How the Other Half Runs
It's pretty much a given that any sharp elbows thrown by a Democrat in a national campaign will send the pundit class into fainting spells and occasion monocles popping out in shock all across the Beltway. Most anticipated the blow would land against Mitt Romney's Mormonism, the way in which "he's not like us" most evident to the paid observers of politics. But the Obama team is pretty smart, and has (to my eye) completely avoided discussion of religion in favor of a much more palatable point of difference: Romney's decades-long immersion in the economic hyper-elite. It turns out the way he's really different is in the rules that apply.
For the better part of two weeks now, coverage of the election has turned on Romney's foreign investments and just when he left Bain Capital, about which he's told some different stories at different times. Despite the possible overstatement of the Obama campaign that Romney might have broken the law, I'd be shocked if he left himself in any jeopardy: the guy is too smart and too careful to make that kind of mistake. But his Friday pushback, making five TV appearances on different networks hoping to kill the story and jujitsu the issue into an a focus on the president's negative tactics, seems to have failed. I happened to see one of the appearances, on CNN, at the gym Friday night; with the sound off, all I focused on was Romney's eyes, rapidly blinking like any bad liar.
The through-line of all the stories about Romney's wealth--his Bain activities both before 1999 and during the period when his role was in question, the overseas accounts, the tax return issue that, to the growing frustration of his media cheering section, he can't dismiss and won't defuse (I almost wonder if he's standing on principle, just to see what that's like)--is that Romney has maximized his wealth by taking advantage of every loophole, every special-interest tax provision, every service available to those of his class. Probably none of this is illegal, and as far as I can tell none of it is even unusual in that world. (If you buy that Romney really did take a "leave of absence" from Bain to run the Salt Lake Olympics effort and planned to return, it was responsible and appropriate for him to sit in on board meetings of Bain companies, so he'd be able to jump back in when the time came.) What the public isn't used to is a candidate seeking election after decades spent in full-throttle pursuit of every last dollar.
Absent a track record of achievement in office (by his own choice, in the case of healthcare reform), and without a particularly appealing personality, Romney is trying to run on his business record. But he didn't make anything and he didn't invest in communities, at least not in any kind of conscious or intentional way; rather, he more often destroyed communities, as this ad powerfully suggests. So he's trying to both run on that record, and hide from it. There are probably politicians out there who can pull off that kind of trick, like Bill Clinton. But Romney isn't one of them.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Upheld
Try as I might to take a more optimistic view, I seem to drift back to a default view of American politics that holds the difference between Democratic and Republican leadership of the government amounts to nothing more than the pace at which things get worse. Not that this isn't meaningful--it would be nice to see my days out in a country that bears as much resemblance as possible to the one I grew up in, even if it's fading--but it's not what I grew up aspiring to in my thoughts about public affairs.
In a way, it was the seeming failure of Barack Obama, a politician into whom I put more money, effort and faith than any other in my lifetime, to change this trajectory that brought me back to this view. It isn't that I think Obama's presidency has been a disaster, by any stretch; I see his performance in the office as among the best of any chief executive in my lifetime, with an impressive list of accomplishments in both domestic and foreign policy and a mostly admirable record in terms of candor, probity and personal conduct. But thus far he's fallen short in what I thought he might be able to do: reclaim the role of small-d democratic government as a felt force for good in the lives of the citizens who choose its officials.
Thursday's stunning Supreme Court decision to uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act doesn't necessarily change that story--but it does give the president and supporters of the law more time and another opportunity to make the case. Vastly more important in terms of the immediate real-world consequences is that tens of millions more Americans will have access to care, as Paul Krugman points out. And as Obama himself said, expanding access to healthcare is the right thing to do even if the politics are adverse, as they sure seem to be.
Finally, for people like me, moving toward universal healthcare was one of the great liberal goals to aspire toward, a signifier of the values we believe America should stand for and the society in which we wished to live. The long journey toward enactment, with its many reverses and disappointments, was the policy equivalent of Red Sox fans until 2004, or Cubs fans to this day.
With so much air time and print and internet to fill, there have been no shortage of very clever analyses holding that Chief Justice Roberts delivered a pyrrhic victory to liberals through his constriction of allowable activities under the Commerce Clause, or an adrenaline shot to Republicans by his determination of the mandate as a tax. Perhaps. I have enough of a suspicion of government not to mourn overmuch the idea that there are some limits on what's allowable under the Commerce Clause, and as for the tax issue, the rather small number of people who would be subject to it (by their own choice) should defuse its potential as a political rallying point--though it won't.
The reason for this, as is so often the case, is that the Republicans refuse to grant any legitimacy or value to the position of their opponents. There's no acknowledgment of any good to "Obamacare" being allowed to stand, no granting that yes, it's okay for the Medicare "donut hole" to remain filled, or that cost control experiments might be helpful in some way at some point, or that in itself it's better--for fiscal as well as moral reasons--to have more people covered than fewer. No, it's entirely and only an unconscionable attack on American liberty, which evidently is much bound up in the freedom to suffer and die because you can't afford preventative care or treatment for chronic health problems. The worst of them compared the Court's decision to 9/11, or claimed America was "lost" or transforming into something unrecognizable.
The historical pattern following the passage of major legislation--Social Security is the most famous of many examples--is that the law improves over time as both parties add their best ideas to the framework now in place. Certainly there's much room for improvement with the Affordable Care Act: more cost controls, malpractice reform, adjustments to the subsidies, a public option, and so on. But it's almost impossible to imagine Republicans coming to the table in good faith to improve a law they consider downright evil. Jonathan Chait suggests, and I don't disagree, that the core of their opposition lies in a belief that healthcare itself is a privilege, not in any sense a right. There are things for which they're willing to expend the public money--defense, tax cuts for the very wealthy--but not this.
It's likely that about a third of the electorate subscribes to this view. I doubt many will change their views even when the policies of the law go into full effect and directly benefit these haters of Obama and Obamacare. It's possible and maybe even fair to blame the president and the supporters of the law for their failure to explain it fully, but at some point idiocy truly is invincible.
Even so, my reaction to the Court's decision was and remains nothing but shocked joy. Perhaps it shouldn't have been so surprising that Roberts would decide, even if on the narrowest of grounds, to uphold a law passed by duly elected majorities, based on an idea born in a Republican think tank and a measure implemented at the state level by a Republican governor and current presidential nominee. But in these hyper-polarized times, and after a decade in which the Court seemed to rule at every turn only in ways that aligned with the best interests of the Republican Party, it was wonderful to see nevertheless. And success is its own reward and its own fuel: perhaps when it becomes clear that this law is working for the betterment of the country, it will do something to move public opinion of the public sector back toward a sense of ownership and even some faith. Hope dies hard, it turns out.
