Sam Smith - The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote a column in the Washington Post that would have made her a prime candidate for psychotherapy had she been talking about alcohol or sexual problems. Fortunately, she was just writing about Obama and how "progressives" were not really opposed to him: "What's happening on the left isn't the equivalent of the anti-incumbent anger on the right. Most progressives support Obama and want his agenda to succeed."
Leaving aside the distortion of the term progressives - properly applied to those tired of liberals in denial - the claim raises some precise questions that vanden Heuvel never addressed. For example, do her "progressives" support:
- The war in Afghanistan?
- The continued use of Gitmo and similar facilities?
- The continuation of unconstitutional practices in wiretapping?
- The harassment of government whistleblowers?
- The corporate-driven war against public education?
- The bailout of huge banks while foreclosure-threatened homeowners are left to fester?
- Increased funding for war on drugs?
- Obama's plans offshore drilling?
- His handling of BP crisis?
- The support Israeli apartheid and occupation of Palestine?
- Obama's plans to undermine the Miranda ruling?
- The extension of the Patriot Act?
- Obama's attempt to wrest more budgetary control from Congress?
- A commission designed to cut Social Security and Medicare?
- Plans to turn public housing over to corporate slumlords?
In fact, true progressives oppose all the above and as a result do not want Obama's agenda on these points to succeed. Vanden Heuvel best go back to calling herself a liberal, because for them, it’s an agenda, sadly, they can live with.
Showing posts with label OBAMA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OBAMA. Show all posts
June 18, 2010
June 16, 2010
THE METAPHOR SPILL
Sam Smith - The establishment is struggling to gain metaphorical control over the BP oil spill. It feels entitled to control metaphors just as much as it does oil drilling policy and doesn't it like when the non-establishment comes up with its own. Thus Chris Matthews goes berserk when anyone refers to the present government as a "regime" and others get hysterical when someone calls something 'fascistic" or "Nazi-like." Curiously, these are the same establishment people who regularly refer to critics as "conspiracy theorists" or "wing nuts."
As a writer, I like metaphors even if I'm never quite sure when they stop and similes pick up. I don't even mind people who dislike metaphors, such as Jack Nicholson, who said once, "People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch."
But what I don't like is the elite using bad metaphors. For example, even Eugene Robinson, in an otherwise fine column on the oil crisis, fell for the "war" image, arguing, along with Obama and many others, that we need to treat the BP spill as we would a military battle.
In fact, wars are carried out in the name of virtue but almost inevitably leave both sides in worst shape than when they started. Wars destroy the environment, kill large numbers of people, and take decades to recover from. The last thing we need in the Gulf right now is a war.
A happier allusion would be to a serious medical operation. The first task is to get the patient in good enough shape so that long term recovery can take place. And, along the way, you want to avoid something called iatrogenic medicine, where the cure does the patient harm.
This is, in many ways, the opposite of a war, and a far better way to think about the oil spill.
Unfortunately, our political and media elite are infatuated with the military - even if they were never part of it. And for men in power, the metaphor has a comforting masculine ring to it. (Having you ever wondered why there is not a psychiatric term for those who become sexually aroused at the thought of sending others to their death in battle?)
If, in fact, we were to send our military into the Gulf like we sent it into Iraq, things would soon be ten times worse than they are right now.
And you may not need a metaphor at all. After all, the BP disaster is what we will be using as a metaphor in endless commentaries and political campaigns well into the future.
As for me, when I see stories about the disaster, it reminds me of that great oil spill back in April 2010. Remember that one? Sadly, it looks like there's a metaphor that will hold up for some time yet.
As a writer, I like metaphors even if I'm never quite sure when they stop and similes pick up. I don't even mind people who dislike metaphors, such as Jack Nicholson, who said once, "People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch."
But what I don't like is the elite using bad metaphors. For example, even Eugene Robinson, in an otherwise fine column on the oil crisis, fell for the "war" image, arguing, along with Obama and many others, that we need to treat the BP spill as we would a military battle.
In fact, wars are carried out in the name of virtue but almost inevitably leave both sides in worst shape than when they started. Wars destroy the environment, kill large numbers of people, and take decades to recover from. The last thing we need in the Gulf right now is a war.
A happier allusion would be to a serious medical operation. The first task is to get the patient in good enough shape so that long term recovery can take place. And, along the way, you want to avoid something called iatrogenic medicine, where the cure does the patient harm.
This is, in many ways, the opposite of a war, and a far better way to think about the oil spill.
Unfortunately, our political and media elite are infatuated with the military - even if they were never part of it. And for men in power, the metaphor has a comforting masculine ring to it. (Having you ever wondered why there is not a psychiatric term for those who become sexually aroused at the thought of sending others to their death in battle?)
If, in fact, we were to send our military into the Gulf like we sent it into Iraq, things would soon be ten times worse than they are right now.
And you may not need a metaphor at all. After all, the BP disaster is what we will be using as a metaphor in endless commentaries and political campaigns well into the future.
As for me, when I see stories about the disaster, it reminds me of that great oil spill back in April 2010. Remember that one? Sadly, it looks like there's a metaphor that will hold up for some time yet.
June 08, 2010
WHY PEOPLE CALL OBAMA A SOCIALIST. .. AND WHY IT MATTERS
Sam Smith
In trying to figure out why so many people think Barack Obama is a socialist, it finally occurred to me that it wasn't a matter of politics or ideology at all, but one of class and culture.
Because of the way Americans have been raised - in school, in the media and in the barroom - they have come to think that there is only one type of governmental cloud that can descend and ruin their day. To them, Hitler was the only fascist ever made, communists are so 1950s, the excesses of conservatism are hardly noticed, and no one’s ever heard of corporatism. What’s left is socialism.
By any logical standard, Obama has hardly a socialist bone in his body but we don’t live in a time when logic owns definitions. Still, if one accepts that many feel something is going on that is intrusive, indecipherable, and uncomfortable, then it is the discomfort rather than the misnomer that should be examined. And politics may have surprisingly little to do with it.
For example, we live in a time of class disparity unlike any in recent history. A few examples:
- Income inequality is at an all time high
- Since 1980, the richest Americans have seen their incomes quadruple, while for the "lowest" 90% of America, incomes fell.
- The average real wage is lower today than it was in the 1970s.
- In 1950 the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's was about 30 to 1. Since 2000 that average has ranged from 300 to 500 to one.
- Between 1978 and 2008, almost 35% of America's total income growth went to the top one-tenth of one percent.
- From 1990 to 2008, middle class incomes rose just 20%, and most of that happened in the 1990s. Since then, income has stagnated for people in the middle, yet home prices shot up 56%, college costs 60%. As for health care, it's up 155%.
- Today, men in their 30s earn 12 percent less than the previous generation did at the same age.
- Percent of workers with defined benefits pension plan is down 50% since mid 1980s
- Long term unemployment rate is the highest since 1948.
- In 1983 middle class debt held at 67% of income. By 2007, middle class debt had gone over the falls to 157% of income.
-Personal bankruptcies are up 400% since the 1980s
Bad as these conditions are, they are exacerbated by ineffective action to deal with them by our elected leaders and seemingly only a passing interest by these leaders and the media.
To them an oil spill or a war is just far more interesting to worry about. But terrible as either may be, they don’t immediately and directly affect the average American the way economic factors do.
Imagine, if all the cable coverage we've had of the oil spill had been given to the mile deep, hidden malfunctions of our economy.
But this won't happen because the top controls the media as well as our politics.
And it's not just about economics. For example, only about nine percent of our population has been to graduate school, yet it is this segment of the population that is increasingly controlling our policy choices. Similarly nearly half of Congress is composed of lawyers, which these days means, among other things, people who do legal work for corporations.
And both these groups are bipartisan. Just look at the contributors to Barack Obama's election and you'll find that every thing you were taught about the political views of big business is just about as wrong as, say, what an average Tea Party member thinks about socialism.
Or consider the lack of small business people, labor leaders, teachers, or social workers in Congress other political bodies.
It helps, therefore, to jettison - at least temporarily - the ideological and political divisions and look at the matter more anthropologically. Because what really divides the leadership of the country from ordinary citizens is class and culture.
And not necessarily the sort of culture we like to talk about. For example, the election of Obama was buried in an influx of commentary on the ethnic implications. But have you noticed how little this has actually mattered?
Obama has done practically nothing that can be attributed positively or negatively to his ethnicity. It turns out that it was not that he was black that mattered; it was that he was a Harvard Law School graduate steeped in the perspective, biases, arrogance and assumptions of an elite subculture that has an increasingly difficult time relating to those not of their class.
This is not to say it has to be like that. FDR and JFK showed otherwise. Of course, FDR lived in a smaller, less economically segregated America and JFK was a war hero.
Even Bill Clinton, who went to Yale and Oxford, was save by an Arkansas accent, which helped him until he lied and got laid once too often. It may also be one reason no one noticed that 77% of Clinton’s initial cabinet were millionaires, beating out both Reagan and Bush in this category. And that one third of his top appointments came from Harvard and Yale.
Obama has continued this strange new Democratic Party tradition. The Washington Post reported that 22 of his first 35 appointments had "a degree from an Ivy League university, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Oxford or Cambridge. Since then, Obama has appointed a Harvard alumnus as education secretary, a Nobel-prize winning Stanford physicist as energy secretary, and a handful of Harvard law school classmates."
Further, his appointment of Elena Kagan insures that Harvard will retain a super majority on the Supreme Court.
Increasingly, the people running our country act as though they belong to a private club. The Washington media, of course, doesn't mention this, because it belongs to the same club (albeit on probation depending on what it writes) So only occasionally is there a true glimpse of what is going on.
For example, Lorraine Adams, a onetime Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The Washington Post, left the paper and became a novelist. In her latest book she has a character modeled on Bob Woodward. Asked on a PBS program to elaborate, Adams said:
"I think if you're a student of American journalism, Bob Woodward is an undeniably potent figure. . . . I think he practices access journalism, which is different from what I did at the Post.
"[I] would talk to the people who have no power and who are affected by the people in power, and that gives a much more useful picture of the way policy affects the human soul. Woodward, who started as a reporter who did that, who knocked on doors and talked to people on the ground, became a celebrity. In becoming a celebrity, he invariably saw it as a much better deal for him, in terms of making money, to talk to other celebrities inside Washington: presidents, their chiefs of staff, vice presidents, their chiefs of staff.
"We have learned that Deep Throat was an FBI official, not an agent, an official. He was on, what we call the 7th Floor. I think Woodward's capitulation to interviewing people in limousines, as opposed to people on the subway, is something I feel is partly responsible for the fact that we ended up in Iraq. Because so many reporters, Judith Miller is the most egregious of them, spoke to Scooter Libby and some other higher officials, and never spoke to intelligence people on the ground. They swallowed wholesale Colin Powell at the U.N., and [ultimately] their limousine reporting meant that 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives."
The assumption of the capital club class is that ordinary Americans will buy into limousine politics and limousine reporting. But they don't. They may not understand it, they may mistakenly call it socialism, and they may not have the slightest idea what to do about it, but they recognize the gap between their lives and what is going on in Washington. And it makes them mad.
In another era, a populist progressive movement might have gathered up that anger and put it to good use for a social revolution or two. But the potential for such a movement these days has been emasculated by a horde of indentured liberals willing to line up behind anyone who calls themselves a Democrat. And as they do so, their beloved president of the moment - a Clinton or Obama - moves the country further to the right with impunity, even as an increasingly angry populace becomes an ever greater market for the real right.
All of which is not helped in the slightest when a president - hailed as eloquent - can't even get the public to feel his pain over the oil spill. Imagine a White House news briefing exchange like the following - only with a FDR, Harry Truman, JFK or LBJ - and you can sense the problem:
Chip Reid, CBS: You said earlier that the President is enraged. Is he enraged at BP specifically?
Press secretary Robert Gibbs: I think he's enraged at the time that it's taken, yes. I think he's been enraged over the course of this, as I've discussed, about the fact that when you're told something is fail-safe and it clearly isn't, that that's the cause for quite a bit of frustration. . . Which is one of the reasons you heard him discuss the setting up of the oil commission in order to create a regulatory framework that ensures something like this doesn't happen again.
Reid: Frustration and rage are very different emotions, though. . . . Have we really seen rage from the President on this? I think most people would say no.
Gibbs: I've seen rage from him, Chip. I have.
Reid: Can you describe it? Does he yell and scream? What does he do? (Laughter.)
Gibbs: He said. . . he has been in a whole bunch of different meetings. . . clenched jaw. . . even in the midst of these briefings, saying everything has to be done. I think this was an anecdote shared last week, to plug the damn hole.
Again, what we face is not an ideological problem, but a class and cultural one; a president so practiced at self-protective reserve that he can't get cross when he needs to. By trying so hard to act intelligent and measured, he ends up seeming distant and a bit dumb.
But the problem extends far beyond speech and manners. For example, the techniques of traditional politics are fading, largely replaced by what is presumed to be good public relations, although often seeming like just one more bad cable TV news clip.
I was reminded of this when Obama recently went to Capitol Hill to meet with Senate Republicans. My first reaction - thinking politics rather than PR - was, "Uh oh, this isn't going to go well."
Turns out, I guessed right, as the Chicago Tribune explained later:
"One angry Republican accused Obama of treating members of the opposition like political props, saying the president's bipartisan words have repeatedly been followed by partisan deeds on such issues as regulation of Wall Street, healthcare and economic stimulus.
"'I told him I thought there was a degree of audacity in him showing up today,' said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who accused the administration of sabotaging efforts to write a bipartisan Wall Street bill. 'I asked him how he was able to reconcile that duplicity.'
"Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said Obama's response to the GOP criticism showed he was so 'thin-skinned' that he should 'take a Valium' before he comes to talk to Republicans again."
Real politicians would have seen it coming. But because the PR ethos has so overwhelmed politics, real politics is pushed aside in favor of easy to puncture performances.
Lyndon Johnson would have had Bob Corker and Pat Roberts over for drinks, given them the pork they were looking for, and you wouldn't have even read about it until the next volume of Robert Caro's biography came out.
But the public relationists of today's politics get so wrapped up in sending a clever message that they completely forget the other side gets to speak into the microphone as well.
o
The capital club class also works on a restricted set of assumptions on how to best get something done, assumptions that involve an overwhelming reliance on centralized decision-making, endless review, public messages, and data that spews itself over the capital as from an uncapped well head.
Thus the sense you often get is that people who should be leading are behaving more in the manner of someone writing a college thesis or appearing on a CPAN panel; they explain, analyze and calculate; they just don't know quite what to do.
And here is where socialism raises its head again. It is part of the popular belief that socialism is, if not a dictatorship, a system run tightly from the top. There is no sharing of power, no decentralization of authority, no letting difference places do things their own way.
This is not an accurate description of socialism, but it is, I think, a fair description of much popular thought on the subject.
Thus the irony of a small group of corporate-sponsored politicians, devoid of any real ideology other than the maintenance of their own power, becoming regarded in popular culture as mean and nasty Marxists.
Obama has produced a series of overly complex, almost indecipherable pieces of legislation that share an additional common trait: extraordinary centralized control by his administration. Worse, perhaps, some of this legislation will clearly result in ordinary citizens having to fill out more forms, go through more procedures, and feel rationally confused about this or that.
Right now, for example, small businesses and small non-profits are facing significant additional tax reporting requirements.
The health bill includes an ungodly aggregation of uncertainties and new obstacles to doing things simply.
The stimulus package had so many restrictions that the paperwork alone would have prevented a reiteration of New Deal public works efforts.
Further, the Obama administration has been clearly unwilling to share power on these matters. It even wants to restrict Congress' budget power by a back door approach to the line item veto.
But perhaps more importantly, there is no sense that Obama and his staff have any feel for the fact that governors and mayors are part of our government as well and that if he wants to look good, they have to look good, which means sharing power. This doesn't even have to be a matter of honor, just good politics.
In public education, he is working to eliminate the whole two century tradition of local control over public schools. Underlying a lot of this is the assumption that people like the Obamites know best how to do things. After all, they have fine law degrees and MBAs from some of the best universities.
And so we find FEMA coming close to causing a disaster on the Portland Maine waterfront by declaring it a flood zone on which no further major construction could ever take place. It wasn't true, but it took not only the Maine congressional delegation but the Portland fire chief coming down to Washington to explain to FEMA that they didn't now what the hell they were talking about.
And while Obama represents these values, he is far from alone. The Supreme Court recently decided a case desribed by Time's Adam Cohen:
"Van Thompkins, a criminal suspect, was not interested in talking to the police, and he never affirmatively waived his right to remain silent. But the court ruled that by not saying clearly that he was exercising his right to remain silent, he in fact forfeited the right - and that a one-word answer he gave late in the questioning could be used against him.
"The ruling flies in the face of the court's long-standing insistence that a suspect can waive his rights only by affirmatively doing so."
Now, mind you, this was a 5-4 decision of the court. This means that the average purported perp without even a GED has to know a bizarre ruling that silence only matters if you first say you're being silent and also has to choose which of the Harvard Law grads on the court to believe on the topic. You don't get more culturally out of touch than that.
O
Finally, the oil spill story still has too many loose ends to analyze fairly, but what we do know is that local talent and judgment, and alternative approaches, have been squashed in favor of a one big solution (actually a series of one big solution) which has yet to come
A problem with people with fine law degrees and MBAs from some of the best universities is that they are unlikely to know squat about oil spills.
Of course, there's at least a partial solution to this: find out who does. This might be called the reporter's approach to life. A good reporter wakes up in the morning not knowing a thing about Topic X, but by the end of the day or week will have found a whole bunch of people who do. Essential to this, however, is first admitting that you don't know a thing about Topic X.
The problem is that those in the capital club class don't think like this. They see themselves and their friends as the best source of knowledge.
Which may be why you heard so much of late about the "Nobel Prize winning Energy Secretary," Mr. Chu.
