cave has to offer. One can imagine Anakin having gone this route, after a patient career of ascent within the Jedi order; it is, in fact, one way to interpret what Palpatine himself winds up doing.

Third, and finally, we have the story of the fall of virtue into vice, as told on the purely metaphysical plane. The language and imagery will still be politicial, of course, but only metaphorically so. The stakes are no longer for the control of any city, but of ultimate reality -- it is a struggle, you might say, between the children of light and the children of darkness. And there is still no superior telling of this story, in English at least, than Milton's Paradise Lost. Here, in Book I, we join Satan and his disciple Beelzebub, having just recently been cast down, and only now starting to get their bearings in their new quarters of hellfire and brimstone, but already plotting their revenge:

O how unlike the place from whence they fell!
There the companions of his fall, o'rewhelm'd
With Floods and Whirlwinds of tempestuous fire,
He soon discerns, and weltring by his side
One next himself in power, and next in crime,
Long after known in PALESTINE, and nam'd
BEELZEBUB. To whom th' Arch-Enemy,
And thence in Heav'n call'd Satan, with bold words
Breaking the horrid silence thus began.

If thou beest he; But O how fall'n! how chang'd
From him, who in the happy Realms of Light
Cloth'd with transcendent brightnes didst outshine
Myriads though bright: If he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope,
And hazard in the Glorious Enterprize,
Joynd with me once, now misery hath joynd
In equal ruin: into what Pit thou seest
From what highth fal'n, so much the stronger provd
He with his Thunder: and till then who knew
The force of those dire Arms? yet not for those
Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage
Can else inflict do I repent or change,
Though chang'd in outward lustre; that fixt mind
And high disdain, from sence of injur'd merit,
That with the mightiest rais'd me to contend,
And to the fierce contention brought along
Innumerable force of Spirits arm'd
That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring,
His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd
In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav'n,
And shook his throne. What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That Glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deifie his power
Who from the terrour of this Arm so late
Doubted his Empire, that were low indeed,
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall; since by Fate the strength of Gods
And this Empyreal substance cannot fail,
Since through experience of this great event
In Arms not worse, in foresight much advanc't,
We may with more successful hope resolve
To wage by force or guile eternal Warr
Irreconcileable, to our grand Foe,
Who now triumphs, and in th' excess of joy
Sole reigning holds the Tyranny of Heav'n.

So spake th' Apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despare:
And him thus answer'd soon his bold Compeer.

O Prince, O Chief of many Throned Powers,
That led th' imbattelld Seraphim to Warr
Under thy conduct, and in dreadful deeds
Fearless, endanger'd Heav'ns perpetual King;
And put to proof his high Supremacy,
Whether upheld by strength, or Chance, or Fate,
Too well I see and rue the dire event,
That with sad overthrow and foul defeat
Hath lost us Heav'n, and all this mighty Host
In horrible destruction laid thus low,
As far as Gods and Heav'nly Essences
Can Perish: for the mind and spirit remains
Invincible, and vigour soon returns,
Though all our Glory extinct, and happy state
Here swallow'd up in endless misery.
But what if he our Conquerour, (whom I now
Of force believe Almighty, since no less
Then such could hav orepow'rd such force as ours)
Have left us this our spirit and strength intire
Strongly to suffer and support our pains,
That we may so suffice his vengeful ire,
Or do him mightier service as his thralls
By right of Warr, what e're his business be
Here in the heart of Hell to work in Fire,
Or do his Errands in the gloomy Deep;
What can it then avail though yet we feel
Strength undiminisht, or eternal being
To undergo eternal punishment?
Whereto with speedy words th' Arch-fiend reply'd.

Fall'n Cherube, to be weak is miserable
Doing or Suffering: but of this be sure,
To do ought good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight,
As being the contrary to his high will
Whom we resist. If then his Providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil;
Which oft times may succeed, so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb
His inmost counsels from their destind aim.

What can I say? If you want a killer scene between a Sith Lord and his apprentice -- deformed and burned to a crisp, but still ready to come back for more, there you have it.

Now, here's the point of making you read all this stuff (besides making you regret that you didn't pay more attention in your philosophy and comparative lit classes): To have brought any one of these three stories of a great fall to the screen -- to have convincingly realized any one of the three on film -- would have been a masterful achievement, worthy of the very greatest filmakers of all time.

I do not know if Lucas is filmaker enough to have pulled something like that off. Let's say I have my doubts. But in the event, that is not what Lucas seems to me to have attempted. Instead, he seems to have tried to put on film all three stories at once -- that is, all three falls, somehow intertwined, in some manner known perhaps only to the adepts of the Force. And in that goal -- whether it was born of commercial calculation, or overwhelming hubris, or (my bet) just bad aesthetic judgment -- he succeeded not at all.

But He's Our Son-of-a-Bitch

2005-05-23T19:48:00.000-07:00

Dateline Uzbekistan, Fergana Valley. The Forward Strategy of Freedom ® -- Special Democracy-Promotion Division ™ -- Marches Happily On.

Via The Medium Lobster, via Atrios.

And to think that that well-known organ of the liberal media conspiracy, the CIA Fact Book, has the temerity to characterize the regime of our good friend and War-on-Terror ally Islom Karimov as, "authoritarian presidential rule, with little power outside the executive branch." Are they implying that there is something wrong with that arrangement? Sounds like a budding case of treason to me -- somebody better alert Ann Coulter.

Revenge of the Sith: An Attempt at a Philosophical Criticism

2005-05-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

Warning! Spoilers Throughout!

So go and see it already, if you've got a problem with that.

First things first: I enjoyed the movie. I can think of no higher praise than to say that, for the duration, it banished the thought of the perfectly dreadful "Episode I" (meaning the third sequel) from my mind. To be haunted no more by little Annie's immaculate conception, or his midi-chlorian blood count, or his amazing prowess in building and driving pod racers (to say nothing of the dreadful shtick of those animated off-season Catskill acts Jar Jar and Watto) is a considerable achievement, in its own right -- a redemption, of sorts. Beyond that, ILM's cityscapes and planetscapes have never been more captivating. A friend suggested to me that the real destiny of this series of films lies in video gaming. I can believe it. I would love to have a "Myst" version of Lucas's worlds to play with and explore. The cinematic use of CGI is that good. (So good, in fact, that one often forgets about the characters in the foreground -- but I'm getting ahead of myself.)

And Lucas is to be credited for going the extra mile for his old-time fans. He troubles himself to tie up such loose ends as: why C-3PO remembers nothing, while R2-D2 remains a font of android wisdom about the intentions of the bad guys and the virtues of the good guys; just how and why Darth Vader winds up imprisoned in his ultra-cool black cyborg outfit; what accounts for the Emperor's terrible skin condition (hint: it wasn't Dioxin poisoning); how it is that the once-great Jedi order winds up as a tiny, dispersed remnant, waiting for Mark Hamill and/or Carrie Fisher to come along and set things right; why it is that the Wookies in general (and Chewbacca in particular) remain so loyal to the good guys; and, most importantly, why it was that Obi-Wan had to send young Luke off to apprentice with Yoda -- the answer being not only (as we already knew) that Obi-Wan is a little, shall we say, challenged in the mentoring department, but also that (as this film makes abundantly clear), Master Yoda is the most ass-kicking little green man in the history of cinema.

Unanswered, however, is the interesting (cinematic) question of why the "New Hope" only gets off the ground (in various senses), thanks to the intervention of one Han Solo, AKA Harrison Ford playing an updated version of the classic American hard-boiled action hero -- the reluctant idealist with a hard shell of protective cynicism -- a type perfected almost 40 years before the original Star Wars by Humphrey Bogart. That kind of character doesn't make an appearance here (and hasn't made one in any of the "first three" episodes), leaving one to wonder if it is too early, or rather too late in saga for such a thing to work for Lucas. Come to think of it, the kind of "dame" capable of bringing such a character's latent idealism to the surface -- through a mixture of snappy dialog, self-reliance, and sexual electricity -- doesn't show up either. But, here I am perhaps just dating myself. Back to the film at hand, and what disappointed me about it on its own terms.

At first I thought the problem was simply Hayden Christensen not being up to the role. Well, in fact, he isn't -- he simply doesn't have the slightest fraction of the screen presence required to carry off either the charismatic young Jedi hero or his transformation into the tormented Sith Lord apprentice. Here's a tip: don't watch Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia on the same day that you see Christensen in Revenge of the Sith, thinking that the characters' similar transformations, amidst similarly epic settings, might make for an interesting comparison. It's a bit like starting out with a surprisingly good morning at the local driving range and then having Tiger Woods show up. Not flattering.

But, on the other hand, Christensen isn't the whole movie. He gets an awful lot of very fine support from the likes of Ewan McGregor and Samuel L. Jackson and Ian McDiarmid and especially from dear old Yoda (as I say, Frank Oz, with the aid of ILM's CGI wizards, makes this a muppet to be reckoned with). And those gorgeous sets (computer generated or otherwise), give practically eveyone in the frame an added dose of conviction. Plus, as others have reported, the quantity of lame Anakin/Padme dialog has been reduced to a bearable (though not, be it noted, a bare) minimum.

And yet, it has to be admitted: The central character's transition from best of the good guys, to worst of the bad guys -- the main aesthetic challenge and justification, wasn't it, for this entire second trilogy? -- still doesn't come off with anything like the impact and conviction it should. Why not?

Then I thought: No, the real issue here is that Lucas is hanging too much on Anakin's fear of losing Padme, without anything to motivate it except a couple of vague and unconvincing dream sequences of her dying in childbirth. After all, she's not dead yet. Yes, yes, he is supposed to able to see into the future, so strong is the force with him. But why then is it just this sliver of the future that he sees?

Oedipus, at least, had a bit a of riddle to puzzle out. Anakin's visions are like digital videos from the operating theater. Shouldn't oracles -- no matter how disturbing -- speak a little less univocally? Shouldn't, in fact, their very inscrutability be part of the what makes them the trigger, or mark, or occasion, of tragedy? If you just flat-out know, with utter certainty, that some very specific, very bad thing is going to happen, why not (to ask the question that instantly dooms all dramatic tension) simply avoid it? Or, to put it more crudely, were the abortifacients known since time immemorial here on earth just supposed to be beyond the technical capacity of the physicians of Coruscant?

But, in fairness, great plots have turned on a lot less: Hamlet was troubled by dreams, wasn't he, and visited by ghosts? Besides, Natalie Portman doesn't suck nearly as bad as Hayden Christensen, and that's almost enough to make his feelings for her convincing -- the implausibility of their immediate motivation aside. Yes, far too much is made of Anakin's desire to "save" Padme and, no, the memory of the loss of his mother Shmi (a scene we are not even given to ponder) doesn't make up for this dramatic deficit in the slightest.

But even that would only have left Anakin/Vader's transformation under-motivated. In fact, the transition felt worse than that. It felt completely false. It felt like a scam. And, strange to say, I realized this, not because of anything Anakin said, nor even because of anything Padme or Palpatine said. I realized it because of something Obi-Wan said -- something that rang completely, utterly false.

Recall the late scene: Anakin/Vader and Obi-Wan are circling one another, gearing up for their final battle, when the following exchange takes place:

ANAKIN: Don't lecture me, Obi-Wan. I see through the lies of the Jedi. I do not fear the dark side as you do. I have brought peace, justice, freedom, and security to my new Empire.

OBI-WAN: Your new Empire?

ANAKIN: Don't make me kill you.

OBI-WAN: Anakin, my allegiance is to the Republic ... to democracy.

ANAKIN: If you're not with me, you're my enemy.

OBI-WAN: Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes. I will do what I must.

Yes, I know, Lucas is wearing his politics on his sleeve here -- the allusion to Bush's "War on Terror" rhetoric in those last two lines is pretty inescapable. But that is not why the exchange went CLANG! for me. It went CLANG! when Obi-Wan came out with that business about his allegiance being to Republic.

Out of kindness to Lucas, let's leave aside the absurd anachronism of "democracy" for the moment. There is, at least, in the world of this film, an institution that looks something like a Republic. Specifically, it is something a lot like the late Roman Republic, with power largely in the hands of an oligarchical Senate. So be it. We know this story well -- the story of how patrician republics devolve into empires. It is, after all, one of the central Western stories, and it has been told, in a variety of forms, by some of the West's best story tellers.

Compared to this tradition (even compared to its considerably thinner cinematic variant -- I'm thinking for instance of Kubrick's Spartacus) -- Lucas's version is abrupt, schematic, unconvincing. But that is not what hit me about Obi-Wan's rejoinder to Anakin/Vader. What hit me about that line is that it was completely, utterly unconvincing. It was, in fact, the most unconvincing line in the whole movie. The good guy (or, rather, whoever was writing the lines for the good guy) was, in this instance, blowing smoke up our hind quarters. Why?

And now we come to a fatal confusion at the heart of Lucas's political vision -- so far, I mean, as that political vision has any specifically cinematic consequences, which is all that really matters here. We have, on the one hand, the story of a great Republic being corrupted into Empire by its greatest and most prominent citizen. That is the story of Palpatine, and Padme, and the Senate and all the rest. It is no accident that Natalie Portman is given the best line in this aspect of the story -- "So this is how liberty dies, to thunderous applause" -- and that she gets to deliver this line in the Senate chamber, in reaction to the speech in which Palpatine declares himself, in effect, Emperor.

We have, on the other hand, the story of the Jedi. And what exactly are they supposed to be doing here, in this Republic, decaying into Empire? This post at Marginal Revolution was a tip-off, but Tabarrok missed, I think, the essential point. The Jedi don't fit the narrative of the decaying Republic, not because they are malign and untrustworthy (Anakin/Vader is emphpaticaly not right about this), but because they don't belong here. They come from, and belong in, another story altogether.

There was nothing like the Jedi in Rome. But something very like them did make a rather famous appearance in the history of Western political thought.

Think about it: They are a self-perpetuating order, dedicated to selfless service of the state. They are chosen, it is said, from a special breed of subjects. Perhaps they were fashioned of gold rather than silver or bronze like other men; or perhaps they are uncommonly rich in midi-chlorians. Either tale would do -- the important thing being that they are set apart at, or shortly after, birth. One way to do that would be to assign randomly-chosen sexual partners in common, always drawn from within the order itself. Another would be to recruit younglings from the general population at a tender age, and impose an ethic of celibacy upon them as a condition of membership.

Their training would emphasize the pathways towards the very highest things. Call these the Forms, or the Force. If we think of these apprentices as escaping the shackles of the illusions of this world, and ascending, with great difficulty, away from those everyday illusions, towards the undying light of the Force, or the Forms, behind them; if we think of them finally coming to behold that light directly; if we think of the ecstasy of that journey upward, away from all merely worldly concerns; -- then, and only then, can we appreciate the great strangeness with which these Jedi initiates would be greeted upon their return to the ordinary, everyday world.

How odd they must seem to everyone else -- how remote, how unnatural! And how, to them, this world must seem like nothing more than a cave -- a cave with illusions projected on its walls, and the denizens of that cave chained in place, and forced to take those illusions for reality, and knowing no better. The Force is not only beyond them, they do not even know of its existence.

And we can appreciate, I suppose, the temptation that some of these apprentices might have, as they begin their ascent, and begin to realize what they are being made privy to -- the temptation to exploit their great and growing knowledge of how illusory is the world as commonly regarded by men, and how much power lies in the knowledge of the true realities behind those illusions.

But -- and this is all-important -- the higher they ascend, these apprentices, the more they approach the status of masters, the less and less will be this temptation to take the slightest advantage of their superior knowledge. On the contrary, indeed, it is the reverse temptation that will take hold of them, and so powerfully that they will find it all but irresistible.

And what is that temptation? It is the temptation to leave the miserable, illusory world of human affairs behind. Or to turn away from it, at the very least, and concentrate instead on the beautiful world of the Forms, or the Force -- the world that only they, after all, of all men, have been vouchsafed the knowledge, and whose sight puts all merely human, merely worldly endeavors and hopes and fears in the shade.

I hope these recent paragraphs of shameless cribbing from Plato have been enough to make my basic point: The Jedi do not belong in this story of the fall of Rome. On the one hand, they would have no particular reason for allegiance to the Republic. Anakin was right -- Obi-Wan's loyalty must be to the Force, not to the Republic. But neither, on the other hand, would they have any temptation at all to seize power. And so Anakin was also wrong -- Obi-Wan wanted nothing for himself, or for the Jedi. In fact, Anakin could never have become a Jedi, much less a great one, with a mind could desire power for himself, for its own sake. He would never have made it out of the cave -- never have glimpsed the Force/Forms.

What Anakin would have to know, as a Jedi who had made the full ascent out of the cave, is that take on the burdens of politics with the greatest possible reluctance, since every hour spent politicking, is an hour less spent communing with the wonder and beauty of the Force/Forms. Democracy, in particular, would be their least favorite (because most demanding and querulous, and least orderly and disciplined) form of government. It's quite clear they would prefer monarchy, if only they could prevail on one of their own number -- specifically, the one least interested in doing it -- to take up the dreadful burden of becoming a philosopher-king. An unlikely prospect, to say the least.

It's quite conceivable, then, that they would try to single out a tyrant, and train him in the Jedi ways -- Plato actually gave this a shot. It didn't go so well. But it makes Chancellor Palpatine's appeal to the Jedi council intelligible -- a plot point which, consequently, works well. What isn't intelligible, is why the Jedi should care about defending the Republic, as opposed to finding a more manageable tyrant, when it turns out that Palpatine is the Sith Lord.

Above all, however -- and this is the part that really throws the monkey wrench into Lucas's plot -- there is absolutely no way that the very greatest of the Jedi would:

a) be diverted from love of the Force/Forms by the love of any individual;

b) be greedy for wealth, power or any other illusory, worldly reward; or,

c) have the slightest desire to possess anything, or anyone, in particular.

This does not mean that the Platonic Jedi would be unrelenting good guys. Actually, your average movie-going audience would probably think them terrible bores. They would disdain all seeking after wealth. They would be communistic in their ways. They would use their considerable fighting skills with zeal, but without hope of power. With great reluctance, they might be prevailed upon to take a hand in politics. The best of them would aim for total detachment from everything except contemplation of the Force/Forms. Their main interest in the prevailing form of government, whatever it was, would be that it let them alone.

A Jedi would never say, with Machiavelli, that the fate of his city (or country, or planet, or solar system, or what have you) was more important to him than the fate of his immortal soul. One of the superiorities of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films over Lucas's second round of Star Wars films, is that Jackson captured (or successfully conveyed from Tolkien) this ineluctable tension between the civic/political and the transcendent/metaphysical realms -- call it our (human) sense of being stuck, or stretched, between two worlds at once. Jackson didn't knock this one out of the park either (neither did Tolkien, for that matter), but he at least showed some awareness that the these realms have claims that push and pull on us humans in quite different, and potentially quite incompatible ways.

Now, in fairness, Lucas heads in the right direction. How, after all, do Plato's guardians become corrupt (and all things become corrupt, with time)? One path he mentions is that of marrying out of turn. That is, particular erotic attachments are formed, and begin to break up the communistic solidarity of the guardian class. So that was a promising path, and it might have worked.

But the problem -- and it is an essential one -- is that one fallen from the guardian/Jedi order, would not have retained his powers. He would have fallen from communion with the Force/Forms, and so would be cast ever more completely into illusion, just like the many around him. He might become politically powerful; he might go even lower and become merely wealthy. But he would not retain -- would in fact progressively lose -- all relation to what made him wise and powerful beyond the ordinary run of humanity.

We would no longer be in Plato's world, but in Cicero's -- and the Cicero of the political battles of the Philippics, not of the Stoic wisdom of The Republic. We would back, in other words, to our eminently political story, about how republics fall into empires.