Try as I might to take a more optimistic view, I seem to drift back to a default view of American politics that holds the difference between Democratic and Republican leadership of the government amounts to nothing more than the pace at which things get worse. Not that this isn't meaningful--it would be nice to see my days out in a country that bears as much resemblance as possible to the one I grew up in, even if it's fading--but it's not what I grew up aspiring to in my thoughts about public affairs.
In a way, it was the seeming failure of Barack Obama, a politician into whom I put more money, effort and faith than any other in my lifetime, to change this trajectory that brought me back to this view. It isn't that I think Obama's presidency has been a disaster, by any stretch; I see his performance in the office as among the best of any chief executive in my lifetime, with an impressive list of accomplishments in both domestic and foreign policy and a mostly admirable record in terms of candor, probity and personal conduct. But thus far he's fallen short in what I thought he might be able to do: reclaim the role of small-d democratic government as a felt force for good in the lives of the citizens who choose its officials.
Thursday's stunning Supreme Court decision to uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act doesn't necessarily change that story--but it does give the president and supporters of the law more time and another opportunity to make the case. Vastly more important in terms of the immediate real-world consequences is that tens of millions more Americans will have access to care, as Paul Krugman points out. And as Obama himself said, expanding access to healthcare is the right thing to do even if the politics are adverse, as they sure seem to be.
Finally, for people like me, moving toward universal healthcare was one of the great liberal goals to aspire toward, a signifier of the values we believe America should stand for and the society in which we wished to live. The long journey toward enactment, with its many reverses and disappointments, was the policy equivalent of Red Sox fans until 2004, or Cubs fans to this day.
With so much air time and print and internet to fill, there have been no shortage of very clever analyses holding that Chief Justice Roberts delivered a pyrrhic victory to liberals through his constriction of allowable activities under the Commerce Clause, or an adrenaline shot to Republicans by his determination of the mandate as a tax. Perhaps. I have enough of a suspicion of government not to mourn overmuch the idea that there are some limits on what's allowable under the Commerce Clause, and as for the tax issue, the rather small number of people who would be subject to it (by their own choice) should defuse its potential as a political rallying point--though it won't.
The reason for this, as is so often the case, is that the Republicans refuse to grant any legitimacy or value to the position of their opponents. There's no acknowledgment of any good to "Obamacare" being allowed to stand, no granting that yes, it's okay for the Medicare "donut hole" to remain filled, or that cost control experiments might be helpful in some way at some point, or that in itself it's better--for fiscal as well as moral reasons--to have more people covered than fewer. No, it's entirely and only an unconscionable attack on American liberty, which evidently is much bound up in the freedom to suffer and die because you can't afford preventative care or treatment for chronic health problems. The worst of them compared the Court's decision to 9/11, or claimed America was "lost" or transforming into something unrecognizable.
The historical pattern following the passage of major legislation--Social Security is the most famous of many examples--is that the law improves over time as both parties add their best ideas to the framework now in place. Certainly there's much room for improvement with the Affordable Care Act: more cost controls, malpractice reform, adjustments to the subsidies, a public option, and so on. But it's almost impossible to imagine Republicans coming to the table in good faith to improve a law they consider downright evil. Jonathan Chait suggests, and I don't disagree, that the core of their opposition lies in a belief that healthcare itself is a privilege, not in any sense a right. There are things for which they're willing to expend the public money--defense, tax cuts for the very wealthy--but not this.
It's likely that about a third of the electorate subscribes to this view. I doubt many will change their views even when the policies of the law go into full effect and directly benefit these haters of Obama and Obamacare. It's possible and maybe even fair to blame the president and the supporters of the law for their failure to explain it fully, but at some point idiocy truly is invincible.
Even so, my reaction to the Court's decision was and remains nothing but shocked joy. Perhaps it shouldn't have been so surprising that Roberts would decide, even if on the narrowest of grounds, to uphold a law passed by duly elected majorities, based on an idea born in a Republican think tank and a measure implemented at the state level by a Republican governor and current presidential nominee. But in these hyper-polarized times, and after a decade in which the Court seemed to rule at every turn only in ways that aligned with the best interests of the Republican Party, it was wonderful to see nevertheless. And success is its own reward and its own fuel: perhaps when it becomes clear that this law is working for the betterment of the country, it will do something to move public opinion of the public sector back toward a sense of ownership and even some faith. Hope dies hard, it turns out.
Saturday, June 02, 2012
Control
The big fuss in NYC late this past week was Mayor Bloomberg's proposal to place limits on the sale of sugary drinks as a public health measure. The idea has drawn opposition ranging from the transparently self-interested to the viciously satirical--the Colbert clip, linked here, is truly awesome--with the pushback drawing additional zing from the mayor's push to ban large sugar drinks while making the media rounds to celebrate (who knew?) National Donut Day.
The proposal makes me uncomfortable on liberty grounds, though the public finance implications give me some pause; if I had to come down one way or another, I'd probably oppose it and urge continued educational measures, maybe even as far as requiring labels on 32-ounce sodas similar to those on cigarettes. (Imagine a Before-pic of Louie Anderson looking up at you as hold the Big Gulp, saying, "Do you really need all 600 of these empty calories?)
But what's really interesting about this to me is how the various ostensible shapers of opinion in the City have lined up on this question. The generally liberal New York Times published an editorial criticizing the ban; the consistently right-wing New York Post wrote in support of it. Add to this that the two ideologically opposed outlets took the same respective positions recently when the City's controversial "stop and frisk" policies resurfaced on the public agenda.
Stop-and-frisk infamously falls most heavily on the poor and non-white. Though I don't have numbers for this, my strong suspicion is that the sugary drinks changes would have the biggest impact on the same groups. And this to me explains why the Times and the Post, and those whose views they more or less represent in the public discourse, have taken the positions they have.
The thru-line is whether or not you believe that low-income, less-educated, less connected non-whites really have the same rights and deserve the same consideration of their wealthier and whiter counterparts. Yet another issue in this bucket, on which the Times and Post would take (and have taken) the editorial positions you'd expect them to take, is on measures that make it more difficult for individuals to register and vote. The right-leaning outlets will cite concerns over voter fraud--which pretty much always have zero basis in reality--to justify restrictions, while the liberal-leaning voices will emphasize equal access.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Murdoch-owned voices and their allies consistently favor policies that, in contrast to the old journalistic truism, comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted.
The big fuss in NYC late this past week was Mayor Bloomberg's proposal to place limits on the sale of sugary drinks as a public health measure. The idea has drawn opposition ranging from the transparently self-interested to the viciously satirical--the Colbert clip, linked here, is truly awesome--with the pushback drawing additional zing from the mayor's push to ban large sugar drinks while making the media rounds to celebrate (who knew?) National Donut Day.