If you've got a Nobel Prize winner, what more do you need? But as Eugene Robinson pointed out the other evening on MSNBC, Chu didn't get his prize in ending oil spills but in the "development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light."
Much of the public sees the Obama administration as arrogant, power-hoggng and indifferent ot the concerns of the ordinary citizen. A strong case can be made that this is true. This, of course, doesn't make Obama a socialist, but the misappropriation and misuse of power is a far great offense than a mundane misnomer. Besides, whatever you call it, it's not helping the Democrats or the country one bit.
In trying to figure out why so many people think Barack Obama is a socialist, it finally occurred to me that it wasn't a matter of politics or ideology at all, but one of class and culture.
Because of the way Americans have been raised - in school, in the media and in the barroom - they have come to think that there is only one type of governmental cloud that can descend and ruin their day. To them, Hitler was the only fascist ever made, communists are so 1950s, the excesses of conservatism are hardly noticed, and no one’s ever heard of corporatism. What’s left is socialism.
By any logical standard, Obama has hardly a socialist bone in his body but we don’t live in a time when logic owns definitions. Still, if one accepts that many feel something is going on that is intrusive, indecipherable, and uncomfortable, then it is the discomfort rather than the misnomer that should be examined. And politics may have surprisingly little to do with it.
For example, we live in a time of class disparity unlike any in recent history. A few examples:
- Income inequality is at an all time high
- Since 1980, the richest Americans have seen their incomes quadruple, while for the "lowest" 90% of America, incomes fell.
- The average real wage is lower today than it was in the 1970s.
- In 1950 the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's was about 30 to 1. Since 2000 that average has ranged from 300 to 500 to one.
- Between 1978 and 2008, almost 35% of America's total income growth went to the top one-tenth of one percent.
- From 1990 to 2008, middle class incomes rose just 20%, and most of that happened in the 1990s. Since then, income has stagnated for people in the middle, yet home prices shot up 56%, college costs 60%. As for health care, it's up 155%.
- Today, men in their 30s earn 12 percent less than the previous generation did at the same age.
- Percent of workers with defined benefits pension plan is down 50% since mid 1980s
- Long term unemployment rate is the highest since 1948.
- In 1983 middle class debt held at 67% of income. By 2007, middle class debt had gone over the falls to 157% of income.
-Personal bankruptcies are up 400% since the 1980s
Bad as these conditions are, they are exacerbated by ineffective action to deal with them by our elected leaders and seemingly only a passing interest by these leaders and the media.
To them an oil spill or a war is just far more interesting to worry about. But terrible as either may be, they don’t immediately and directly affect the average American the way economic factors do.
Imagine, if all the cable coverage we've had of the oil spill had been given to the mile deep, hidden malfunctions of our economy.
But this won't happen because the top controls the media as well as our politics.
And it's not just about economics. For example, only about nine percent of our population has been to graduate school, yet it is this segment of the population that is increasingly controlling our policy choices. Similarly nearly half of Congress is composed of lawyers, which these days means, among other things, people who do legal work for corporations.
And both these groups are bipartisan. Just look at the contributors to Barack Obama's election and you'll find that every thing you were taught about the political views of big business is just about as wrong as, say, what an average Tea Party member thinks about socialism.
Or consider the lack of small business people, labor leaders, teachers, or social workers in Congress other political bodies.
It helps, therefore, to jettison - at least temporarily - the ideological and political divisions and look at the matter more anthropologically. Because what really divides the leadership of the country from ordinary citizens is class and culture.
And not necessarily the sort of culture we like to talk about. For example, the election of Obama was buried in an influx of commentary on the ethnic implications. But have you noticed how little this has actually mattered?
Obama has done practically nothing that can be attributed positively or negatively to his ethnicity. It turns out that it was not that he was black that mattered; it was that he was a Harvard Law School graduate steeped in the perspective, biases, arrogance and assumptions of an elite subculture that has an increasingly difficult time relating to those not of their class.
This is not to say it has to be like that. FDR and JFK showed otherwise. Of course, FDR lived in a smaller, less economically segregated America and JFK was a war hero.
Even Bill Clinton, who went to Yale and Oxford, was save by an Arkansas accent, which helped him until he lied and got laid once too often. It may also be one reason no one noticed that 77% of Clinton’s initial cabinet were millionaires, beating out both Reagan and Bush in this category. And that one third of his top appointments came from Harvard and Yale.
Obama has continued this strange new Democratic Party tradition. The Washington Post reported that 22 of his first 35 appointments had "a degree from an Ivy League university, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Oxford or Cambridge. Since then, Obama has appointed a Harvard alumnus as education secretary, a Nobel-prize winning Stanford physicist as energy secretary, and a handful of Harvard law school classmates."
Further, his appointment of Elena Kagan insures that Harvard will retain a super majority on the Supreme Court.
Increasingly, the people running our country act as though they belong to a private club. The Washington media, of course, doesn't mention this, because it belongs to the same club (albeit on probation depending on what it writes) So only occasionally is there a true glimpse of what is going on.
For example, Lorraine Adams, a onetime Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The Washington Post, left the paper and became a novelist. In her latest book she has a character modeled on Bob Woodward. Asked on a PBS program to elaborate, Adams said:
"I think if you're a student of American journalism, Bob Woodward is an undeniably potent figure. . . . I think he practices access journalism, which is different from what I did at the Post.
"[I] would talk to the people who have no power and who are affected by the people in power, and that gives a much more useful picture of the way policy affects the human soul. Woodward, who started as a reporter who did that, who knocked on doors and talked to people on the ground, became a celebrity. In becoming a celebrity, he invariably saw it as a much better deal for him, in terms of making money, to talk to other celebrities inside Washington: presidents, their chiefs of staff, vice presidents, their chiefs of staff.
"We have learned that Deep Throat was an FBI official, not an agent, an official. He was on, what we call the 7th Floor. I think Woodward's capitulation to interviewing people in limousines, as opposed to people on the subway, is something I feel is partly responsible for the fact that we ended up in Iraq. Because so many reporters, Judith Miller is the most egregious of them, spoke to Scooter Libby and some other higher officials, and never spoke to intelligence people on the ground. They swallowed wholesale Colin Powell at the U.N., and [ultimately] their limousine reporting meant that 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives."
The assumption of the capital club class is that ordinary Americans will buy into limousine politics and limousine reporting. But they don't. They may not understand it, they may mistakenly call it socialism, and they may not have the slightest idea what to do about it, but they recognize the gap between their lives and what is going on in Washington. And it makes them mad.
In another era, a populist progressive movement might have gathered up that anger and put it to good use for a social revolution or two. But the potential for such a movement these days has been emasculated by a horde of indentured liberals willing to line up behind anyone who calls themselves a Democrat. And as they do so, their beloved president of the moment - a Clinton or Obama - moves the country further to the right with impunity, even as an increasingly angry populace becomes an ever greater market for the real right.
All of which is not helped in the slightest when a president - hailed as eloquent - can't even get the public to feel his pain over the oil spill. Imagine a White House news briefing exchange like the following - only with a FDR, Harry Truman, JFK or LBJ - and you can sense the problem:
Chip Reid, CBS: You said earlier that the President is enraged. Is he enraged at BP specifically?
Press secretary Robert Gibbs: I think he's enraged at the time that it's taken, yes. I think he's been enraged over the course of this, as I've discussed, about the fact that when you're told something is fail-safe and it clearly isn't, that that's the cause for quite a bit of frustration. . . Which is one of the reasons you heard him discuss the setting up of the oil commission in order to create a regulatory framework that ensures something like this doesn't happen again.
Reid: Frustration and rage are very different emotions, though. . . . Have we really seen rage from the President on this? I think most people would say no.
Gibbs: I've seen rage from him, Chip. I have.
Reid: Can you describe it? Does he yell and scream? What does he do? (Laughter.)
Gibbs: He said. . . he has been in a whole bunch of different meetings. . . clenched jaw. . . even in the midst of these briefings, saying everything has to be done. I think this was an anecdote shared last week, to plug the damn hole.
Again, what we face is not an ideological problem, but a class and cultural one; a president so practiced at self-protective reserve that he can't get cross when he needs to. By trying so hard to act intelligent and measured, he ends up seeming distant and a bit dumb.
But the problem extends far beyond speech and manners. For example, the techniques of traditional politics are fading, largely replaced by what is presumed to be good public relations, although often seeming like just one more bad cable TV news clip.
I was reminded of this when Obama recently went to Capitol Hill to meet with Senate Republicans. My first reaction - thinking politics rather than PR - was, "Uh oh, this isn't going to go well."
Turns out, I guessed right, as the Chicago Tribune explained later:
"One angry Republican accused Obama of treating members of the opposition like political props, saying the president's bipartisan words have repeatedly been followed by partisan deeds on such issues as regulation of Wall Street, healthcare and economic stimulus.
"'I told him I thought there was a degree of audacity in him showing up today,' said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who accused the administration of sabotaging efforts to write a bipartisan Wall Street bill. 'I asked him how he was able to reconcile that duplicity.'
"Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said Obama's response to the GOP criticism showed he was so 'thin-skinned' that he should 'take a Valium' before he comes to talk to Republicans again."
Real politicians would have seen it coming. But because the PR ethos has so overwhelmed politics, real politics is pushed aside in favor of easy to puncture performances.
Lyndon Johnson would have had Bob Corker and Pat Roberts over for drinks, given them the pork they were looking for, and you wouldn't have even read about it until the next volume of Robert Caro's biography came out.
But the public relationists of today's politics get so wrapped up in sending a clever message that they completely forget the other side gets to speak into the microphone as well.
o
The capital club class also works on a restricted set of assumptions on how to best get something done, assumptions that involve an overwhelming reliance on centralized decision-making, endless review, public messages, and data that spews itself over the capital as from an uncapped well head.
Thus the sense you often get is that people who should be leading are behaving more in the manner of someone writing a college thesis or appearing on a CPAN panel; they explain, analyze and calculate; they just don't know quite what to do.
And here is where socialism raises its head again. It is part of the popular belief that socialism is, if not a dictatorship, a system run tightly from the top. There is no sharing of power, no decentralization of authority, no letting difference places do things their own way.
This is not an accurate description of socialism, but it is, I think, a fair description of much popular thought on the subject.
Thus the irony of a small group of corporate-sponsored politicians, devoid of any real ideology other than the maintenance of their own power, becoming regarded in popular culture as mean and nasty Marxists.
Obama has produced a series of overly complex, almost indecipherable pieces of legislation that share an additional common trait: extraordinary centralized control by his administration. Worse, perhaps, some of this legislation will clearly result in ordinary citizens having to fill out more forms, go through more procedures, and feel rationally confused about this or that.
Right now, for example, small businesses and small non-profits are facing significant additional tax reporting requirements.
The health bill includes an ungodly aggregation of uncertainties and new obstacles to doing things simply.
The stimulus package had so many restrictions that the paperwork alone would have prevented a reiteration of New Deal public works efforts.
Further, the Obama administration has been clearly unwilling to share power on these matters. It even wants to restrict Congress' budget power by a back door approach to the line item veto.
But perhaps more importantly, there is no sense that Obama and his staff have any feel for the fact that governors and mayors are part of our government as well and that if he wants to look good, they have to look good, which means sharing power. This doesn't even have to be a matter of honor, just good politics.
In public education, he is working to eliminate the whole two century tradition of local control over public schools. Underlying a lot of this is the assumption that people like the Obamites know best how to do things. After all, they have fine law degrees and MBAs from some of the best universities.
And so we find FEMA coming close to causing a disaster on the Portland Maine waterfront by declaring it a flood zone on which no further major construction could ever take place. It wasn't true, but it took not only the Maine congressional delegation but the Portland fire chief coming down to Washington to explain to FEMA that they didn't now what the hell they were talking about.
And while Obama represents these values, he is far from alone. The Supreme Court recently decided a case desribed by Time's Adam Cohen:
"Van Thompkins, a criminal suspect, was not interested in talking to the police, and he never affirmatively waived his right to remain silent. But the court ruled that by not saying clearly that he was exercising his right to remain silent, he in fact forfeited the right - and that a one-word answer he gave late in the questioning could be used against him.
"The ruling flies in the face of the court's long-standing insistence that a suspect can waive his rights only by affirmatively doing so."
Now, mind you, this was a 5-4 decision of the court. This means that the average purported perp without even a GED has to know a bizarre ruling that silence only matters if you first say you're being silent and also has to choose which of the Harvard Law grads on the court to believe on the topic. You don't get more culturally out of touch than that.
O
Finally, the oil spill story still has too many loose ends to analyze fairly, but what we do know is that local talent and judgment, and alternative approaches, have been squashed in favor of a one big solution (actually a series of one big solution) which has yet to come
A problem with people with fine law degrees and MBAs from some of the best universities is that they are unlikely to know squat about oil spills.
Of course, there's at least a partial solution to this: find out who does. This might be called the reporter's approach to life. A good reporter wakes up in the morning not knowing a thing about Topic X, but by the end of the day or week will have found a whole bunch of people who do. Essential to this, however, is first admitting that you don't know a thing about Topic X.
The problem is that those in the capital club class don't think like this. They see themselves and their friends as the best source of knowledge.
Which may be why you heard so much of late about the "Nobel Prize winning Energy Secretary," Mr. Chu.
If you've got a Nobel Prize winner, what more do you need? But as Eugene Robinson pointed out the other evening on MSNBC, Chu didn't get his prize in ending oil spills but in the "development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light."
Much of the public sees the Obama administration as arrogant, power-hoggng and indifferent ot the concerns of the ordinary citizen. A strong case can be made that this is true. This, of course, doesn't make Obama a socialist, but the misappropriation and misuse of power is a far great offense than a mundane misnomer. Besides, whatever you call it, it's not helping the Democrats or the country one bit.
May 26, 2010
WHEN THE TOP CAVES IN
What corporate America wanted was nothing less than the Third Worlding of the US, a collapse of both present reality and future expectations. The closer the life and wages of our citizens could come to those of less developed nations, the happier the huge stateless multinationals would be. Then, as they said in the boardrooms and at the White House, the global playing field would be leveled. Once having capitulated on economic matters, Americans would be taught to accept a similar diminution of social programs, civil liberties, democracy, and even some of the most basic governmental services. Free of being the agent of our collective will, government could then concentrate on the real business of a corporatist state, such as reinforcing the military, subsidizing selected industry, and strengthening police control over what would inevitably be an increasingly alienated and fractured electorate.
We would be taught to deny ourselves progress and to blame others for our loss. Worse, underneath the sturm und drang of political debate, the American establishment -- from corporate executive to media to politician -- reached a remarkable consensus that it no longer had to play by any rules but its own.
There is a phrase for this in some Latin American countries: the culture of impunity. In such places it has led to death squads, to the live bodies of dissidents being thrown out of military helicopters, to routine false imprisonment and baroque financial fraud. We are not there yet but are certainly moving in the same direction. In a culture of impunity, rules serve the internal logic of the system rather than whatever values typically guide a country, such as those of its constitution, church or tradition.
The culture of impunity encourages coups and cruelty, at best practices only titular democracy, and puts itself at the service of what Hong Kong, borrowing from fascist Germany and Italy, refers to as "functional constituencies," which is mainly to say major corporations. A culture of impunity varies from ordinary political corruption in that the latter represents deviance from the culture while the former becomes the culture. Such a culture does not announce itself. It creeps up day by day, deal by deal, euphemism by euphemism.
The intellectual achievement, technocratic pyrotechnics, and calm rationality that serves as a patina for the culture of impunity can be dangerously misleading. In a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values, tradition, fairness, consensus, debate and all that sort of arcane stuff? Mainly greed and power. As Michael Douglas put it in Wall Street: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works."
Of course, there has always been an overabundance of greed in America's political and economic system. But a number of things have changed. As activist attorney George LaRoche points out, "Once, I think, we knew our greedy were greedy but they were obligated to justify their greed by reference to some of the other values in which all of us could participate. Thus, maybe ‘old Joe' was a crook but he was also a ‘pillar of the business community' or ‘a member of the Lodge' or a ‘good husband' and these things mattered. Now the pretense of justification is gone and greed is its own justification." The result is a stunning lack of restraint. We find ourselves without heroism, without debate over right and wrong, with little but an endless narcissistic struggle by the powerful to get more money, more power, and more press than the next person. In the chase, anything goes and the only standard is whether you win, lose, or get caught. - Sam Smith, Why Bother?, 2001
Sam Smith - When I wrote that, I assumed that, having ditched the First American Republic, we might well move towards some form of ordered and unpleasant tyranny. I assumed that the establishment would stick to its agenda that we would be expected to understand and obey.
After all, as I wrote at the time, "we all live in a Mafia neighborhood now." And a big part of living in a Mafia neighborhood is that you know what the rules are. But what I missed was the possibility that the forces driving the elite would not only destroy our America, but their America as well. And it wasn't until the chaos, confusion, crises, conflicts and controversies of the last year and a half that it became apparent that both victim and tyrant had lost this battle.
What has happened is that atomized ambition has created aggregated anarchy. No one controls the country any more. Yes, they are in charge of the buttons, but the buttons no longer work. The housing and stock markets have collapsed. Academics act as though they haven't gotten their GED yet. Intellectuals grasp at adjectives and metaphors that bear no contact with reality. Corporate executives speak of markets long gone. We are in wars no one can defend reasonably yet against which there is no major protest. Reporters prefer adjectives over facts and have come to think of skepticism as a form of extremism. Sanctified, sanctimonious figures in the church and the GOP are caught in gay trysts. And a hustler named Madoff easily rips off the very high society of which he was a part.
Among the most striking developments has been the impermeable inconsistency of the Obama administration. Although it has spoken repeatedly of transparency, seldom has there been an administration whose true purpose was more difficult to perceive.
Of course, it has been aided mightily by a Democratic Senate that created months of trouble for itself simply by choosing not to revert to traditional rules that could have made it the most, rather than the least, effective upper body in years. Instead, all you needed for a filibuster was to hand in a slip of paper.