But Lucas wants to stay on the Platonic plane, right through the fall of his Rome, so that he can justify, retroactively, the rise of the New Hope, and the reemergence of the Force. And there is only one way to pull that off: Lucas needs more than Platonism -- he needs Manicheanism. This is why the Force must have a "Dark Side," why there must be Sith Lords, and not just Jedi Masters. If there were no Dark Side of the Force, then the story of the dissolution of the Jedi would be a different kind of beginning -- the beginning of a non-metaphysical age, of a Political Age -- of what Tolkien called (in a tone, no doubt, of lamentation) The Age of Men. And, as we all know, that is not what the New Hope is all about.

Of course, once one dabbles in Manicheanism, one needs to decide whether to go all the way, or rather to find some path back to something like an Augustinian settlement, in which the Dark Side, for all its power, is but, in the last analysis, the privation, the absence, of the Good. And this little excursion has its own theological-philosophical pitfalls (into which Tolkien, like his friend and fellow fantasist C.S. Lewis -- both far braver and more experienced hikers than Lucas could ever hope to be over terrain like this -- seems to have tripped head-first, in that way peculiar to very smart, orthodox yet eccentric English Roman Catholics). But all that is a post, or several, for another day.

Democrat-Republican Crazy Glue

2005-05-21T23:09:00.000-07:00

Speaking of the problem of democratic authority as it relates to our present partisan ideological division: Another of my excellent teachers once said to me, apropos this general topic, "What you want to know is -- what's the glue?" By which I think he meant something like -- what bothers you is the question of what the hell is supposed to hold a liberal-capitalist society together.

Now I don't deny that this particular concern has from time to time been part of what I was (am) most worried about, in my (less and less frequent) episodes of serious political thinking. But there was, and is, a good deal more to it than that, and if, dear George, by some cyber-miracle you are out there somewhere reading this, what I wanted to say was something more like the following:

In the first place, I am, at bottom, not really that puzzled by what the glue is, that holds this thing together. I think the broad outlines of this are pretty obvious to any moderately diligent student of modern social order. What does interest me rather a great deal, these days, is the way the whole glue-factory is run -- and in particular the role of the different major parties, interests groups and ideological formations, in the running of it.

For convenience's sake, let's make a broad division between two major kinds of glue that keep American society together (once again I beg off commenting on other liberal-capitalist regimes for lack of first-hand experience): And for nostalgia's sake, let's call one of these Panem and the other Circenses.

Now under Panem I would place the broad responsibility of a modern government to keep a mixed capitalist economy growing in a responsible way -- to minimize and shorten recessions, stave off excessive inflation, assure reasonably robust job growth and middle-class asset accumulation, provide for general economic security, keep national savings and investment in some kind of reasonable balance. Without making too big a deal about the reasons for this at the moment, it's pretty clear as an empirical matter that Democrats tend to do a better job of it than Republicans.

But when it comes to the other major glue factor that holds things togeher in this society -- what I'm calling Cicenses -- the conservative movement has, I submit, a decisive edge. This may seem odd at first. After all, isn't American popular culture and entertainment dominated by godless Hollywood types who'd sooner lick Michael Moore's stubble than pledge allegiance to the flag? Well, yes, I suppose so, but there's the problem with that, from the perspective of social glue.

Popular culture is, and has always been, thank the gods, a rather anarchic affair. The kind of circenses it provides is, by and large, distinctly non-civic. That, indeed, is part of it's point. Rock and Roll was about youthful rebellion. What it strays too far from that legacy, punk and post-punk keep yanking it right back, like fundamentalist orders. Hip-Hop, like Jazz before it, is associated with a(an enormously popular) counter-culture of pleasure in the sheer violation of taboos about the mixing of high and low, and white and black and brown, cultural styles. And Hollywood, at its best and its worst, is about keeping going a medium in which both shlock and great art are possible, and in which you really have to experience a fair chunk of both to recognize either.

My point is -- none of this is designed to, and none of this does, provide the kind of diversions, the kind of entertainments, that weld Americans together qua Americans -- that give us that crucial rooting interest that transcends all merely instrumental calculations of loyalty or consent.

For that, you need a very different kind of circenses. The most mild version of it is on dislay during the quadrennial Olympics, when, as a people, we suddenly throw off our nationalist athletic lethargy and start acting like the planet's most pumped-up world-cup football (soccor) fans.

But that is, unfortunately, only a very occasional form of the circenses that makes the glue that, together with our prosperity, currently holds what's left of the Republic together. The more pervasive form, the more persistent form, the far more effective form, is the one on display when our President appears on the nation's television screens and declares that it is time to destroy an evil dictator or regime, in a far off, foreign land.

Not to stop a human rights emergency, not to provide humanitarian relief, not to separate warring combatants who are killing innocents -- no, these things do not have the glue-making power. Only the pitched contest with naked evil, the more demonic, the better: Fidel Castro, Maurice Bishop, Daniel Ortega, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein (twice). It is not necessary that they be especially threatenting enemies. In fact, in a pinch, they need not be possessed of any particular enmity for us at all. (In fact, as it happens, we have a rather poorer track record when it comes to hunting down the real thing -- the Bin Ladens and Zarquawis).

For remember, we are talking here about circenses. We are not trying to convince a committee of Congress diligently doing its job. We are putting on a show, and that show must be satisfying. It must in fact be satisfying enough to weld its audience -- all of us, with our welter of doubts and fears and questions -- into a compact unit of public opinion, ready to fill the public spaces with our ullulations, as our warriors march off to battle.

The point, then, is that these figures, the chosen targets, must be made to seem like the ultimate enemies of all that is American and good and true. Always, they must be made to seem to be seeking our destruction -- overtly or covertly. And always, therefore, they must be made to seem like adversaries who can only be stopped, by being granted the utter destruction they have chosen for themselves, in deciding to menace us.

And now comes political lesson number two about the glue that stands in for a legitimate concept of democratic authority: At this form of circenses, the conservative movement absolutely excels. It leaves the left utterly in the dust. It has done so since it's inception in the Red-baiting of the late 40's and early 50's, led by a young Congressman named Richard Nixon and a vituperative Senator named Joe McCarthy. It is no accident that Bush recently presumed to excoriate Churchill and FDR for being insufficiently resolute friends of liberty -- presumably for the historical blunder of not being willing to turn World War II into World War III. The "betrayal" at Yalta was one of the founding myths of the birth of right-wing fanaticism -- after all, there was Alger Hiss himself, standing right there in the background of the picture with Stalin and FDR!

The legacy of this kind of right-wing circenses in post-war Red-baiting points to an important -- indeed a crucial element -- of how it works to glue the nation together, despite its seeming divisiveness. It works, in particular, by identifying enemies internal as well as external -- and the former, of course, are regarded as by far the more insidious. "Treason" -- once a charge of the utmost possible gravity -- is now thrown around on national media outlets by right-wing hacks like Ann Coulter with all the care and glee of a malicious child pulling the legs off of spiders. Why is this tolerated in our public discourse? Why is it, in fact, encouraged? Because it works.

The glue provided by this kind of entertainment does the trick -- it brings in the viewers and the listeners, and in the process it welds together at least some elements of the popular mind. There are enemies -- wicked enemies -- to seek out and destroy. They are sufficiently distant, and sufficiently foreign to us in their ways, that one needn't worry too much about which ones will get sent to their maker, or their precise degree of culpability, or for what. Some of the tank crews invading Iraq painted 'remember 9/11' slogans on their canons. Who gave them such a notion? They might as well have painted 'remember the Main' for all the reality it reflected. But the show must go on, and the show owes no one any apologies.

And if things bog down unexpectedly (as, indeed, they have)? This does not make for the best TV. But, it can kept out of the headlines when the news is very bad and, when a report does have to be filed, so long their body counts continue to exceed our own by a sufficient order of magnitude, the job, it can be reported, is getting done. Somewhere, after all, other enemies, or would-be enemies, are cowering before our might -- of that, the show tells us, we can be sure. And at home -- at home the weak and the would-be traitors are learning what it means to be on our side.

And what does it mean? It means what it has always meant, throughout time immemorial, when you are content for your "side" to be nothing better than a tribe, a clan, a gang: It means that the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must; it means that might makes right; it means that justice is the interest of the stronger; it means that if one of "their" tribe kills one of our tribe we will kill another of theirs -- or many times more -- in return; it means that to share a world with others different than yourself is to live in a constant state of war; and it means that to question any of this is be, at best, a weak link and, at worst, suspect in your loyalty to the tribe.

And that, it seems to me, pretty much sums up the warp and woof of our current politics. We elect Democrats to give us Panem. They're pretty good at it -- not great, but a hell of a lot better at it than the other fellows, who are always leaving things in a shambles. But then, when things get good and confortable, we start to long for the Circenses. And Democrats, as everyone knowns, give lousy circenses. You have to maneuver them into perjury traps to get interesting television out of them.

But now the Republicans -- they give us the tribal entertainments we crave, that make us feel whole and unified, and that we never seem to get with the other guys. Good and evil, foreign enemies out to destroy us, unless we get them first, morally unambiguous wars in distant lands, with overwhelming firepower at our disposal. We feel like real members of the tribe, then, and we fly its colors proudly.

Later, inevitably, reality starts to kick in, and the story starts to fall apart, lose its narrative drive and unity. And then the Democrats get brought back in, like a relief pitcher after a particularly long, rough inning, to try to save what can saved, and clean up the mess.

And that, as far as I can tell, is how our social and political glue currently works. It's crazy glue, of course, that we use to keep this Republic going, in its present condition. But that is what we have got, and what I fear we will continue to have, in lieu of a working concept, and reality, of democratic authority.

Does it surprise you, Mr Bentley?

2005-05-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

This is an old story, but very much worth repeating in the current climate. Via Digby, citing the Tim Golden's May 20th report in The New York Times, which (acting like real newspaper for once) got its hands on the Army's internal 2,000 page report on detainee deaths at the so-called Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan.

By all means read the whole thing, if you can stomach it. But here's my summary of what it tells us -- or rather what it reminds us -- about the what else, besides vast quantities American blood and treasure, Mr. Bush's way of conducting the "War on Terror" has so far cost us:

The Administration's insistance that Afghan prisoners were neither properly enemy combatants, nor covered by the Geneva Conventions, was the magic legal-political key that opened the door to everything that followed.

Bagram, in Afghanistan, subsequently became the training ground for the torturers and methods of Abu Ghraib.

At a bare miminum, dozens of U.S. military and intelligence personnel became, in effect, professional torturers, whose duties included all manner of human torment, up to and including murder.

Neither due process of law -- nor the actual guilt or innocence of particular detainees -- nor even the proportional military necessity (if, indeed, any at all) of so treating them, seems to have crossed anyone's mind.

Military spokesmen (that is, the Pentagon's professional PR flaks) lied about the entire thing from day one.

The punishment of those so-far identified as perpetrators of these war crimes has been slow, uncertain and -- to all appearances -- designed primarily to limit responsibility to the lowest ranks, while exculpating those who, explicitly or implicitly, ordered it done.

In the present political climate I suppose it is necessary to add what would, in less-corrupt political times, go without saying, namely this: That the moral depradations here described are primarily the reponsibility of the political leadership that placed these soldiers in this situation, and that the resulting political evil is not in the slightest excused, but is in fact immeasurably compounded, by having meanly and illegitimately cloaked itself in, and thus far tainted, the honor of our armed forces.

The army of a free people is not maintained so that its political masters can order up torture and murder by decree.

Stuck in the Cave Again Blues

2005-05-19T21:13:00.000-07:00

I want to keep going on about this (to me at least) very interesting theoretical question that I call the problem of democratic authority. I really do. But, unfortunately, I find that massive quantities of current-affairs stupidity just keep pulling me back into the damn cave of contemporary events again and again.

Consider: Here is Robert Rubin -- co-architect, at the very least, of the late-90's prosperity -- on the magnitude and likely effects of our current budgetary problems, if left unchecked. Some highlights:

Most pressing is the 10-year federal deficit, which most independent analysts project at $4.5 trillion to $5 trillion, assuming that the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 are made permanent and that the alternative minimum tax is adjusted to avoid unintended effects on middle-income taxpayers. And while 10-year numbers can be highly unreliable, deficits are as likely to be higher as to be lower. Over the longer term, Social Security has a 75-year estimated deficit of $4 trillion, while the different components of Medicare, including its new prescription drug benefit, represent a fiscal problem of roughly $20 trillion.

For those keeping track at home, this means that the general fund deficit over the next ten years is as large, or larger, than the (obviously much less certain) Social Security funding shortfall projected for three quarters of a century from now. It also means that Medicare looms as a problem roughly five times the size of the worst-case Social Security shortfall. But wait, there's more:

Virtually all mainstream economists agree that, over time, sustained deficits crowd out private investment, increase interest rates, and reduce productivity and economic growth. But, far more dangerously, if markets here and abroad begin to fear long-term fiscal disarray and our related trade imbalances, those markets could then demand sharply higher interest rates for providing long-term debt capital and could put abrupt and sharp downward pressure on the dollar. These market effects, plus the adverse impact of continuing fiscal imbalances on business and consumer confidence, could seriously undermine our economy.

We have managed to avoid these market effects so far because private demand for capital has been relatively limited, and because the central banks of Japan, China and other countries have provided large inflows of foreign capital. A change in either of those circumstances, or simply a change of market psychology for whatever reason, could, however, turn these interest rate and currency risks into a reality.

So, in a, er, nutshell, our financial balls are hanging out over the void, and a relatively small handfull of foreign bankers and currency speculators are holding all the sharp knives. So what should we be doing about it?

The tough decisions needed on both spending and revenues will probably require some process whereby the president and leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives and both parties assume joint responsibility for painful political choices. Tax revenues are approximately 16.5 percent of gross domestic product, the lowest level since 1960, and spending is roughly 20 percent. We must have serious spending discipline and entitlement reform - though any entitlement reforms likely to be proposed would have little immediate effect.

But, as BusinessWeek, not an advocate of activist government, said in a recent editorial, "the deficit morass is due as much to a revenue shortfall as to excessive spending." (The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, for example, are estimated to have a 75-year cost of $11 trillion, almost three times the entire Social Security deficit.) And that shortfall is especially pressing given the rapid increases in entitlement costs and the need to finance national security, investments in education and infrastructure and other critical programs. At the same time, revenue-increasing measures must reverse the recent trend of disproportionately favoring upper-income taxpayers.

The first priority should be to tackle the 10-year fiscal imbalances, which would also be the best way to promote economic growth and minimize the risks I have outlined. Using structural measures to address the 10-year deficits would address our long-term imbalances as well.

For example, if the tax cuts for those earning above $200,000 were repealed and the inheritance tax as reformed were continued rather than eliminated, the 10-year projected deficit would be reduced by roughly $1.1 trillion, or almost 25 percent, and the 75-year fiscal reduction would be roughly $3.9 trillion, or approximately equal to the Social Security shortfall. This course of action would be similar to the income tax increases that were combined with spending cuts in the 1993 deficit reduction program, which some predicted would lead to recession but which, instead, was followed by the longest economic expansion in our nation's history.

We should also begin a serious bipartisan process on Medicare to identify possible solutions and create public support for action, because doing so is absolutely key to our long-run fiscal health. Despite the focus in Washington today on Social Security, it is a smaller and less pressing problem, and our political system can bear only so much traffic at one time.

If we were to address Social Security now, whatever we do must not increase federal deficits and borrowing but instead must improve fiscal conditions and increase national savings in both the short and long terms. The proposal that the administration has embraced - private accounts plus progressive price indexing of benefits - would result in additional deficits and borrowing of more than $1 trillion in the first 10 years, more than $3 trillion in the second 10 years, and so on for roughly 50 years.

That's because this approach - which would eliminate only about one-third of the projected 75-year Social Security deficit - calls for private accounts that would involve immediate and large continuing costs while the savings begin only in the second decade and would grow slowly. While some estimate that after 50-plus years those savings will exceed costs on a cumulative basis, projected savings 50 years out will do nothing to offset the impact of increased deficits on interest rates. After all, if markets took into account 50-year projections of fiscal conditions, interest rates would already be through the roof.

Now all that sounds bad enough -- impending fiscal disaster, which the administration is not only ignoring but positively worsening by its stated policies, while toying with Social Security "reform" of dubious necessity that, itself, is more likely to do harm than good. All that, is, as I say, bad enough. But it is not the worst of it.

The worst of it is that they are not even trying to rectify this mess at the White House. They are, on the contrary, if anything, pushing it to new heights of utter incompetence. Read the whole De Long post, by all means (he's drawing on Jason Furman's analysis over at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities), but here are the bits that get the essential points across most succinctly:

It is a clown show, an episode of stupidity of a jaw-dropping magnitude:

1. The administration's Social Security gurus shove Bush out there with talking points saying that we need to act now to pass the Bush plan, because starting in 2017 Social Security will start taking resources away from the rest of the government and that's a very bad thing--and then they roll out a plan in which Social Security starts taking resources away from the rest of the government in 2011.

2. The administration's Social Security gurus shove Bush out there with talking points saying that passing the Bush plan is essential because if we don't the Social Security trust fund balance will hit zero in 2041, and big benefit cuts will then be necessary--and then they roll out a plan in which the Social Security trust fund balance hits zero in 2030.

3. The administration's Social Security gurus shove Bush out there with talking points about the importance of restoring actuarial balance to Social Security--and then they roll out a plan which closes less than a third of the 75-year funding gap (and refuse to specify the plan in sufficient detail to allow anyone to do a longer-run analysis).

I am sorry, but with the best will in the world there is no other explanation for this than the most cyncial one. No one -- not even in this White House -- could be this inept. The point is clear. It is exactly the point Yglesias made in commenting on the White House's on-again-off-again flirtation with the so-called Pozen plan:

Robert Pozen is primarily concerned with putting Social Security in long-term actuarial balance. George W. Bush is primarily concerned with keeping taxes very low and with phasing Social Security out in order to replace it with something very different. Pozen isn't a die hard opponent of private accounts. It's not clear that he's even an opponent at all. But he's aiming at so-called "solvency" and Bush isn't. Pozen seems to have thought he could drag Bush on to his side of the fence. But he can't. There's a lesson to be learned here.

And the lesson, folks, is obvious: The reason Bush and his mouthpieces in the right-wing media machine started talking about solvency, then dropped it, then picked it up again, and so on, to suit the changing Party line, is because all this has squat to do with "saving" social security (if, indeed, it needed saving). What it has to do with is a bold as brass attempt to carry out an item that has been at the very top of the hard right's agenda ever since FDR beat them four elections in a row and convinced them Bolshevism was right around the corner -- and that is, quite simply, the destruction of the signature domestic achievement of the New Deal.

This is not, in other words, about economics -- which is why the so-called economic arguments on the Right are so damn pitiful. It is about class power, and trans-generational payback. It is about political revenge -- the kind that is carried out by people and institutions with long, long ideological memories.

The John Birchers fantasized about doing it in. The Goldwater Republicans scorned Ike's acceptance of it and treated its reversal as a spearhead of the true Anti-Communist crusade here at home. Reagan touted privatization in the euphoria of his first 100 days -- until he realized he'd come perilously close to electrocuting himself on what then became known as the Third Rail of American Politics, and quickly backed off, becoming almost a born-again New Dealer in his rhetorical defense of it.

But Bush's people have learned some new tricks: First, make it look like you're "saving" the program from itself. (This they picked up from the bi-partisan, Greenspan-led compromise of the late 80's, which really was about guaranteeing solvency, back when there was some serious question about that, but which unhappily lacked the safeguards to make sure the benefits resulting from the compromise stayed within the system.)

Then the Bushies figured out that they needed -- without getting too specific about the details -- to suggest a way to "save" the system that happens to strip it of its near-universality among the middle class, and its inherent relationship to the obligation to work for a living, thereby making its benefits look increasingly like something received by economic losers. And then, someday, in a more-thoroughly right-wing future than our own, a future Bushite can unleash the coup de grace. For, by then, the old quasi-socialist Daemon, no longer cherished by the middle-classes, can be killed off with relative ease, just like any other unloved "welfare" program that most people naturally assume is full of nothing but cheaters and malingerers.