The proposal makes me uncomfortable on liberty grounds, though the public finance implications give me some pause; if I had to come down one way or another, I'd probably oppose it and urge continued educational measures, maybe even as far as requiring labels on 32-ounce sodas similar to those on cigarettes. (Imagine a Before-pic of Louie Anderson looking up at you as hold the Big Gulp, saying, "Do you really need all 600 of these empty calories?)
But what's really interesting about this to me is how the various ostensible shapers of opinion in the City have lined up on this question. The generally liberal New York Times published an editorial criticizing the ban; the consistently right-wing New York Post wrote in support of it. Add to this that the two ideologically opposed outlets took the same respective positions recently when the City's controversial "stop and frisk" policies resurfaced on the public agenda.
Stop-and-frisk infamously falls most heavily on the poor and non-white. Though I don't have numbers for this, my strong suspicion is that the sugary drinks changes would have the biggest impact on the same groups. And this to me explains why the Times and the Post, and those whose views they more or less represent in the public discourse, have taken the positions they have.
The thru-line is whether or not you believe that low-income, less-educated, less connected non-whites really have the same rights and deserve the same consideration of their wealthier and whiter counterparts. Yet another issue in this bucket, on which the Times and Post would take (and have taken) the editorial positions you'd expect them to take, is on measures that make it more difficult for individuals to register and vote. The right-leaning outlets will cite concerns over voter fraud--which pretty much always have zero basis in reality--to justify restrictions, while the liberal-leaning voices will emphasize equal access.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Murdoch-owned voices and their allies consistently favor policies that, in contrast to the old journalistic truism, comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Come the Evolution: Obama, Marriage Equality, Bloomberg, and my Dad
The consensus around President Obama's public endorsement of marriage equality this week seems to be that it's a solid net plus for him politically. It's very unlikely that he'll lose many if any net votes over this statement, and already it's fueling a surge of donations and energy around a heretofore somewhat demotivated Democratic base. I thought it was kind of cynical in terms of the timing, yet I'll admit the announcement had me considering going into pocket for the president for the first time in this cycle.
One thing I haven't seen in the coverage, however, is how Obama's announcement might impact the race in terms of a powerful centrist figure whose own view on marriage equality long has been known: Mayor Bloomberg. Check out this item from Tuesday, the day before Obama made his statement; then consider what Bloomberg said following Obama's declaration of support:
Mayor Bloomberg carries a kind of totemic power for a small but important segment of the electorate (not to mention outsized, borderline-absurd-and-embarrassing influence within certain pundit precincts). My father is one of those voters who just digs the guy. He's very suspicious of Obama, not particularly turned on by Romney, more or less indifferent to social issues, and basically looking for someone to make government function, as he perceives (with some justification... says the City employee) Bloomberg to have done in NYC. I'm fairly sure that were Bloomberg to endorse Romney, that would signal to my dad, and probably at least a few hundred thousand other politically homeless but fairly engaged types, that the Republican is the better of two tepid choices. I don't know for sure that these folks tend to concentrate in swing states, but it's not hard to imagine them in Pennsylvania (where Dad lives), Ohio, Virginia, Florida and Colorado.
I have no information whatsoever, but prior to Obama's announcement, I would have put the odds of Bloomberg endorsing Romney at something like 50 percent. The presumptive Republican nominee certainly is gunning for the mayor's blessing (as is the president). Notwithstanding their serious policy differences on abortion and gun rights, I suspect that Bloomberg is much more personally comfortable with Romney, a fellow rich guy and sharp-elbowed capitalist who in his Massachusetts guise wasn't really at odds with Bloomberg's social views, than the former community organizer and occasional Wall Street critic in the White House. Yes, the City Bloomberg governs will go something like 75 percent for the president, and the administration he leads likely an even higher percentage, but the mayor won't face the voters again and, mostly for better and occasionally for worse, he's shown on many occasions that he forms and states his opinions without concern for what his constituents or subordinates think.
Now, though, a Romney endorsement will prompt a barrage of questions on how he can support a candidate whose public position on perhaps the defining civil rights issue of the era is inimical to the mayor's own strong and oft-voiced view. He'll have to face friends and colleagues who are in same-sex marriages, including his likely candidate of choice to succeed him, Council Speaker Christine Quinn (who's getting married a week from today). He can say that the economic issues, and particularly Romney's position on finance-industry deregulation, trump everything else, and maybe he will. But I have trouble seeing it--particularly considering the questions of legacy that now occupy so much of the thinking on the part of the mayor and his close advisors.
I don't think Bloomberg will endorse the president; I just don't believe he likes the man, or sees him as good for the City. But I think Obama's announcement has cut the odds of Mayor Bloomberg endorsing Romney by quite a bit, and I'm not sure that wasn't somewhere in his head when he made the decision. Meanwhile, I'll keep working on my dad.
The consensus around President Obama's public endorsement of marriage equality this week seems to be that it's a solid net plus for him politically. It's very unlikely that he'll lose many if any net votes over this statement, and already it's fueling a surge of donations and energy around a heretofore somewhat demotivated Democratic base. I thought it was kind of cynical in terms of the timing, yet I'll admit the announcement had me considering going into pocket for the president for the first time in this cycle.
One thing I haven't seen in the coverage, however, is how Obama's announcement might impact the race in terms of a powerful centrist figure whose own view on marriage equality long has been known: Mayor Bloomberg. Check out this item from Tuesday, the day before Obama made his statement; then consider what Bloomberg said following Obama's declaration of support:
Mayor Michael Bloomberg called President Barack Obama’s newly announced support for same-sex marriage “a major turning point in the history of American civil rights.”
“No American president has ever supported a major expansion of civil rights that has not ultimately been adopted by the American people — and I have no doubt that this will be no exception,” Bloomberg said in a statement today.
Mayor Bloomberg carries a kind of totemic power for a small but important segment of the electorate (not to mention outsized, borderline-absurd-and-embarrassing influence within certain pundit precincts). My father is one of those voters who just digs the guy. He's very suspicious of Obama, not particularly turned on by Romney, more or less indifferent to social issues, and basically looking for someone to make government function, as he perceives (with some justification... says the City employee) Bloomberg to have done in NYC. I'm fairly sure that were Bloomberg to endorse Romney, that would signal to my dad, and probably at least a few hundred thousand other politically homeless but fairly engaged types, that the Republican is the better of two tepid choices. I don't know for sure that these folks tend to concentrate in swing states, but it's not hard to imagine them in Pennsylvania (where Dad lives), Ohio, Virginia, Florida and Colorado.