The results have been unlike anything that has ever been seen on Capitol Hill. Put together the stimulus package, the health care bill and banking reform and you have a triptych of laws of uncertain purpose, volcanic confusion and concealed contradiction - one to two thousand pages making the future impenetrable until it will be too late to do much about it.
Congress used to pass legislation in order to accomplish something, whether for good or evil. Now we have major bills no one can accurately explain, no one can predict their consequences and no one can convincingly argue on their behalf save for a series of abstractions easily balanced by similar vagaries of the opposition.
We do know that the stimulus bill has so far done little worthwhile, unless you work on Wall Street. Unemployment remains high, foreclosures have not been significantly limited and public works are pathetic.
What the score will be for the health care measure is far harder to guess, for the legislators and Obama have simply hid some of its most important elements for years in the future.
As for the so-called bank reform measure, it was clearly a gift to Wall Street. Yet the LA Times, among others, called it "the most sweeping rewrite of financial rules since the Great Depression."
In fact, the bill didn't even bring back the Glass-Steagall Act which would have been the most sweeping rewrite of financial rules since, well since 1999, when Bill Clinton and Congress buried it.
Eric Alterman came closer to the truth: "When was the last time Congress passed a bill so large that even its significant provisions resisted summarization, both for reasons of complexity and enormity? If you said 'health care,' well, perhaps you're noticing a pattern. Once again, Democrats spent the better part of a year playing three-dimensional chess with themselves, lobbyists, and Republicans to pass. . . The actual provisions of this bill are beyond the capacity of most of us to understand"
Add to all this the BP disaster, in which our leaders desperately try to spin the oil away by endless news conferences in front of a gulf they never cared about before. And the attempt to dismantle a system of public education that for a couple of centuries helped make America a place to admire.
How does one define politics in times like this? In truth, the only parties that still have a whit of purpose are the Greens, Libertarians and Socialists and they can't hardly make it on the ballot. The rest has been reduced to office politics.
We have now gone through a year and a half when either nothing has happened or nobody can tell what has happened. Yet the elite still acts like they know what they are up to and their indentured media loyally spreads the myth.
For example, Obama appoints a Supreme Court justice whom none of her social ilk can describe much except to say how smart she is. These same figures, however, then proceed to admit that her views are a "blank page."
Is the only purpose of intelligence to go through life filling out crossword puzzles correctly? Might it not help to do or say something worthwhile that someone might remember? Apparently, by today's elite standards, that is not smart.
Obama himself warned us in his memoirs that he was merely a mirror, that people would see what they wanted in him. Only now are many who voted for him beginning to realize that Barack Obama never really existed; he was only a transient reaction to things that really existed - a reaction based on what seemed to be most beneficial or safest for himself at the moment.
One leader of this kind would be a problem in any period, but when a whole elite has given up shared values, community and conscience in order to play the game solo, you have a problem that can destroy your entire culture.
And that's where we find ourselves. Vicky Ward gets close to the nub in her book on the desperate housewives of Lehman Brothers. The illusion of common purpose - taken to the extreme of precisely defined clothing, rigorously shared charities and climbing mountains together - is finally shattered by the reality that the men who were supposed to be partners in a common endeavor actually viewed each other as one more market to manipulate and beat.
Lately a strange image has been bouncing about in my head. It is a scene of urban riots, flames in the street, of aimed guns and aimless bodies. But the people in the image aren't the poor and the helpless, and they are not in Athens or Bangkok. Rather they are in Washington and they are judges and CEOs and lawyers and MBAs and cabinet officials and TV news hosts. They are looting stores, smashing statues, and lighting gasoline in a desperate last act of the greed that got them so far yet now has so little to offer. Their memories can no longer recall conscience, causes, or community. They have no friends, allies or movements. They are on their own just like the Lehman Brothers housewife to whom former friends would longer speak after the firm had died.
We have, from a young age, been trained to respect, admire and follow our leaders. Even now, you can hardly find a major op ed writer or a TV commentator who will admit that those who are supposed to show us the way have disintegrated like, say, a malfunctioning deep water well or a high rolling hedge fund.
But we're on our own now. Which was never a bad idea; it was just that we weren't meant to think about it.
If Obama has done us one favor, perhaps it is this: we now know there is no one waiting behind the curtain to save us.
But there still is an America and a good one. You just won't find it on the front pages or on the evening news. It is in our communities, our towns and our states and we have to rediscover and build this America from the bottom up.
It can happen, but the first step is to stop listening to an elite that has destroyed our land and disgraced itself, an elite that has rolled into one great cultural tar ball.
So move on, folks, nothing to see here.
From here on out, it's up to us.
We would be taught to deny ourselves progress and to blame others for our loss. Worse, underneath the sturm und drang of political debate, the American establishment -- from corporate executive to media to politician -- reached a remarkable consensus that it no longer had to play by any rules but its own.
There is a phrase for this in some Latin American countries: the culture of impunity. In such places it has led to death squads, to the live bodies of dissidents being thrown out of military helicopters, to routine false imprisonment and baroque financial fraud. We are not there yet but are certainly moving in the same direction. In a culture of impunity, rules serve the internal logic of the system rather than whatever values typically guide a country, such as those of its constitution, church or tradition.
The culture of impunity encourages coups and cruelty, at best practices only titular democracy, and puts itself at the service of what Hong Kong, borrowing from fascist Germany and Italy, refers to as "functional constituencies," which is mainly to say major corporations. A culture of impunity varies from ordinary political corruption in that the latter represents deviance from the culture while the former becomes the culture. Such a culture does not announce itself. It creeps up day by day, deal by deal, euphemism by euphemism.
The intellectual achievement, technocratic pyrotechnics, and calm rationality that serves as a patina for the culture of impunity can be dangerously misleading. In a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values, tradition, fairness, consensus, debate and all that sort of arcane stuff? Mainly greed and power. As Michael Douglas put it in Wall Street: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works."
Of course, there has always been an overabundance of greed in America's political and economic system. But a number of things have changed. As activist attorney George LaRoche points out, "Once, I think, we knew our greedy were greedy but they were obligated to justify their greed by reference to some of the other values in which all of us could participate. Thus, maybe ‘old Joe' was a crook but he was also a ‘pillar of the business community' or ‘a member of the Lodge' or a ‘good husband' and these things mattered. Now the pretense of justification is gone and greed is its own justification." The result is a stunning lack of restraint. We find ourselves without heroism, without debate over right and wrong, with little but an endless narcissistic struggle by the powerful to get more money, more power, and more press than the next person. In the chase, anything goes and the only standard is whether you win, lose, or get caught. - Sam Smith, Why Bother?, 2001
Sam Smith - When I wrote that, I assumed that, having ditched the First American Republic, we might well move towards some form of ordered and unpleasant tyranny. I assumed that the establishment would stick to its agenda that we would be expected to understand and obey.
After all, as I wrote at the time, "we all live in a Mafia neighborhood now." And a big part of living in a Mafia neighborhood is that you know what the rules are. But what I missed was the possibility that the forces driving the elite would not only destroy our America, but their America as well. And it wasn't until the chaos, confusion, crises, conflicts and controversies of the last year and a half that it became apparent that both victim and tyrant had lost this battle.
What has happened is that atomized ambition has created aggregated anarchy. No one controls the country any more. Yes, they are in charge of the buttons, but the buttons no longer work. The housing and stock markets have collapsed. Academics act as though they haven't gotten their GED yet. Intellectuals grasp at adjectives and metaphors that bear no contact with reality. Corporate executives speak of markets long gone. We are in wars no one can defend reasonably yet against which there is no major protest. Reporters prefer adjectives over facts and have come to think of skepticism as a form of extremism. Sanctified, sanctimonious figures in the church and the GOP are caught in gay trysts. And a hustler named Madoff easily rips off the very high society of which he was a part.
Among the most striking developments has been the impermeable inconsistency of the Obama administration. Although it has spoken repeatedly of transparency, seldom has there been an administration whose true purpose was more difficult to perceive.
Of course, it has been aided mightily by a Democratic Senate that created months of trouble for itself simply by choosing not to revert to traditional rules that could have made it the most, rather than the least, effective upper body in years. Instead, all you needed for a filibuster was to hand in a slip of paper.
The results have been unlike anything that has ever been seen on Capitol Hill. Put together the stimulus package, the health care bill and banking reform and you have a triptych of laws of uncertain purpose, volcanic confusion and concealed contradiction - one to two thousand pages making the future impenetrable until it will be too late to do much about it.
Congress used to pass legislation in order to accomplish something, whether for good or evil. Now we have major bills no one can accurately explain, no one can predict their consequences and no one can convincingly argue on their behalf save for a series of abstractions easily balanced by similar vagaries of the opposition.
We do know that the stimulus bill has so far done little worthwhile, unless you work on Wall Street. Unemployment remains high, foreclosures have not been significantly limited and public works are pathetic.
What the score will be for the health care measure is far harder to guess, for the legislators and Obama have simply hid some of its most important elements for years in the future.
As for the so-called bank reform measure, it was clearly a gift to Wall Street. Yet the LA Times, among others, called it "the most sweeping rewrite of financial rules since the Great Depression."
In fact, the bill didn't even bring back the Glass-Steagall Act which would have been the most sweeping rewrite of financial rules since, well since 1999, when Bill Clinton and Congress buried it.
Eric Alterman came closer to the truth: "When was the last time Congress passed a bill so large that even its significant provisions resisted summarization, both for reasons of complexity and enormity? If you said 'health care,' well, perhaps you're noticing a pattern. Once again, Democrats spent the better part of a year playing three-dimensional chess with themselves, lobbyists, and Republicans to pass. . . The actual provisions of this bill are beyond the capacity of most of us to understand"
Add to all this the BP disaster, in which our leaders desperately try to spin the oil away by endless news conferences in front of a gulf they never cared about before. And the attempt to dismantle a system of public education that for a couple of centuries helped make America a place to admire.
How does one define politics in times like this? In truth, the only parties that still have a whit of purpose are the Greens, Libertarians and Socialists and they can't hardly make it on the ballot. The rest has been reduced to office politics.
We have now gone through a year and a half when either nothing has happened or nobody can tell what has happened. Yet the elite still acts like they know what they are up to and their indentured media loyally spreads the myth.
For example, Obama appoints a Supreme Court justice whom none of her social ilk can describe much except to say how smart she is. These same figures, however, then proceed to admit that her views are a "blank page."
Is the only purpose of intelligence to go through life filling out crossword puzzles correctly? Might it not help to do or say something worthwhile that someone might remember? Apparently, by today's elite standards, that is not smart.
Obama himself warned us in his memoirs that he was merely a mirror, that people would see what they wanted in him. Only now are many who voted for him beginning to realize that Barack Obama never really existed; he was only a transient reaction to things that really existed - a reaction based on what seemed to be most beneficial or safest for himself at the moment.
One leader of this kind would be a problem in any period, but when a whole elite has given up shared values, community and conscience in order to play the game solo, you have a problem that can destroy your entire culture.
And that's where we find ourselves. Vicky Ward gets close to the nub in her book on the desperate housewives of Lehman Brothers. The illusion of common purpose - taken to the extreme of precisely defined clothing, rigorously shared charities and climbing mountains together - is finally shattered by the reality that the men who were supposed to be partners in a common endeavor actually viewed each other as one more market to manipulate and beat.
Lately a strange image has been bouncing about in my head. It is a scene of urban riots, flames in the street, of aimed guns and aimless bodies. But the people in the image aren't the poor and the helpless, and they are not in Athens or Bangkok. Rather they are in Washington and they are judges and CEOs and lawyers and MBAs and cabinet officials and TV news hosts. They are looting stores, smashing statues, and lighting gasoline in a desperate last act of the greed that got them so far yet now has so little to offer. Their memories can no longer recall conscience, causes, or community. They have no friends, allies or movements. They are on their own just like the Lehman Brothers housewife to whom former friends would longer speak after the firm had died.
We have, from a young age, been trained to respect, admire and follow our leaders. Even now, you can hardly find a major op ed writer or a TV commentator who will admit that those who are supposed to show us the way have disintegrated like, say, a malfunctioning deep water well or a high rolling hedge fund.
But we're on our own now. Which was never a bad idea; it was just that we weren't meant to think about it.
If Obama has done us one favor, perhaps it is this: we now know there is no one waiting behind the curtain to save us.
But there still is an America and a good one. You just won't find it on the front pages or on the evening news. It is in our communities, our towns and our states and we have to rediscover and build this America from the bottom up.
It can happen, but the first step is to stop listening to an elite that has destroyed our land and disgraced itself, an elite that has rolled into one great cultural tar ball.
So move on, folks, nothing to see here.
From here on out, it's up to us.
May 06, 2010
THE CIVILITY CLUE
Sam Smith
You know things are going poorly for the establishment when it starts appealing for civility as Obama did the other day, asking for a "a basic level of civility in our public debate."
That means they've pretty much run out of arguments to defend the way they're screwing things up and are now attempting to pass on the blame for to anger to the victims. It is interesting that Obama baRely mentioned the employment situation when talking at the University of Michigan graduates, something that even quite civil students would have been interested in.
I also like civility, however, and in the interest of improving my relations with the Obama administration I’d like to offer a few suggestions on how to increase the amount of civility in our land:
- Get out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq now.
- Stop bailing out Wall Street and start helping endangered homeowners and the unemployed.
- Stop letting oil companies determine when their rigs are safe.
- Stop unconstitutional spying on people through wiretaps and other means.
- Stop trying to find ways to cut Social Security and Medicare for seniors.
- Stop calling for civility and start practicing it.
You know things are going poorly for the establishment when it starts appealing for civility as Obama did the other day, asking for a "a basic level of civility in our public debate."
That means they've pretty much run out of arguments to defend the way they're screwing things up and are now attempting to pass on the blame for to anger to the victims. It is interesting that Obama baRely mentioned the employment situation when talking at the University of Michigan graduates, something that even quite civil students would have been interested in.
I also like civility, however, and in the interest of improving my relations with the Obama administration I’d like to offer a few suggestions on how to increase the amount of civility in our land:
- Get out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq now.
- Stop bailing out Wall Street and start helping endangered homeowners and the unemployed.
- Stop letting oil companies determine when their rigs are safe.
- Stop unconstitutional spying on people through wiretaps and other means.
- Stop trying to find ways to cut Social Security and Medicare for seniors.
- Stop calling for civility and start practicing it.
May 05, 2010
THE THREE WARS WE’LL NEVER WIN
Sam Smith
The three wars we'll never win are easy to remember. The enemy in each conflict begins with the letter M: Muslim, Mexican and marijuana.
Leaving aside all moral restraints, there is still one exceptionally good rule about starting a war: don't begin one you can't win.
But an extraordinary percentage of our national, state and local budgets goes into these three failed struggles. The cause of our incapability varies in each case, but in the end the story is the same: by fighting these wars we are making ourselves their major victim.
Consider what happened the other day in Times Square. In a few months it will have been nine years since something far worse happened in New York City, yet during all that time our country has not taken one significant step towards improving relations with the Muslim world. We have instead continued to support Israel's apartheid and its abuse of Palestinians, treated Muslims in this land like pro forma suspects of terror, escalated the war in Afghanistan and expanded it to Pakistan, including drone attacks on innocent households. All the time denying we were anti-Muslim.
The Afghan war, the second longest war in American history (after Vietnam), is also the second longest military failure in American history (after Vietnam). Again, leaving morality aside (since the media and our politicians find it offensive and cowardly), it can be said fairly that the major result of the Afghan war has been to increase Middle Eastern and Muslim hostility towards the United States.
This hostility has been reflected in a number of ways, but perhaps most interestingly has been the recent shift in the character of our most feared opponents from being little known residents of Pakistani encampments to being citizens of our own land. We have, you might say, domesticated Al Qaeda and the Taliban. This is not a smart move.
Faishal Shahzad even has an MBA from the University of Bridgeport. And unless he's just a cover for a new Wall Street assault on America by bombs rather than by derivatives, this is a striking symbol of how our foreign policy has not eased our problem but merely brought it to within an hour and 21 minutes of Manhattan via Metro North.
Justin Raimondo of Anti War describes it well:
|||| The oddness of this case is brought out in the details of Shahzad’s career – from being a financial analyst at the Affinion Group, in Norwalk, Connecticut, where he commuted from the home he and his wife had purchased in nearby Shelton, to quitting his job, in 2009, going off to Waziristan for "training," and then returning to at the beginning of this year, a changed man. . . News articles talk about how, in the beginning, Shahzad and his wife - whose Facebook page says she "likes to party every night" - were friendly, at first, but later seemed to withdraw as Shahzad became more "radicalized" . . .
What stands out about Shahzad and his family is their ordinariness - the wife, a University of Colorado graduate, majoring in business, and Shahzad, who spent his days calculating profit margins and tending his garden, not to mention a baby daughter nicknamed "Bunny Wabbit." So typical is this family that they recently had their Shelton house foreclosed." ||||
Even Walt Kelly - who warned us years ago of meeting the enemy and finding it to be us - might be alarmed.
This apparent enemy not only did not have to invade us; we gave him an MBA. This is not good military strategy.
Our war against Mexicans is less dangerous but similarly futile. It is not that illegal immigrants don't pose a problem, but not every problem in life can be solved by force, regulation, and macho police raids.
The anti-immigrant hysteria is driven by a number of factors including the successful effort by the repugnant right to blame our lack of jobs on a few of the weakest people in our land.
Yet the number of illegals has actually declined of late. And to get rid of all of them would cost each of us close to $1000 in tax dollars according to one study.
Further, The number of foreign born - legal or not - now comprise the same percentage of the population as was the case in 1930 and considerably less than between 1860 and 1910.