Meanwhile, while this little ideological project is underway, the share of taxes paid by the very rich have been so sharply and systematically and permanently reduced, that we face a very real, and quite immediate, and exceedingly dangerous prospect of fiscal shipwreck -- our economic fate, essentially, mortgaged into the hands of a few powerful foreign institutions whose interests, for the time being, happen to coincide with ours -- but may very well not do so tomorrow.

And this -- this mishegoss -- is what your modern Republican Party is pleased to call "fiscal conservatism."

Liberalism, Conservatism and Values Talk

2005-05-17T23:05:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about liberalism, conservatism and question of (a word I dislike, and so will put in scare quotes) "values." I'm pretty sure most of what has been written about this on the vaguely liberal side -- while well-intentioned -- hasn't gotten us very far, by which I mean very deeply into the problem. I'm almost entirely certain that nearly everything that has been written about it on the so-called conservative side (at least based on the all-too-broad sampling to which I've already been subjected) has been written in a spirit of mindless triumphalism and philistinism, that scarcely justifies the trouble of commenting on it.

But, but, there is a real question here. Not the question of why the Democrats lost the last election, or how they can eek out a win in the next one -- all of which is probably best left to the inside dopesters and the political pros. No, the interesting question is what is really going on with us -- all of us -- in this American public life of ours, which seems, at least to my mind, to be spinning off in directions no one anticipated, and about whose ultimate direction and destination, no one has much of a clue.

In short, just what the hell is going on in our politics right now? It's obviously all got something to do with "values" -- but just as obviously not in the stereotyped, presentist senses being retailed on the boob tube talk fests and even in most of the prestigious newspapers. All that current-event analysis certainly has its place (well, at least some of it does -- see my blogroll for the voices I at least find worth paying attention to). But maybe, just maybe, it's time to take two steps back, and do a little political theory. It couldn't hurt, and it might just help. So here goes nothing.

Let's start with something respectable -- or, at least something that used to be respectable sometime in the middle of the last century. In his The Self and the Dramas of History, Reinhold Niebuhr, the greatest American theologian of the past century, and one of its most powerful political thinkers, had this to say:

Our "modern" age had many beginnings. But in political history it had an obvious beginning in the revolt against traditional authorities, of which monarchial power was most symbolic. The revolt was both inevitable and justified. Unfortunately it created the impression that it was necessary only to substitute the artifacts of order for the organisms of community to establish the desired justice and order. Thereby the permanent significance of the organic factors of community was obscured. An even more grievous miscalculation was that the permanent tension between order and justice was believed to have been eliminated.

And this is true. Order is always what Nietzsche called "order of rank." Thus, always involves hierarchy and unconsciousness (that which escapes being questioned because it is beyond, or beneath question)--in a word, authority. And to put the problem little too schematically for the moment: justice is always, in one way or another, rooted in equality, no less than order is always, in one way or another rooted in authority. And so, as Hannah Arendt once pointed out, authority and equality are much more naturally in tension, than are liberty and equality.

A consequence of this, according to Niebuhr, is that the community -- any community entering into what I'll call for convenience's sake the modern project -- faced a triple crisis, concerning three major institutions, located right at the heart of the whole project:

The organs of communal integration which were under criticism and which the modern community was forced to revise in the interest of justice were chiefly three: government, social hierarchy and property.

Now of this trinity, it's pretty easy to see that contemporary liberalism and conservatism (to use the partisan terminology favored in the U.S.) have championed various fragments, duly transformed by the processes of modernization.

Liberals defend, not government in the sense of the right and duty of the magistrate to command the willing obedience of subjects, but government as the expert-driven, rational-bureaucratic administration of things, in the interest of the greatest number. Conservatives meanwhile are largely content with the idea that government should have sufficient capacity for violence to compel obedience.

Conservatives defend, not property in the sense of a fixed place-in-the-world, but property as a process--the endless accumulation of wealth by means of existing wealth, all of it endlessly fungible. Liberals respond by getting creative about ways of socializing the idea of property, creating rights and entitlements that (they hope) will be as secure from political expropriation as the old familial titles were (hence the present battles over Social Security).

Admittedly, social hierarchy is in some ways more of an orphan--no one claims it with a clear conscience, and all make a pretense of attacking it. But it is obvious from the criticisms of each party that the liberals rather assiduously defend some version of an intellectual hierarchy of merit (the famous "career open to talents"). The old-line conservatives never quite renounced the idea of a (somewhat more carefully muted) hierarchy of inherited influence -- at least in the form of wealth and the social graces and contacts that wealth confers.

But it is the newly ascendant, "social" conservatives, with their very base in the fast-growing evangelical and fundamentalist churches, who have substituted for this tired old snobbery something that can look like its populist opposite, namely, that most beastly spawn of the Reformation, the hierarchy of moral propriety -- of the saved over the damned, the elect against the preterite. And this new, inverted social hierarchy also carries, increasingly, (as did, after all, the original version), a militaristic component of not inconsiderable ardor, replacing some of the former reverence even for the state -- at least at the outset of foreign wars in infidel lands, in which we are the odds-on favorites.

So where does this all leave us? It leaves us, as the price for vast and (I hope it goes without saying) both totally necessary and as-yet incomplete set of advances in human justice, with rather a shambles of a concept of what a society is, of what a social order is, and of what authority can be, under democratic (or at least aspiring-democratic) conditions. And this shambles, largely describes and determines our present political conflicts and options. Let's pause here for some more Niebuhr:

The religious reverence for established order is not created by priests but it can be manipulated and corrupted by them. It springs up spontaneously wherever men appreciate an order that they could not have created. It is, in short, the chief ingredient of the state’s "majesty." Majesty is certainly a more important source of authority than power, though no state can exist without the police power to suppress overt recalcitrance. But the possession of majesty spells the difference between legitimate and illegitimate government, that is, between the government which rules by implicit consent or that which rules by "force and fraud."

The ingredients of majesty are chiefly three: (a) historic prestige, symbolized in the principle of legitimacy in all monarchies; (b) the religious aura, derived either from the sense of the divinity of the monarch or (within Christian terms) his divine ordination to rule; and (c) the moral prestige derived from the justice of his reign.

Here, within his analysis of the government as organ of communal integration, the old Roman trinity identified by Arendt comes up: historic prestige is the fruit and substance of what she called tradition; the religious aura surrounding the social order of things speaks for itself; and the moral prestige of rule itself is the thing once known as authority.

To put the matter as bluntly as possible, (aspiring) democracy is, as an absolutely indispensable condition of its own possibility: (a) critical towards the past, and most particularly towards the inherited practices and institutions of its own past; (b) irreverent toward the pretenses of its rulers to be inspired or otherwise authorized by transmundane powers; and (c) tasked with a constant and jealous vigilance over depredations of its own liberties by those in positions of power.

So the problem of democratic authority, or order, is really as simple as that of squaring (a) historical prestige with critical historicism; (b) reverent piety with pragmatic skepticism; and (c) moral devotion with anti-authoritarianism. That's all there is to it.

Now I am very far from supposing that this cannot be done. I am pretty sure it cannot be done permanently -- I am pretty sure it is more-or-less the work of modernity to keep having at it, in fact, and that there is no end to that work outside of the aspiration to democracy itself. But anyway, I am quite sure it cannot be done by means of the crippled creeds ascribed (with some justice, and with some injustice) to the current major ideological tendencies in the United States (and, perhaps, elsewhere in the rich, constitutionalist, capitalist democracies -- though I know a hell of lot less about any of them, so I'll just keep quiet for now).

I'm pretty sure that "my" side's crippled creed is less crippled than the "other" side's is -- that, after all, is why I'm on this side. Above all, I think it has a hell of a lot better chance of being made more whole than the other one does, anytime soon. But I certainly don't think this is going to happen by means of some higgledy-piggledy swapping of stereotypically "liberal" "positions" on various, carefully poll-selected "issues" for some stereotypically "conservative" "positions" on those same "issues."

Let me emphasize something here: I am emphatically not calling for Democrats to go around ostentatiously sermonizing about how Hollywood (or Hip-Hop, or Alt Rock, or what have you) is destroying the American soul. In all seriousness, the American soul -- always given, by the relative ease of our circumstances, as Emerson and Thoreau tried their damndest to remind us, to excessive moral somnolence -- could probably use a sharp dose of the Coen Brothers, Outkast, and P.J. Harvey, so don't get me started.

Incidentally, sorry for all the scare quotes two paragraphs above, but this business of throwing around words like "liberal" and "conservative," as if we all know exactly what we mean by them, and as if it is a foregone conclusion that there can't be any interesting questions about what these terms might actually signify -- and, even worse, the habit of using words like "positions" and "issues," as if anyone outside a relatively-small circle of political-media insiders and junkies gives a rat's ass about such categories -- is, I think, a large part of what we need to get over if we are to make any genuine progress here.

My claims to being at least partly a conservative at heart are (for me, at least), a highly-relevant example of this kind of unwillingness for, or uninterest in, the (let me say) moral stake in the accuracy or inaccuracy of our political utterances. Said claims, you see, are frequently met with disdain, derision, or, at the very least, disbelief by my soi-disant conservative friends. I have been told things like (not an exact quote here, but you get the idea): "Maybe by some old-fashioned standard you're a conservative, but that's not what it means to be a conservative today, and there's no way you're a conservative now."

This struck me, in the first place, as an exceedingly odd sort of criticism coming from a self-professed "conservative." Is conservatism now the political philosophy that reinvents itself when it grows tired of its old forms? Is it to be from now on regarded as the Jay Gatsby of American political theory? Is the claim that a point I happen to be defending might be more in tune with the sensibility of an Edmund Burke, while my so-called conservative opponent is sounding for all the world like Tom Paine in a particularly Jacobin mood, suppose somehow to count against my "conservative" credentials? In such moments I find myself frequently reminded of the incident when, at some debate on the merits of the Iraq War, Daniel Cohn-Bendit turned to Richard Perle and said something along the lines of, "Why, you're more of a Trotskyite than I ever was!" Oh brave new world, that hath such thinkers in it!

Secondly, and on a purely biographical note, I was originally and, I think I may say, most enduringly trained in the history of political thought by a genuine conservative: a man who, as he liked to say, would, if he could, have joined Henry Adams' party of Conservative Christian Anarchy, provided that the members of the CCA agreed to work the factories, the discipline being good for them; a man who (with gentler irony than I can ever hope to convey) once described himself as embarked upon a life-long Jihad against Karl Marx; a man whose sympathetic but deeply critical book on New Left hero Eric Fromm was entitled Escape From Authority; a man who once said (I quote here from memory) "Freedom comes into the world with soldiers"; a man who once proclaimed that the only banner he was prepared to march under was the red and black banner of communitarian-anarchy; a man in whose Spartan office hung a reproduction of the original, thirteen-state stars and stripes (and very little else) -- an emblem, I am sure, of the fact that he thought the Anti-Federalists had the better of the argument with Hamilton, Madison and Jay; a man who (more than anyone else) taught me how to read Winthrop and Melville and Lincoln and Faulkner; and the man who taught me that, in any political struggle, that side is to be preferred which, if victorious, would give the fullest and most generous measure of honor to the values and interests of the defeated side.

(I still remember, incidentally, the rush of recognition when, years later, I read in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, the mysterious admonition to Mohammed: "What kind of idea are you when you win?" Partly thanks to this uncanny synchronicity of my old teacher's lesson, and the great novelist's words, I sometimes think there may be no more important question to ask when reviewing the whole, long bloodbath of human history.)

In any case, my point in engaging in this extended paean -- besides repaying, in some small, evanescent way, a welcome debt to one of my intellectual forefathers -- is simply to say this: When it comes to true conservatives, I don't need to rely on books, to know whereof I speak. For I have known a considerable one, first-hand. And all the spinning, screaming heads, in all the assorted hell-mouths of the right-wing propaganda machine -- print, cable and Web -- will never, ever, get me to mistake their trumped-up, Frankenstein's monster versions, for the genuine, living, feeling, thinking being.

With all this talk about conservatives and conservatism, I suppose I should close with some sort of coda about liberalism. Liberalism, if anyone is interested, is a similarly rich and complex topic, about which, for the moment, I'm not going to have a hell of a lot to say -- not at least until I've had the benefit of reading what, judging from Alan Ryan's review essay in The New York Review of Books (itself a fine piece by another old teacher of mine, but subscription only), looks to be an excellent new book by Kwame Anthony Appiah -- a philosopher who happens to be one of that rare company whose published work has never disappointed me.

Appiah's new book, called The Ethics of Identity, apparently takes John Stuart Mill as its point of departure, for a nuanced defenese of liberalism, unusually sensitive and responsive to its standardly-regarded shortcomings. I am looking forward, in particular, to something far more supple and resonant with human experience, than John Rawls' undoubtedly formidible, but logically chilly and remote achievement. And I can't think of anyone better equipped to make the case for contemporary liberalism than K.A. Appiah (operating under the aegis, though not, evidently and happily, under the thrall, of J.S. Mill). If it's as good as his In My Father's House, who knows?, he may yet succeed in making me a liberal on mondays, wednesdays and fridays, instead of tuesdays and thursdays.

Iraq, Romantic Violence, and the Lessons of Aurans

2005-05-14T11:35:00.000-07:00

Below are five episodes from David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia that I have long suspected would wind up capturing the essence of the various stages of our Iraqi adventure.

What prompts me to quote these scenes at such length now is two extraordinary pieces I read in the last few days: First, this (for the The New York Times at least) unusually frank and cogent summary of the current state of play among the various Iraqi factions. Second, this exellent review (in The New York Review of Books, subscription only) by Pankaj Mishra of William Pfaff's The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia--which is now on my must-read list. So, with a bow to the ghost of Ronnie Reagan, let's continue this political discussion by turning to the silver screen...

First comes the scene in which Lawrence's embryonic Arab army, in a daring move to flank the Turkish fortifications at Aqaba by reaching that port overland, has just crossed the pitiless "Anvil of the Sun," only to discover that one of Lawrence's companions fell off his mount sometime during the pre-dawn march. Lawrence's determination to return for his fallen comrade -- and still complete the mission--his naked rejection, in other words, of tragic fate, is the film's great emblem of the Western mind and spirit at its proudest, and most powerful.

LAWRENCE
Have we done it?

SILIAM
No! But we're off the Anvil.

LAWRENCE
Thank God for that, anyway!

SILIAM
Yes. Thank Him! Aurens, I do not think
you know how you have tempted him.

LAWRENCE
I know. We've done it.

ALI
God willing.

LAWRENCE
When do we reach the wells?

ALI
God willing, midday.

LAWRENCE
Then we've done it.

SILIAM
Thank Him, Aurens. Thank Him.

DOUD, SEEING A RIDERLESS CAMEL

Aurens!

ALI
Gasim's!

LAWRENCE
What's happened to him?

ALI
God knows!

LAWRENCE
Why don't you stop?

ALI
For what? He will be dead by midday!

LAWRENCE
We must go back.

ALI
What for? To die with Gasim? In one hour
comes the sun. In God's name, understand!
We cannot go back!

LAWRENCE
I can! Take the boy!

ALI
If you go back, you kill yourself, is
all! Gasim you have killed already.

LAWRENCE
Get out of my way!

ALI
Gasim's time is come, Aurens. It is
written.

LAWRENCE
Nothing is written!

ALI
Go back, then! What did you bring us here
for with your blasphemous conceit! Hey?
English blasphemer! Aqaba? Was it Aqaba?
You will not be at Aqaba, English! Go
back, blasphemer, but you will not be at
Aqaba!

LAWRENCE
I shall be at Aqaba; that is written...in
here.

The second scene is the one in which, on the eve of the daring attack on Aqaba, one of Ali's murders a man from Audar's clan, and Lawrence realizes that he, the only one without tribal allegiance, must execute the traditional sentence, to prevent a cycle of self-destructive revenge between the Harif and the Howetat, thereby dooming the mission. He then discovers the identity of the condemned man--and starts to learn something of fate's long reach, and its power to implicate even (especially?) the will of those who most proudly defy it.

AUDAR
He killed: he dies.

ALI
This is the end of Aqaba.

SILIAM
One of our men murdered one of Auda's
men.

LAWRENCE
Why?

SILIAM
Theft? Blood-feud? It makes no matter
why.

LAWRENCE
Ali!

ALI
It is an ancient wound.

LAWRENCE
I didn't come here to watch a tribal
bloodbath.

AUDAR
It is the law, Aurens.

LAWRENCE
The Law says the man must die.

AUDAR
Hm!

LAWRENCE
It he dies, would that content the
Howitat?

AUDAR
Yes.

LAWRENCE
Sherif Ali. If none of lord Auda's men
harms any of yours, will that content the
Harif?

ALI
Yes.

LAWRENCE
Then, I will execute the Law. I have no
tribe and no one is offended.

LAWRENCE POINTS HIS PISTOL AT THE CONDEMNED MAN,
WHO RAISES HIS HEAD. WE SEE THAT IT IS GASIM.

Gasim! Did you do it?

GASIM NODS. LAWRENCE SHOOTS HIM ONCE,
THEN CONTINUES SHOOTING, EMPTYING HIS REVOLVER.

AUDAR
Well. Aurens. What ails the Englishman?

ALI
That man he killed was the man he brought
out of the Nefud.

AUDAR
Ah, it was written, then. Better to have
left him.

ALI
It was execution, Aurens: no shame in
that. Besides, it was necessary. You gave
life and you took it. The writing is
still yours.

The third sequence comes after Lawrence has been tortured and raped by a Turkish general in D'ara, attempted to resign from service in Arabia, but been ordered by Allenby to return, and hold down the right flank of the Turkish forces, while the British advance on Damascus. Lawrence, knowing by now of the Sikes-Picot agreement to divide the Ottoman domains after the war, agrees, intending to reach Damascus first, and claim it for the Arabs. On the march, however, his forces come upon a retreating Turkish column that has just finished slaughtering a Bedouin village.

ALI
Damascus, Aurens. Aurens. Not this.
Go round. Damascus, Aurens! Damascus!

GUARD
No prisoners.

ALI
Aurens?

AUDAR
This was Talal's village.

LAWRENCE
No prisoners! No prisoners!

THEY CHARGE THE TURKISH COLUMN, OVERWHELMING IT.
CUT TO ALI, SEARCHING FOR LAWRENCE AMONG THE CARNAGE.

ALI
God. God! God!! Aurens! Enough!
Enough! Make them stop! Aurens!

LAWRENCE, DAZED, HOLDS A KNIFE. HE IS COVERED IN GORE.

BENTLEY
Major! Major Lawrence! Jesus wept! Jesus
wept!

ALI
Does it surprise you, Mr Bentley? Surely,
you know the Arabs are a barbarous
people. Barbarous and cruel. Who but
they! Who but they!

Fourth comes the sequence that opens with Lawrence attempting to preside over a round table meeting of the various factions to whom, under his leadership, the control of Damascus has temporarily fallen. The cheap comedy about lack of bedouin technical expertise is dated and offensive, but the naivete of Lawrence's faith in his own ability to coordinate all of these intense rivalries, and weld them into one nation under law, through the sheer force of his will (combined of course with his moral and technical superiority) is timeless. As the scene opens, nearly everyone round the table is shouting simultaneously.

LAWRENCE
We, here, are neither Harif, nor Howetat,
nor any other tribe, but Arabs at the
Arab Council, acting for Prince Feisal.

AUDAR
He insulted me.

LAWRENCE
Sherif Ali said that the telephones were
in the care of the Howetat, and that the
telephones had ceased to work, and this
is true, Auda.

AUDAR
They will not work because they are given
no electricity. The electricity is in the
care of the Harif.

LAWRENCE
If you answer there'll be bloodshed.

ALI
You speak to me of bloodshed? I ask
pardon of Audar Bute.

AUDAR
Humbly? Humbly! Harif!

ALI
Yes! Humbly!

AUDAR
This is a new trick.

LAWRENCE
Why is there no electricity?

ALI
I have been to that electrical house,
Aurens. There are three large machines.

LAWRENCE
He means 'generators'!