I have no information whatsoever, but prior to Obama's announcement, I would have put the odds of Bloomberg endorsing Romney at something like 50 percent. The presumptive Republican nominee certainly is gunning for the mayor's blessing (as is the president). Notwithstanding their serious policy differences on abortion and gun rights, I suspect that Bloomberg is much more personally comfortable with Romney, a fellow rich guy and sharp-elbowed capitalist who in his Massachusetts guise wasn't really at odds with Bloomberg's social views, than the former community organizer and occasional Wall Street critic in the White House. Yes, the City Bloomberg governs will go something like 75 percent for the president, and the administration he leads likely an even higher percentage, but the mayor won't face the voters again and, mostly for better and occasionally for worse, he's shown on many occasions that he forms and states his opinions without concern for what his constituents or subordinates think.
Now, though, a Romney endorsement will prompt a barrage of questions on how he can support a candidate whose public position on perhaps the defining civil rights issue of the era is inimical to the mayor's own strong and oft-voiced view. He'll have to face friends and colleagues who are in same-sex marriages, including his likely candidate of choice to succeed him, Council Speaker Christine Quinn (who's getting married a week from today). He can say that the economic issues, and particularly Romney's position on finance-industry deregulation, trump everything else, and maybe he will. But I have trouble seeing it--particularly considering the questions of legacy that now occupy so much of the thinking on the part of the mayor and his close advisors.
I don't think Bloomberg will endorse the president; I just don't believe he likes the man, or sees him as good for the City. But I think Obama's announcement has cut the odds of Mayor Bloomberg endorsing Romney by quite a bit, and I'm not sure that wasn't somewhere in his head when he made the decision. Meanwhile, I'll keep working on my dad.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Thinking About Guns
Jill Lepore's disturbing recent New Yorker article about the policies and politics of gun control isn't likely to resonate in this political year. This is unfortunate, because it gets at some of our deeper national pathologies. Interspersed with accounts of and references to rampages of gun violence--including both well-known episodes like the massacres at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech, and less covered (but more recent) multiple murders at schools in Ohio and California--are daunting facts about our national fascination with deadly weapons and statistics on their dreary impact.
Even more interesting is a story I hadn't known before, about the evolution of the National Rifle Association from a "sporting and hunting association" often supportive of common-sense gun control into the maximalist and ferociously partisan lobbying entity we know today. The NRA has moved toward a harder line even as the national incidence of gun ownership has declined; Lepore reports that significantly fewer Americans own guns now than was the case a generation ago. But gun-related violence certainly hasn't decreased, probably owing in part to the slackening of gun laws as well as the increasingly easy availability of ever-deadlier weapons.
It's well known and not even much lamented anymore that the Democrats have all but entirely ceded gun control as an issue. (Though this hasn't stopped the leadership of the NRA from insisting that Barack Obama's very silence on firearms through his first term is itself proof of his utter commitment to seizing Americans' guns if they're foolish enough to re-elect him.) The automatic weapons ban signed by Bill Clinton in 1994 lapsed in 2004, and when Obama took office there was little effort to reinstate it despite Democrats' sizable congressional majorities in 2009. No matter how egregious the gun-related crime--Columbine and Virginia Tech, the January 2011 massacre in Tucson, Arizona that killed six people (including the granddaughter of Dallas Green, manager of the 1980 world champion Phillies) and wounded another twelve (including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords)--there's no serious effort to tighten up gun laws. Even the Trayvon Martin case in Florida, which Lepore discusses at some length, seems unlikely to lead to serious consideration of repealing the "Stand Your Ground" law under which George Zimmerman claims justification for having shot the teenager.
This is the nature of interest-group politics: a small faction that holds a minority viewpoint can prevail so long as its commitment to that position is disproportionately greater than that of the majority and has the resources to press its case. The irony here, if that's the word, is that the NRA as an organization seems to hold positions far more extreme than that of its membership: "According to a 2009 Luntz poll, for instance, requiring mandatory background checks on all purchasers at gun shows is favored not only by eighty-five per cent of gun owners who are not members of the N.R.A. but also by sixty-nine per cent of gun owners who are." It seems reasonable to assume that non-gun owners would be even more solidly in support of stronger gun laws. But given what we've seen over the last fifteen years, it's almost impossible to imagine what series of events would suffice to shift the political dynamic in a way that would lead to tighter regulation.
In addition to the obvious factor--our national and ongoing romanticizing of weapons and what one can do with them--I have a theory on why this is. The one common complaint across the American political spectrum is the feeling that the average citizen has lost control. Banks seemingly can foreclose upon your home at will; certainly the vast majority of Americans now can be fired without much advance notice or recourse; your retirement savings can be wiped out in an eyeblink. Some of this is specific to our politics; some of it just has to do with modernity. But whatever the reason, the collective sense is that things are out of our hands.
In some respect, the possession and use of a gun is a logical, though not rational, response to that circumstance. I imagine that the seeming rightness of that response increases as you head down the socioeconomic ladder.
Jill Lepore's disturbing recent New Yorker article about the policies and politics of gun control isn't likely to resonate in this political year. This is unfortunate, because it gets at some of our deeper national pathologies. Interspersed with accounts of and references to rampages of gun violence--including both well-known episodes like the massacres at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech, and less covered (but more recent) multiple murders at schools in Ohio and California--are daunting facts about our national fascination with deadly weapons and statistics on their dreary impact.
Even more interesting is a story I hadn't known before, about the evolution of the National Rifle Association from a "sporting and hunting association" often supportive of common-sense gun control into the maximalist and ferociously partisan lobbying entity we know today. The NRA has moved toward a harder line even as the national incidence of gun ownership has declined; Lepore reports that significantly fewer Americans own guns now than was the case a generation ago. But gun-related violence certainly hasn't decreased, probably owing in part to the slackening of gun laws as well as the increasingly easy availability of ever-deadlier weapons.
It's well known and not even much lamented anymore that the Democrats have all but entirely ceded gun control as an issue. (Though this hasn't stopped the leadership of the NRA from insisting that Barack Obama's very silence on firearms through his first term is itself proof of his utter commitment to seizing Americans' guns if they're foolish enough to re-elect him.) The automatic weapons ban signed by Bill Clinton in 1994 lapsed in 2004, and when Obama took office there was little effort to reinstate it despite Democrats' sizable congressional majorities in 2009. No matter how egregious the gun-related crime--Columbine and Virginia Tech, the January 2011 massacre in Tucson, Arizona that killed six people (including the granddaughter of Dallas Green, manager of the 1980 world champion Phillies) and wounded another twelve (including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords)--there's no serious effort to tighten up gun laws. Even the Trayvon Martin case in Florida, which Lepore discusses at some length, seems unlikely to lead to serious consideration of repealing the "Stand Your Ground" law under which George Zimmerman claims justification for having shot the teenager.