The blame for our economy being placed on illegals is grossly misleading. Here's a test I proposed some time back:
1. Has a Mexican ever fired or laid you off?
2. Was the plant you worked for until it was sent overseas been bought by Mexicans or is it still owned by the same people you used to work for?
3. Has a Mexican ever cut your pension or health benefits? Outsourced your job to India?
4. Was Enron run by Mexicans?
5. How much of the corruption in Washington has been instigated by the Mexicans?
6. Did the Mexicans make us invade Iraq?
The best way to think of illegal immigration is: how do we keep it down to a dull roar? Enforcement at the borders is clearly important, but turning our workplaces into magnets for police terrorism or Arizona style brutality is not helpful at all. Once again, we become the victim.
My sense is that many people are actually less concerned about the fact that the immigrants are illegal than that they got away with it. The best way to deal with that is with some form of restorative justice, such as required community service for undocumented workers.
An even better reform is to liberalize immigration. After all, our present policies have their roots in some of the most racist and xenophobic periods of our history. Consider this: if the immigration laws passed since the 1920s had been around when Europeans first landed, most of us would be the descendents of illegal immigrants. In fact, check with a native American for further thoughts on this topic.
In "Let Them In," Jason L. Riley writes: "Reasonable people agree that illegal immigration should be reduced. The question isn't whether it's a problem but how to solve it. Historically, the best results have come from providing more legal ways for immigrants to enter the country. Most of these people are not predisposed to crime or terrorists in waiting. They are economic migrants who would gladly use the front door if it were open to them. Post 9/11, knowing who's in the country has rightly taken on an urgency. But painting Latino immigrants as violent criminals or Islamofascists won't make us any safer. Nor will enforcing bad laws and policies, as opposed to reforming them. On the whole, immigrants are an asset to America, not a liability. We benefit from the labor, they benefit from the jobs. Our laws should acknowledge and reflect this reality, not deny it."
And the next time Lou Dobbs tries to scare you, keep this in mind. Cutting illegal immigration by half would be like someone offering you a two percent discount on something. Would you give up your Constitution and pay more taxes for that? Probably not.
Finally, there is the least important but silliest M War of all - that against marijuana. This has been an utter failure. And to what end? To punish those who dare to use a drug less dangerous than cigarettes and vodka.
The war against marijuana has been a vicious abuse of our young (and the once young), but more importantly has helped to lay the groundwork for other endless wars we are in against something or other. It was the drug war that convinced us to surrender our Constitution, and to waste money on militaristic, fatuous and futile police activities. In many ways the war on drugs helped lead us to the war on Mexicans and the Muslim world, to abandon reason and fairness, negotiation and compromise - in favor of a science fiction version of law, order and diplomacy in which nothing matters but the brutal power available at a particular moment.
There is only one sure result from such behavior: the practitioners become increasingly brutal and deranged, while increasingly failing at whatever it is they think they are doing.
The three wars we'll never win are easy to remember. The enemy in each conflict begins with the letter M: Muslim, Mexican and marijuana.
Leaving aside all moral restraints, there is still one exceptionally good rule about starting a war: don't begin one you can't win.
But an extraordinary percentage of our national, state and local budgets goes into these three failed struggles. The cause of our incapability varies in each case, but in the end the story is the same: by fighting these wars we are making ourselves their major victim.
Consider what happened the other day in Times Square. In a few months it will have been nine years since something far worse happened in New York City, yet during all that time our country has not taken one significant step towards improving relations with the Muslim world. We have instead continued to support Israel's apartheid and its abuse of Palestinians, treated Muslims in this land like pro forma suspects of terror, escalated the war in Afghanistan and expanded it to Pakistan, including drone attacks on innocent households. All the time denying we were anti-Muslim.
The Afghan war, the second longest war in American history (after Vietnam), is also the second longest military failure in American history (after Vietnam). Again, leaving morality aside (since the media and our politicians find it offensive and cowardly), it can be said fairly that the major result of the Afghan war has been to increase Middle Eastern and Muslim hostility towards the United States.
This hostility has been reflected in a number of ways, but perhaps most interestingly has been the recent shift in the character of our most feared opponents from being little known residents of Pakistani encampments to being citizens of our own land. We have, you might say, domesticated Al Qaeda and the Taliban. This is not a smart move.
Faishal Shahzad even has an MBA from the University of Bridgeport. And unless he's just a cover for a new Wall Street assault on America by bombs rather than by derivatives, this is a striking symbol of how our foreign policy has not eased our problem but merely brought it to within an hour and 21 minutes of Manhattan via Metro North.
Justin Raimondo of Anti War describes it well:
|||| The oddness of this case is brought out in the details of Shahzad’s career – from being a financial analyst at the Affinion Group, in Norwalk, Connecticut, where he commuted from the home he and his wife had purchased in nearby Shelton, to quitting his job, in 2009, going off to Waziristan for "training," and then returning to at the beginning of this year, a changed man. . . News articles talk about how, in the beginning, Shahzad and his wife - whose Facebook page says she "likes to party every night" - were friendly, at first, but later seemed to withdraw as Shahzad became more "radicalized" . . .
What stands out about Shahzad and his family is their ordinariness - the wife, a University of Colorado graduate, majoring in business, and Shahzad, who spent his days calculating profit margins and tending his garden, not to mention a baby daughter nicknamed "Bunny Wabbit." So typical is this family that they recently had their Shelton house foreclosed." ||||
Even Walt Kelly - who warned us years ago of meeting the enemy and finding it to be us - might be alarmed.
This apparent enemy not only did not have to invade us; we gave him an MBA. This is not good military strategy.
Our war against Mexicans is less dangerous but similarly futile. It is not that illegal immigrants don't pose a problem, but not every problem in life can be solved by force, regulation, and macho police raids.
The anti-immigrant hysteria is driven by a number of factors including the successful effort by the repugnant right to blame our lack of jobs on a few of the weakest people in our land.
Yet the number of illegals has actually declined of late. And to get rid of all of them would cost each of us close to $1000 in tax dollars according to one study.
Further, The number of foreign born - legal or not - now comprise the same percentage of the population as was the case in 1930 and considerably less than between 1860 and 1910.
The blame for our economy being placed on illegals is grossly misleading. Here's a test I proposed some time back:
1. Has a Mexican ever fired or laid you off?
2. Was the plant you worked for until it was sent overseas been bought by Mexicans or is it still owned by the same people you used to work for?
3. Has a Mexican ever cut your pension or health benefits? Outsourced your job to India?
4. Was Enron run by Mexicans?
5. How much of the corruption in Washington has been instigated by the Mexicans?
6. Did the Mexicans make us invade Iraq?
The best way to think of illegal immigration is: how do we keep it down to a dull roar? Enforcement at the borders is clearly important, but turning our workplaces into magnets for police terrorism or Arizona style brutality is not helpful at all. Once again, we become the victim.
My sense is that many people are actually less concerned about the fact that the immigrants are illegal than that they got away with it. The best way to deal with that is with some form of restorative justice, such as required community service for undocumented workers.
An even better reform is to liberalize immigration. After all, our present policies have their roots in some of the most racist and xenophobic periods of our history. Consider this: if the immigration laws passed since the 1920s had been around when Europeans first landed, most of us would be the descendents of illegal immigrants. In fact, check with a native American for further thoughts on this topic.
In "Let Them In," Jason L. Riley writes: "Reasonable people agree that illegal immigration should be reduced. The question isn't whether it's a problem but how to solve it. Historically, the best results have come from providing more legal ways for immigrants to enter the country. Most of these people are not predisposed to crime or terrorists in waiting. They are economic migrants who would gladly use the front door if it were open to them. Post 9/11, knowing who's in the country has rightly taken on an urgency. But painting Latino immigrants as violent criminals or Islamofascists won't make us any safer. Nor will enforcing bad laws and policies, as opposed to reforming them. On the whole, immigrants are an asset to America, not a liability. We benefit from the labor, they benefit from the jobs. Our laws should acknowledge and reflect this reality, not deny it."
And the next time Lou Dobbs tries to scare you, keep this in mind. Cutting illegal immigration by half would be like someone offering you a two percent discount on something. Would you give up your Constitution and pay more taxes for that? Probably not.
Finally, there is the least important but silliest M War of all - that against marijuana. This has been an utter failure. And to what end? To punish those who dare to use a drug less dangerous than cigarettes and vodka.
The war against marijuana has been a vicious abuse of our young (and the once young), but more importantly has helped to lay the groundwork for other endless wars we are in against something or other. It was the drug war that convinced us to surrender our Constitution, and to waste money on militaristic, fatuous and futile police activities. In many ways the war on drugs helped lead us to the war on Mexicans and the Muslim world, to abandon reason and fairness, negotiation and compromise - in favor of a science fiction version of law, order and diplomacy in which nothing matters but the brutal power available at a particular moment.
There is only one sure result from such behavior: the practitioners become increasingly brutal and deranged, while increasingly failing at whatever it is they think they are doing.
April 20, 2010
MEMO FROM A FORMER WHITE HOUSE ADVISER
Sam Smith
The following memo was discovered in the White House desk of Oliver G.Chortlelywell, former presidential public relations adviser, shortly after he had resigned his post in order, as he put it, "to spend more time with my family and pursue other interests."
HOW TO CHANGE THE OBAMA IMAGE FOR THE BETTER
1. Stop behaving like a movie actor and start acting like a politician. The actor shtick worked fine to get you elected, but once in office people want a leader, not a leading man.
2. Specifically, knock off the repeated displays of your finger pressed against your cheek and other corny efforts to appear deeply thoughtful. People will judge your thoughtfulness by the results not by the warm-up.
3. No more jogging down the last few steps getting off Air Force 1 or when going up to the podium. Not even champion marathon runners do that and when you do it, you look like the host of a third rate cable TV show.
4. My surveys found that the only person in your administration most Americans would want to have a beer with is Joe Biden. Act more like Biden and less like Bismarck and you'll do better in the polls.
5. My surveys also found that it's not your ethnicity that's the big problem but class. Too many Americans think you belong to an elite class that not only is not theirs but one they don't like that much.
6. Worse, you seem to celebrate your membership in this subculture. Unfortunately, the unintended effect is that you often seem stuck up and to be lecturing or speaking down to your audience. I read about a drama teacher who taught a chief financial officer how to speak better by reading aloud the works of Dr. Seuss. Maybe you should give it a try.
7. To the extent that ethnicity is a problem, it is largely due to the fact that you have ignored the first rule for minority politicians in America: lead the majority. The Irish understood this instinctively but among black leaders, Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the few who had a feeling for it. That's why he's one of America's few cross-ethnic heroes. He consciously led not just blacks, but whites, into the future. Jesse Jackson, in his memorable presidential run, was on the same track, picking up surprising support from white farmers and other non-blacks who were struggling. So far you've done virtually nothing for strugglers of any color.
8. I noticed that you listed yourself as black on the census form. This is suggests another problem. Here you are - a biologic and cultural symbol of the growing multiculturalism with which America is struggling and you don't even want to even put in writing, let alone talk about it. This is a great lost opportunity. You could have personalized a new America, but you took what appeared to be the easy route.
9. Most folks think lawyers are people you go to for legal advice, not to tell them how to run their lives. You approach issues like a lawyer and not like a politician, which is a major reason you're in so much trouble. Design your policy based on what's good for the country and the people, then check to see if there are any legal problems. Stop doing it the other way around.
10. Although most don't know the term, you and your administration come across as higher functioning autistics - people with command over data and other information but unable to integrate it into normal human existence.
11. While we're on the subject, dump Arne Duncan. He's the worst of the lot. I heard him the other day answering a teacher who was complaining about excessive test taking by saying we needed better assessments. In other words, more tests. If you don't want to fire him, maybe he could undergo Asperger's therapy to help him learn that the important choices in life do not all begin with A., B., C. D. and blank boxes.
12. Keep it simple, keep clear and get it down to the 'hood. The only visible sign I can find of the stimulus package in my community is one-eight mile of road improvement. I think of the remaining two miles of bumps and holes as the part Obama forgot.
13. About this shovel ready business: how come public works had to be shovel ready but major healthcare reforms don't have to come in until 2014 or 2019? The future isn't always shovel ready, but people still like to know it's coming.
14. Thirty percent into your first term, ordinary people are still out of work, still without decent health care, and still in danger of foreclosure. All that many of them can see is the size of the deficit and where it is going - to Wall Street and not to help them. This is a major cause of their anger. Can't your brilliant Harvard and Yale assistants come up with one or two plans that will really make people feel better?
15. Your most effective campaign organization consists of other Democratic politicians. But your programs have given them little to brag about, your funding fails to get down to a level where they can take credit for it, and your policies are on verge of ending many of their careers. This is not good politics. Get things to their level and let them have a piece of the action and the glory and you'll find it will make you look a lot better than if you try to hog it all for your self.
16. If things don't improve, resign and let Joe Biden take over and appoint you to the Supreme Court. I think you'd be much happier there and so would be the better part of the American public.
The following memo was discovered in the White House desk of Oliver G.Chortlelywell, former presidential public relations adviser, shortly after he had resigned his post in order, as he put it, "to spend more time with my family and pursue other interests."
HOW TO CHANGE THE OBAMA IMAGE FOR THE BETTER
1. Stop behaving like a movie actor and start acting like a politician. The actor shtick worked fine to get you elected, but once in office people want a leader, not a leading man.
2. Specifically, knock off the repeated displays of your finger pressed against your cheek and other corny efforts to appear deeply thoughtful. People will judge your thoughtfulness by the results not by the warm-up.
3. No more jogging down the last few steps getting off Air Force 1 or when going up to the podium. Not even champion marathon runners do that and when you do it, you look like the host of a third rate cable TV show.
4. My surveys found that the only person in your administration most Americans would want to have a beer with is Joe Biden. Act more like Biden and less like Bismarck and you'll do better in the polls.
5. My surveys also found that it's not your ethnicity that's the big problem but class. Too many Americans think you belong to an elite class that not only is not theirs but one they don't like that much.
6. Worse, you seem to celebrate your membership in this subculture. Unfortunately, the unintended effect is that you often seem stuck up and to be lecturing or speaking down to your audience. I read about a drama teacher who taught a chief financial officer how to speak better by reading aloud the works of Dr. Seuss. Maybe you should give it a try.
7. To the extent that ethnicity is a problem, it is largely due to the fact that you have ignored the first rule for minority politicians in America: lead the majority. The Irish understood this instinctively but among black leaders, Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the few who had a feeling for it. That's why he's one of America's few cross-ethnic heroes. He consciously led not just blacks, but whites, into the future. Jesse Jackson, in his memorable presidential run, was on the same track, picking up surprising support from white farmers and other non-blacks who were struggling. So far you've done virtually nothing for strugglers of any color.
8. I noticed that you listed yourself as black on the census form. This is suggests another problem. Here you are - a biologic and cultural symbol of the growing multiculturalism with which America is struggling and you don't even want to even put in writing, let alone talk about it. This is a great lost opportunity. You could have personalized a new America, but you took what appeared to be the easy route.
9. Most folks think lawyers are people you go to for legal advice, not to tell them how to run their lives. You approach issues like a lawyer and not like a politician, which is a major reason you're in so much trouble. Design your policy based on what's good for the country and the people, then check to see if there are any legal problems. Stop doing it the other way around.
10. Although most don't know the term, you and your administration come across as higher functioning autistics - people with command over data and other information but unable to integrate it into normal human existence.
11. While we're on the subject, dump Arne Duncan. He's the worst of the lot. I heard him the other day answering a teacher who was complaining about excessive test taking by saying we needed better assessments. In other words, more tests. If you don't want to fire him, maybe he could undergo Asperger's therapy to help him learn that the important choices in life do not all begin with A., B., C. D. and blank boxes.
12. Keep it simple, keep clear and get it down to the 'hood. The only visible sign I can find of the stimulus package in my community is one-eight mile of road improvement. I think of the remaining two miles of bumps and holes as the part Obama forgot.
13. About this shovel ready business: how come public works had to be shovel ready but major healthcare reforms don't have to come in until 2014 or 2019? The future isn't always shovel ready, but people still like to know it's coming.
14. Thirty percent into your first term, ordinary people are still out of work, still without decent health care, and still in danger of foreclosure. All that many of them can see is the size of the deficit and where it is going - to Wall Street and not to help them. This is a major cause of their anger. Can't your brilliant Harvard and Yale assistants come up with one or two plans that will really make people feel better?
15. Your most effective campaign organization consists of other Democratic politicians. But your programs have given them little to brag about, your funding fails to get down to a level where they can take credit for it, and your policies are on verge of ending many of their careers. This is not good politics. Get things to their level and let them have a piece of the action and the glory and you'll find it will make you look a lot better than if you try to hog it all for your self.
16. If things don't improve, resign and let Joe Biden take over and appoint you to the Supreme Court. I think you'd be much happier there and so would be the better part of the American public.
April 19, 2010
THE VANISHED POLITICIAN
Sam Smith
Depending on whether you watch Fox or MSNBC, either Barack Obama or the Tea Party crowd may seem terminally insane.
There is, however, a third alternative: that we've all gone a little nuts. A dysfunctional family with 300 million siblings.
It is tempting to choose sides when you see a woman interviewed by Greg Kaufmann of the Nation claiming that Obama's parents and his grandparents were communists. I don't believe even Joe McCarthy went that far.
On the other hand, the man of such allegedly dubious descent is also the one who has spent more federal funds than anyone in our history bailing out the fattest cats in the country, not to mention supervising the most poorly assembled legislation of supposedly good intent of modern times.
Think of it this way. You have been wrongly mistreated by your boss. You come home and have six whiskeys and don't show up for work for a week. Not a wise move, but the fact is that your boss did mistreat you. In other words, your poor reaction is not exculpation for the cause. The same is true for the Tea Party and what's going on in Washington. Under stress, people do strange things.