ALI
So, one of them is burned. They are of an
incredible size, but helpless.

AUDAR
It is so of all machines. Let them burn!
What need of telephones?

LAWRENCE
The need is absolute.

ALI
Then, we need the English engineers.

LAWRENCE
No! Take English engineers and you take
English government. Take...

SOLIDER
Fire has broken out.

ALI
Where?

SOLIDER
In the Gensebe district.

ALI
It is not a district that matters.

LAWRENCE
It will spread.

ALI
Then, in God's name, use the fire
brigade!

SOLIDER
We have tried, Aurens, but there is force
in the water.

LAWRENCE
Then, you must carry it.

ALI
The Urala do not carry water.

AUDAR
What else are they good for?

LAWRENCE
We will hear petitions this afternoon.
This afternoon!

CUT TO ALLENBY AND HIS AIDS. ALLENBY IS STUDYING A BOOK
ON FLY FISHING AND PLAYING AT CASTNG. FROM THE WINDOW OF
THEIR ROOMS, AFIRE CAN BE SEEN RAGING IN THE CITY BELOW.

ALLENBY
I'm going to take this up after the war.

BRIGHTON
Surely, we should do something, sir.

ALLENBY
It's an old man's sport.

DRYDEN
Are you an old man, sir?

ALLENBY
Hmm.

BRIGHTON
Well, all I can say is, sir, it's a heavy
responsibility.

THE LIGHTS IN THE ROOM GO OUT.

Sorry, sir.

ALLENBY
Maybe, it's the bulb.

DRYDEN
No, sir. It's the power.

OUT THE WINDOW, THEY FIRST HEAR THEN SEE
THE ARAB FORCES MARCHING OUT OF THE CITY.

They're leaving,
sir.

ALLENBY
That's it, then. Marvellous-looking
beggars, aren't they?

The final scene is primarily between Allenby and Feisal, as Lawrence is both (reluctantly) promoted and then dismissed. The spirit of romantic violence having been excused with due honor, what follows is a sharp but cordial negotiation among old men who understand one another, and the ways of the world, and the way such things must always end--if, at least, after all the shooting and the shouting, the world is to resume something like its normal course.

FEISAL
There's nothing further here for a
warrior. We drive bargains. Old men's
work. Young men make wars and the virtues
of war are the virtues of young men;
courage and hope for the future. Then,
old men make the peace. And the vices of
peace are the vices of old men; mistrust
and caution. It must be so.

TO LAWRENCE'S BACK AS THE LATTER EXITS

What I owe
you is beyond evaluation.

TURNING AGAIN TO ALLENBY

The power-house, the telephone exchange - these I
concede; the pumping plant I must retain.

ALLENBY
If you retain the pumping-plant, there'll
be no water, sir.

FEISAL
I shall be glad of any technical
assistance.

ALLENBY
In fairness then, you must bring down
your flag.

FEISAL
I shall not bring down my flag, and if
your men attempt it, my men will resist
it.

ALLENBY
Have you any men, sir?

FEISAL
Enough for that. It's the kind of thing
that makes a very ugly incident. I'm sure
you're government does not wish to appear
at the peace conference in the light of
an aggressor...

Col. David H. Hackworth, 1930-2005

2005-05-08T21:26:00.000-07:00

Soldier, dissident, journalist, citizen, patriot.

After so many battles so nobly fought, Requiescat in Pace at last.

A Little Iraq News

2005-04-30T23:50:00.000-07:00

Three months after the Iraqi elections, a government is -- almost -- in place. (Informed Comment, as usual, is the place to go for details: here here and here.)

Among the new government's curiosities is a measure of power for our original man-in-Baghdad, thief liar and probable Iranian agent Ahmad Chalabi, who wound up with one of four deputy prime ministerships, as well as, of all things, the oil ministry -- at least temporarily. Chalabi's partial comeback offers a sharp contrast to the fortunes of our more recent man-in-Baghdad, Iyad Allawi, whose Iraqiya List got not a single portfolio, despite his frantic attempts to forge a Kurdish-Iraqiya block to thwart the power of the religious Shi'ites.

The latter, of course, are running the show now, with a majority of portfolios including the finance ministry. Interior (an exceptionally powerful portfolio in the Iraqi context) went to a Turkman who is a long-time member of SCIRI and hardcore supporter of its paramilitary arm, the Badr Brigades. The Kurds were mollified with something less than a quarter of the positions, including notably the foreign ministry. Prime minister Jaafari is holding down the defense job himself for the time being, until, apparently, an acceptable Sunni can be found.

That difficulty -- finding Sunnis willing to fill the few positions reserved for them, who are also acceptable to the Shi'ites -- appears to be the main reason that the entire cabinet is not yet seated, and that negotiations to finish the job are stalling. Well, that, and the fact that practically everyone in any way connected with the regime has become a bombing target.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair, whose government has done pretty well managing the British economy and even making a start on improving social services, is desperately trying to convince Labour supporters, irate with him over Iraq, not to vent their frustration by defecting to the Liberal-Democrats in the upcoming general election. With luck they'll listen to him since, by this means and by this means alone, could the amazingly lame Tories conceivably back their way into power, courtesy of Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system. The Guardian has all the gory details on the latest embarrassing revelations, along with the usual hypocritical Tory grandstanding, and Blair's sad if dogged campaign to convince the British electorate not to take out its loathing for his Iraq policy (of toadying to Bush on the war while keeping friends and allies at home in the dark) on the Party that he, more than anyone else, brought back from the dead.

And what of the U.S. involvement in all of this? Our President, in one of his exceedingly rare prime time press conferences, recently informed the nation that he thinks things are going well in Iraq.

That's comforting. I wonder if, in making that assessment, he paused to consider the fact that, since the Iraqi elections, which occasioned so much celebratory coverage and commentary here at home, 149 American soldiers have been killed. These 149 were killed, that is to say, while the political wheeling and dealing was going on that finally produced the above-reviewed results. Or I wonder if it crossed his mind that this number exceeds (by nine), the number killed during "major combat operations," back before he declared the mission accomplished, on May 1, 2003, two years ago today. I wonder if he paused to consider what lessons might lurk in the fact that getting (most of) an interim cabinet appointed, cost us more American dead than knocking down an entire dictatorship?

I hope, in any case, that the Iraqis get the rest of their cabinet appointed soon, and that it serves them well. It was dearly bought.

Protecting Privacy

2005-04-25T23:44:00.000-07:00

It was a couple of weeks ago that Atrios alerted us all to this remarkably frank revelation of Tom DeLay's views regarding three major American institutions:

The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them.

I must admit that the effect of such a broad and deep assault on the very foundations of the Constitutional order, was at first a bit disorienting. With the separation of church and state, judicial review and the right to privacy all under simultaneous attack by the Majority Leader, it was hard to know where to begin in mounting one's defense of what one had assumed, until recently, to be some of the most firmly established American traditions. If Mr. DeLay's purpose was to stun and immobilize the would-be defenders of the status quo by the audacity and scope of his lightening strike, he at least partly and temporarily succeeded.

After noting Mark Kleiman's timely call upon the words and spirit of Alexander Hamilton, in defense of judicial review, I contributed my own defense of the separation of church and state, citing Hugo Black's half-century-old majority opinions and, through him, Madison's and Jefferson's views on the subject. Although my own effort was no doubt inadequate in various ways, I felt secure at least in having such illustrious and ancient authorities to call upon, in defending the good old way.

But as I turn now to the problem of how to defend the right to privacy against attacks by the likes of Mr. DeLay, I find the prospect for success seems to darken significantly.

It is not that there is nothing to cite. Mr. Justice Douglas's opinion, in Griswold v. Connecticut, is a masterful thing. In defending the right of married adults to receive information about contraception without interference from the state, he convincingly illucidates how established judicial tradition has it that "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance." And he backs up the application of this principle to ground a right of privacy by citing (as Mr. Justice Clark had recently done, in Mapp v. Ohio) the 19th-century Boyd v. U.S., with its ringing invocation of "the sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life."

All this is much, but perhaps not, after all, enough. Griswold is good law, but it dates only to 1965. Mapp is only four years older. It is good to have Boyd in the background (and some pre-revolutionary English case law behind that), but it would be far better to have Jefferson and Madison, or Hamilton and Marshall. If the right of privacy were not under assault by a determined and compact ideological minority, all this would probably not matter. In due course, Griswold's assertion of a right to privacy would become what many of us had assumed it was well on its way to being -- an element of the Constitutional order nearly as sacrosanct as if it were contained in a founding document of the Republic.

But we do not live in age in which long-settled constitutional interpretations -- even ones that are so clearly in fundamental accord with the spirit of our institutions -- can grow old gracefully, slowly acquiring that aura of benevolent authority that only time can give to all human contrivances. Instead, we live in an age in which so-called "conservatives," drunk with power and heedless of the consequences, have determined to wreck as much Constitutional furniture as they can get away with, and give every indication that they will continue to do so, as long as their power lasts. And that leaves me wishing I had something weightier than young Griswold and old Boyd to throw into the breech.

For the willingness to acknowledge the authority of the reasoning in Griswold (as opposed to merely coincidentally agreeing with its outcome) truly depends on a kind of conservatism that our modern "conservatives" have forgotten (or never knew) how to practice. These DeLay Men would no doubt assert that the "privacies" of Boyd were meant to be limited to, as the decision itself says, "the sanctity of a man's home." With privacy thus sunk back into property rights (and indeed, specifically, into the property rights of the male head-of-household), there could be no question of its extending to, say, a woman's privacy in her body and its reproductive life, or a gay person's in his or her sexual intimacies.

As technology and society evolve toward ever greater complexity and interdependence, we repeatedly face the choice whether to interpret an old right as particular to the institutional form it once had -- in which case it practically shrivels and dies in the new surround -- or to see it rather as something whose outward form must expand to allow it to go where it's enduring spirit wants to take it, preserving the latter in a gradually changing shape. The scorn and contempt of our contemporary "conservatives" for the idea of a "living constitution" is nothing but their active preference for a dead one -- as though they had set out to prove Burke's most hamfisted liberal critics right, in making conservatism synonymous with the rejection of all change, no matter how gradual or just, so long as that rejection fortifies some entrenched privilege, or forestalls some genuine advancement of human freedom.

And it is for this reason that I think it might be worth the considerable trouble and expense to clarify this matter in the only way the Right will be compelled, if we are successful, to respect. Winning this or that election won't do it, for their present mode is one of permanent ideological war. Only one thing can stop them cold, and at the same time force them to show themselves to the American people for what they are. I have in mind a campaign for the passage of a Constitutional amendment to make the right to privacy as explicit, and as inviolable, as any other of our fundamental rights. Such an amendment need not, and probably should not, say much. But what it says it should say utterly without equivocation:

The right to privacy shall not be abridged without due process of law.

Let us propose something like that, and let us see where the Republican party stands on it, and where the American people do, and the real distance between those positions.

Maxims for the Age of Bush and DeLay

2005-04-22T00:38:00.000-07:00

L'intérêt, qui aveugle les uns, fait la lumière des autres.
-- François de la Rochefoucauld

1. A politician is never more political than when urging other politicians to put politics aside.

2. Politicians who are astute students of the mechanisms for measuring the drift of public opinion take the greatest possible care to speak ill of such mechanisms at every opportunity.

3. The surest measure of the sincerity of a politician's stand on principle is the political price paid when that stand was originally taken; political costs that come due at a later date are as likely to indicate miscalculation, as courage.

4. A politician's true readiness to take positions that place his power at risk is generally in inverse proportion to his eagerness to claim credit for having done so.

5. The more emphatic a politician's denials that his actions are calculated to serve a particular vested interest, the more secure one can assume is the place of that interest in his counsels.

6. When a politician happens to be truly at odds with a certain interest group, the reasonableness and moderation of that politician's tone, when confronting that interest group, is a reliable index to the amount of political power wielded by the latter.

7. A politician's public willingness to oppose the wishes of a genuinely powerful interest group nearly always indicates a more covert willingness to do the bidding of a rival interest group.

8. What looks to be a principled defense of the rights of a particular branch or level of government is often a result of the fact that, once an interest finds itself well served by an institution, it tends to remain so for a long time.

9. Generally speaking, the trustworthiness of a journalist is in inverse proportion to his celebrity.

10. The words "some say," occurring in a piece of political journalism, indicate that the writer felt a strong need to give vent to a wholly unsupported assertion on the subject at hand -- along with a slightly stronger need to conceal this fact.

11. Elite journalists are expected to maintain a reputation for both accuracy and non-partisanship. When these goals collide, however, non-partisanship is seldom sacrificed for the sake of accuracy, for this would risk offending power, while the opposite choice risks offending only truth.

12. Other things being equal, the level of a journalist's access to those in positions of great power indicates how well that journalist can be relied upon to serve their interests.

13. The normal relationship between powerful politicians and celebrated journalists is one of mutually beneficent exchange: the politician requires votes; the journalist, notoriety; each is ideally positioned to help supply the other's wants.

14. While its relation to the truth remains a mystery, the anonymous official leak is an unfailingly reliable indicator of the political interest of the originator of the leak.

15. With official leaks, the main interest generally lies in determining whether the leak is intended to serve the political interest of the leaker, or of the leaker's patron, or both.

16. In a great many cases, an official leak is a piece of carefully prepared propaganda that is as yet too obviously such, to be defended publicly; the purpose of such a leak is to remove the taint of propaganda, by establishing a precedent.

17. Successful open conspiracies are as common as successful hidden conspiracies are rare.

18. The use of a specific deception to achieve a specific political goal is rare, for it generally requires far more self-discipline than most politicians and pundits possess; the use of innumerable lies to destroy the efficacy of the distinction between truth and falsehood, is the common coin of politics and punditry alike.

19. While the first blow is the most damaging in any fight, a reputation for attacking first can be equally damaging; thus the skillful politician or pundit will always lay the groundwork for an unprovoked ad hominem attack by accusing the target of having drawn first blood.

20. Effective attacks upon an opponent's character, when they cannot plausibly be attributed to retaliation, must be carried out by agents who can be disowned without diminishing their effectiveness; such attacks, therefore, require neither wit nor truth, but a mechanism.

Not-So-Good Times

2005-04-19T23:54:00.000-07:00

Seems like a lot of smart people sure are worried about macroeconomic fundamentals these days. Éminence grise Paul Volker -- the former Fed chair who finally broke the back of 70's era inflation -- says that the underlying imbalances, foreign and domestic, are "as dangerous and intractable as any I can remember." Brad DeLong quotes Financial Times analyst Martin Wolf on the mutually-addictive relationship between China's exchange rate rigidity and the U.S. budget deficit, wherein he calls the current administration "arguably the most fiscally irresponsible... since the second world war ." Meanwhile, Paul Krugman sniffs the employment and inflation data, catches "a wiff of stagflation," and warns that this means "there will be no good options if something else goes wrong." (And there are plenty of candidates for that "something else.") Finally, a worried Billmon breaks out his Excel for a chart-stuffed post showing that the Asian-financed U.S. consumption binge is, ironically enough, just the local aspect a really worrisome problem of global oversaving.

But, hey, on the other hand, annuntio vobis gaudium magnum -- habemus Papam! And it's not every day you get to write a blog post saying that. Oh wait, maybe this particular papal announcement is not such a great joy after all. Sully, for one, sure ain't too pleased -- ouch!

Tom DeLay, Political Theorist

2005-04-16T17:01:00.000-07:00

I think Atrios was the first one to pick up this particular outburst of Tom DeLay's in the Moonie Times:

Mr. DeLay: Not zealous. I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them.

Just so we're all clear on this, here we have the Majority Leader of the United States House of Representatives -- one of the three or four most powerful Republican officeholders in the land -- advocating the destruction (or, what amounts to the same thing, lamenting the survival) of three notable American institutions:

The separation of church and state
Judicial review
The right to privacy

Since Mr. DeLay is still, at this hour, Majority Leader of the House, and since no high-ranking Republican officials have come forth to condemn his words, I assume we are safe in concluding that today's G.O.P. agrees with this implicit characterization of itself as the party of theocracy, legislative tyranny, and government control of private life. I feel I owe Mr. DeLay a word of thanks: Thank you Mr. DeLay, that's very clarifying.

On the question of judicial review, Mark Kleiman has very helpfully summoned no less an authority than Alexander Hamilton (in Federalist 78) to remind Mr. DeLay that "50 to 100 years" of revisionism won't quite cover it, and also that judicial review exists, among other things, to keep Constitutionally-delegated power (such as that presently enjoyed by Mr. DeLay) from doing things it is expressly forbidden to do (such as, for instance, rewriting the Constitution at will). A simple enough lesson but one that, clearly, bears repeating -- espeially now.

One can undertake a similar teaching enterprise for the principle of the separation of church and state, calling upon similarly-weighty authorities. True, the Supreme Court decisions in this tradition do happen to fall within Mr. DeLay's 50 to 100 year time for prospecitive revision of Court decisions, but, as we shall see, they have (like the prinicple of judicial review) a pretty secure chain of authority that goes all the way back to the Founders:

Here is Mr. Justice Black, writing for the majority in McCollum v. Board of Education, 1948 (footnotes deleted):

This [program for voluntary religious instruction in Illinois public schools] is beyond all question a utilization of the tax- established and tax-supported public school system to aid religious groups to spread their faith. And it falls squarely under the ban of the First Amendment (made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth) as we interpreted it in Everson v. Board of Education. There we said: 'Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force or influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or nonattendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups, and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between Church and State."

Now this may "only" be a half-century old Supreme Court decision (and thus strictly speaking subject to Mr. DeLay's ban) but -- let's face it -- it helps to have Jefferson on your side. It helps especially when you are going to be as emphatic about this question as Justice Black is being here:

[T]he First Amendment rests upon the premise that both religion and government can best work to achieve their lofty aims if each is left free from the other within its respective sphere. Or, as we said in the Everson case, the First Amendment had erected a wall between Church and State which must be kept high and impregnable.

In the Everson decision that Justice Black cites (and for which he also wrote the majority opinion), there is a good deal more of this kind of thing, including a brief lesson on the historical background and evolution of religious liberty in America:

A large proportion of the early settlers of this country came here from Europe to escape the bondage of laws which compelled them to support and attend government favored churches. The centuries immediately before and contemporaneous with the colonization of America had been filled with turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions, generated in large part by established sects determined to maintain their absolute political and religious supremacy. With the power of government supporting them, at various times and places, Catholics had persecuted Protestants, Protestants had persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects had persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics of one shade of belief had persecuted Catholics of another shade of belief, and all of these had from time to time persecuted Jews. In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place, men and women had been fined, cast in jail, cruelly tortured, and killed. Among the offenses for which these punishments had been inflicted were such things as speaking disrespectfully of the views of ministers of government-established churches, nonattendance at those churches, expressions of non-belief in their doctrines, and failure to pay taxes and tithes to support them.

These practices of the old world were transplanted to and began to thrive in the soil of the new America. The very charters granted by the English Crown to the individuals and companies designated to make the laws which would control the destinies of the colonials authorized these individuals and companies to erect religious establishments which all, whether believers or non-believers, would be required to support and attend. An exercise of this authority was accompanied by a repetition of many of the old world practices and persecutions. Catholics found themselves hounded and proscribed because of their faith; Quakers who followed their conscience went to jail; Baptists were peculiarly obnoxious to certain dominant Protestant sects; men and women of varied faiths who happened to be in a minority in a particular locality were persecuted because they steadfastly persisted in worshipping God only as their own consciences dictated. And all of these dissenters were compelled to pay tithes and taxes to support government-sponsored churches whose ministers preached inflammatory sermons designed to strengthen and consolidate the established faith by generating a burning hatred against dissenters. These practices became so commonplace as to shock the freedom-loving colonials into a feeling of abhorrence. The imposition of taxes to pay ministers' salaries and to build and maintain churches and church property aroused their indignation. It was these feelings which found expression in the First Amendment. No one locality and no one group throughout the Colonies can rightly be given entire credit for having aroused the sentiment that culminated in adoption of the Bill of Rights' provisions embracing religious liberty. But Virginia, where the established church had achieved a dominant influence in political affairs and where many excesses attracted wide public attention, provided a great stimulus and able leadership for the movement. The people there, as elsewhere, reached the conviction that individual religious liberty could be achieved best under a government which was stripped of all power to tax, to support, or otherwise to assist any or all religions, or to interfere with the beliefs of any religious individual or group.