This is the nature of interest-group politics: a small faction that holds a minority viewpoint can prevail so long as its commitment to that position is disproportionately greater than that of the majority and has the resources to press its case. The irony here, if that's the word, is that the NRA as an organization seems to hold positions far more extreme than that of its membership: "According to a 2009 Luntz poll, for instance, requiring mandatory background checks on all purchasers at gun shows is favored not only by eighty-five per cent of gun owners who are not members of the N.R.A. but also by sixty-nine per cent of gun owners who are." It seems reasonable to assume that non-gun owners would be even more solidly in support of stronger gun laws. But given what we've seen over the last fifteen years, it's almost impossible to imagine what series of events would suffice to shift the political dynamic in a way that would lead to tighter regulation.
In addition to the obvious factor--our national and ongoing romanticizing of weapons and what one can do with them--I have a theory on why this is. The one common complaint across the American political spectrum is the feeling that the average citizen has lost control. Banks seemingly can foreclose upon your home at will; certainly the vast majority of Americans now can be fired without much advance notice or recourse; your retirement savings can be wiped out in an eyeblink. Some of this is specific to our politics; some of it just has to do with modernity. But whatever the reason, the collective sense is that things are out of our hands.
In some respect, the possession and use of a gun is a logical, though not rational, response to that circumstance. I imagine that the seeming rightness of that response increases as you head down the socioeconomic ladder.
Sunday, April 01, 2012
Legitimacy vs. Politics
The Founders, bigoted and oligarchical (and--don't tell the Tea Party--elitist) though they might have been, were pretty smart guys. George Washington saw at the outset that factional politics could undermine the efficacy of representative government, and we can't say he didn't warn us:
Facing the prospect of an all but explicitly partisan Supreme Court decision that seems very likely to overturn part or all of the Affordable Care Act, and poking through the wreckage of last summer's near-miss to strike a "grand bargain" on the national debt, it's difficult to reach a conclusion other than that partisan advantage has entirely overshadowed the larger national interest. Or maybe it's that in the eyes of the partisans, there's no daylight at all between what's good for Our Team and what's good for the country. Certainly there's not much consideration even for the idea that the Other Side might have a valid point.
It's not difficult to understand how we got here. The disappearance of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans is now complete, and there aren't even many moderate Republicans remaining. Epistemic closure is pretty much a done deal on the right, and those on the left--I'll admit myself at least somewhat guilty here, as the links on this page suggest--also tend to choose their own validating sources.
But while we now have a parliamentary orientation with monolithic ideologies in Manichean struggle, our governance institutions remain premised on accommodation. Thanks to all the choke points built into the system, the parties can't really implement their programs even when they have full control, as the Republicans did from 2003-2006 and the Democrats did in 2009-10. Add in how closely balanced the sides, and the dream of a "final victory" in which, say, the Democrats impose single payer healthcare and raise taxes back to pre-Reagan levels, or the Republicans eliminate five federal agencies, privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into a voucher program, seems pretty implausible.
Ultimately, public faith in the system is predicated upon the demonstrated capacity of the system to keep faith with the public and deliver the goods of governance in a relatively rational and equitable manner. We know that the social contract started to fray in the '60s and '70s and has only continued to erode since then. The other piece, ability to serve public interests, is under ever greater pressure.
Speculation regarding the aftermath of the ACA being overturned mostly has focused on short-term political ramifications; whether the decision will illuminate President Obama as ineffectual or motivate his supporters to swarm forth in righteous fury. That's kind of the wrong question. The bigger question might be what happens when a step forward, however compromised or limited or preliminary, is erased for no good reason and without anything to replace it--when the suffering of millions is intensified for the gratification of "cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men."
The Founders, bigoted and oligarchical (and--don't tell the Tea Party--elitist) though they might have been, were pretty smart guys. George Washington saw at the outset that factional politics could undermine the efficacy of representative government, and we can't say he didn't warn us:
All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency.—They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force—to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party;—often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community;—and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils, and modified by mutual interests.—However combinations or associations of the above descriptions may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, and to usurp for themselves the reins of Government; destroying afterwards the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.—
...
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.—But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.—The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an Individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind, (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.
Facing the prospect of an all but explicitly partisan Supreme Court decision that seems very likely to overturn part or all of the Affordable Care Act, and poking through the wreckage of last summer's near-miss to strike a "grand bargain" on the national debt, it's difficult to reach a conclusion other than that partisan advantage has entirely overshadowed the larger national interest. Or maybe it's that in the eyes of the partisans, there's no daylight at all between what's good for Our Team and what's good for the country. Certainly there's not much consideration even for the idea that the Other Side might have a valid point.
It's not difficult to understand how we got here. The disappearance of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans is now complete, and there aren't even many moderate Republicans remaining. Epistemic closure is pretty much a done deal on the right, and those on the left--I'll admit myself at least somewhat guilty here, as the links on this page suggest--also tend to choose their own validating sources.
But while we now have a parliamentary orientation with monolithic ideologies in Manichean struggle, our governance institutions remain premised on accommodation. Thanks to all the choke points built into the system, the parties can't really implement their programs even when they have full control, as the Republicans did from 2003-2006 and the Democrats did in 2009-10. Add in how closely balanced the sides, and the dream of a "final victory" in which, say, the Democrats impose single payer healthcare and raise taxes back to pre-Reagan levels, or the Republicans eliminate five federal agencies, privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into a voucher program, seems pretty implausible.
Ultimately, public faith in the system is predicated upon the demonstrated capacity of the system to keep faith with the public and deliver the goods of governance in a relatively rational and equitable manner. We know that the social contract started to fray in the '60s and '70s and has only continued to erode since then. The other piece, ability to serve public interests, is under ever greater pressure.
Speculation regarding the aftermath of the ACA being overturned mostly has focused on short-term political ramifications; whether the decision will illuminate President Obama as ineffectual or motivate his supporters to swarm forth in righteous fury. That's kind of the wrong question. The bigger question might be what happens when a step forward, however compromised or limited or preliminary, is erased for no good reason and without anything to replace it--when the suffering of millions is intensified for the gratification of "cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men."
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Two Quick Points on Politics
Neither of these ideas strikes me as quite worth a full post, but together perhaps they just nose over the bar of being worth writing...
Neither of these ideas strikes me as quite worth a full post, but together perhaps they just nose over the bar of being worth writing...
- Dennis Kucinich lost a primary against another Ohio Democratic congressperson, Marcy Kaptur, last week following a Republican redistricting in the Buckeye State. As Glenn Greenwald points out, this prompted a good deal of schadenfreude not just among the right-leaning outlets you'd expect, but in Democrat-friendly outlets such as The American Prospect and The New Republic. Greenwald's point is that Kucinich attracted the disdain of these establishment publications in large part because he was the rare Democrat with the courage of his convictions: resolutely opposed both to corporate power and the imperial presidency, political calculations be damned. Since they can't frontally assault Kucinich on these positions, which they honor in the breach, they go after him for his veganism, his stated belief in UFOs, or--closest to relevancy--his unrealistic proposals to create a Department of Peace or impeach whichever president is currently abusing his powers.