I learned long ago that this is a hazardous argument to make. David Carr, then editor of Washington City Paper, called me up about something. In the course of the interview, I mentioned that I had begun in journalism covering national affairs and then had started a community newspaper. One of the things I had to learn was not to treat the activists in the neighborhood as roughly as I had senators or cabinet members. Carr, who is now with the NY Times, got furious with me, called me condescending, and ended the interview.
It was a sign that I was getting out of touch with the direction of journalism. I had joined it as a trade or a craft, at a time when over half the reporters in the country only had a high school education. One of the assumptions was that reporters identified with the little guys and helped defend them against the trouble caused by the big guys. But now journalism had joined the big guys and so the unpowerful had shifted from being journalism's main client to being just another of its targets.
I wasn't - and still aren’t - ready to join. And so despite my substantial differences with the Tea Party, they're far from the top of my complaint list, well under, say, journalists who never explained to them what was really going on and liberals who would put up with anything as long as Barack Obama did it.
A couple of decades ago I described it this way, "This writer proposes to serve not as an expert, but rather in the more modest and, I would argue, more constructive journalistic role of being the surrogate eyes and ears of the reader. Consider me simply someone who has traveled this trail several times before and thus might remember where the clean water is to be found, the names of some of the rarer plants and possibly even a shortcut home."
You can’t get much further from Glenn Beck and Chris Matthews than that. It describes an intermediary role for the journalist - finding connections between the grandiosity of policy or public events and the quiet humanity of private life.
Something similar has happened to politicians. They, too, once saw their role as to help connect the individual to the collective, to translate the obscurities of policy, to represent the small before the grand, and to serve as an ambassador from their district to whatever larger group they had been chosen to join.
But much has changed: the rise of the mass media, the centralization of corporate power, the replacement of votes with dollars as the driving force in elections, and a general disintegration of both the reality of, and appreciation for, community.
The typical politician no longer represents a constituency, but contributors.
The typical constituency is not a community to serve, but just another market to sell.
And the model is not that of old machines but of new media.
For all practical purposes, the politician - as a true representative of a group of citizens - has largely vanished, just as has the reporter serving as a true intermediary for the public.
The public is thus left on its own, flailing about with little assistance from those who once aided them. It is small wonder that strange things happen.
Or that some find comfort in misdirected anger, just as in a dysfunctional family.
But the answer is not to trade more misdirected anger, but in public figures - in politics, the media and other places - who can help us all find again the trail we have lost. Those who speak truth to power, and common sense to those without it. And who save their anger for those with the most ability to do something about it all.
Depending on whether you watch Fox or MSNBC, either Barack Obama or the Tea Party crowd may seem terminally insane.
There is, however, a third alternative: that we've all gone a little nuts. A dysfunctional family with 300 million siblings.
It is tempting to choose sides when you see a woman interviewed by Greg Kaufmann of the Nation claiming that Obama's parents and his grandparents were communists. I don't believe even Joe McCarthy went that far.
On the other hand, the man of such allegedly dubious descent is also the one who has spent more federal funds than anyone in our history bailing out the fattest cats in the country, not to mention supervising the most poorly assembled legislation of supposedly good intent of modern times.
Think of it this way. You have been wrongly mistreated by your boss. You come home and have six whiskeys and don't show up for work for a week. Not a wise move, but the fact is that your boss did mistreat you. In other words, your poor reaction is not exculpation for the cause. The same is true for the Tea Party and what's going on in Washington. Under stress, people do strange things.
I learned long ago that this is a hazardous argument to make. David Carr, then editor of Washington City Paper, called me up about something. In the course of the interview, I mentioned that I had begun in journalism covering national affairs and then had started a community newspaper. One of the things I had to learn was not to treat the activists in the neighborhood as roughly as I had senators or cabinet members. Carr, who is now with the NY Times, got furious with me, called me condescending, and ended the interview.
It was a sign that I was getting out of touch with the direction of journalism. I had joined it as a trade or a craft, at a time when over half the reporters in the country only had a high school education. One of the assumptions was that reporters identified with the little guys and helped defend them against the trouble caused by the big guys. But now journalism had joined the big guys and so the unpowerful had shifted from being journalism's main client to being just another of its targets.
I wasn't - and still aren’t - ready to join. And so despite my substantial differences with the Tea Party, they're far from the top of my complaint list, well under, say, journalists who never explained to them what was really going on and liberals who would put up with anything as long as Barack Obama did it.
A couple of decades ago I described it this way, "This writer proposes to serve not as an expert, but rather in the more modest and, I would argue, more constructive journalistic role of being the surrogate eyes and ears of the reader. Consider me simply someone who has traveled this trail several times before and thus might remember where the clean water is to be found, the names of some of the rarer plants and possibly even a shortcut home."
You can’t get much further from Glenn Beck and Chris Matthews than that. It describes an intermediary role for the journalist - finding connections between the grandiosity of policy or public events and the quiet humanity of private life.
Something similar has happened to politicians. They, too, once saw their role as to help connect the individual to the collective, to translate the obscurities of policy, to represent the small before the grand, and to serve as an ambassador from their district to whatever larger group they had been chosen to join.
But much has changed: the rise of the mass media, the centralization of corporate power, the replacement of votes with dollars as the driving force in elections, and a general disintegration of both the reality of, and appreciation for, community.
The typical politician no longer represents a constituency, but contributors.
The typical constituency is not a community to serve, but just another market to sell.
And the model is not that of old machines but of new media.
For all practical purposes, the politician - as a true representative of a group of citizens - has largely vanished, just as has the reporter serving as a true intermediary for the public.
The public is thus left on its own, flailing about with little assistance from those who once aided them. It is small wonder that strange things happen.
Or that some find comfort in misdirected anger, just as in a dysfunctional family.
But the answer is not to trade more misdirected anger, but in public figures - in politics, the media and other places - who can help us all find again the trail we have lost. Those who speak truth to power, and common sense to those without it. And who save their anger for those with the most ability to do something about it all.
April 11, 2010
LIBERALISM IS DEAD. TIME TO MOVE ON
Sam Smith
Liberalism is dead.
It started going into its final throes when liberals jumped aboard the Clinton campaign, claiming that the toy boy of the Democratic Abandonship Council was really a one of them. Later on, even the anti-worker and anti-environmental trade deals, the assault on welfare, and the deep corruption didn't dissuade them. They were, if you asked, "being realistic."
But if you go back just four years earlier, it becomes clear that the motivation wasn't realism but cowardice. The right had so frightened liberals that they would take anyone with a hyphen and a capital D after their name.
Just four years earlier, the Democratic liberal everyone likes to ridicule - Michael Dukakis - had done something neither the media nor the liberals will even mention today: he got a higher percentage of the vote than Clinton - 46% vs. 43% - and he got better percentages in such heartland states as Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming.
In fact, Clinton wouldn't have even made it to the White House if there hadn't been a split on the right thanks to Ross Perot. And Clinton only got two percentage points more than a real liberal - Walter Mondale - had when he ran against the invincible Ronald Reagan.
With the surrender to Clinton it was already clear that liberals had lost their purpose in life, which had once been to do the most for the most. Now they were just part of a sycophantic crowd, not unlike the audience at a Tyra Banks show.
What had caused this collapse? A major, and sadly ironic, explanation is that the paleo-liberals of the New Deal and Great Society had been so successful in advancing the status of their constituencies - including blacks, labor, women, and Jews - that those who had advanced the most became increasingly separated from less successful members of their own ilk and of the less successful generally. Thus the gap in America that liberals had once tried to close now existed even within its own ranks.
The result was an unhinging of the liberal constituency with decreasing interest by the liberal elite in the concerns of those they had left behind.
Because I grew up in a paleo-liberal family, I am acutely aware of the change. My father had been in the New Deal almost from the start and lasted into the Truman years. What a liberal was about was part of my being.
These folks made plenty of mistakes - including failing to move fast enough on civil rights as well as hyping the Cold War and downgrading civil liberties after Joe McCarthy accused them of being soft on communism - but one thing they got right. With programs like the minimum wage, protection of unions, Social Security and later, under LBJ, Medicare, liberals looked after the average folk.
Now, not only do they not serve the greater part of America, they don't even seem to like it all that much. They offer few policies on its behalf and they scold, ridicule, patronize and insult the very constituency that FDR and LBJ were so successful at reaching. Not too surprisingly, that constituency has gone looking elsewhere for friends.
And today's liberals don't even seem to care that much that it's happened. As a child of earlier liberal values, I don't even have to read op ed columns to find this out. I just feel it listening to liberals talk and watching what they do. They are no longer group leaders of progress but just more groupies of power, and we're all paying a huge price for this shift.
The 2008 election offered the last big opportunity for liberals to show their worth. They found their candidate, elected him and then continued cheering as he escalated the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, created a weak and ineffective economic recovery program, failed to deal with soaring foreclosures, announced plans for offshore oil drilling and a return of nuclear power, supported Israeli apartheid, signed an extension of the Patriot Act, approved unconstitutional wiretapping, opposed the protection of gay marriage, and created a huge new subsidy for private health insurers in the false name of universal healthcare.
In short liberals sold themselves out with Clinton and now have sold us out with Obama.
At present there is nothing that liberals have to offer. In fact they serve a negative function, as a form of political pornography that gets the right all excited. They are the dirty pictures that the Tea Parties show each other.
To be sure, liberals will continue to exist, but if we hold any hope of ending this country's three decade slide to the right, they can not serve as the main alternative to disaster.
You can call this alternative what you want, but I like the term progressive populism, which is to say a politics that is both progressive and also appeals to the American mainstream.
Central to this politics are the economic conditions of ordinary lives, the issue liberals have so strongly abandoned. As just a few examples, a progressive populist platform might include:
A progressive populist politics would be based on respect for all Americans, not just those who meet the cultural, class or ideological standards of an elite. Unconvinced voters - from Tea Party members to the apathetic - would be regarded as a market and not a menace. It would be the job of the progressive populist politics to change their minds. This means replacing the MSNBC model of 'aren't they stupid' with what the Quakers called the concept of "reciprocal liberty," i.e. you can't have your freedom unless I have mine. In other words, all sides need to rediscover the idea of tolerance towards those with whom we disagree.
There is nothing to be gained by simply being the mirror image of the Tea Parties, but a lot to be gained by changing the nature and tone of the debate. There is also absolutely nothing wrong with going after Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, but to declare all their fans terminally ill is the death knell for one's own politics.
Another key element of a progressive populist politics would be respect for the small. Because the liberal elite has been trained to work in large institutions it has come to think size is the best way to get things done. This bias can be felt strongly in the policies of the Obama administration and in the attacks on any who support the Tenth Amendment that accuses them essentially of being new age states rights segregationists. This is not only factually wrong, it is politically stupid, because people in this country strongly rate their state and local government better than the feds.
There was nothing in the historic liberal canon that require such contempt for distributing government to its most effective level. In fact, the best of old time liberal politics had as one of its key questions: how do we get this down to the street? One answer, of course, was to not make all the decisions at the federal level, but to let your party's mayors and governors strut their stuff.
There is further a huge difference between the protection of a universal right, properly a federal role, and the distribution of ordinary services, which is pragmatically done at various levels.
It is interesting to note that Obama appears headed for a mid-term election disaster similar to that of Bill Clinton's. By the end of Clinton's second term, the Democrats has lost 48 seats in the House, 8 seats in the Senate, 11 governorships, 1254 state legislative seats and 9 legislatures .439 elected Democrats had joined the Republican Party while only three Republican officeholders had gone the other way. And to this day, both liberals and other Democrats refuse to even notice that it happened. They like local lettuce - but not local politics.
Part of this is undoubtedly due to the fact that both Clinton and Obama suffer from a political narcissism that defines success as a personal possession rather than as a national benefit, which is not only bad for the country, it's terrible for their own party. Obama might well listen to the tapes of Lyndon Johnson, late in the evening after winning the 1964 election, calling politicians around the country to thank them for their help. After talking to a county chair in Texas, he asks - by name - for his wife. He then tells her how wonderful her husband has been. There was a politician who knew the importance of the small yet got more national progressive bills passed in less time than we may ever see again.
Economic improvement, treating voters decently, and respect for the small in government. Just three good principles to help get a new politics going.
And a lot of it has to do with style and tone. For example, ending imperial warfare may sound great in Manhattan but not so good in Butte. But what about a demand to return to the governors their control over the National Guard in their state? That would accomplish some of the same thing. In other words, progressive populism must speak United States, not PBS News Hour.
We also need to dump vetted ideology for pragmatic alliances based on issues. The media and our leaders want us to treat politics like a religion, but in real life one agrees with some people sometimes and not at other times. There is no reason why progressive populism can't have as allies at various moments - Greens, Libertarians, liberals and even Tea Party members.
We find this strange, but historically it isn't. Take for example the Socialist Party. From the beginning the Socialist Party was an ecumenical organization for American radicals. Its membership included Marxists of various kinds, Christian socialists, Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish socialists, foreign-language speaking sections, single-taxers and virtually every variety of American radical. On the divisive issue of "reform vs. revolution," the Socialist Party from the beginning adopted a compromise formula, producing platforms calling for revolutionary change but also making "immediate demands" of a reformist nature. The Socialist Party historically stressed cooperatives as much as labor unions, and included the concepts of revolution by education and of "building the new society within the shell of the old."
Creating a new movement won't be easy. God knows, I know. Way back in 1965 I wrote an article headlined, "Where are the Gutbucket Liberals?" - back when I didn't even think Johnson was moving fast enough. I said:
And then in 2002 after Bush had won:
Liberalism is dead.
It started going into its final throes when liberals jumped aboard the Clinton campaign, claiming that the toy boy of the Democratic Abandonship Council was really a one of them. Later on, even the anti-worker and anti-environmental trade deals, the assault on welfare, and the deep corruption didn't dissuade them. They were, if you asked, "being realistic."
But if you go back just four years earlier, it becomes clear that the motivation wasn't realism but cowardice. The right had so frightened liberals that they would take anyone with a hyphen and a capital D after their name.
Just four years earlier, the Democratic liberal everyone likes to ridicule - Michael Dukakis - had done something neither the media nor the liberals will even mention today: he got a higher percentage of the vote than Clinton - 46% vs. 43% - and he got better percentages in such heartland states as Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming.
In fact, Clinton wouldn't have even made it to the White House if there hadn't been a split on the right thanks to Ross Perot. And Clinton only got two percentage points more than a real liberal - Walter Mondale - had when he ran against the invincible Ronald Reagan.
With the surrender to Clinton it was already clear that liberals had lost their purpose in life, which had once been to do the most for the most. Now they were just part of a sycophantic crowd, not unlike the audience at a Tyra Banks show.
What had caused this collapse? A major, and sadly ironic, explanation is that the paleo-liberals of the New Deal and Great Society had been so successful in advancing the status of their constituencies - including blacks, labor, women, and Jews - that those who had advanced the most became increasingly separated from less successful members of their own ilk and of the less successful generally. Thus the gap in America that liberals had once tried to close now existed even within its own ranks.
The result was an unhinging of the liberal constituency with decreasing interest by the liberal elite in the concerns of those they had left behind.
Because I grew up in a paleo-liberal family, I am acutely aware of the change. My father had been in the New Deal almost from the start and lasted into the Truman years. What a liberal was about was part of my being.
These folks made plenty of mistakes - including failing to move fast enough on civil rights as well as hyping the Cold War and downgrading civil liberties after Joe McCarthy accused them of being soft on communism - but one thing they got right. With programs like the minimum wage, protection of unions, Social Security and later, under LBJ, Medicare, liberals looked after the average folk.
Now, not only do they not serve the greater part of America, they don't even seem to like it all that much. They offer few policies on its behalf and they scold, ridicule, patronize and insult the very constituency that FDR and LBJ were so successful at reaching. Not too surprisingly, that constituency has gone looking elsewhere for friends.
And today's liberals don't even seem to care that much that it's happened. As a child of earlier liberal values, I don't even have to read op ed columns to find this out. I just feel it listening to liberals talk and watching what they do. They are no longer group leaders of progress but just more groupies of power, and we're all paying a huge price for this shift.
The 2008 election offered the last big opportunity for liberals to show their worth. They found their candidate, elected him and then continued cheering as he escalated the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, created a weak and ineffective economic recovery program, failed to deal with soaring foreclosures, announced plans for offshore oil drilling and a return of nuclear power, supported Israeli apartheid, signed an extension of the Patriot Act, approved unconstitutional wiretapping, opposed the protection of gay marriage, and created a huge new subsidy for private health insurers in the false name of universal healthcare.
In short liberals sold themselves out with Clinton and now have sold us out with Obama.
At present there is nothing that liberals have to offer. In fact they serve a negative function, as a form of political pornography that gets the right all excited. They are the dirty pictures that the Tea Parties show each other.
To be sure, liberals will continue to exist, but if we hold any hope of ending this country's three decade slide to the right, they can not serve as the main alternative to disaster.
You can call this alternative what you want, but I like the term progressive populism, which is to say a politics that is both progressive and also appeals to the American mainstream.
Central to this politics are the economic conditions of ordinary lives, the issue liberals have so strongly abandoned. As just a few examples, a progressive populist platform might include:
- A return to the 40 hour week established by the New Deal six decades ago. One recent survey found that 63% of Americans work more than a 40 hour week, with 40% working more than 50 hours a week. One reason for this: it save employers money on the anti-liberal private health insurance system that Obama has just boosted.
- A limit on credit card usury, such as a return to the sub-10% levels of the 1980s.
- Court-supervised restructuring of mortgages in foreclosure cases.
- A real public works program - such as one aimed as returning our rail system to its late 19th century level - emphasizing jobs and visible improvements to the lives of communities.
- A big growth in support for small business, largely ignored by both major parties.
- A single payer healthcare system.
- Support of community and state banks, cooperatives and other alternatives to the economic institutions that almost destroyed our economy.