The movement toward this end reached its dramatic climax in Virginia in 1785-86 when the Virginia legislative body was about to renew Virginia's tax levy for the support of the established church. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison led the fight against this tax. Madison wrote his great Memorial and Remonstrance against the law. In it, he eloquently argued that a true religion did not need the support of law; that no person, either believer or non-believer, should be taxed to support a religious institution of any kind; that the best interest of a society required that the minds of men always be wholly free; and that cruel persecutions were the inevitable result of government-established religions. Madison's Remonstrance received strong support throughout Virginia, and the Assembly postponed consideration of the proposed tax measure until its next session.

At this point, the curious reader might be tempted to break off and have a look at Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance for herself, in which she would find, among fifteen reasons cited for the rejecting the levy in support of religion, the following:

3. Because it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entagled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much soon to forget it. Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? that the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?

5. Because the Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation

6. Because the establishment proposed by the Bill is not requisite for the support of the Christian Religion. To say that it is, is a contradiction to the Christian Religion itself, for every page of it disavows a dependence on the powers of this world: it is a contradiction to fact; for it is known that this Religion both existed and flourished, not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them, and not only during the period of miraculous aid, but long after it had been left to its own evidence and the ordinary care of Providence. Nay, it is a contradiction in terms; for a Religion not invented by human policy, must have pre-existed and been supported, before it was established by human policy. It is moreover to weaken in those who profess this Religion a pious confidence in its innate excellence and the patronage of its Author; and to foster in those who still reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.

7. Because experience witnesseth that eccelsiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution. Enquire of the Teachers of Christianity for the ages in which it appeared in its greatest lustre; those of every sect, point to the ages prior to its incorporation with Civil policy. Propose a restoration of this primitive State in which its Teachers depended on the voluntary rewards of their flocks, many of them predict its downfall. On which Side ought their testimony to have greatest weight, when for or when against their interest?

Perhaps that's enough to give the flavor of the thing, and to reassure one that Mr. Justice Black wasn't just blowing smoke ("legislating from the bench") here. In any event, back now to Everson, where Justice Black picks up his narrative with the contemporary reaction to Madison's words:

Madison's Remonstrance received strong support throughout Virginia, and the Assembly postponed consideration of the proposed tax measure until its next session. When the proposal came up for consideration at that session, it not only died in committee, but the Assembly enacted the famous Virginia Bill for Religious Liberty originally written by Thomas Jefferson.

Well there's a fine how-do-you-do for the DeLay's of 18th century Virginia! Not only is their Christian relief act turned down, but wiley old Madison actually gets them so wrapped around the axle that, next thing they know, they're enacting as law one of Jefferson's most polemical Enlightenment harrangues.

There's a nice little story about how Jefferson wanted three achievements put on his tombstone -- notably excluding his having been, well, President of the United States. The three are: the authorship of the Declaration of Independence (okay, that's kind of a big one), the founding of the University of Virginia (not bad, not bad) and, third, authorship of the aforementioned Virginia Declaration of Religious Liberty. So he thought this one was kind of a biggie too. Apparently, Hugo Black agreed. In Everson he quotes the preamble at length:

Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either . . .; that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern ...

Then comes a relevant bit of the actual statute:

That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened, in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief.

At this point, Black has us where he wants us and, continuing in his own voice (or rather that of the court majority), moves in for the kill:

This Court has previously recognized that the provisions of the First Amendment, in the drafting and adoption of which Madison and Jefferson played such leading roles, had the same objective and were intended to provide the same protection against governmental intrusion on religious liberty as the Virginia statute.

This is followed by a flurry of citations to back up the point, but the deed is done: Black has married the 1st Amendment's establishment clause to Madison's and Jefferson's views about how the state should maintain a strict separation from religious institutions.

Even though the particular New Jersey statute under review in Everson survived, the foundation was already laid for McCollum, as Black could now pronounce the Constitutional principle that is to govern these matters in the firmest possible terms:

The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.

It may be the clap of despotic doom to the DeLay's of this world, but that's two Founders to none behind the whole separation of church and state thing -- and a pretty weighty pair of them at that. Somehow, I don't think the theocrats are equipped with much in the way of a comeback.

More Pop Culture War

2005-04-13T20:34:00.000-07:00

The latest salvos in the great center-left-blogospheric culture war have been exchanged:

Yglesias quotes a rapper named Immortal Technique (evidently a sort of Peruvian-American Chomsky with dope beats and a criminal past) to make an important point about the autonomy of the aesthetic (the old warhorses Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will having evidently become passé among twenty-something cultural élites). He also helpfully points out that Joe Lieberman would make a bad culture critic -- and not just because he's Joe Lieberman (which is bad enough, if you ask me), but also because he has the wrong day job.
Ed Kilgore says its all about the earnestly Naderite-sounding goal of regulating corporate marketing to kids, and not at all about censoring Yglesias's iPod choices. In fact, since Yglesias is a bit over 18, Kilgore won't even offer to protect him from all the record company hype that is clearly working a little too well in Matt's particular case. He also tries to snap Yglesias out of his serial Walter Mondale impersonation by offering up some actual anti-bad-culture policies, which Kilgore claims will have the effect of signaling voting parents that we aren't all a bunch of nihilists.
Digby forefully responds to Kilgore by saying that better V-chips and such don't cut much ice with culture-fearing parents who are too lazy or confused or whatever to use the parental tools they already have, and also that the GOP will always win on this issue because, after all, they really do want to censor stuff, and aren't afraid to say so straight out, without any Kerry-esque nuance. Digby further proposes that, if liberals want to make it clear that they have a moral backbone, it might more sense to take a principled stand on something that they are actually willing to pay a political price for -- like say the First Amendment.

I think I'm with Digby on this one. If things like a uniform ratings system represent the strongest medicine that the Kilgore-Gerstein-Sullivan wing is willing to prescribe, then we really aren't talking about much more than Clintonesque "micro-initiatives" and jawboning, neither of which I have any serious objection to.

And if Kilgore et al. seriously think that this kind of thing will be effective in the way that real censorship is effective, they should stop and contemplate the differences between Hollywood movies under the Production Code (which was real censorship, courtesy of the Catholic hierarchy and an energetic anti-Semite named Joseph Breen), and Hollywood movies under the ratings system. The latter, as I recall, had the net effect of making my friends and me wait until at least one of us sorta-kinda looked 17 before we could experience the full measure of sex and violence that movies had to offer. It was a longer wait than I wanted it to be, but I made up for it pretty quickly.

I should have said: I have no objection to micro-initiatives and jawboning -- provided they have the promised political effect of swinging some actual votes our way. It sure worked for the Big Dog, but (as Digby points out) not so much in poor Al Gore -- even though he had Frank Zappa's great nemesis at his side. In any case, making effective use of such tactics, and keeping them from backfiring, probably requires the kind of political dexterity and experience that most bloggers (including this one) don't remotely possess.

Negotiating Cultural Disturbance: The Way of The Dude

2005-04-13T00:12:00.000-07:00

I've been following with interest the Sullivan/Yglesias debate about what, if anything, Democrats should do to distance themselves from the entertainment industry, in order to "claim some moral ground" (Sullivan) with parents concerned about how Hollywood and such might be corrupting their children. (Updates here, here, here and here.) It ain't exactly Woods versus DiMarco, but you can follow it without a TV, so it's my kind of contest.

Near as I can figure, here is the state of play after two full rounds:

Sullivan thinks the Dems need to acknowledge concerns about the corrupting influence of pop culture verbally and (maybe) with (unspecified) policies.
Yglesias thinks that verbal acknowledgment is okay as a political tactic, though he doesn't care for it personally, thinks it won't do anyone any good, and might even backfire.
Yglesias also thinks that Sullivan hasn't put forward any policy options short of censorship (which is true), so that unless she is advocating the latter, there is as yet nothing substantive to talk about.
Sullivan, meanwhile, thinks Yglesias thinks pop culture is no problem (which is probably true) and that it's wrong to charge anyone who raises these issues with advocating censorship.

Wanting to advance the debate, but preferring to deal with concrete cases, I submit the following artifact of popular culture which, to my mind, raises these issues in a particularly vivid way. Fans of the Coen brothers' movies will recognize this as an excerpt from their 1998 comedy, The Big Lebowski, one of many scenes set in a bowling alley:

VOICE

Are you ready to be fucked, man?

THE DUDE AND WALTER LOOK UP TO SEE:

QUINTANA

I see you rolled your way into the semis. Deos mio, man. Seamus and me, we're gonna fuck you up.

DUDE

Yeah well, that's just, ya know, like, your opinion, man.

QUINTANA, LOOKING AT WALTER

Let me tell you something, bendeco. You pull any your crazy shit with us, you flash a piece out on the lanes, I'll take it away from you and stick it up your ass and pull the fucking trigger til it goes "click".

DUDE

Jesus.

QUINTANA

You said it, man. Nobody fucks with the Jesus.

JESUS WALKS AWAY.

WALTER

Eight-year-olds, Dude.

For those unfamiliar with the movie, I should immediately add that Quintana (John Turturo) is identified as a former child molestor who, while bowling, sports a colorful unitard, hairnet, costume jewelry and painted nails, who licks his bowling ball provocatively before rolling, and who has a penchant for punctuating his rhetorical references to the sexual act with grinding hip thrusts.

Now I imagine I am on pretty firm ground in supposing that this scene would qualify as one that Sullivan's concerned "average" parents would find disturbing, and at least potentially corrupting of the youth. It contains four instances of the word "fuck" or its cognates, features a flamboyant sexual deviant named Jesus (pronounced in the english manner though the character is evidently hispanic), and a rather vivid verbal threat of combined murder/sodomy. It is also considered, among afficionados of the Coen's work, one of the classic scenes in the film, and is, by certain sensibilites, regarded as quite hysterically funny.

Leaving issues of censorship aside, this obviously raises the question of who is right -- the hypothetical concerned parent (or Democratic moralist), who would find the scene unacceptably disturbing and corrupting of the youth, or the Coen brothers fan, who might find it an emblematic moment from the ouevre of perhaps the most consistently excellent film makers in the last decade and a half of American cinema?

Interestingly, The Big Lebowski -- which is by the way set in Los Angeles and at least tangentially concerned with the adult entertainment industry -- has its own way of exploring these moral/aesthetic issues, as in the following exchange between the story's male and female leads (Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore, respectively). In the scene, The Dude (Bridges) has just entered a large artist's studio, and been nearly run down by a speeding, airbound Maude (Moore), who is engaged in splashing paint on a canvas while in motion on a cable track strung along the ceiling of her loft:

MAUDE, NUDE EXCEPT FOR HER HARNESS

Does the female form make you uncomfortable, Mr. Lebowski?

DUDE, LOOKING AT MAUDE's CANVAS

Is that what that's a picture of?

MAUDE

In a sense, yes. Elfranco, my robe. My art has been commended as being strongly vaginal. Which bothers some men. The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. Vagina.

DUDE

Oh yeah?

MAUDE

Yes, they don't like hearing it and find it difficult to say. Whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his "dick" or his "rod" or his "Johnson".

DUDE

"Johnson"?

Not only does Maude explicitly raise the issue of disturbing speech with The Dude, attempting to provoke an adverse reaction from him, but this will turn out, in the furhter unfolding of the plot, to have been a sort of test of Maude's to begin determining whether this man would be a good candidate to father her child. Yet the adverse reaction -- finding the word "vagina" disturbing -- would clearly have been the "wrong" answer to Maude's test, which apparently is designed to assess the hold of patriarchal ideology upon The Dude, whereas The Dude's somewhat bewildered (and perhaps partly stoned) equanimity evidently passes muster, as we subsequently discover, when Maude offers herself to him sexually.

Note also that the entire mis-en-scene calls attention rather provocatively to the issues of cultural-political conflict. Maude, with her polemical, non-representational art, casual nudity, relations with sexually ambiguous others, aggressively feminist sensibility, and kinky painting gear, is a virtual emblem of the artist as bearer of cosmopolitan values and transgressor of mainstream cultural norms. The Coen's thereby clearly wed the civil status of the comic vulgarity so lavishly on display in their own film to larger questions of the politics of cultural production.

The Dude's combination of unfamiliarity with, and willingness readily to adopt, esoteric vulgar terms for the male organ ("Johnson") can also be seen as an early indicator of his openness to the intellectual challenge represented by Maude's presence in his life -- and thus perhaps constitutes an additional source of perceived compatibility for Maude. Along these lines, a friend once usefully suggested that the film can be viewed as being largely concerned with The Dude's learning of new vocabulary.

The Big Lebowski, in other words, mounts its own internal argument about the nature and acceptability of disturbing speech -- one which, however, leads to conclusions that one suspects would surprise and perhaps dismay those who find the film's own speech disturbing. That the movie does this without advocating an "anything goes" or relativistic attitude toward the moral valence of speech acts is best exemplified by the character of Walter (John Goodman), who is the film's great defender of the rule-boundedness of all human action and speech, as in this scene in which he explicitly confronts villains who, indeed, claim to believe that everything is permitted:

WALTER

There's no ransom if you don't have a fucking hostage. That's what ransom is. Those are the fucking rules.

DIETER

Zere ARE no ROOLZ!

WALTER

NO RULES! YOU CABBAGE-EATING SONS-OF-BITCHES!

KIEFFER

His girlfriend gafe up her toe! She sought we'd be getting million dollars! Iss not fair!

WALTER

Fair! WHO'S THE FUCKING NIHILIST HERE! WHAT ARE YOU, A BUNCH OF FUCKING CRYBABIES?!

Notice that Walter's opening remark is clearly what Wittgenstein would have called "grammatical": Walter is calling attention to the fact that the word and concept "ransom" naturally imply the presence of a "hostage" -- that we would not ordinarily demand a "ransom" in the absence of a "hostage," for it is part of the (grammatical) essence of a ransom to imply the presence of a hostage. The "rules" Walter cites are the thus the rules of ordinary usage. The nihilists he confronts therefore represent the skeptical bent of mind, that excercises the human capacity for turning away from the conditions of the possibility of human speech, in refusing the call of the word "ransom," and instead choosing to deliberately using it outside of our ordinary language games.

This is a clearly, as Walter perceives it to be, a refusal of community on the part of the former members of Autobahn, and his quite violent response can be thought of as emblematizing the violence of anti-skepticism, driven to prolong skepticism's violence against the ordinary precisely in the effort to overcome it. In this sense, Donny's death at the end of this scene represents the tragic cost of failing to maintain the dialectical tension with skepticism, within the ordinary.

I will close simply by citing the movie's final exchange, between The Dude and the narrator (Sam Elliot, making his second appearance in the film), a coda that beautifully allegorizes the possibilities of community within the reality of conflicting language games, including conflicts such as that over the nature of disturbing cultural materials. I think it is not too much to take the Stranger's final chuckle as a (an intentionally non-verbal) token of that comic spirit of tolerance that can bless even our most seemingly intractable symbolic/cultural conflicts, provided we can summon the will to acknowledge that, when all is said and done, the twin fact of human frailty and expressiveness is what abides:

THE STRANGER

I like your style, Dude.

DUDE

Well I like your style too, man. Got a whole cowboy thing goin'.

THE STRANGER

Thankie. . . Just one thing, Dude. D'ya have to use s'many cuss words?

DUDE

The fuck are you talking about?

THE STRANGER, CHUCKLING TO HIMSELF

Okay, have it your way.

Doing My Part For A Biblical Constitution

2005-04-09T19:30:00.000-07:00

Wanting to do all I can to further the cause of Judeo-Christian Constitutional Restoration I checked the historical record to make sure we have a clear sense of who among the Founding Fathers did, and who did not, support a biblically based interpretation of the Constitution.

Now, we all know that most of the Founders had accepted Jesus as their personal Savior, and could hardly have wished for anything less than a bible-centered interpretation of our country's founding documents. Sadly, however, there were a few heretics and apostates among them. For far too long, the presence of this tiny clique of unimportant anti-Christian radicals among the G_d fearing Founders has been used by liberal haters of religion to make the absurd argument that the Constitution was a product of the aetheistical Freemasonry of the so-called Enlightenment -- a completely foreign, and indeed french, theory that has no place in a bible-affirming culture such as our own.

So to combat this tendency, I've singled out some of the worst cases below, complete with the evidence I turned up of their deviations from Biblical Constitutionalism, or simply their individual lack of politico-theological correctness. I humbly suggest that, as part of the forthcoming Restoration, it would be best for the spiritual health of the nation, and especially for the innocent unborn of future generations, to arrange for the timely and unobtrusive removal of all trace of the offending personages listed here, and any others of their ilk, from the historical record of the Founding. Since they are all, in any case, minor figures, it's doubtful that they will be missed, and history will thank us for shouldering the unpleasant but long overdue task of taking out the historical garbage of this, our otherwise-unblemished Christian Nation.

Here, then, is our role of dishonor:

Sam Adams

The civil magistrate has everywhere contaminated religion by making it an engine of policy; and freedom of thought and the right of private judgment, in matters of conscience, driven from every other corner of the earth, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum. Let us cherish the noble guests, and shelter them under the wings of a universal toleration! Be this the seat of unbounded religious freedom. She will bring with her in her train, industry, wisdom, and commerce. She thrives most when left to shoot forth in her natural luxuriance, and asks from human policy only not to be checked in her growth by artificial encouragements.

-- Speech on American Independence, 1 August 1776

Benjamin Franklin

If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England, blamed persecution in the Roman church, but practised it against the Puritans: these found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England. To account for this we should remember, that the doctrine of toleration was not then known, or had not prevailed in the world. Persecution was therefore not so much the fault of the sect as of the times. It was not in those days deemed wrong in itself. The general opinion was only, that those who are in error ought not to persecute the truth: But the possessors of truth were in the right to persecute error, in order to destroy it. Thus every sect believing itself possessed of all truth, and that every tenet differing from theirs was error, conceived that when the power was in their hands, persecution was a duty required of them by that God whom they supposed to be offended with heresy.

-- Letter to the London Packet, 3 June 1772

If Christian Preachers had continued to teach as Christ and his Apostles did, without Salaries, and as the Quakers now do, I imagine [Religious] Tests would never have existed; for I think they were invented, not so much to secure Religion itself, as the Emoluments of it. When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig'd to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one. But I shall be out of my Depth, if I wade any deeper in Theology.

-- letter to Richard Price, 9 Oct. 1780

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that Belief has the good Consequence, as probably it has, of making his Doctrines more respected and better observed; especially as I do not perceive, that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the Unbelievers in his Government of the World with any peculiar Marks of his Displeasure.

-- letter to Ezra Stiles, 9 March 1790

George Washington

We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart. In the enlightened Age and in this Land of equal liberty it is our boast, that a man's religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United States.

-- letter to the members of the New Church in Baltimore, 27 January 1793

I regret exceedingly that the disputes between the protestants and Roman Catholics should be carried to the serious alarming height mentioned in your letters. Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause; and I was not without hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy of the present age would have put an effectual stop to contentions of this kind.

-- letter to Sir Edward Newenham, 22 June 1792

If I could have entertained the slightest apprehension that the Constitution framed in the Convention, where I had the honor to preside, might possibly endanger the religious rights of any ecclesiastical society, certainly I would never have placed my signature to it; and if I could now conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution. For you, doubtless, remember that I have often expressed my sentiment, that every man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being accountable to God alone for his religious opinions, ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.

-- Letter to the United Baptist Churches in Virginia, 10 May 1789

The liberty enjoyed by the people of these States, of worshipping Almighty God agreeably to their conscience, is not only among the choicest of their blessings, but also of their rights. While men perform their social duties faithfully, they do all that society or the state can with propriety demand or expect; and remain responsible to their Maker for the religion or modes of faith which they may prefer or express.