Intellectually I sympathize with Greenwald's point, but I think he's intentionally avoiding the question of whether Kucinich--who, full disclosure, I've long disliked--is an effective advocate for his laudable views. He's not the only principled progressive out there, after all: ten years ago the Senate featured two such Democrats in the late Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and his midwestern colleague Russ Feingold. Both were consistent and proud liberal Democrats who, unlike Kucinich, were able to avoid making themselves the story and at least on occasion found common cause with the less pure to advance the issues they cared about. I believe both current Minnesota Senators are in that vein as well, as is Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Patty Murray of Washington and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. There are dozens of such Democrats in the House, who lack the exposure of Kucinich's two (pathetic) presidential runs but actually, y'know, legislate. I would suggest to Greenwald that we are to win more converts to the laudable views Kucinich holds, it's important to put forward champions who, at the least, can avoid muddying the message with their own goofy antics. I'd add that the way Kucinich has responded to defeat--thinking out loud about moving to some community where he has no connection solely to run again--stands in stark and unfavorable contrast to how, say, Feingold, has adjusted to life after losing an election.
- At the other end of the spectrum from Kucinich on both principle and looks is Mitt Romney, who continues to limp toward the Republican presidential nomination. At this point, we know with something close to certainty that none of his remaining opponents can win, but I'm still not totally sure that Romney can't lose. The Super Tuesday primaries were predictably inconclusive, though it's probably fair to say that Romney's narrow win in Ohio closed off any chance of Santorum winning the nomination. Still, other than his support among Mormons and a certain kind of one-percenter, Romney seems to do best among those groups that Obama will compete with him for in the general: moderates and the upper middle class.
This reminds me of the old (pre-1972) model of presidential primaries, which were considered "tests of strength" that candidates would enter not so much to win delegates for the nomination--often those primaries weren't even binding--as to impress the guys who sat in the smoke-filled rooms at the convention that they could win in November. John F. Kennedy's win over Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia in 1960 is the classic example; by the time the convention began in Los Angeles, Kennedy was the prohibitive favorite over Adlai Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson because he'd shown broad appeal in addition to having shored up his inside game. Nominations don't work this way anymore, and it's an open question whether the "Republican establishment" could stop Romney even if they wanted to--which they don't, given the known alternatives of Santorum, whom they fear and dislike, and Gingrich, whom they positively loathe. But the smart ones must be looking at the inability of the front-runner to put away his terribly flawed rivals, and his struggles to be effective on the campaign trail after six years of effort, and feel some despair at the prospect of his carrying their standard this fall. This will continue unless and until Romney puts some big, convincing, maybe even surprising wins on the board.
Sunday, March 04, 2012
The Lose-Lose Scenario
I can't really take issue with how President Obama is handling the extremely delicate politics of the Iran-Israel standoff. He's walking a delicate line between keeping a real deterrent option on the table--one he's made credible, like it or not, by his track record of using force in that part of the world for operations large and small--and signaling to all parties that he'd really prefer not to start another war in that part of the world. He's handling the domestic politics responsibly as well, acting as a relative brake on the rush to war... in stark contrast to the Bush administration in Iraq, not quite ten years ago.
That said, I'm sadly in agreement with Sullivan that the Israeli government, a coalition of fairly run-of-the-mill hawks and religious absolutists who eerily if unsurprisingly mirror their enemies in Teheran, might push for war in part to hurt Obama in the presidential election. It's hard to believe any leadership group could be that reckless and cynical, but the paranoia of Netanyahu and the Likudniks plus the messianic impulses of the fundamentalists combine to make this all too plausible.
I'm not sure whether there's a material difference whether the attack is carried out by Israel or the U.S. (Israel surely would prefer the latter), assuming it's not a joint strike. This is an important question, because if Israel acts unilaterally and the U.S. doesn't back its action--the "Suez scenario"--everything I'm about to say might not hold up. But I find the idea that the U.S. wouldn't support Israel pretty far-fetched, particularly after Obama's statements at AIPAC today.
An attack on Iran might or might not have the desired effect of slowing down their nuclear program, assuming (as I do, for what it's worth; I see no reason to trust the Iranians) that there really is one. I am, however, pretty sure it will result in three things:
1) an indefinite reprieve for the despicable regime of the mullahs, as the Iranians rally 'round their flag;
2) the undoing of whatever goodwill Obama has managed to create in the Muslim world these last three years; and
3) sustained gas prices at levels easily high enough to wipe out our economic recovery, costing millions of jobs here at home.
Since an air strike alone wouldn't suffice to remove the threat and Iran surely would take retaliatory action directly or through surrogates, we also could reasonably expect, sooner or later--sooner, if the Republicans win or Obama concludes that inaction would guarantee same--a new ground war in Iran that, in addition to horrific human costs, would undo whatever budgetary savings are now projected from winding down the war in Iraq. Further, as Iran is more competent at this sort of thing than our last foes, an attack almost surely would prompt significant terror strikes inside the United States. This in turn would lead to new "security measures" that will erode our civil liberties, degrade our public spaces, and reduce our quality of life.
The effects of the Iraq War were generally quarantined to those fighting, their families, and the communities in which they concentrated, at least in real time. (The budgetary and geopolitical consequences are still unfolding, and affect all of us.) Given the likelihood of new acts of terrorism and the near certainty of a renewed economic downturn, we'd have no such luck this time. As people ask the question of how we could be so stupid as to start two wars in the Middle East in less than ten years, I strongly suspect the answers would prompt a surge in anti-Semitic sentiment to levels we haven't seen in a century, as "the Jews" are scapegoated for all the human and economic misery. Read some of the comments in the Times piece linked above if you doubt that possibility.
All told, it doesn't seem remotely worth it even if the mission succeeded in materially disrupting and delaying Iran's nukes program. No rational actor would make the decision to go forward. But the mix of bad history, bad religion and bad politics means that we're in a mode of multiple irrationalities.
I can't really take issue with how President Obama is handling the extremely delicate politics of the Iran-Israel standoff. He's walking a delicate line between keeping a real deterrent option on the table--one he's made credible, like it or not, by his track record of using force in that part of the world for operations large and small--and signaling to all parties that he'd really prefer not to start another war in that part of the world. He's handling the domestic politics responsibly as well, acting as a relative brake on the rush to war... in stark contrast to the Bush administration in Iraq, not quite ten years ago.
That said, I'm sadly in agreement with Sullivan that the Israeli government, a coalition of fairly run-of-the-mill hawks and religious absolutists who eerily if unsurprisingly mirror their enemies in Teheran, might push for war in part to hurt Obama in the presidential election. It's hard to believe any leadership group could be that reckless and cynical, but the paranoia of Netanyahu and the Likudniks plus the messianic impulses of the fundamentalists combine to make this all too plausible.