A progressive populist politics would be based on respect for all Americans, not just those who meet the cultural, class or ideological standards of an elite. Unconvinced voters - from Tea Party members to the apathetic - would be regarded as a market and not a menace. It would be the job of the progressive populist politics to change their minds. This means replacing the MSNBC model of 'aren't they stupid' with what the Quakers called the concept of "reciprocal liberty," i.e. you can't have your freedom unless I have mine. In other words, all sides need to rediscover the idea of tolerance towards those with whom we disagree.
There is nothing to be gained by simply being the mirror image of the Tea Parties, but a lot to be gained by changing the nature and tone of the debate. There is also absolutely nothing wrong with going after Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, but to declare all their fans terminally ill is the death knell for one's own politics.
Another key element of a progressive populist politics would be respect for the small. Because the liberal elite has been trained to work in large institutions it has come to think size is the best way to get things done. This bias can be felt strongly in the policies of the Obama administration and in the attacks on any who support the Tenth Amendment that accuses them essentially of being new age states rights segregationists. This is not only factually wrong, it is politically stupid, because people in this country strongly rate their state and local government better than the feds.
There was nothing in the historic liberal canon that require such contempt for distributing government to its most effective level. In fact, the best of old time liberal politics had as one of its key questions: how do we get this down to the street? One answer, of course, was to not make all the decisions at the federal level, but to let your party's mayors and governors strut their stuff.
There is further a huge difference between the protection of a universal right, properly a federal role, and the distribution of ordinary services, which is pragmatically done at various levels.
It is interesting to note that Obama appears headed for a mid-term election disaster similar to that of Bill Clinton's. By the end of Clinton's second term, the Democrats has lost 48 seats in the House, 8 seats in the Senate, 11 governorships, 1254 state legislative seats and 9 legislatures .439 elected Democrats had joined the Republican Party while only three Republican officeholders had gone the other way. And to this day, both liberals and other Democrats refuse to even notice that it happened. They like local lettuce - but not local politics.
Part of this is undoubtedly due to the fact that both Clinton and Obama suffer from a political narcissism that defines success as a personal possession rather than as a national benefit, which is not only bad for the country, it's terrible for their own party. Obama might well listen to the tapes of Lyndon Johnson, late in the evening after winning the 1964 election, calling politicians around the country to thank them for their help. After talking to a county chair in Texas, he asks - by name - for his wife. He then tells her how wonderful her husband has been. There was a politician who knew the importance of the small yet got more national progressive bills passed in less time than we may ever see again.
Economic improvement, treating voters decently, and respect for the small in government. Just three good principles to help get a new politics going.
And a lot of it has to do with style and tone. For example, ending imperial warfare may sound great in Manhattan but not so good in Butte. But what about a demand to return to the governors their control over the National Guard in their state? That would accomplish some of the same thing. In other words, progressive populism must speak United States, not PBS News Hour.
We also need to dump vetted ideology for pragmatic alliances based on issues. The media and our leaders want us to treat politics like a religion, but in real life one agrees with some people sometimes and not at other times. There is no reason why progressive populism can't have as allies at various moments - Greens, Libertarians, liberals and even Tea Party members.
We find this strange, but historically it isn't. Take for example the Socialist Party. From the beginning the Socialist Party was an ecumenical organization for American radicals. Its membership included Marxists of various kinds, Christian socialists, Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish socialists, foreign-language speaking sections, single-taxers and virtually every variety of American radical. On the divisive issue of "reform vs. revolution," the Socialist Party from the beginning adopted a compromise formula, producing platforms calling for revolutionary change but also making "immediate demands" of a reformist nature. The Socialist Party historically stressed cooperatives as much as labor unions, and included the concepts of revolution by education and of "building the new society within the shell of the old."
Creating a new movement won't be easy. God knows, I know. Way back in 1965 I wrote an article headlined, "Where are the Gutbucket Liberals?" - back when I didn't even think Johnson was moving fast enough. I said:
|||| Perhaps the saddest of the lot is the professional Washington liberal. He is the most vocal in his claim of liberalism and quickest to accede to the whims of the illiberal. The professional Washington liberal attends White House conferences on this and that, writes articles for the press, testifies before congressional committees, and feels proud when he can help tack on fifty million dollars to a piece of constructive-sounding legislation. Yet give him a legislative placebo to salve his conscience and he will beat his reactionary compatriot to the Chevy Chase Club by a half hour every time.
Though his language is rife with intellectual cliches and jargon, he and his brothers throughout the land pride themselves on their intellectual command of the complexities of our society.
No mere men of action are they, no scummy populists or red-faced, raspy-voiced demagogues of the rabble, but deep-dish thinkers tackling the intricate philosophical and sociological problems of America.
Yet, on those uncomfortable occasions when the liberals are dragged down to reality, they suddenly forget their ideological commitments and rush to support third-rate programs in the interest of - as they say - "getting the camel's nose under the tent."
Then, when the wrong camel's nose gets under the wrong tent, they return to their seminars to wonder amongst themselves what it is that is wrong with society.
Among the things that are wrong with society are that the liberals have accepted the limited goals of a national front government: they suffer from the torpor of excessive intellectualism: and they seem congenitally unwilling to come out swinging for programs our country obviously requires.
What we need is more gutbucket liberalism: more down-to-earth struggles in the tradition of the best of the early Progressive movements: more liberal politicians willing to say "I'd rather be right than regular;" and more without embarrassment fighting in the interests of the little people of America. ||||
And then in 2002 after Bush had won:
|||| For the [Democratic] party to recover, it must divorce itself from the con men who have done it so much damage. It must find its way back to the gutbucket, pragmatic populism that gave this country Social Security, a minimum wage, veterans' programs, the FHA, civil rights, and the war on poverty. It must jettison its self-defeating snobbism towards Americans who go to church or own a gun. It needs to be as useful to the voter in the cubicle as it once was to the voter on the assembly line. It must find a soul, a passion, and a sense of itself. Most of all, it must get rid of those false prophets and phony friends who have not only done it so much damage but have left the country fully in the hands of the cruel, the selfish, the violent, the dumb, and the anti-democratic."||||So, yes, I repeat myself. But time is running out so perhaps yet another plea in the dark may be forgiven. Are there any other progressive populists in the room?
April 06, 2010
WHAT'S A REGIME?
Sam Smith
Chris Matthews and David Corn have gotten extremely upset about the use of the word "regime" to refer to the Obama administration. You might even call them regimaphobes or anti-regime extremists or regime conspiracy theorists - that is if you write like Chris Matthews and David Corn.
Corn thinks those who use the term "regime" are dangerous because "extreme rhetoric can lead to extreme action" and he adds, "to those who accused Chris Matthews and me of being too tough on Republicans, I say: If you lie down with "Nazi"-chanters, you get up with a responsibility for what they might do."
Matthews was even more upset: "I've never seen language like this in the American press - referring to an elected representative government, elected in a totally fair, democratic, American election -- we will have another one in November, we'll have another one for president in a couple years -- fair, free, and wonderful democracy we have in this country. . . We know that word, 'regime.' It was used by George Bush, 'regime change.' You go to war with regimes. Regimes are tyrannies. They're juntas. They're military coups. The use of the word 'regime' in American political parlance is unacceptable, and someone should tell the walrus [Limbaugh] to stop using it."
Leaving aside the fact that Matthews is forgetful as well as inaccurate - he used the term "Bush regime" at least once - there are two reasons the pair strike me as extremists (albeit just dumb, not dangerous) on the topic.
The first is that I was either the first, or one of the first, to use the term to describe what was happening under Bill Clinton. I then followed the practice with George Bush.
It seemed that we needed a new term to describe administrations run by corrupt power hogs and, contrary to Chris Matthews' claim, there was nothing "totally fair" and democratic about American elections.
In 1997, I offered the notion of mob politics as having gained a foothold with Jack Kennedy and had been growing ever since. For example, the 1960 election, the Castro assassination attempts, the Bay of Pigs, and perhaps even Kennedy's assassination had mob connections.
Under Nixon, we had CHAOS, a massive covert program of spying on, and disruption of, progressive groups. Nixon conducted a secret illegal war in Cambodia and planned the demise of democracy in Chile along with the assassination of its president. Watergate was the biggest presidential scandal yet in American history
Under Reagan, we had the S&L and BCCI scandals. We had Iran-Contra, the flourishing of the western hemispheric drug trade, domestic spying and the "continuity in government" scheme.
Under Daddy Bush we had the Iran-Contra cover-up, BCCI cover-up and S&L cover-up. George Bush, the first ex-CIA operative and director to be elected president, presided during an extensive cover-up of the Iran-Contra affair. Also under Bush, the lid was kept on the more embarrassing aspects of the BCCI scandal. Most of those involved in the S&L scandals also went unpunished. Other individuals and corporations picked up distressed property at fire sale prices while the taxpayers footed the bill.
And with Clinton we had administration officials and close friends of the president involved in complex and sprawling scandals growing out of Arkansas mob politics. Allegations included financial misdeeds, drug running, abuse of FBI files and obstruction of justice.
Add to this the steady disappearance of constitutional protections and it all made "regime" seem like a pretty good word.
But if Corn and Matthews want to pretend that none of this happened, then they should at least check the dictionary. Here's how Wikipedia describes it:
"In politics, a regime is the form of government: the set of rules, cultural or social norms, etc. that regulate the operation of government and its interactions with society. For instance, the United States has one of the oldest regimes still active in the world, dating to the ratification of its Constitution in 1789. Although modern usage often gives the term a negative connotation, like an authoritarian one, Webster's definition clearly states that the word 'regime' refers simply to a form of government."
On one point, however, I agree with this pair of liberal scolds. Obama's operation does not yet deserve the title of regime. A regime implies order and discipline. Obama's administration is much to closer to what I have dubbed an "adhocracy," in which those in power play it all by ear - a particularly dangerous activity when, like Obama and his buddies, one is tone deaf.
Chris Matthews and David Corn have gotten extremely upset about the use of the word "regime" to refer to the Obama administration. You might even call them regimaphobes or anti-regime extremists or regime conspiracy theorists - that is if you write like Chris Matthews and David Corn.
Corn thinks those who use the term "regime" are dangerous because "extreme rhetoric can lead to extreme action" and he adds, "to those who accused Chris Matthews and me of being too tough on Republicans, I say: If you lie down with "Nazi"-chanters, you get up with a responsibility for what they might do."
Matthews was even more upset: "I've never seen language like this in the American press - referring to an elected representative government, elected in a totally fair, democratic, American election -- we will have another one in November, we'll have another one for president in a couple years -- fair, free, and wonderful democracy we have in this country. . . We know that word, 'regime.' It was used by George Bush, 'regime change.' You go to war with regimes. Regimes are tyrannies. They're juntas. They're military coups. The use of the word 'regime' in American political parlance is unacceptable, and someone should tell the walrus [Limbaugh] to stop using it."
Leaving aside the fact that Matthews is forgetful as well as inaccurate - he used the term "Bush regime" at least once - there are two reasons the pair strike me as extremists (albeit just dumb, not dangerous) on the topic.
The first is that I was either the first, or one of the first, to use the term to describe what was happening under Bill Clinton. I then followed the practice with George Bush.
It seemed that we needed a new term to describe administrations run by corrupt power hogs and, contrary to Chris Matthews' claim, there was nothing "totally fair" and democratic about American elections.
In 1997, I offered the notion of mob politics as having gained a foothold with Jack Kennedy and had been growing ever since. For example, the 1960 election, the Castro assassination attempts, the Bay of Pigs, and perhaps even Kennedy's assassination had mob connections.
Under Nixon, we had CHAOS, a massive covert program of spying on, and disruption of, progressive groups. Nixon conducted a secret illegal war in Cambodia and planned the demise of democracy in Chile along with the assassination of its president. Watergate was the biggest presidential scandal yet in American history
Under Reagan, we had the S&L and BCCI scandals. We had Iran-Contra, the flourishing of the western hemispheric drug trade, domestic spying and the "continuity in government" scheme.
Under Daddy Bush we had the Iran-Contra cover-up, BCCI cover-up and S&L cover-up. George Bush, the first ex-CIA operative and director to be elected president, presided during an extensive cover-up of the Iran-Contra affair. Also under Bush, the lid was kept on the more embarrassing aspects of the BCCI scandal. Most of those involved in the S&L scandals also went unpunished. Other individuals and corporations picked up distressed property at fire sale prices while the taxpayers footed the bill.
And with Clinton we had administration officials and close friends of the president involved in complex and sprawling scandals growing out of Arkansas mob politics. Allegations included financial misdeeds, drug running, abuse of FBI files and obstruction of justice.
Add to this the steady disappearance of constitutional protections and it all made "regime" seem like a pretty good word.
But if Corn and Matthews want to pretend that none of this happened, then they should at least check the dictionary. Here's how Wikipedia describes it:
"In politics, a regime is the form of government: the set of rules, cultural or social norms, etc. that regulate the operation of government and its interactions with society. For instance, the United States has one of the oldest regimes still active in the world, dating to the ratification of its Constitution in 1789. Although modern usage often gives the term a negative connotation, like an authoritarian one, Webster's definition clearly states that the word 'regime' refers simply to a form of government."
On one point, however, I agree with this pair of liberal scolds. Obama's operation does not yet deserve the title of regime. A regime implies order and discipline. Obama's administration is much to closer to what I have dubbed an "adhocracy," in which those in power play it all by ear - a particularly dangerous activity when, like Obama and his buddies, one is tone deaf.
March 31, 2010
BLACK IVIES IN TROUBLE
Sam Smith
Interesting mayoral race is brewing in DC, where black Ivy Adrian Fenty, running for reelection, is clearly in trouble. Fenty is one of a new class of black politicians - well educated and superficially attractive -- but who were raised to think of themselves as God's gift to diversity and never went through those hard patches that make a truly good politician.
Three of the current black Ivies - Fenty, Obama and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick - quickly lost their political sheen, although Newark mayor Cory Booker seems to be hanging in there, and might even be a strong candidate for governor.
The DC races is particularly interesting because the city is still majority black - although becoming more white by the day. Fenty won every precinct in the city but started slipping almost from the start. In January, the Washington Post reported that Fenty's support among black voters has dropped from 68% to 29% and among whites from 78% to 57%.
Definitely running against Fenty will be Vincent Gray, the city council chair, a far more socially conscious politician and also far more liked. Gray is the sort of pol you don't even get that mad at even when he's wrong, whereas Fenty could be dead right and still piss you off.
Adding to the excitement is another possibility described by Washington City Paper's Loose Lips: "The contest could get considerably more competitive and unpredictable in the coming days: Millionaire developer R. Donahue Peebles said that he is 'planning to run' as well, backing off earlier statements that family issues would keep him out of the race.'"
At this point Gray seems clearly the best, but he's also the one with far the least money. Stay tuned for a race that uniquely features three quite different styles of blackness.
March 28, 2010
FRACTURE AND FUSION
Sam Smith
When bad things happen, strange things happen:
- During a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889, an American Indian named Wovoka claimed to have had a dream in which all his fellow native Americans were taken into the sky as the Earth opened up and swallowed all the whites upon it. The earth then returned to its natural state as a land where native Americans could live in peace.
According to Wovoka, to make this dream real, his native Americans were to follow these instructions: "When you get home you must begin a dance and continue for five days. Dance for four successive nights, and on the last night continue dancing until the morning of the fifth day, when all must bathe in the river and then return to their homes. You must all do this in the same way. . . I want you to dance every six weeks. Make a feast at the dance and have food that everybody may eat."
The ghost dance culture would sweep across the tribes of western America as the dancers were losing their last hold on their beloved lands.
- As military supplies poured into the Pacific Islands during World War II, local peoples reacted to the sudden change by developing "cargo cults" that offered magical explanations for the flow of imports. When the war ended, members of the cults built imitation landing strips and aircraft to attempt to recreate the former reality and restart the influx of goods.
- The early 20th century Maji Maji Rebellion in Africa was spurred by a medium who offered medicine he claimed would turn German colonials' bullets into water.
- Sometimes the strange and the rational are strangely mixed as in America's first Great Awakening, both an expression of excessive evangelicalism and of nascent equality that would help to lay the philosophical groundwork of the American revolution. Unlike the hierarchal assumptions of the Enlightenment, the Awakening taught that under God all were equal, a principle that even attracted Benjamin Franklin, though he didn't care for the theology behind it.
- And sometimes the bad times produce not just the strange but the disastrous, as with the rise of Nazism.
Typically, the strange things were a reaction to events that had overwhelmed many and led them to seek solace in a simplistic and seemingly comfortably symbolic solution. Those reacting had not caused the problem; they had suffered and become disoriented as a result of them.
Nazism, for example, didn't spring up as just an evil virus. It fed on:
- Unhappiness in the wake of World War I
- The collapse of conventional liberal and conservative politics that bears uncomfortable similarities to what we are now experiencing.
- The gross mismanagement of the economy and of such key worker concerns as wages, inflation, pensions, layoffs, and rising property taxes. There were also bankruptcies, negative trade balance, major decline in national production, and a large national debt rise compensated for by foreign investment. In other words, a version of what America and its workers are experiencing today.
- The use of negative campaigning, a contribution to modern politics by Joseph Goebbels. The Nazi campaigns argued what was wrong with their opponents and ignored stating their own policies. Sound at all familiar?
- The collapse of the country's self image, falling from world leadership in education, industry, science, and literacy.
Like Ghost Cult dancers in the 19th century, World War II Pacific Islanders wondering where their cargo was, Africans beset by German colonialists, and Germans beset by economic and cultural decline, Americans today face an extraordinary assemblage of change, discouragement, challenges and uncertainties.
Add together the prospect of climate change, the erosion of democracy, the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, the decline of America's position in the world, rapid changes in both technology and social values, and the collapse of conventional conservative and liberal politics and we're lucky to have a reaction no stranger than that of the Tea Party movement.
When considering such developments it's good to keep two things in mind:
- They are reactions and not the events or movements that caused the reactions.
- What happens as a result of these reactions usually depends more on how those controlling major events behave than how those responding to them do.