-- To the Quakers, 1789

John Adams

We have now, it seems a National Bible Society, to propagate King James's Bible, through all Nations. Would it not be better, to apply these pious Subscriptions, to purify Christendom from the Corruptions of Christianity; than to propagate those Corruptions in Europe Asia, Africa and America!

-- letter to Thomas Jefferson, 4 November 1816

Checks and Ballances, Jefferson, however you and your Party may have derided them, are our only Security, for the progress of Mind, as well as the Security of Body. Every Species of these Christians would persecute Deists, as soon as either Sect would persecute another, if it had unchecked and unballanced Power. Nay, the Deists would persecute Christians, and Atheists would persecute Deists, with as unrelenting Cruelty, as any Christians would persecute them or one another. Know thyself, human Nature!

-- letter to Thomas Jefferson, 25 June 1813

I have long been settled in my opinion, that neither Philosophy, nor Religion, nor Morality, nor Wisdom, nor Interest, will ever govern nations or Parties against their Vanity, their Pride, their Resentment or Revenge, or their Avarice or Ambition. Nothing but Force and Power and Strength can restrain them.

-- letter to Thomas Jefferson, 9 October 1787

The human Understanding is a revelation from its Maker which can never be disputed or doubted. There can be no Scepticism, Pyrrhonism or Incredulity or Infidelity here. No Prophecies, no Miracles are necessary to prove this celestial communication. This revelation has made it certain that two and one make three; and that one is not three; nor can three be one. We can never be so certain of any Prophecy, or the fullfillment of any Prophecy; or of any miracle, or the design of any miracle as We are, from the revelation of nature, i.e. natures God that two and two are four. Miracles or Prophecies might frighten Us to lie; to say that We believe that 2 and 2 make 5. But we should not believe it. We should know the contrary.

-- letter to Thomas Jefferson, 14 September 1813

Oh! Lord! Do you think a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America? Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical Strifes in Maryland Pennsilvania, New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could they would.

-- letter to Thomas Jefferson, 18 May 1817

Thomas Jefferson

The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore us to the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.

-- letter to John Adams, 11 April 1823

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. If it be said, his testimony in a court of justice cannot be relied on, reject it then, and be the stigma on him. Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man. It may fix him obstinately in his errors, but will not cure them. Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion, by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only.

-- Notes on the State of Virginia, 1784

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

-- letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, 1 January 1802

I consider the government of the US. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.... I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct it's exercises, it's discipline, or it's doctrines; nor of the religious societies that the general government should be invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them. Fasting & prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, & the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the constitution has deposited it.

-- letter to Rev. Samuel Miller, 23 January 1808

But I have ever thought religion a concern purely between our God and our consciences, for which we were accountable to him, and not to the priests. I never told my own religion, nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change another's creed. I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives, and by this test, my dear Madam, I have been satisfied yours must be an excellent one, to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that that our religion must be read. By the same test the world must judge me. But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that system only what is really there. These, therefore, they brand with such nick-names as their enmity chooses gratuitously to impute.

-- letter to Mrs. Samuel H. Smith, 6 August 1816

But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State: that the purest system of morals ever before preached to man has been adulterated and sophisticated by artificial constructions, into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves: that rational men, not being able to swallow their impious heresies, in order to force them down their throats, they raise the hue and cry of infidelity, while themselves are the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus, and do, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.

-- To S. Kercheval, 1810

It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one . . . But this constitutes the craft, the power and the profit of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies. We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe.

-- To John Adams, 1813

The priests have so disfigured the simple religion of Jesus that no one who reads the sophistications they have engrafted on it, from the jargon of Plato, of Aristotle and other mystics, would conceive these could have been fathered on the sublime preacher of the Sermon on the Mount. Yet, knowing the importance of names, they have assumed that of Christians, while they are mere Platonists, or anything rather than disciples of Jesus.

-- To Dr. Waterhouse, 1815

On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind. Were I to enter on that arena, I should only add an unit to the number of Bedlamites.

-- To Carey, 1816: N. Y. Pub Lib., MS, IV, 409

Altho' I rarely waste time in reading on theological subjects, as mangled by our Pseudo-Christians, yet I can readily suppose Basanistos may be amusing. Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. If it could be understood it would not answer their purpose. Their security is in their faculty of shedding darkness, like the scuttlefish, thro' the element in which they move, and making it impenetrable to the eye of a pursuing enemy, and there they will skulk.

-- To Van der Kemp, 1816

The genuine and simple religion of Jesus will one day be restored: such as it was preached and practised by himself. Very soon after his death it became muffled up in mysteries, and has been ever since kept in concealment from the vulgar eye. To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

-- To Van der Kemp, 1820

I am not afraid of the priests. They have tried upon me all their various batteries, of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering, without being able to give me one moment of pain. I have contemplated their order from the Magi of the East to the Saints of the West, and I have found no difference of character, but of more or less caution, in proportion to their information or ignorance of those on whom their interested duperies were to be plaid off. Their sway in New England is indeed formidable. No mind beyond mediocrity dares there to develop itself.

-- To H. G. 1816

[T]he benevolent and sublime reformer of that religion has told us only that God is good and perfect, but has not defined him. I am, therefore, of his theology, believing that we have neither words nor ideas adequate to that definition. And if we could all, after this example, leave the subject as undefinable, we should all be of one sect, doers of good, and eschewers of evil. No doctrines of his lead to schism. It is the speculations of crazy theologists which have made a Babel of a religion the most moral and sublime ever preached to man, and calculated to heal, and not to create differences. These religious animosities I impute to those who call themselves his ministers, and who engraft their casuistries on the stock of his simple precepts. I am sometimes more angry with them than is authorized by the blessed charities which he preaches.

-- To E. Styles, 1819

The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason and right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it should read, "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination."

-- Autobiography, 1821

My thanks go to this site and this one for much valuable help in locating examples of the worst offenses against Biblical Constitutionalism. I am yours for the Restoration.

Why We Invaded Iraq - The Mystery Solved At Last!

2005-04-08T21:27:00.000-07:00

Ever since it became clear that Saddam Hussein neither possessed WMD, nor helped carry out 9-11, nor provided any support to those who did, the question of why we went ahead an invaded Iraq anyway has perplexed the punditocracy no end.

All sorts of rationales have been proposed retrospectively -- love of democracy, clever politics, masterful realpolitik, what have you -- but the actual results in Iraq have tended to deflate all these theories. Two years in, the plan -- whatever it is alleged to have been -- doesn't exactly look like a raging success on the ground.

But now Richard Perle -- one of the chief intellectual architects of the war -- has finally provided a rationale that really makes sense:

There is reason to believe that we were sucked into an ill-conceived initial attack aimed at Saddam himself by double agents planted by the regime.

Yes, you heard right -- we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein tricked us into it.

Of course! Suddenly it all falls into place -- the shattered alliances, the lost credibility, the military overstretch, the distraction from al-Qaida, the hopping into bed with Islamic fundamentalists, the should-I-stay-or-should-I-go quagmire -- in short, the perfectly logical pattern behind every last embarrassment and setback associated with the war is suddenly revealed for all to see by Perle's astonishing flash of brilliance and worldly wisdom:

Saddam Hussein fucked us over. He double crossed us. It was a grift.

And, damn his pitiless little tyrant's heart, he is still doing it, even today, right from his death-row cell. Wild-eyed, black-mustachioed Saddam, the survivor, has been winning, and laughing up his tattered sleeve, the whole time!

Who'd have thunk it? Who, but the brilliant Perle, would even have dared to conceive of it?

Social Security - Problem Solved!

2005-04-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

As everyone knows by now, the Social Security system is projected to experience a shortfall of revenues relative to expenditures in 2041 (according to the system's actuaries) or 2052 (according to the CBO), such that it will then only be able to pay the current level of benefits (adjusted for price inflation), as opposed to the higher (wage-indexed) level of benefits currently promised -- unless the projections, which are awfully pessimistic about the next half century of economic growth, prove to be too pessimistic, in which case never mind.

What? You didn't know all that? What's that you say? You thought Social Security was actually going broke in 2041? You thought it was going broke in 2017? You thought it was already broke, because its trust fund is full of worthless IOUs?

My goodness, where do you get such notions? It's a good thing we have responsible political and media elites to keep everything straight for us, or views like yours might become commonplace, and frighten people unnecessarily.

But, anyway, about this shortfall that will (or maybe won't) happen 40 or 50 years from now. It's really a problem we can't put off any longer. Well, strictly speaking, we could put it off for 40 or 50 years but, you know, everyone's talking about it so the rules of the blogosphere say that I have to do so too.

Now everyone also knows (well, I do anyway - what's your problem? - try reading a newspaper once in while) that there are a lot different ways to make up this projected shortfall, and that one of the ways would be to have more immigration, so as to increase the number of payroll tax paying workers relative to the number of really decrepit old Baby Boomers desperately clinging to life by their government-issue feeding tubes.

But since the extra immigrants would eventually retire as well, and start collecting Social Security of their own (the greedy bastards), we might find ourselves right back where we started in, say, 2095. And that would be very bad because, after all, 90 years go by awfully fast, and the best time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining, and you should never put off for tomorrow what you can do today, and so on.

So, really, we need a better solution. And fortunately there is one, though you might find it to be a slightly unusual suggestion at first. Here it is: more illegal immigrants!

You see, it turns out that illegal immigrants pay a ton of Social Security taxes, without ever getting a penny back because, well, they're using fake Social Security numbers and fake IDs, so they can't claim they paid in. It currently comes out to about $6 to $7 billion a year in free money for the rest of us.

So here's my modest proposal: Let in a bunch more illegal immigrants, until we have enough of them that the payroll taxes they're paying, but can never collect on, are enough to make up the shortfall in 2041 or 2052 or whenever.

This has the added benefit that, for people who really don't like immigrants, we would need a lot fewer of them to make up the shortfall than we would if we were using legal immigrants, who actually get something out of system, as well as putting something in.

So this is really an anti-immigration measure, and a social security bailout plan, combined. And it's also a free lunch for all us non-immigrants (who get our Social Security fixed up good, without having to sacrifice a single thing). And if that isn't a plan the Bush White House and the Republican Congress can get behind, I don't know what is.

As Ross Perot used to say: Problem solved!

[For some reason, this post was backdated to April 1st. Can't imagine why.]

Our Iraq Policies

2005-02-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

My last post was so long ago that we've had time for an Iraqi election, the requisite period of post-electoral euphoria (in the U.S.), and the beginnings, at least, of the inevitable return to sobriety. But not time, apparently, for the formation of a new interim government, the exact composition of which, at this hour, is still in doubt.

Not in doubt -- any more now than before the election -- is which groups will wield power in the new Iraq. The United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), led spiritually by Ayatollah Ali Sistani and rather more temporally by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and composed primarily of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and al-Dawa ("The Call"), won a simple majority of seats in the new parliament that will draft the new constitution.

For the purpose of forming (though not of running) the next government, the UIA will need a two-thirds majority. This means the cooperation of the Kurds, whose two parties hold the next-largest block of seats -- over a quarter. This cooperation is apparently being received -- no doubt in exchange for certain concessions regarding the preservation of de facto Kurdish autonomy. Ibrahim al-Jaafari of al-Dawa looks set to succeed the hapless Iyad Allawi -- yesterday's toast of the town in Washington -- whose secular list managed less than 15% of the available seats.

The Sunnis, meanwhile, largely boycotted (or were frightened away from) the polls, with the result that they have virtually no representation in the body that will decide their country's future. It remains to be seen how far the victorious religious Shi'ites and their highly-mobilized Kurdish partners will be willing to go in overlooking Sunni parliamentary weakness, and in actively seeking out Sunni participation in the drafting of the constitution -- and whether any such informal inclusion, if it happens, will be enough to undermine the hold that the Sunni insurgency currently has on much of central Iraq.

It seems in any case an appropriate time to take stock of the costs and benefits of our Iraqi venture, so far. I've been familiar enough, I think, with the costs. But I've also inquired of friends who are ardent supporters of the war about the benefits, encouraging them to summon as many levels of defense as possible, not wanting to leave any out of account.

I have not been disappointed. As far as Mr. Bush's supporters are concerned, there never was a single Iraq policy, with a single goal, and a single criterion of success. There were, and are, several.

Unfortunately, for every policy, there has already been a manifest failure. Or, more accurately, every policy but one has already failed -- and that one may well be failing too. Consider them in turn:

Strengthen the ability and willingness of international institutions to deal with "rogue" regimes. Here, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. Stop history's clock in the fall of 2002, with the inspections regime not only restored but raised to an unprecedented level of intrusiveness, and America looks a lot like it did in the first Gulf War -- a superpower that knows how to marry diplomacy and force to achieve real enforcement of international norms. Roll forward to the spring of 2003, with intrusive inspections coming up empty and the invasion about to go forward anyway, and America stands revealed as a fairweather friend of international law and order -- embracing it when it seems it might justify what we are already determined to do, and discarding it the moment it impedes our will. The case of Iraq became the Bush v. Gore of international law -- another precedent that overturns itself.

Preempt an imminent threat to America's security. This policy failed, of course, when the rumored threat, against which the preemption was launched, turned out to be non-existent. That threat had been composed of twin spectres, one slightly more plausible than the other (which is to say, not completely implausible), but both far from credibly established, even before the inspectors set to work: That Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons (or was getting them, or that he had chem/bio, or was getting it), and that he was prepared to give said weapons to al-Qaida (or anyway to someone sufficiently similar to al-Qaida) for use against us. There is not much more to say here beyond the obvious fact that the game can hardly be worth the candle unless there is, in fact, a candle.

Prevent the future unfolding of an imminent threat to America's security. This is the Minority Report version of the previous policy -- not preemption but pre-preemption. The failure here is both less and more obvious. Less obviously a failure because, as war supporters like to say, we didn't know that Saddam didn't have the weapons, or the terrorist partners, to create such a threat, and he could have gotten them eventually anyway, even if he didn't then have them. More obviously a failure because, after all, if you are going to go around buying insurance against such eventualities, you had better give at least a little thought to whether you are buying the right policy, at a reasonable price. The subsequent behavior of Iran and North Korea suggest rather strongly that we are in the position of the homeowner who, living on a flood plain, decided to take out a second mortgage to pay for -- earthquake insurance.

Quickly and cheaply install a pro-Israeli, pro-American regime in the heart of the Middle East. The arguments associated with this policy were much in the air during the campaign to build support for the war: we would be welcomed as liberators (hence the "quickly" part); we would use Iraq oil revenue to finance the reconstruction (hence the "cheaply" part); the new regime would be headed up by Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress (hence the "pro-Israeli, pro-American" part). There was to be no occupation to speak of, and certainly no nation-building. It was to be regime change in the sense of a coup d'etat -- albeit with a little more outside force than is typical in such cases. Alas, when we decapitated the Iraqi state, the body exploded. Whatever we are doing there now, it long since past the point of being quick, or cheap, or even likely to issue in an especially pro-Israeli or pro-American end state.

Strike fear into hearts of our enemies. This is the updated, war-on-terrorism variation on Nixon's "mad bomber" thesis: Only Nixon could bring the Vietnam war to a successful close because only Nixon could get the North Vietnamese to believe he was crazy enough to do anything. The Bush/Iraq variation is either about our enemies in "the region" (politically correct version), in "the civilization" (academic version), or in the religion and/or ethnic group (the verison one encounters when freepers really let their hair down). Though alive and well as a massively multiplayer online fantasy, as actual policy this long ago foundered on the shoals of perception -- as policies with purely symbolic aims are wont to do (think of what became of "credibility" in Vietnam). In this case, what we thought of as "toughness" turns out to look a lot like wish fulfillment to the worst of them. The mad bomber thesis simply breaks down when the bomber on the other side really is nuttier than you.

Achieve a stable and democratic Iraq, at peace with its neighbors. This is the one Iraq policy that, mercifully, hasn't yet failed. Unfortunately, not unlike the real fallout of the recent election (and partly wedded to it), the outcome of this policy remains very much in doubt. This has something to do with the inherent difficulty of such a job, and also something to do with the special circumstances of the particular case. But it also has to do with the very policy failures reviewed above. Some of the aims have been highly counter-productive from the point of view of this policy goal; others would have been highly complementary, had they been achieved, but, having failed, have only made the odds of this one succeeding that much longer. It would be a terrible irony, as well as a terrible result, if the one thing still worth doing, and still at least partly within reach, were undermined by everything that was never worth doing, or never within reach.

To assume the best in Iraq now is to assume the least-bad -- that we get out of this with at least one policy success, after so miserable and costly a string of failures. I hope we do. However, even if we do, there would still then be the question of whether that last success was worth the cost of achieving it.

Colonel Hackworth, who has done this kind of thing before, and seen it botched before, says that it takes about ten years to really build an army -- a step pretty much everyone agrees to be necessary for this last chance of success to take hold, whatever may happen on the political side of things. We are now about two years into it, and it has so far cost, in addition to a rather massive amount of borrowed money, the lives of 1,470 American soldiers -- along with the wounds of some 7 to 10 times that many. At the current death rate (2.84 per day since the official handover of sovereignty last summer), and assuming Col. Hackworth's time table is right, the price of the ticket will hit just shy of 10,000 by the time Iraq is really ready to fight it's own battles.

Will it have been worth it, after all?

Col. Hackworth Makes a Resolution

2005-01-05T01:13:00.000-08:00

You may have heard that Secretary Rumsfeld was, until recently, having his condolence letters to the families of U.S. troops killed in Iraq signed by a machine. What apparently prompted him to start performing this sad duty personally was the fact that Stars and Stripes was about to publish a story on his failure, up until now, to do so.

But it seems that the person most responsible for forcing poor Rumsfeld to run a heightened risk of carpel tunnel is none other than the Pentagon's ancient nemesis, David Hackworth--the man who, as the youngest colonel in Vietnam, looked into a TV camera in 1971 and declared that the war couldn't be won, and that it was time to get out.

Well, Col. Hackworth has made his New Year's resolution, and it's a Dusey:

Considering the hits we keep taking in our global fight against terrorism, I'm gearing up in '05 to go up against the Pentagon's increasingly out-of-control campaign to keep us all conned. The cover-ups track too often with more names added to the U.S. casualty list.

So here's my New Year's resolution: to keep countering Pentagon lies with the truth until enough concerned citizens demand that Congress set up a congressional investigative arm to formally expose the liars and hold them accountable.

Why is Hack so torqued? It seems that the Rumsfeld Pentagon's habit of treating the American citizenry like mushrooms (keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit) finally pushed the old soldier too far:

The final straw for me was when I asked Pentagon flack Jim Turner last November if Donald Rumsfeld personally signed the letters to the loved ones of those killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. A day later he told me, "Rumsfeld signs the letters himself."

But before the sun had set, he sent me the following e-mail: Our official response follows. Jim. "The SECDEF correspondence with any family members of DoD (Department of Defense) personnel is private in nature."

Then Stars & Stripes reporter Leo Shane III contacted me, jumped onto the story with both boots and brilliantly wore the Pentagon lie machine down into finally confessing that Rumsfeld had not personally signed all the KIA letters.

Okaaaaay. If Rummy & Spinners are into lying about signing KIA letters, then what really went down with WMDs in Iraq, and how is our $6 billion-a-month war in that sad, bloody land really going? And is the Pentagon truly busting its butt to provide our soldiers with sufficient armor protection, or is that spin, too?

In other words: A Pentagon vain and petty enough to lie about whether its chief is bothering to ink his own name on letters to the families of the fallen, is a Pentagon that cares more about looking bad than it does about anything else--including the troops' welfare, including winning. If that seems a harsh judgment, remember that the same highly-decorated young colonel who said it was time to get out in '71, also said that a North Vietnamese flag would be flying over Saigon in four years.