I'm not sure whether there's a material difference whether the attack is carried out by Israel or the U.S. (Israel surely would prefer the latter), assuming it's not a joint strike. This is an important question, because if Israel acts unilaterally and the U.S. doesn't back its action--the "Suez scenario"--everything I'm about to say might not hold up. But I find the idea that the U.S. wouldn't support Israel pretty far-fetched, particularly after Obama's statements at AIPAC today.
An attack on Iran might or might not have the desired effect of slowing down their nuclear program, assuming (as I do, for what it's worth; I see no reason to trust the Iranians) that there really is one. I am, however, pretty sure it will result in three things:
1) an indefinite reprieve for the despicable regime of the mullahs, as the Iranians rally 'round their flag;
2) the undoing of whatever goodwill Obama has managed to create in the Muslim world these last three years; and
3) sustained gas prices at levels easily high enough to wipe out our economic recovery, costing millions of jobs here at home.
Since an air strike alone wouldn't suffice to remove the threat and Iran surely would take retaliatory action directly or through surrogates, we also could reasonably expect, sooner or later--sooner, if the Republicans win or Obama concludes that inaction would guarantee same--a new ground war in Iran that, in addition to horrific human costs, would undo whatever budgetary savings are now projected from winding down the war in Iraq. Further, as Iran is more competent at this sort of thing than our last foes, an attack almost surely would prompt significant terror strikes inside the United States. This in turn would lead to new "security measures" that will erode our civil liberties, degrade our public spaces, and reduce our quality of life.
The effects of the Iraq War were generally quarantined to those fighting, their families, and the communities in which they concentrated, at least in real time. (The budgetary and geopolitical consequences are still unfolding, and affect all of us.) Given the likelihood of new acts of terrorism and the near certainty of a renewed economic downturn, we'd have no such luck this time. As people ask the question of how we could be so stupid as to start two wars in the Middle East in less than ten years, I strongly suspect the answers would prompt a surge in anti-Semitic sentiment to levels we haven't seen in a century, as "the Jews" are scapegoated for all the human and economic misery. Read some of the comments in the Times piece linked above if you doubt that possibility.
All told, it doesn't seem remotely worth it even if the mission succeeded in materially disrupting and delaying Iran's nukes program. No rational actor would make the decision to go forward. But the mix of bad history, bad religion and bad politics means that we're in a mode of multiple irrationalities.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
The Left, the Right, and the Iron Law of Emulation
From the Times Saturday morning:
In his place of eternal repose, the late, great Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan nods knowingly: this is his Iron Law of Emulation, which posited that entities in conflict increasingly come to mimic each other. I would suggest a corollary: the more intractable the conflict, the stronger the tactical resemblance.
Anyone who paid even semi-close attention to the 2008 election will remember Republicans, commandeered by Rush Limbaugh, doing the exact same thing to prolong and embitter the Clinton-Obama primary fight. Then as now, it made tactical sense while further eroding what’s left of the soul of American democracy.
As a human response, I find this understandable. As it becomes ever more difficult to maintain the fiction that our society is anything other than an oligarchy in which those at the top can fix the rules in real time to maintain their enormous advantages, it can’t seem anything other than rational to exert what little agency we have to likewise rig the game. The Limbaugh listener who voted for the despised murderous lesbian Hillary Clinton in an open Democratic primary solely to fuck up the Kenyan Muslim socialist Obama doubtless got a small thrill from doing so; likewise the Daily Kos poster who pulls the lever for the Christianist maniac Santorum just to thwart the goofy-yet-heartless plutocrat Romney.
But it just doesn’t seem, I dunno, sporting—and I think it misses the larger point. This ties to the inchoate but real sense that the Tea Party and the Occupy movement are pissed off about at least some of the same things: the said rigging of the game that allows elites, whether cultural or economic or both, to exert all the control. Wouldn’t it be better to focus our energies on shared goals of fixing the game rather than exploiting and reinforcing its flaws for very parochial ends?
At least for me, this vision of rewriting the rules to restore the fundamentals of our Republic explains the theoretical appeal of reform-minded entities such as Americans Elect. But the unfortunate reality is that Americans Elect so perfectly embodies that ultra-centrist and Beltway-centric mindset that emphasizes debt reduction and vague bipartisan collegiality over either true structural reform or tangible policy changes that it almost could be a caricature. It could have sprung full-formed from the brows of David Broder or David Gergen. It’s an almost absurdly elitist product within a vaguely populist and reformist wrapper.
(Sure enough, here comes Tom Friedman to raise the flag again on Sunday. Were the franchise limited to white middle- and upper-class men with bachelors degrees or higher, David Walker might approach Perot's numbers from 1992. Naturally, Friedman completely fails to grasp that Perot's appeal was less about his specific "program," such as it was, than his sense that people are friggin' pissed.)
The real question here, however, is of legitimacy. In a recent New York Review of Books article, Elizabeth Drew asks a question that initially struck me as somewhere between goofy and plaintive--"Can We Have a Democratic Election?"--but turns out to be very real, and very concerning. The functioning of our society rests upon shared notions of fairness and, if not equality per se, then at least the sense that we all face the same set of possibilities in life. If that dissolves, what's left is something we might call America, but that will become unrecognizably different from our best conception of that word.
From the Times Saturday morning:
When Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the liberal blog Daily Kos, proposed that Democrats vote for Rick Santorum in open Republican primaries, many of the site’s 1.6 million monthly readers protested.
Mr. Moulitsas wanted to prolong the Republican presidential nominating battle. “The longer this G.O.P. primary drags on, the better the numbers for Team Blue,” Mr. Moulitsas wrote as he introduced the plan, Operation Hilarity, on Wednesday. He said it would not take many mischief-making Democrats to swing some contests away from Mitt Romney toward Mr. Santorum.
In his place of eternal repose, the late, great Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan nods knowingly: this is his Iron Law of Emulation, which posited that entities in conflict increasingly come to mimic each other. I would suggest a corollary: the more intractable the conflict, the stronger the tactical resemblance.
Anyone who paid even semi-close attention to the 2008 election will remember Republicans, commandeered by Rush Limbaugh, doing the exact same thing to prolong and embitter the Clinton-Obama primary fight. Then as now, it made tactical sense while further eroding what’s left of the soul of American democracy.
As a human response, I find this understandable. As it becomes ever more difficult to maintain the fiction that our society is anything other than an oligarchy in which those at the top can fix the rules in real time to maintain their enormous advantages, it can’t seem anything other than rational to exert what little agency we have to likewise rig the game. The Limbaugh listener who voted for the despised murderous lesbian Hillary Clinton in an open Democratic primary solely to fuck up the Kenyan Muslim socialist Obama doubtless got a small thrill from doing so; likewise the Daily Kos poster who pulls the lever for the Christianist maniac Santorum just to thwart the goofy-yet-heartless plutocrat Romney.