In other words - silly, misinformed, prejudiced or even criminal as they may be - members of the Tea Party movement are not responsible for the longest indefensible war in American history, the exploitation of the economy leading to the current collapse, the degradation of the environment, or the disintegration of a liberal movement once responsive to the needs of the average citizen.
And so it doesn't help much to have those who contributed to the misdirection simply scold the discontented. Especially when a recent poll finds that 52% of Americans believe the average member of the Tea Party movement has a better understanding of the issues facing America today than the average member of Congress and 47% think that their own political views are closer to those of the average Tea Party member than to the views of the average member of Congress
And it doesn't help to create a counter myth that blames the Tea Party for our problems, when, in fact, it was the extremist center that created them. Name one of our crises to which we were driven by either left or right. This is not to say trouble can't come from the political edges but this time it was the centrist establishment - whose interest is more in power retention rather than in political policy - that started our present wars, degraded our environment, lost our jobs and chipped away at democracy and our freedoms.
This is not unusual in history. For example, one of the reasons members of the KKK wore hoods was because some of them were town officials, important businessmen or police officers. Today the extremist center doesn't have to wear hoods; the media just covers for them.
There is no doubt, however, that it is all quite strange. Consider, for instance, that a Democratic president and Democratic Congress have recently passed a healthcare bill based in no small part on principles outlined in similar legislation offered by conservative Republican Robert Dole in 1994.
Yet recent polling finds that a large margin of Republicans think it's terrible and a similar percentage of Democrats think its wonderful.
At such times, we shouldn't be too surprised if some voters are acting a bit confused or crazy. Or feel that they're losing control.
Although obviously encouraged by hypocrites, hate-mongers and know-nothings of the political right, the failure of liberal politics also bears substantial blame for the Tea Party rebellion.
Instead moving firmly to resolves our crises - as did their predecessors in the New Deal and Great Society - today's liberals content themselves with being common scolds, attacking those who dare to express discomfort with the times. They reject, rather than redirect.
For example, one of the problems has been the over-centralization of a nonresponsive federal government. It's not about how big government so much as where it is. But can we discuss openly (even perhaps with "civil discourse") the status of the Tenth Amendment?
Apparently not without Chris Matthews comparing you to the bad guys of the pre-civil rights South. Or history professor Joseph Crespino writing in the History News Network: "Defending state sovereignty inevitably evokes memories of the civil rights era - when 'states’ rights' was the catchphrase of Southern segregationists."
This is easily as stupid an argument as some of those of the Tea Party movement, the difference being that arguers are far better situated in America's elite and so can get away with it without being held to account.
The contempt such voices have for rights specifically reserved for the states and the people under the Constitution only adds to the anger of others. I even feel some of it when a lawyer argues, for example, that my constitutional rights under several amendments as an individual are subservient to the commerce clause - because I still regard myself as something better than a truck.
Besides, it puts liberals out of sync with the rest of the country. A recent Rasmussen poll found that:
- Forty-three percent of U.S. voters rate the performance of their local government as tops compared to its counterparts on the state and federal level.
- Nineteen percent say state government is better than the other two.
- Just 14% think the federal government does a better job.
- And 25% aren't sure.
- Fifty-six percent of all voters believe the federal government has too much influence over state government. Only 12% percent say the federal government doesn't have enough influence over states.
From what I've seen as a journalist, this is pretty accurate. State and local government often works better than the federal government except in certain areas, the primary one being the redistribution of public funds for public purposes such as Social Security and Medicare.
Liberals are afraid to criticize big government because they think it makes them sound like Republicans. In fact, the idea of devolution -- having government carried out at the lowest practical level -- dates back at least to that good Democrat, Thomas Jefferson.
Conservative columnist William Safire wrote once that "in a general sense, devolution is a synonym for 'power sharing,' a movement that grew popular in the sixties and seventies as charges of 'bureaucracy' were often leveled at centralized authority." But modern liberals have lost touch even with the recent past, preferring to embrace centralized authority. It makes them vulnerable to the charge that their politics is one of intentions rather than results -- symbolized by huge agencies like the Department of Housing & Urban Development that fail miserably to produce policies worthy of their name.
Conservatives, on the other hand, often confuse the devolution of government with its destruction. Thus while the liberals are underachieving, the conservatives are undermining. In fact, a sensible and democratic devolution of power should be high on the American repair list.
The question must be repeatedly asked of new and present policies: how can these programs be brought closer to the supposed beneficiaries - the citizens? And how can government money go where it works best?
My own priorities for devolution would include giving back the public schools to their communities, giving back the National Guard to the governors, and allowing far more local and state discretion with stimulus funds.
Here are some other thoughts from another non-Tea Party member, former Democratic Senator Gary Hart:
"Let's shift administration of domestic programs as much as possible to local communities, what Thomas Jefferson called elementary republics. And, since the 50 states have become targets since 9/11, let's make the National Guard, local citizen-soldiers, the backbone of homeland security. . .So long as we are one nation and one national community, we will have a national government, governed by elected officials. But, if local citizens are willing to take the trouble to participate in local decisions, there is no reason in the world why they cannot administer national programs according to their own local needs. At the very least, it might help us move on from a stale big government/small government quarrel which is getting us nowhere. What all of us want is effective government. . . and citizens who care."
The disparagement of state and local government by many liberals reflects not so much an ideological view as it does a form a snobbishness, which is to say they feel better qualified to run things than mere governors or city council members and, anyway, they don't want to be stuck in Des Moines. The Obama crowd strongly projects this attitude.
But without power resting close to the people, where they feel they can influence it, the alienation towards government in general inevitably grows, whether expressed in anger or apathy.
This issue is one leading cause of the current political fracture. But even more important is economics. Who's winning and who's losing? Before getting too mad at someone else's anger, it's good to figure out where that person rests in the economic pyramid. It will affect, and often not in a strictly logical way, how they feel about other matters.
During the whole healthcare debate, however, economic issues were swept aside. The fear of many seniors that their policies would be hurt, the uncertainty about premium costs, and the personal expense of obeying the individual mandate were largely ignored, but almost certainly were hidden factors in the opposition.
Worse as a visible and convincing attempt to revive the economy, the stimulus package has been pathetic.
Obama and the Democrats have been tone deaf on this. And the media has hardly noticed.
This is not new. Since the Great Society, liberals have increasingly lost interest in what used to be their main reason for existence: doing the most for the most. During the 2008 campaign, for example, neither Obama nor Clinton could find much time to discuss such issues as foreclosures, jobs, pensions, interest rates and so forth.
Bloomberg reports that a recent survey found, "more than 90 percent of Tea Party backers said the federal government is trying to control too many aspects of private life and more decisions should be made at the state level. At the same time, 70 percent of those who sympathize with the Tea Party want a federal government that fosters job creation."
It is this little understood inconsistency that crops up repeatedly in times of stress. Economic insecurity turns into hostility towards other things, including those of other ethnicities.
And the powerful play upon it. For example, it was the white elite in the South that convinced poorer whites that poor blacks were their true problem. And it has been the Republican elite in Washington who have egged the Tea Party on.
Those who perceive and deal with this anomaly are rare. Roosevelt, aided substantially by strong populist and socialist pressure, built a coalition around his programs that included many who would today be Tea Party members. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, amazing in so many ways, has never really gotten credit for how it furthered ethnic progress not just by civil rights legislation but by simultaneously improving the lives of many whites as well.
And one of the most extraordinary governors of modern times, Louisiana's Earl Long, who gets virtually no notice for anything other than his bizarre behavior, had the South's real dysfunction figured out long before most.
Long was not driven by noble ideology but by good politics. At a time when nothing close was happening elsewhere in the south - and seventeen years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act - he increased the number of black voters from 7,000 to over 100,000.
Was it an act of virtue? No, it was an act of political organizing of a sort no one else dared to do.
How did he get away with it?
His programs for blacks hired 2,000 new black teachers at salaries equal to whites, led to a 50% decrease in black illiteracy and a tenfold increase in funding of black colleges.
But that was just part of the story. At the heart were programs that helped everyone regardless of ethnicity: pushing for a school free lunch program, building highways, bridges and other public works, 14 new trade schools and 100 new public schools.
Robert Wilfred Franson recalls a story from AJ Liebling's classic account, The Earl of Louisiana, in which Liebling, during a conversation with Long brings up the topic of prize fighting. Says Liebling: "I hear they've got a law here in Louisiana that a white boy can't even box on the same card with colored boys.".
"'Yeah,' said the Governor, 'but dat kind of stuff is foolish. If dere's enough money in it, dey're bound to get together.'"
"Said Liebling, 'I recognized the theory of an economic resolution of the race conflict.'"
This is a revealing story that is not told in the media nor in the history books. It ruffles the myth of good change being only the product of virtue and well-schooled intelligence. That someone as corrupt as Earl Long could do as much good defies everything the establishment stands for. And to suggest that who gets the money is key, is even worse.
Yet it happened again a decade or so later when two of the most corrupt men in Washington - LB Johnson and Adam Clayton Powell Jr - got more good legislation passed in less time that at any moment in Americna history.
They understood that if you want to solve a major problem like ethnic relations, you also have to look at how the money is flowing. And if you want to get into trouble, as Obama has, just ignore this issue and spend more on your war supplemental than you do dealing to handle foreclosures.
But Obama and the Tea Party reflect a much larger problem. The system has broken down and nobody is doing much to fix it. Simply berating those who react in simplistic and misguided fashion doesn't help things at all.
One real reason for our troubles is that the two major parties have morphed into political Mafia organizations with minimal interest in actual issues.
Further, beginning with Clinton, liberals cut a deal with the Democratic right not to cause too much trouble and have been living up to the bargain under two faux liberal presidents. To the extent they do raise any noise, it is through de facto ad agencies like Move On rather than with serious organizing. So far have liberals drifted from their former values that a recent poll finds 61% of them supporting full body scans at airports.
And the real left has become too weak to do anything much about it.
Thus, for Clinton and Obama, there was no pressure from the left and, as a result, no programs to reflect it.
Further, we cling to identities that no longer exist. Both liberals and conservatives have become two more demographic groups rather than political organizations.
Some time back I concocted a new political spectrum, based not on theory but on actual positions. On a number of issues Libertarians and Greens were closer than either were to the Democrats or Republicans.
This flies in the face with everything our politicians, media and academics tell us to think, but it is far more accurate.
One thing is to stop thinking so much about parties and more about issues.
This was dramatically demonstrated in a recent day-long meeting I attended, held by 36 activists - ranging from left to right - to discuss creating a crss-ideological antiwar, anti-empire coalition. The fact that we might not agree on taxation, education or agriculture didn't matter. We were picking one issue and working on it.
Besides war and empire, here are other issues open to a similar new fusion politics:
- Civil liberties issues such as Real ID, the Patriot Act, and warrantless wiretapping.
- Devolution of government to the lowest practical level.
- Conservation of natural resources, once often a non- ideological issue.
- Ending the war on drugs
We need to get over the idea that joining with someone of another set of beliefs is wrong even though you agree on one or more things. Some of the most effective political organizing in America has been achieved by ignoring that rule. As I have sometimes put it, if you find a gun-toting, abortion-hating nun who'll help you save the forest, put her on the committee.
One good reason for doing this is that the system doesn't want you to. It wants us to all stay in our little political boxes and act according to code.
Ignoring this rule is one way to start to change the system.
Another way is to stop taking orders from the system and start writing orders for the system.
A case in point is campaign finances. Now that the Supreme Court has removed all dignity from this activity, we can no longer expect the law's help.
But that doesn't mean we're helpless. One way to help revive democracy in our country is to make sure that every organization, church, school, or club is run according to its principles.
A great model for such gatherings is the New England town meeting. These are a far cry from the undemocratic political talk fests pursued since by every cynical politician and every public affairs TV producer desperate for a program idea.
Ken Bresler, who wrote a primer on Massachusetts town meetings, noted that "one reason that Massachusetts colonists revolted against Great Britain was the British attempt to ban most town meetings except by permission. In 1774, British soldiers tried to stop a Salem town meeting in progress, but the citizens barred the door of their town house and continued to meet."
New England town meetings were -- and are -- serious democratic business. Says John Gould in his book, Town Meeting, "Absolute independence characterizes town meeting. No one tells a Yankee how to vote, no one dictates, and only another Yankee can persuade."
Another early American model for reaching democratic decisions comes from the Society of Friends. The Quakers have always conducted their business on the basis of consensus. While the concept seems risky and time-consuming to those who have not observed or participated in it, people all over the country are adapting consensus as they come to realize that majority voting is often insufficient -- or even alienating -- in our increasingly diverse communities. The beauty of consensus is that people feel better after reaching it, for in its wake is clear evidence that one has done the best possible under the circumstances.
Of course, that still leaves conventional politicians as rogue agents. One way to deal with this would be to bring together a community of citizens - including from churches, small businesses, non-profits and schools - and design campaign finance standards for all candidates. If they agree to observe these standards, they get to use the group's seal of approval. Done right, and with enough consensus, it could dramatically change how finances were handled by candidates at both the local and state level.
As things work now, it's a little like letting the criminal class - i.e. politicians - write the laws. We need to find new ways to encourage or embarrass them into doing better.
I think of this approach as a new fusion politics, politics that shakes up the current sick rules of politics by bringing people together in new ways to make better rules.
And there's hope in it. To get a sense of this, I'll close with a story from the North Carolina History Project abut some old fusion politics. It describes well what can happen when you start to change what everyone thinks are the inevitable rules:
||||| During the 1890s, a national phenomenon called Fusion politics united political parties. In some western states the Populist (or People's Party) and the Democratic Party united, but in North Carolina the movement, spearheaded by agricultural leader Marion Butler, combined the Populist and Republican parties. In the presidential election of 1896, the Populist Party found itself ironically backing the Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan at the national level, while joining forces with Republicans at the state level.
The term Fusion is somewhat misleading, for it implies a merger. The parties maintained separate executive committees and merely cooperated whenever feasible by forming joint electoral tickets. In the Tar Heel State, the Populist and Republican parties disagreed on certain national issues, such as the tariff, the gold standard, and silver coinage. The parties, however, agreed on many state issues, including education, voting rights, and restoring the charter of the Farmers' Alliance. . .
Prior to 1894, Marion Butler, chairman of the state People's Party and editor of The Caucasian, held secret meetings with black and white Republican leaders, including former black Congressman Henry P. Cheatham and future Governor Daniel L. Russell. Finally, Butler and other Populists met with Republicans. Among the Republicans present were silver leader John J. Mott and Congressman Richmond Pearson. They helped the two parties' leadership reach a tentative agreement that divided political offices according to the parties' electoral support in the General Assembly districts; a similar agreement was also made for U.S. House of Representative seats. The parties' leadership also divided statewide offices to ensure that, for any office, either a Republican or Populist (not both) would run against a Democrat.
On August 1, 1894, the Populist Party convention endorsed a combined slate for state offices. On August 30, the Republican Party convention followed suit. The die was cast.
In the 1894 election, the Fusion alliance of Populists and Republicans swept the state. Fusionists won control of the legislature, elected several Congressmen, and secured some statewide offices. They immediately pursued a reform agenda. First, Fusionists elected Marion Butler to the U.S. Senate for a full six-year term and Republican Jeter C. Pritchard to the two-year vacancy created by the 1894 death of Senator Zebulon B. Vance. Second, they repealed the County Government Act of 1877 and restored county home-rule. Third, they set the legal interest rate at six-percent, increased funding for public education, and for state prisons and charitable institutions. Perhaps the greatest legislation of Fusionist rule was ensuring that all political parties were represented by election judges at the polls and requiring designated colors and party insignias on ballots so that the illiterate had a political voice. The reforms were highly successful and popular. The election law alone led to an increase of registered voters by over 80,000.
The Fusion agreement for the election of 1896 was not reached until September of that year. In November, the Fusion legislative victory was impressively larger than in 1894. The entire statewide slate of Fusionist administrative officers was elected. Republican Daniel L. Russell handily won election as governor.
For the first time since Reconstruction, Democrats were totally out of power. ||||
Sadly, old style fusion politics was so successful that the two major parties worked hard to get rid of it. Today, only eight states even allow it.
But nothing can stop issue by issue fusion except our timidity. It's time to try some. And who knows? Maybe even some Tea Party members will join us.
FRACTURE
When bad things happen, strange things happen:
- During a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889, an American Indian named Wovoka claimed to have had a dream in which all his fellow native Americans were taken into the sky as the Earth opened up and swallowed all the whites upon it. The earth then returned to its natural state as a land where native Americans could live in peace.
According to Wovoka, to make this dream real, his native Americans were to follow these instructions: "When you get home you must begin a dance and continue for five days. Dance for four successive nights, and on the last night continue dancing until the morning of the fifth day, when all must bathe in the river and then return to their homes. You must all do this in the same way. . . I want you to dance every six weeks. Make a feast at the dance and have food that everybody may eat."
The ghost dance culture would sweep across the tribes of western America as the dancers were losing their last hold on their beloved lands.
- As military supplies poured into the Pacific Islands during World War II, local peoples reacted to the sudden change by developing "cargo cults" that offered magical explanations for the flow of imports. When the war ended, members of the cults built imitation landing strips and aircraft to attempt to recreate the former reality and restart the influx of goods.
- The early 20th century Maji Maji Rebellion in Africa was spurred by a medium who offered medicine he claimed would turn German colonials' bullets into water.
- Sometimes the strange and the rational are strangely mixed as in America's first Great Awakening, both an expression of excessive evangelicalism and of nascent equality that would help to lay the philosophical groundwork of the American revolution. Unlike the hierarchal assumptions of the Enlightenment, the Awakening taught that under God all were equal, a principle that even attracted Benjamin Franklin, though he didn't care for the theology behind it.
- And sometimes the bad times produce not just the strange but the disastrous, as with the rise of Nazism.