Why We Are Losing In Iraq

2005-01-04T20:59:00.000-08:00

Gregory Djerejian of Belgravia Dispatch generously excerpts a much-quoted Economist article on the poor state of the counter-insurgency in Iraq. Djerejian's entire post (or, for Economist subscribers, I suppose, the whole article) is very much worth reading, but here is the part that lept out at me:

[T]he Americans had not visited the nearby smugglers' town of Baij in force for three months, until they rode there one recent night in a convoy of 1,000 troops, with Apache attack helicopters flying overhead. The target was three houses in the town centre which signal intelligence had linked to Mr Zarqawi's group. The Americans had no further intelligence to support their mission except that provided by an informant from the local Ayzidi tribe, America's main ally in the area. This source claimed there was a wounded Yemeni rebel in the town. "I think it should be a great operation," said Colonel Robert Brown, beforehand. "I think a lot of folks from Fallujah have gone there and we need to go there."

There was no one in the three targeted houses bar women and children. Baij's police station had been blown up and its police had fled. The town's English-speaking former mayor, Abdullah Fahad, was frank about the town's allegiances. "There are terrorists here, not from Syria, not from Mosul, but from Baij. Some are Baathists and some are Islamists and before they hated each other but now they work together, and they tell people that if they don't work with them they will kill them."

Mr Fahad, who claimed to have survived several assassination attempts and whose son had been kidnapped, refused to help the Americans on the grounds that he would be murdered if he did. When the American commander offered to protect him, he replied: "Thank you, but you are not always here. This is the first time I have ever seen you." Whereupon the American troops labelled Mr Fahad a "bad guy", and debated whether to detain him.

We have done, and are doing, plenty of things wrong in Iraq--almost all of them attributable to the Bush Administration's astonishing combination of naivete and arrogance. But all of the Administration's mistakes--the too-few troops, the wrong force mix, the failure to prevent looting and chaos in the aftermath of regime collapse, the favoring of untrustworthy exiles with no local legitimacy, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, the use of air and artillery power in civilian areas, the reliance on arbitrary detention and torture, the long delay and slow pace of the reconstruction effort, the failure to give all major ethnic groups a stake in the institution-building process, and so on and on--all of the Administration's errors of commission and omission, come down to this:

We are losing this war because Mr. Fahad knows that troops who show up in Baij every three months are in no position to protect him from the local Islamists and Baathists who plan to kill him, should he start cooperating with the Americans.

The gung-ho response to the complexities of counter-insurgency is always some version of, "Get them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow." Moral considerations aside, here's the problem with that strategy in (you should pardon the expression) a nutshell: In a counter-insurgency, someone (namely, the insurgency) already has them (that is, those among the population who might conceivably aid your cause) by the balls. That, precisely, is what an insurgency aims at--the goal it constantly strives to achieve and maintain, the way a regular military force strives to capture and hold territory.

Of course, the counter-insurgent power can (whether in self-defense or out of sheer frustration at the enemy's elusiveness) decide to blow some of the insurgents, along (inevitably) with some of the captive populace, sky high. But after the smoke has cleared, and the troops have fallen back, some other insurgents will still be there, or will quickly get back in. Soon enough, they will have Mr. Fahad by the short hairs once more. And three months is an awfully long time to ask someone to hold that position, while awaiting your return.

How Great Must Be Their Sin

2005-01-02T21:01:00.000-08:00

Brad De Long notes that it's not at all clear what David Brooks means to say in his column on the tsunami. Admittedly, Brooks dances around this theme, but I think Professor De Long is being too generous here. It's pretty obvious that the following paragraphs are designed to make us long for the good old days when religion's ability to give meaning to suffering on such a scale was unimpaired by the modern disenchantment of the world:

Human beings have always told stories to explain deluges such as this. Most cultures have deep at their core a flood myth in which the great bulk of humanity is destroyed and a few are left to repopulate and repurify the human race. In most of these stories, God is meting out retribution, punishing those who have strayed from his path. The flood starts a new history, which will be on a higher plane than the old.

Nowadays we find these kinds of explanations repugnant. It is repugnant to imply that the people who suffer from natural disasters somehow deserve their fate. And yet for all the callousness of those tales, they did at least put human beings at the center of history.

In those old flood myths, things happened because human beings behaved in certain ways; their morality was tied to their destiny. Stories of a wrathful God implied that at least there was an active God, who had some plan for the human race. At the end of the tribulations there would be salvation.

If you listen to the discussion of the tsunami this past week, you receive the clear impression that the meaning of this event is that there is no meaning. Humans are not the universe's main concern. We're just gnats on the crust of the earth. The earth shrugs and 140,000 gnats die, victims of forces far larger and more permanent than themselves.

Note that Brooks does not say that moral explanations of disaster are, in fact, repugnant--he says the "we" find them so "nowadays," and that he attributes meaninglessness, not directly to the event itself, but rather to "the discussion [of it] this past week." This is the rhetoric of conservative lamentation.

Brooks comes within a hair's breath of condemning us precisely for not finding a moral meaning in the catastrophe. He can't quite bring himself to do that, so instead he tries to make us feel the lack of it, and also a bit of guilt for wallowing in the (I guess) metaphysical correctness that "nowadays" (sadly) keeps us from achieving this kind of solace. That is why (to Professor De Long's puzzlement) Brooks obtusely insists, at the end of his column, that now is a time to feel "deeply bad," not just for the victims, but "for those of us who have no explanation."

This kind of thing cannot be rejected too vehemently. There is, Lord knows, precious little evidence of spiritual progress in human history. One of the very few exceptions is the dawning of the idea (it sure took us long enough) that really terrible things happen to totally innocent people for no moral reason at all. To be sure, this refusal to acknowledge this essential innocence of becoming was, throughout long ages of human history, as natural a posture of the human mind as, say, the ability to tolerate slavery, or the subjection of women, and still think oneself righteous. To persist in it under modern conditions, however, is a species of moral idiocy.

Not having "an explanation" (by which Brooks means, of course, a meaning -- explanation is hardly lacking) for this cataclysm is not something we should feel "deeply bad" about. Apart from the narcissism of this pose ("It's wrong to turn it into a story about us," says Brooks, in a column whose entire rhetorical purpose is to do exactly this), the moral-philosophical judgment underlying it is exactly backwards.

We should feel relief, and even a modest pride, that we are no longer the kind of people who are willing to heap moral opprobrium upon the innocent victims of a disaster in order to preserve some childish assurance of our own conformity to the underlying order of the universe--that we no longer feel compelled to say, "How great must be their sin, who suffer so horribly." No doubt there are costs associated with this new liberty from the old compulsion to moralize the world. All momentous cultural changes carry such costs. In this case, however, they are costs we should be happy to pay.

The thing to feel "deeply bad" about--if you want to focus on the witnesses of this event, rather than its victims--is that this freedom from metaphysical schadenfreude is hardly yet universal. I seem to recall that, even after 9/11, some rather powerful voices on the side of the contemporary 'values' debate with which Brooks associates himself (I am thinking of course of Messrs. Fallwell and Roberts) were more than eager to provide edifying interpretations about just which groups in America were being given divine payback, and for what sins.

I do not recall whether Brooks felt deeply bad about this at the time, but it sure made me long for the good old days--when democracies could still osctracize those who had become too odious to the life of the polis.

My Problem With "Values" Talk

2004-11-27T13:49:00.000-08:00

Values talk, in the form it takes in our current politics, worries me. But from what I have heard from both partisan camps since the election, I suspect that my kind of worry is not the typical kind. So I want to say a few words about it. If I'm to be criticized on "values" issues, directly or by proxy, I want to make sure the critics have the right target in their sights. I also want to make sure that those who would take me for an ally know what they're getting themselves in for.

To explain my worry, I want to go all the way back to an early example, almost a founding moment, of the current era of political values talk. It was a speech given by Ronald Reagan on January 25th, 1974, at the First Conservative Political Action Conference.

It was a bleak time for the conservatives. Governor Reagan was in his last year in office, and would soon be replaced by Jerry Brown. He had yet to make his public concession that Richard Nixon, whom he had championed for years, and defended as recently as the previous May, had deceived the nation. But talk of Watergate already dominated the conference. The conservative hero Spiro Agnew had been forced to resign to evade bribery charges, a major Democratic victory was looming in the mid-term elections, and the crowd was soured enough on the ideological deviations of the Administration's economic and foreign policies (price controls, détente) to give its official representative to the conference, speech writer Pat Buchanan, a thorough grilling.

And yet it was, it retrospect, an occasion of beginnings. In attendance were the seasoned political operatives who would, over the next half dozen years, fuse a diverse array of mostly single-issue "values" voters into the a formidable new electoral coalition: Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie. Reagan acknowledged the presence of the conservative movement's erstwhile champion, Berry Goldwater, but he was also making ready to take over the leadership of that movement, and to make an even bolder run at the GOP establishment than Goldwater had. Within two years he would be challenging an incumbent Republican President for the party's nomination and--despite almost unanimous opposition from the party hierarchy--very nearly winning. Four years after that, with Weyrich and Viguerie's New Right coalition fully deployed behind him, he would finally avenge Goldwater's defeat and bring movement conservatism to power for the first time.

So this was Reagan in his heyday, his ideological elan at its peak, and the speech is still regarded as among his best. I want to focus on its central allusion, which gives the speech its title, and which is one Reagan would return to again and again in years to come. After a litany of liberal pessimism, profligacy and paternalism, Reagan cites the lay sermon given by John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts, aboard the Arrabella in 1630:

We will be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.

Reagan immediately adds: "Well, we have not dealt falsely with our God, even if He is temporarily suspended from the classroom." What follows is another, concluding litany, but this time a litany of progress: soaring life expectancy, rapid gains in racial equality, educational achievement, unprecedented material prosperity balanced by religious and cultural vigor, a kindliness "unmatched" in the world, space exploration and, as the capstone, a divinely ordained destiny to "lead the free world."

Leave aside the questions that always came up when Reagan would launch into one of these paeans to American progress--questions about the actual mechanisms and social forces responsible for the cited progress (in particular the almost perverse citation, in front of this particular audience, of progress on racial equality as something "we" had achieved). What interests me is not so much Reagan's talent for obscuring the work of social progress while celebrating its results. What I find even more fascinating, astonishing really, is what becomes of Winthrop's sermon. For this illustrates Reagan's ability to speak in a moral register while removing any taint of collective or public moral obligation. It is a talent the right has never ceased to exploit, down to the present day.

In Reagan's reading, our prosperity and progress since that first founding is proof of divine favor. Governor Winthrop set before us a blessing and a curse, and Governor Reagan is sure that we have justly received the full measure of that blessing. The only curse on the land he is aware of, is the one brought on by those who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the fulfillment of the blessing, and so continue to force all manner of collective schemes down our throats, to solve problems that a free and virtuous people such as ourselves can not really have. There is the strong implication of impiety in such obstinacy--an implication reinforced by the liberal "suspension" of God from the classroom. Piety, on the other hand, is the enjoyment of prosperity and power. In Reagan's version of the sermon, our worldly successes represent the realization of God's plan for the Americans, and to express dissatisfaction with them is turn one's back on Him, rejecting His gift of freedom.

Now compare the use Reagan makes of Winthrop's the City on a Hill to what Winthrop actually says. First, note that this little sermon is called "A Modell of Christian Charity." The word and concept of charity do not come into Reagan's reading -- American conservatives had not yet discovered the strategic advantages of talking a lot about "compassion."

Next, and more importantly, consider that the subject of the sermon is inequality. Winthrop takes some measure of social, economic and political inequality as a given, and so treats its existence with a frankness that will become hard to muster in our public rhetoric after 1776. And yet Winthrop is addressing a community embarked on a great collective task, and inequality among the members of such a community was evidently something that required explanation and justification. Inequality must have some rationale, which turns out to be its usefulness in strengthening the bonds of community, and humbling the pride of all its members. Inequality exists:

That every man might have need of other, and from hence they might be all knitt more nearly together in the Bond of brotherly affeccion: from hence it appeares plainely that noe man is made more honourable then another or more wealthy etc., out of any particuler and singuler respect to himselfe but for the glory of his Creator and the Common good of the Creature, Man.

This introduces the great theme of the sermon, which is the need for an unprecedented strengthening of the bonds of community. Winthrop goes on to remind his listeners that the life they are about to embark upon in New England will put unprecedented temptations and demands on the community, and that they must respond by surpassing themselves in the fulfillment of their mutual pledges:

[W]ee must be knitt together in this work as one man, wee must entertaine each other in brotherly Affecion, wee must be willing to abridge our selues of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities, wee must vphold a familiar Commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality, wee must delight in eache other, make others Condicions our owne reioyce together, mourne together, labour, and suffer together, allwayes haueing before our eyes our Commission and Community in the worke, our Community as members of the same body....

Now there is nothing of this spirit of community in Reagan's speech--not here and, to my knowledge, not on any other of the many occasions on which he evoked Winthrop's City on a Hill. It is as if Reagan intuitively knew that an audience of movement conservatives, whose greatest spokesman he was, would sit still for expressions of collective piety only so long as those expressions wound up affirming the present state of American civilization and, most especially, the present condition of community in America.

But of course the very notion that he could do more than that is absurd. The values Reagan celebrates in this speech and elsewhere as emblematic of America--individual independence, economic enterprise, technological prowess, military strength--do not begin to make room for an interpretation of substantive inequality as an opportunity for greater community. Instead, they amount almost to the converse of that--formal equality as an opportunity for the creation of fully justified inequalities. Nor are those values, framed in that way, compatible with the idea that individual wills and desires should subordinate themselves to some enduring communal work, some ongoing task of creation in which all participate, and whose imperatives are binding on all. On the contrary, the only collective task compatible with those values is one of destruction--military victory. Nor do they encompass anything remotely like the mutual reciprocity, care and affection that Winthrop calls for from the members of the community.

This is why values talk in American politics worries me. Those most eager to sell us values in exchange for our votes like to portray themselves as bringing some great and demanding discipline to bear upon the body politic. Given the nature of their wares, this strikes me as a piece of self-flattery at best, and a terrible delusion at worst.

The kind of values talk made for winning elections these days seems incapable of distinguishing between how we want to see ourselves, and what we really are--or maybe it is just uninterested in such distinctions. One fact is most telling: The demands it makes are somehow always directed at those perceived as lacking in values--never at the bearers of values themselves. Such talk does not stop to consider that values might raise a standard of performance against which the present practices of those who profess them most strongly might fall short--that values talk might cost us something, might demand something of us, rather than merely serving to assure us of our own righteousness, and to justify the restraint or punishment of those we consider less righteous than ourselves.

In our current politics, I mean, values are almost always a salve or a weapon, almost never an instrument of genuine moral reflection and self-discipline. There seems to be no acceptable public language for making genuine moral demands on ourselves. It is as if a block had been introduced somewhere in the American mind, warning our politicians (and most especially our so-called conservative politicians) against going down any path that might require genuine self-sacrifice, a humbling of the self's own pride and purposes--no matter how pious and patriotic their audience's mood. After 9/11, we were asked mainly to spend more money on ourselves, and given fat tax cuts (with borrowed public money, most of it going to the best off among us) to encourage us to do so. That one fact says all one needs to know about the level of "values" our politics presently permits.

[The above text is a slightly revised version of the original post.]

Let Us Now Give Thanks and Praise

2004-11-24T11:56:00.000-08:00

For my Thanksgiving prayer, here are a few words from Hannah Arendt on the intricate web of relationships among wonder, admiration, thought, speech and praise:

What sets men wondering is something familiar and yet normally invisible, and something men are forced to admire. The wonder that is the starting-point of thinking is neither puzzlement nor surprise nor perplexity; it is an admiring wonder. What we marvel at is confirmed and affirmed by admiration which breaks out into speech, the gift of Iris, the rainbow, the messenger from above. Speech then takes the form of praise, a glorification not of a particularly amazing appearance or of the sum total of things in the world, but of the harmonious order behind them which itself is not visible and of which nevertheless the world of appearances gives us a glimpse.

Post-Election Political Theorizing, Part III

2004-11-24T01:14:00.000-08:00

By now a number of bloggers have already linked to this article by Christopher Hayes in TNR, giving a first hand account of what it was like trying to persuade undecided voters in Wisconsin to vote for John Kerry. Hayes' stories of encounters with such voters are a rich source for the kind of thick data that exit polls can't provide -- a vein that has not been worked very well in the election post-mortems that I have seen so far. (An exeception is Digby's use of it to add force to his interpretation of the Bush victory as as the triumph of showbiz values plus tribalism.) The piece deserves both wider circulation and as much careful thought as we can give it. What follows is my own modest attempt to learn from it.

Hayes' own conclusion -- "that the caricature of undecided voters favored by liberals and conservatives alike doesn't do justice to the complexity, indeed the oddity, of undecided voters themselves" -- seems undeniable. So a good place to start is with what he calls the "observations" that he culled from his encounters, and that led him to that conclusion:

Undecided voters aren't as rational as you think.

One probably wants to put scare quotes around that "rational" -- it really means: predictable. Here Hayes finds stark confirmation of Philip Converse's classic essay, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," first published forty years ago and highlighted anew last August in a popluar review of the state of political science research on voting behavior by Louis Menand in The New Yorker. In essence, Hayes found that his voters' political opinions were what Converse called "unconstrained" -- with the implications of one opinion failing to rule out another opinion with contrary implications. Hayes cites a Bush supporter whose most important issue was the environment, an enthusiastic Dean supporter who switched to Bush after Dean lost the Democratic nomination, and a Kerry volunteer who switched to Bush because of the President's "support" for stem cell research (!). In short, the normal "heuristics" whereby politically active people and eager spectators of the political game sort candidates and opinions into mutually-exclusive ideological categories simply did not apply -- even in simplified or debased forms. It's hard to escape the conclusion that these are less Popkin's "reasoning voters" than Converse's "non-ideologues" -- voters who lack a coherent political belief system of any kind.

Undecided voters do care about politics; they just don't enjoy politics.

The importance of this observation lies, I think, not so much in how it marks undecideds off from decideds, as in how it implicitly marks undecideds off from the much larger pool of plain non-voters. Essentially, it seems that the undecideds regard politics much as non-voters do, except that the undecideds retain a residual feeling that voting is somehow a duty or obligation to be born. This makes the them, in effect, the representatives of the non-voters among the voters -- the outsiders among insiders. If this is right, then the implication is pretty important, because people who play and intently watch the political game are accustomed to thinking of "swing voters" and non-voters as different blocks requiring very different (difficult to reconcile) appeals -- the one representing a battle for the ideological middle, the other a potential reserve army for base mobilization. This is probably a distinction of limited usefulness: Non-voters and swing voters are probably very similar in their adherence to "unconstrained" (that is, not smoothly predictable) opinions that don't fit neatly anywhere along any of the given ideological spectra. I'll have more to say about this below.

A disturbing number of undecided voters are crypto-racist isolationists.

Hayes' anecdotes suggest that a strong undercurrent of know-nothingism -- we are capable of civilized government if left to our own devices, but other peoples are not, and should be dealt with accordingly -- is available for both isolationist and imperialist purposes. Thus, we must either mind our own business, or else dominate others with whom we come into contact. There is little faith in any alternative based on the active promotion of our ideals -- whether the cooperative kind of promotion favored by John Kerry or the coercive kind of favored by George Bush. And, in general, American security and interests are not seen as being much implicated by what happens to others on the world stage. Here again, political opinions seem realtively unconstrained by logical consistency or correspondence with fact. But more than this, they reflect no particular view of Amercia's much-discussed (by elites) leadership role in world affairs, or its place in history. America is not the representative of any political cause, so much as a tribe in a hostile world. Foreign policy is not an international form of politics so much as a domain of violent encounters where one either avoids fights, or wins them quickly and gets out.

The worse things got in Iraq, the better things got for Bush.