Typically, the strange things were a reaction to events that had overwhelmed many and led them to seek solace in a simplistic and seemingly comfortably symbolic solution. Those reacting had not caused the problem; they had suffered and become disoriented as a result of them.
Nazism, for example, didn't spring up as just an evil virus. It fed on:
- Unhappiness in the wake of World War I
- The collapse of conventional liberal and conservative politics that bears uncomfortable similarities to what we are now experiencing.
- The gross mismanagement of the economy and of such key worker concerns as wages, inflation, pensions, layoffs, and rising property taxes. There were also bankruptcies, negative trade balance, major decline in national production, and a large national debt rise compensated for by foreign investment. In other words, a version of what America and its workers are experiencing today.
- The use of negative campaigning, a contribution to modern politics by Joseph Goebbels. The Nazi campaigns argued what was wrong with their opponents and ignored stating their own policies. Sound at all familiar?
- The collapse of the country's self image, falling from world leadership in education, industry, science, and literacy.
Like Ghost Cult dancers in the 19th century, World War II Pacific Islanders wondering where their cargo was, Africans beset by German colonialists, and Germans beset by economic and cultural decline, Americans today face an extraordinary assemblage of change, discouragement, challenges and uncertainties.
Add together the prospect of climate change, the erosion of democracy, the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, the decline of America's position in the world, rapid changes in both technology and social values, and the collapse of conventional conservative and liberal politics and we're lucky to have a reaction no stranger than that of the Tea Party movement.
When considering such developments it's good to keep two things in mind:
- They are reactions and not the events or movements that caused the reactions.
- What happens as a result of these reactions usually depends more on how those controlling major events behave than how those responding to them do.
In other words - silly, misinformed, prejudiced or even criminal as they may be - members of the Tea Party movement are not responsible for the longest indefensible war in American history, the exploitation of the economy leading to the current collapse, the degradation of the environment, or the disintegration of a liberal movement once responsive to the needs of the average citizen.
And so it doesn't help much to have those who contributed to the misdirection simply scold the discontented. Especially when a recent poll finds that 52% of Americans believe the average member of the Tea Party movement has a better understanding of the issues facing America today than the average member of Congress and 47% think that their own political views are closer to those of the average Tea Party member than to the views of the average member of Congress
And it doesn't help to create a counter myth that blames the Tea Party for our problems, when, in fact, it was the extremist center that created them. Name one of our crises to which we were driven by either left or right. This is not to say trouble can't come from the political edges but this time it was the centrist establishment - whose interest is more in power retention rather than in political policy - that started our present wars, degraded our environment, lost our jobs and chipped away at democracy and our freedoms.
This is not unusual in history. For example, one of the reasons members of the KKK wore hoods was because some of them were town officials, important businessmen or police officers. Today the extremist center doesn't have to wear hoods; the media just covers for them.
There is no doubt, however, that it is all quite strange. Consider, for instance, that a Democratic president and Democratic Congress have recently passed a healthcare bill based in no small part on principles outlined in similar legislation offered by conservative Republican Robert Dole in 1994.
Yet recent polling finds that a large margin of Republicans think it's terrible and a similar percentage of Democrats think its wonderful.
At such times, we shouldn't be too surprised if some voters are acting a bit confused or crazy. Or feel that they're losing control.
Although obviously encouraged by hypocrites, hate-mongers and know-nothings of the political right, the failure of liberal politics also bears substantial blame for the Tea Party rebellion.
Instead moving firmly to resolves our crises - as did their predecessors in the New Deal and Great Society - today's liberals content themselves with being common scolds, attacking those who dare to express discomfort with the times. They reject, rather than redirect.
For example, one of the problems has been the over-centralization of a nonresponsive federal government. It's not about how big government so much as where it is. But can we discuss openly (even perhaps with "civil discourse") the status of the Tenth Amendment?
Apparently not without Chris Matthews comparing you to the bad guys of the pre-civil rights South. Or history professor Joseph Crespino writing in the History News Network: "Defending state sovereignty inevitably evokes memories of the civil rights era - when 'states’ rights' was the catchphrase of Southern segregationists."
This is easily as stupid an argument as some of those of the Tea Party movement, the difference being that arguers are far better situated in America's elite and so can get away with it without being held to account.
The contempt such voices have for rights specifically reserved for the states and the people under the Constitution only adds to the anger of others. I even feel some of it when a lawyer argues, for example, that my constitutional rights under several amendments as an individual are subservient to the commerce clause - because I still regard myself as something better than a truck.
Besides, it puts liberals out of sync with the rest of the country. A recent Rasmussen poll found that:
- Forty-three percent of U.S. voters rate the performance of their local government as tops compared to its counterparts on the state and federal level.
- Nineteen percent say state government is better than the other two.
- Just 14% think the federal government does a better job.
- And 25% aren't sure.
- Fifty-six percent of all voters believe the federal government has too much influence over state government. Only 12% percent say the federal government doesn't have enough influence over states.
From what I've seen as a journalist, this is pretty accurate. State and local government often works better than the federal government except in certain areas, the primary one being the redistribution of public funds for public purposes such as Social Security and Medicare.
Liberals are afraid to criticize big government because they think it makes them sound like Republicans. In fact, the idea of devolution -- having government carried out at the lowest practical level -- dates back at least to that good Democrat, Thomas Jefferson.
Conservative columnist William Safire wrote once that "in a general sense, devolution is a synonym for 'power sharing,' a movement that grew popular in the sixties and seventies as charges of 'bureaucracy' were often leveled at centralized authority." But modern liberals have lost touch even with the recent past, preferring to embrace centralized authority. It makes them vulnerable to the charge that their politics is one of intentions rather than results -- symbolized by huge agencies like the Department of Housing & Urban Development that fail miserably to produce policies worthy of their name.
Conservatives, on the other hand, often confuse the devolution of government with its destruction. Thus while the liberals are underachieving, the conservatives are undermining. In fact, a sensible and democratic devolution of power should be high on the American repair list.
The question must be repeatedly asked of new and present policies: how can these programs be brought closer to the supposed beneficiaries - the citizens? And how can government money go where it works best?
My own priorities for devolution would include giving back the public schools to their communities, giving back the National Guard to the governors, and allowing far more local and state discretion with stimulus funds.
Here are some other thoughts from another non-Tea Party member, former Democratic Senator Gary Hart:
"Let's shift administration of domestic programs as much as possible to local communities, what Thomas Jefferson called elementary republics. And, since the 50 states have become targets since 9/11, let's make the National Guard, local citizen-soldiers, the backbone of homeland security. . .So long as we are one nation and one national community, we will have a national government, governed by elected officials. But, if local citizens are willing to take the trouble to participate in local decisions, there is no reason in the world why they cannot administer national programs according to their own local needs. At the very least, it might help us move on from a stale big government/small government quarrel which is getting us nowhere. What all of us want is effective government. . . and citizens who care."
The disparagement of state and local government by many liberals reflects not so much an ideological view as it does a form a snobbishness, which is to say they feel better qualified to run things than mere governors or city council members and, anyway, they don't want to be stuck in Des Moines. The Obama crowd strongly projects this attitude.
But without power resting close to the people, where they feel they can influence it, the alienation towards government in general inevitably grows, whether expressed in anger or apathy.
This issue is one leading cause of the current political fracture. But even more important is economics. Who's winning and who's losing? Before getting too mad at someone else's anger, it's good to figure out where that person rests in the economic pyramid. It will affect, and often not in a strictly logical way, how they feel about other matters.
During the whole healthcare debate, however, economic issues were swept aside. The fear of many seniors that their policies would be hurt, the uncertainty about premium costs, and the personal expense of obeying the individual mandate were largely ignored, but almost certainly were hidden factors in the opposition.
Worse as a visible and convincing attempt to revive the economy, the stimulus package has been pathetic.
Obama and the Democrats have been tone deaf on this. And the media has hardly noticed.
This is not new. Since the Great Society, liberals have increasingly lost interest in what used to be their main reason for existence: doing the most for the most. During the 2008 campaign, for example, neither Obama nor Clinton could find much time to discuss such issues as foreclosures, jobs, pensions, interest rates and so forth.
Bloomberg reports that a recent survey found, "more than 90 percent of Tea Party backers said the federal government is trying to control too many aspects of private life and more decisions should be made at the state level. At the same time, 70 percent of those who sympathize with the Tea Party want a federal government that fosters job creation."
It is this little understood inconsistency that crops up repeatedly in times of stress. Economic insecurity turns into hostility towards other things, including those of other ethnicities.
And the powerful play upon it. For example, it was the white elite in the South that convinced poorer whites that poor blacks were their true problem. And it has been the Republican elite in Washington who have egged the Tea Party on.
Those who perceive and deal with this anomaly are rare. Roosevelt, aided substantially by strong populist and socialist pressure, built a coalition around his programs that included many who would today be Tea Party members. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, amazing in so many ways, has never really gotten credit for how it furthered ethnic progress not just by civil rights legislation but by simultaneously improving the lives of many whites as well.
And one of the most extraordinary governors of modern times, Louisiana's Earl Long, who gets virtually no notice for anything other than his bizarre behavior, had the South's real dysfunction figured out long before most.
Long was not driven by noble ideology but by good politics. At a time when nothing close was happening elsewhere in the south - and seventeen years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act - he increased the number of black voters from 7,000 to over 100,000.
Was it an act of virtue? No, it was an act of political organizing of a sort no one else dared to do.
How did he get away with it?
His programs for blacks hired 2,000 new black teachers at salaries equal to whites, led to a 50% decrease in black illiteracy and a tenfold increase in funding of black colleges.
But that was just part of the story. At the heart were programs that helped everyone regardless of ethnicity: pushing for a school free lunch program, building highways, bridges and other public works, 14 new trade schools and 100 new public schools.
Robert Wilfred Franson recalls a story from AJ Liebling's classic account, The Earl of Louisiana, in which Liebling, during a conversation with Long brings up the topic of prize fighting. Says Liebling: "I hear they've got a law here in Louisiana that a white boy can't even box on the same card with colored boys.".
"'Yeah,' said the Governor, 'but dat kind of stuff is foolish. If dere's enough money in it, dey're bound to get together.'"
"Said Liebling, 'I recognized the theory of an economic resolution of the race conflict.'"
This is a revealing story that is not told in the media nor in the history books. It ruffles the myth of good change being only the product of virtue and well-schooled intelligence. That someone as corrupt as Earl Long could do as much good defies everything the establishment stands for. And to suggest that who gets the money is key, is even worse.
Yet it happened again a decade or so later when two of the most corrupt men in Washington - LB Johnson and Adam Clayton Powell Jr - got more good legislation passed in less time that at any moment in Americna history.
They understood that if you want to solve a major problem like ethnic relations, you also have to look at how the money is flowing. And if you want to get into trouble, as Obama has, just ignore this issue and spend more on your war supplemental than you do dealing to handle foreclosures.
FUSION
But Obama and the Tea Party reflect a much larger problem. The system has broken down and nobody is doing much to fix it. Simply berating those who react in simplistic and misguided fashion doesn't help things at all.
One real reason for our troubles is that the two major parties have morphed into political Mafia organizations with minimal interest in actual issues.
Further, beginning with Clinton, liberals cut a deal with the Democratic right not to cause too much trouble and have been living up to the bargain under two faux liberal presidents. To the extent they do raise any noise, it is through de facto ad agencies like Move On rather than with serious organizing. So far have liberals drifted from their former values that a recent poll finds 61% of them supporting full body scans at airports.
And the real left has become too weak to do anything much about it.
Thus, for Clinton and Obama, there was no pressure from the left and, as a result, no programs to reflect it.
Further, we cling to identities that no longer exist. Both liberals and conservatives have become two more demographic groups rather than political organizations.
Some time back I concocted a new political spectrum, based not on theory but on actual positions. On a number of issues Libertarians and Greens were closer than either were to the Democrats or Republicans.
This flies in the face with everything our politicians, media and academics tell us to think, but it is far more accurate.
FOR LARGER CHART CLICK HERE
So what do you do with such information? One thing is to stop thinking so much about parties and more about issues.
This was dramatically demonstrated in a recent day-long meeting I attended, held by 36 activists - ranging from left to right - to discuss creating a crss-ideological antiwar, anti-empire coalition. The fact that we might not agree on taxation, education or agriculture didn't matter. We were picking one issue and working on it.
Besides war and empire, here are other issues open to a similar new fusion politics:
- Civil liberties issues such as Real ID, the Patriot Act, and warrantless wiretapping.
- Devolution of government to the lowest practical level.
- Conservation of natural resources, once often a non- ideological issue.
- Ending the war on drugs
We need to get over the idea that joining with someone of another set of beliefs is wrong even though you agree on one or more things. Some of the most effective political organizing in America has been achieved by ignoring that rule. As I have sometimes put it, if you find a gun-toting, abortion-hating nun who'll help you save the forest, put her on the committee.
One good reason for doing this is that the system doesn't want you to. It wants us to all stay in our little political boxes and act according to code.
Ignoring this rule is one way to start to change the system.
Another way is to stop taking orders from the system and start writing orders for the system.
A case in point is campaign finances. Now that the Supreme Court has removed all dignity from this activity, we can no longer expect the law's help.
But that doesn't mean we're helpless. One way to help revive democracy in our country is to make sure that every organization, church, school, or club is run according to its principles.
A great model for such gatherings is the New England town meeting. These are a far cry from the undemocratic political talk fests pursued since by every cynical politician and every public affairs TV producer desperate for a program idea.
Ken Bresler, who wrote a primer on Massachusetts town meetings, noted that "one reason that Massachusetts colonists revolted against Great Britain was the British attempt to ban most town meetings except by permission. In 1774, British soldiers tried to stop a Salem town meeting in progress, but the citizens barred the door of their town house and continued to meet."
New England town meetings were -- and are -- serious democratic business. Says John Gould in his book, Town Meeting, "Absolute independence characterizes town meeting. No one tells a Yankee how to vote, no one dictates, and only another Yankee can persuade."
Another early American model for reaching democratic decisions comes from the Society of Friends. The Quakers have always conducted their business on the basis of consensus. While the concept seems risky and time-consuming to those who have not observed or participated in it, people all over the country are adapting consensus as they come to realize that majority voting is often insufficient -- or even alienating -- in our increasingly diverse communities. The beauty of consensus is that people feel better after reaching it, for in its wake is clear evidence that one has done the best possible under the circumstances.
Of course, that still leaves conventional politicians as rogue agents. One way to deal with this would be to bring together a community of citizens - including from churches, small businesses, non-profits and schools - and design campaign finance standards for all candidates. If they agree to observe these standards, they get to use the group's seal of approval. Done right, and with enough consensus, it could dramatically change how finances were handled by candidates at both the local and state level.
As things work now, it's a little like letting the criminal class - i.e. politicians - write the laws. We need to find new ways to encourage or embarrass them into doing better.
I think of this approach as a new fusion politics, politics that shakes up the current sick rules of politics by bringing people together in new ways to make better rules.
And there's hope in it. To get a sense of this, I'll close with a story from the North Carolina History Project abut some old fusion politics. It describes well what can happen when you start to change what everyone thinks are the inevitable rules:
||||| During the 1890s, a national phenomenon called Fusion politics united political parties. In some western states the Populist (or People's Party) and the Democratic Party united, but in North Carolina the movement, spearheaded by agricultural leader Marion Butler, combined the Populist and Republican parties. In the presidential election of 1896, the Populist Party found itself ironically backing the Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan at the national level, while joining forces with Republicans at the state level.
The term Fusion is somewhat misleading, for it implies a merger. The parties maintained separate executive committees and merely cooperated whenever feasible by forming joint electoral tickets. In the Tar Heel State, the Populist and Republican parties disagreed on certain national issues, such as the tariff, the gold standard, and silver coinage. The parties, however, agreed on many state issues, including education, voting rights, and restoring the charter of the Farmers' Alliance. . .
Prior to 1894, Marion Butler, chairman of the state People's Party and editor of The Caucasian, held secret meetings with black and white Republican leaders, including former black Congressman Henry P. Cheatham and future Governor Daniel L. Russell. Finally, Butler and other Populists met with Republicans. Among the Republicans present were silver leader John J. Mott and Congressman Richmond Pearson. They helped the two parties' leadership reach a tentative agreement that divided political offices according to the parties' electoral support in the General Assembly districts; a similar agreement was also made for U.S. House of Representative seats. The parties' leadership also divided statewide offices to ensure that, for any office, either a Republican or Populist (not both) would run against a Democrat.
On August 1, 1894, the Populist Party convention endorsed a combined slate for state offices. On August 30, the Republican Party convention followed suit. The die was cast.
In the 1894 election, the Fusion alliance of Populists and Republicans swept the state. Fusionists won control of the legislature, elected several Congressmen, and secured some statewide offices. They immediately pursued a reform agenda. First, Fusionists elected Marion Butler to the U.S. Senate for a full six-year term and Republican Jeter C. Pritchard to the two-year vacancy created by the 1894 death of Senator Zebulon B. Vance. Second, they repealed the County Government Act of 1877 and restored county home-rule. Third, they set the legal interest rate at six-percent, increased funding for public education, and for state prisons and charitable institutions. Perhaps the greatest legislation of Fusionist rule was ensuring that all political parties were represented by election judges at the polls and requiring designated colors and party insignias on ballots so that the illiterate had a political voice. The reforms were highly successful and popular. The election law alone led to an increase of registered voters by over 80,000.
The Fusion agreement for the election of 1896 was not reached until September of that year. In November, the Fusion legislative victory was impressively larger than in 1894. The entire statewide slate of Fusionist administrative officers was elected. Republican Daniel L. Russell handily won election as governor.
For the first time since Reconstruction, Democrats were totally out of power. ||||
Sadly, old style fusion politics was so successful that the two major parties worked hard to get rid of it. Today, only eight states even allow it.
But nothing can stop issue by issue fusion except our timidity. It's time to try some. And who knows? Maybe even some Tea Party members will join us.
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