This observation speaks to the overwhelming fatalism of the maginal voter born of their skepticism about the ability of politics and politicians to change anything big and complex for the better. Hayes makes clear that Iraq was just a special case of a general phenomenon. The story was the same on the deficit, or healthcare -- the more intractable the issue, it seems, the less likely the undecideds were to believe any politician's promises of fixing it. Retrospectively, they therefore absolved Bush of any special blame for objectively bad conditions -- since politicians can do nothing anyway, the incumbent is not particularly at fault for how bad things are. But the lack of interest in the past did not mean these voters looked with any real hope toward the future -- thus Kerry's promises to do better thus left them unmoved. Although these voters recognized the importance of Iraq, it is as though they dared neither raise a standard of accountability for past actions, nor invest too much hope in the success of future actions -- presumably for fear of being disappointed. Such concerns were thus effectively removed from their political calculus. Expecting little from their politicians, they discounted claims that would have required them to raise the bar.

Undecided voters don't think in terms of issues.

Hayes thinks this is his most myth-shattering observation, and he is probably right. His undecideds were not, for the most part, torn between the candidates because certain issues drew them in one direction, while others pulled the opposite way (environment vs. abortion, say, or Iraq vs. terrorism). Instead, the whole framework of approaching politics in terms of more-or-less well-defined issues was foreign to them. Hayes gives the especially telling example of a man whose recent personal experience with a work-related accident might have predisposed him to sympathy either with tort reform or labor rights. In fact, he showed interest in neither, since he made no connection between his predicament and any conceivable political action.

These voters did not think in terms of issues, then, not because they lacked concerns that might have been addressed through public policy, but because they completely failed to consider such a possibility. They utterly lacked what C. Wright Mills once called "the sociological imagination" -- the ability to connect a personal problem in one's life with social problems of the milieu. And so they regarded their predicaments and worries as utterly beyond the aid of politics. Informing them, for example, that Kerry had a plan to lower health care costs elicited disbelief in the very notion that such a thing could be subject to political decision and control. This unwillingness or inability to operate with the concept of a political issue was so extensive, according to Hayes, that it amounted to a "fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the 'political.'"

Now this absence of a sense of the political is the thread that runs through all Hayes' observations, tying together the "unconstrained" opinions, the lack of passionate political interest, the unreflective tribalism, the fatalism. I want to think about this a little, and to do so I want to borrow the framework John Schaar used in his 1966 essay "Insiders and Outsiders." The undecideds are interesting precisely because they stand on the margins beteween insiders and outsiders -- they vote, but without enthusiasm; they participate (barely), but without really adopting the terms of participation used by the insiders of either party; they give their opinions to the pollsters and the canvaasers, but those opinions are not predictable and steady, the way insiders' opinions are. The undecideds then are truly ambassadors from the outsiders to the insiders, in that they share many of the characteristics of outsiders, and yet, unlike them, have one (perhaps very tentative) foot in the public realm. It is this position -- and not some supposed median location on a left-to-right ideological spectrum -- that gives such voters a significance far beyond their numbers. They are not in the middle of the political system, but on its margins. They are the insiders' outsiders.

Put it this way: For the undecideds, the political realm floats above their lives without making any real contact with those lives. They sense its importance (or are at least willing to accept the claim of insiders that it is somehow very important). That indeed is why they trouble themselves to vote at all -- why they are not in the ranks of the outsiders. But they would probably be at a loss as to account for that importance in their own words, much less to link it to their own everyday lives. Partly this is because they do not credit politics with being able to do much, if anything, about the large matters with which it claims to deal -- the subject may be important but the activity is unavailing. Partly it is because those same matters are in fact so large -- their importance is remote, abstract, generalized, while the problems that press in upon these voters' lives are immediate, concrete, specific.

It is as if the undecideds are being called upon to be judges in a game whose prizes they have no inherent interest in, and whose terms they do not really understand -- but, since they have been asked to judge, and they are willing to do the onerous job that is asked of them, as best they can. As for themselves, when they look out at their lives and the lives of those around them, they see plenty of troubles, but the idea that politics could do anything about those troubles, is inconceivable. Politics is not the cause of their troubles, and it can do nothing to fix them. Instead, politics concerns other, bigger things -- which it also mostly fails to deal with successfully.

Suppose this is an accurate account of how most (not all) swing voters think about their electoral choices. Further suppose that -- minus the sense of duty that makes them at least cast a vote -- this is also a fair account of what many (not all) non-voters think about politics, or would, if they ever gave it much thought. If all that is so, then what, if anything, can or should be done about it?

I don't have any special insight here, but I want to use the problem so framed to think through a little more the whole question of "values" and their relation to political action that has been in the air since the election.

First, it seems obvious that the Right is currently doing a far better job of winning over marginal voters like the ones Hayes describes -- both by taking a bigger share of those known to be undecided than history would predict (remember the undecideds-break-for-the-challenger rule?) and also by drawing non-voters (who, again, likely have a similarly attenuated relation to the political realm as undecideds) directly into the Republican ranks. In short, the movement-driven GOP is doing a better job of expanding its base from the pool of marginal voters.

Second, their success on these margins is no doubt owing at least in part to the so-called "values" vote. That at least seems to be the consensus among those who have sifted the tea leaves of the exit polls. And given the way that undecideds and other marginals approach political questions, this makes some intuitive sense. As Hayes points out, "Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values--we all know what's right and wrong." The appeal to values, that is, seems to work for the GOP with these voters precisely because that appeal has so little directly and distinctly political content in it.

Yes, some public policy measures do fall out of all the values-talk -- support for state and federal constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage and its correlates, for legislation and judicial appointments aimed at eroding reproductive freedom, for government censorship on behalf of "decency" standards in cultural production, and so on. But, first, none of these are actually central items in the GOP's public policy agenda -- at least not when compared to, say, tax cuts designed to benefit disproportionately high incomes and accumulated wealth, or the removal of regulatory oversight from, and the granting of special privileges to, extractive industries. More importantly, the "values" oriented policy changes all come down to attempts to use the state's police powers to enforce individual moral obligation -- to constrain individuals to live what the advocates of such policies believe to be more righteous and disciplined private lives.

The public good is not even in view in such measures -- not at least as a goal in itself. Their advocates betray no interest in solving public problems as such -- problems that affect everyone, and whose resolution would require changes in the relations of each to all the others. For instance, public policies to reduce the number of abortions receive either little attention, or an actively hostile response, from the same advocates who press for restrictions on abortion rights. Similarly, conservative positions on crime and drug policy are largely dictated by the felt need to demonstrate strong social disapproval of such behavior by punishing it aggressively -- effectiveness in actually reducing the amount of crime or drug abuse is at best a secondary concern.

From this perspective the public world is mostly seen as a source of potential contamination, to be combatted on behalf of individual redemption. It is not even remotely thought of as a place in which to work out shared solutions to common problems. GOP values talk is about reshaping the moral lives of individuals, or at most of individuals-in-families, but never of citizens. It has almost nothing to say about the quality of the lives we live as members of a single political community. Such talk is thus deeply privatistic at its core, concerned above all with fencing off and protecting a zone of moral purity from the perceived onslaught of a hostile public world.

This in turn means that a depoliticized citizenry is not necessarily an impediment to mobilizing more supporters on the Right. On the contrary, the less people look to the political realm for solutions to public problems -- the more they see it as only capable of contributing to those problems -- the more receptive they are to solutions that require nothing more than changes in individual, private conduct. Even if such changes need to be enforced by public power, that is still easier to believe in than that public power will actually be able to change the world in some positive direction. Instead, one need only believe that public power will be used to punish and restrain individuals who do not have their own lives in order. One can believe that much, after all, even (indeed, perhaps especially) in a dictatorship. No sentimental faith in democratic self-government is required. Everyone knows that rulers like things orderly. All that is needed is to get the bleeding-heart liberals out of the way.

Matters stand otherwise on the Left. Some of the frustration that true-blue Democrats and liberals feel with all the talk about reaching out to swing voters on "values," has to do with their entirely correct intuition that there is no way to fight effectively for a progressive agenda if, for tactical or strategic reasons, one has to give up the right to make public claims on the attention of the citizenry. If "reaching out" means adopting the same contemptuous and cynical attitude toward the whole notion of public life and public commitments that the Right both feeds and exploits to its advantage, then, many progressives feel, we may as well pack it in. From the progressive standpoint, our public discourse is already so debased that truly public questions -- questions about what is good for the country as a whole, as opposed to this or that individual or group -- can hardly get a hearing. Who wants to push them even further away, by indulging the rhetoric of private moral purity? We may win a little more, here and there, but to what end? The country doesn't need two parties that think private piety is a perfectly adequate replacement for public spiritedness.

We have, then, an interesting divide on what might called the relationship between morality and politics, with the Right obviously getting the better of the deal, at least in terms of its ability to reach marginal voters. The Right looks to the protection and promotion of private morality, the left to moral obligations to whole community. The Right's values-talk speaks directly to the lives of depoliticized marginal voters -- their fears for how their children will deal with temptations of the street and the crowd, their relief at having overcome their own demons and moved on, their anxieties about staying on the straight and narrow in a world that makes that hard to do. Whatever one thinks of these concerns, and however unhelpful or even counterproductive some of the Right's proposed solutions might be, there is no denying their immediate, visceral appeal. They have the feel of real, human problems that anyone, in any walk of life, might share.

The official story on the Right of course is that the left simply has no moral orientation -- no concern with "values" -- to offer. Or else it does advocate values, but debased ones -- the values, roughly, of Soddom and Gamorra. I'm not sure it matters much whether the Right thinks of the Left's ways as a kind of moral relativism which refuses to distinugish between right and wrong, or as an active preference for vice over virtue -- a pact with the Devil. Either way, the end result is (for the Right) about the same -- anything goes, everything is permitted.

Now to anyone who has actually spent a little time among leftists, this is of course a laughably inapposite caricature. Leftists tend to be moralistic to a fault. Often their entire interest in politics is explicitly grounded in unrelievedly moral concerns. Largely as a consequence, there is often relatively little patience among them for the radical contingency that characterizes all political action, and for the attitudes of historical irony and the comic tolerance of human folly that deep acquaintance with such contingency tends to produce -- and that are probably the only attitudes that make one capable of sustaining such an acquaintance for long without succumbing to despair. The Left tends, on the contrary, towards a sometimes-debilitating obsession with moral seriousness expressed as ideological purity. The attitude makes for a lot of abortive crusades, plenty of factionalism, long meetings, and much reinventing of the wheel. The syndrome was beautifully satirized in Monty Python's Life of Brian:

REG (to Brian): Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.
ALL: Yeah!
JUDITH: Splitters!
ALL: Splitters!
FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.
ALL: Yeah! Oh, yeah! Splitters! Splitters!
LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.
ALL: Yeah! Splitters! Splitters!
REG: What?
LORETTA: The People's Front of Judea. Splitters!
REG: We're the People's Front of Judea!
LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.
REG: People's Front!
FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?
REG (pointing to a lone man): He's over there.
ALL: Splitter!

Obviously, this kind of thing is of limited usefulness in reaching out to voters who have not already been highly politicized, and the undecideds, as we have seen, are among the least politcized voters imaginable. But why is left-wing moral animus mostly a burden in electoral politics, while the right-wing variety is an asset?

I think there are two general answers to this, one of which is the aforementioned difference between concern with private versus public moral objects, and the other of which has to do with the epistemological modesty, or immodesty, of moral claims. The short version of the latter is that the Right is willing to be less intellectually scrupulous in its claims and, though this doesn't make those claims any more politically or morally coherent in our present circumstances, it does give them a certain ideological verve that the Left's instrumentalized public values tend to lack.

Both of these differences between Right and Left are in turn rooted in the (to be sure, very different) responses their adherents have developed and cultivated to what we may as well call the ongoing crisis of authority in the modern states. Ultimately, it is that shared dilemma, rather than the small current advantage in dealing with it enjoyed by the Right, that interests me. For I do not think that the Left is going to get very far tinkering at the margins of this problem. Really fresh thinking is necessary and, for that, one needs to risk being a little radical.

These are fairly huge themes, and I can't do any more than sketch them here. One upshot is that the Left has given itself much the harder task when it comes to the universally-difficult job of reconciling moral and political life and standards under modern conditions: It has both tried to achieve a more forthright integration of the two spheres than the Right has ever dared and, at the same time, it has, out of epistemological scruple, undertaken this task with a much more limited set of moral resources than the Right routinely permits itself. But another upshot is that Left and Right are both pretty thoroughly mired in the problem of how to square moral and political commitments in a liberal capitalist democracy. Their settlements of this question are awkward and unsatisfactory to large numbers of citizens (or maybe they would better be called would-be citizens), and so the parties are left scrounging for new adherents even in the most polarizing and high-stakes of elections.

To try to show what I mean, I am going to borrow yet another analytic device, this one from J. David Greenstone's excellent study called The Lincoln Persuasion. The device is a relatively simple matrix that sorts political-moral views along two dimensions. (My use of it will be quite different from Greenstone's, but I wouldn't have thought to do it without his example.) The vertical dimension asks whether moral obligations are seen primarily as collective or individual -- as obligations of each to all, or of each considered in isolation from all others. In our somewhat watered-down contemporary language, we often talk about "social responsibility" and "individual responsibility." In an older, harder-edged vocabulary, it is the difference between the duty to one's city and the concern for one's soul. The horizontal dimension asks whether moral standards are grounded in claims about the final (that is, the highest, most universal and objective) ends of human life, or whether they concern only the choice the right means to achieve human purposes (goals that are necessarily diverse and possibly irreconcilable with one another). Call this the distinction between instrumentalism and transcendence (or, for you philosophers out there, consequentialism and deontology).

Without bothering to justify it further, let me present an initial version of this matrix, with various contemporary political ideologies or groups located in what seem the approriate quadrants. Later I am going to add complexity to this picture, but if you don't find at least some political reality in the simple version, the complex one probably won't convince you either. So here goes:

	Instrumentalism	Transcendence
Social Responsibility	Organized Labor, New Deal Coalition	The New Left, Greens
Individual Responsibility	Libertarians	Christian Right

I imagine that all this is pretty self-explanatory. The traditional Left occupies the upper left quadrant. It's politics is shaped by moral obligations centered on the community, best expressed in the social safety net that grew out of the New Deal and the incorporation of organized industrial labor as a legitimate social force. To the Right, this emphasis on social goals often looks like meddling do-goodism at best, elitist paternalism at worst. At the same time, liberalism keeps its distance from talk of transcendent moral principles. Its historical commitments to freedom of conscience and religious liberty spill over into its entire attitude toward the moral realm. The virtue in politics means effective pursuit of ends that must be set elsewhere in life -- particularly in private life -- and debateable only there. For different individuals and groups will have different ends, and the liberty of each demands that no one dictate terms to anyone else. The liberal conscience virtually requires us to treat all goals (within very broad limits, chiefly that of not harming others or impeding their goals) as equally worthy.

In the lower right quadrant, we have the more recent phenomenon of the Christian Right, core of the contemporary conservative movement. Here, moral principles have an undoubted and unambiguous grounding in "absolute truth," religiously revealed. This gives the movement its ideological elan, but it also causes many on the Left to see it as a kind of moral tyranny, far too eager to "impose its morality" on everyone else. At the same time, however, the Christian Right is oddly disengaged from questions of collective moral responsibility or meaning. With few exceptions, its "values" are for individual souls, or at best individual families. The public realm comes into the conversation only negatively -- as a source of corruption or, at best, of useful curbs on those who fail in the task of individual responsibility. It is to be improved mainly through opposition to its ways, and by cultivating righteous alternatives in the private moral sphere of the family, whose protection is paramount.

The other two quadrants are occupied by more maginal ideological phenomena, but ones that are still useful for understanding how their more popular alterntives are put together. In the lower left quadrant, the complete shunning of any moral identification with the community (typical of the Christian Right) meets the pure focus on efficiency of means to the exclusion of correctness of ends (usually associated with the liberal Left). These are the truly consistent libertarians who might, for example, defend unregulated capitalism and legalized drugs or prostitution with equal fervor. In the upper right quadrant, conservatism's unabashed interest in moral purity -- in the right ends, uncompromisingly adhered to -- meets the liberal idea of a moral community. The result is the ideological passion and social activism of the New Left or, in our day, of the Greens and the anti-globalizers (as well as, to a lesser extent, the Deaniac wing of the Democratic party).

Of course, this little device radically simplifies the moral-political landscape. It portrays a pretty rigid set of moral-political options, but part of that rigidity is in the model itself. It should really be made much more nuanced before it is deployed to make any claims about the political reality it seeks to depict. I believe that this can be done, but I am not going to pause to do it in detail here. (Much of this work would be in effect an extension and updating of Greenstone's outstanding analysis of the fault lines in the nineteenth-century version of the American "liberal consensus.") Instead, I am simply going to present, without much further comment, a slightly more elaborate version of the model, with more ideological groups and some added capacity for representing shades of meaning, rather than mere binary oppositions. My hope is that the improved fidelity of this version will help make the model's general usefulness and power a little clearer:

	Instrumentalism	Both	Transcendence
Social	Organized Labor, New Deal Coalition	Liberal Christians, The Social Gospel	The New Left, Greens
Both	Neo-Liberals		Conservative Catholics
Individual	Libertarians	Right Evangelicals	Fundamentalists

The only thing I would add is that I think it can be made out that Bill Clinton tried very, very hard to occupy that sweet spot in the very center -- the overcoming of both political-moral polarities simultaneously. This would have been a very strong position indeed, had Clinton and, more to the point, his party been able to hold onto it -- or rather, if they had let it deepen its hold on them. But, for a whole set of reasons that I won't go into here, that did not really come close to happening, despite Clinton's evident political success as both candidate and president.

Now all this business with matrices and models is obviously still very rough, but the intuitions it seeks to capture are relatively simple and, I hope, uncontroversial. First, the political-moral landscape in the last half-century or so of American politics is just too complex to model in terms of a simple left-right dichotomy. (Nor is the usual resort to "social issues" in distinction from "economic issues" very helpful in this regard: That obscures more than it illuminates, partly because it provides no account of why different groups have such seemingly-paradoxical positions on the different classes of issues, and partly because, as we have seen, marginal voters don't see the world in terms of political issues anyway.) Second, our more-or-less stable political ideologies have a great deal to do with how the different politically-articulate groups see the relationship between morality and political power. Third, the whole phenonmenon of marginal voting and non-voting is somehow also related to these available options for describing and understanding the moral-political world -- but negatively: a great many of our fellow citizens do not find themselves and their lives in the various political-moral systems on offer from the politically articulate groups.

Fourth and finally, seen in this light, the GOP success with "values"-based issues in the recent election is a marginal phenomenon in the strict sense that it represents no fundamental change in the political-moral landscape. In this election, both parties tried desperately to get a relatively small number of persuadable but mostly-inattentive voters to accept their party's favored settlement of the political-moral conundrums of contemporary Amerian life. The story of the election is that, after enormous expenditures of money and effort by both sides, one party did slightly better at this sisyphean task than the other.

Considering that both party machines pulled out all their stops, and invented a few new ones, and succeeded in driving their vote totals far above those of the lackluster 2000 election, the results were still pretty meager. At about 56%, the turnout of voting-age population only slightly exceeded that of the best cycles of the last three decades (55.1% in 1992 and 55.2% in 1972) and fell far short of the participation level common in the fifties and sixties. (From 1952 to 1968, turnout in presidential cycles fell below 60% only once: in 1956 only 59.3% made it to the polls.) As for Mr. Bush's mandate, as others have pointed out, one has to go back to Wilson to find an incumbent reelected with a similarly tiny margin of victory. In short, there was no great resurgence of interest on the part of the marginals and the non-voters in the political-moral visions being offered to them by the major parties.

In a future post, I want to look again, and more critically, at those available political-moral visions. As I mentioned before, I think they can all be understood largely as responses to an ongoing and deepening crisis of authority in the U.S. (and which is shared with all the large modern states). Their various shortcomings, I mean, have a common root, and they are far more intimately related, especially in their failures, than most on either the Left or the Right realize.

But those, as I say, are matters for another post. This one is long enough already.

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