But it just doesn’t seem, I dunno, sporting—and I think it misses the larger point. This ties to the inchoate but real sense that the Tea Party and the Occupy movement are pissed off about at least some of the same things: the said rigging of the game that allows elites, whether cultural or economic or both, to exert all the control. Wouldn’t it be better to focus our energies on shared goals of fixing the game rather than exploiting and reinforcing its flaws for very parochial ends?
At least for me, this vision of rewriting the rules to restore the fundamentals of our Republic explains the theoretical appeal of reform-minded entities such as Americans Elect. But the unfortunate reality is that Americans Elect so perfectly embodies that ultra-centrist and Beltway-centric mindset that emphasizes debt reduction and vague bipartisan collegiality over either true structural reform or tangible policy changes that it almost could be a caricature. It could have sprung full-formed from the brows of David Broder or David Gergen. It’s an almost absurdly elitist product within a vaguely populist and reformist wrapper.
(Sure enough, here comes Tom Friedman to raise the flag again on Sunday. Were the franchise limited to white middle- and upper-class men with bachelors degrees or higher, David Walker might approach Perot's numbers from 1992. Naturally, Friedman completely fails to grasp that Perot's appeal was less about his specific "program," such as it was, than his sense that people are friggin' pissed.)
The real question here, however, is of legitimacy. In a recent New York Review of Books article, Elizabeth Drew asks a question that initially struck me as somewhere between goofy and plaintive--"Can We Have a Democratic Election?"--but turns out to be very real, and very concerning. The functioning of our society rests upon shared notions of fairness and, if not equality per se, then at least the sense that we all face the same set of possibilities in life. If that dissolves, what's left is something we might call America, but that will become unrecognizably different from our best conception of that word.
Sunday, February 05, 2012
The Minimum Wage, Again
Perhaps because of political pressures rising out of the Occupy movement, perhaps just because it's an election year and the Democrats really would like another shot at the State Senate majority, there's a move afoot to raise the statewide minimum wage in New York to $8.50 per hour. The majority Democrats in the Assembly led by Speaker Sheldon Silver are pushing the measure, to which the Republicans and the business community are putting up predictable resistance. The likely support of both Governor Cuomo and, much more surprising to me, Mayor Bloomberg, would seem to indicate it has a good shot of being enacted.
It won't surprise that I'm generally of the view that the minimum wage should be indexed to inflation (which one iteration of Silver's proposal would do), and skeptical of the oft-repeated claims from the Right that raising the minimum wage stifles job creation. I know (and like) both of the experts cited in the Times article linked above; I'm much closer to James Parrott's position that a higher minimum wage serves as stimulus by circulating more money within communities where low-wage workers are concentrated. (It's kinds of disconcerting that Rus Sykes, who's an old friend and a former co-author of mine, is now on the anti- side of this issue; from the wording of the article, I'm hoping that Rus's concern is with the magnitude of the wage.)
That said, there is one aspect of a prospective minimum wage increase in New York City that really concerns me: what the impact would be on youth employment.
The City administers and, at this point, provides a plurality of the funding for the Summer Youth Employment Program, a six-week, 30-hour work opportunity for eligible NYC residents ages 14 to 24. Participants are paid the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. SYEP is by far the largest youth employment program in the country, but the crap economy accelerated a long-term trend of disinvestment and the program enrolled only 30,628 participants in 2011, down from a high of more than 52,000 in 2009. (Don't let anyone tell you the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act--the "stimulus"--didn't do anything. That thing did an enormous amount of good, and its reversal, albeit temporary, of the trend toward falling rates of youth employment was among its big wins.)
The math that follows is hacky and not meant to be taken literally (for instance, few participants work the full 180 hours), but illustrates the point:
Total funding for SYEP in 2011 was $43.5 million. The cost per participant was $1,420.27. Wages at the minimum for six weeks and 30 hours per total to $1,305, with the rest going toward administrative costs. If the wage is $8.50 rather than $7.25, the total cost for 180 hours of work becomes $1,530, and keeping the admin costs steady the total per-participant tab rises to around $1,650. Divide $43.5 million by that number, and suddenly you only have 26,364 young New York City residents working summer jobs.
This matters because the labor market in NYC is such that if you're a poor kid and you don't get a summer job through this program, you're not likely to work at all. Extensive research conducted by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University has shown that the likelihood of working as a teen rises with household income (and is higher anyway for whites than non-whites). More than three quarters of the SYEP participants surveyed reported that they wouldn't have worked were it not for SYEP; if anything I suspect the kids were too optimistic about their chances of finding alternate employment. Poor kids from poor communities simply aren't as likely to have the social capital or neighborhood opportunities that often lead to summer work as a teen.
In turn, this matters because work, as the CLMS also has found, tends to be habit-forming: do it at 15 and you're more likely to do it at 16. Work at 17 and you're probably have a job at 18, and so on. Part of this is probably that one gets accustomed to and expectant of having that extra spending money; more of it is that one starts to figure out how to function in a workplace, and having had a job once, it's not so unreasonable to expect to secure a different one again. This doesn't always work out, but the odds both of subsequent employment and at least baseline academic attainment rise with incidence of work in the teen years.
Which brings us back to the minimum wage question. My strong belief is that it's more important for kids from low-income families in New York City--which had the lowest teen employment-to-population ratio by far among the 20 biggest American cities as of 2005, with no reason to think it's changed much since--to have any paid work experience than that they earn the same wage as an adult who's very possibly the main or co-equal wage earner in the household. I wouldn't trust myself to do it, but I'm fairly sure one can monetize the gains and costs attached to different levels of early work experience for youth from disadvantaged backgrounds, in terms of subsequent educational attainment, employment and contributions to the tax base versus costs for social services provided, incarceration, and shelter. An extra four or five thousand kids each year who don't work as a consequence of the higher minimum wage likely would undo a lot of the good brought about by a higher minimum wage for everyone else.
I'm not sure what the answer is. I suppose a lower minimum wage for teens, or some kind of tax benefit for businesses who hire youth workers, might serve the goal of maximizing teen exposure to the job market without altogether having to forego the benefits of a wage increase. Whether this is legal or politically palatable, I'm not sure.
Perhaps because of political pressures rising out of the Occupy movement, perhaps just because it's an election year and the Democrats really would like another shot at the State Senate majority, there's a move afoot to raise the statewide minimum wage in New York to $8.50 per hour. The majority Democrats in the Assembly led by Speaker Sheldon Silver are pushing the measure, to which the Republicans and the business community are putting up predictable resistance. The likely support of both Governor Cuomo and, much more surprising to me, Mayor Bloomberg, would seem to indicate it has a good shot of being enacted.
It won't surprise that I'm generally of the view that the minimum wage should be indexed to inflation (which one iteration of Silver's proposal would do), and skeptical of the oft-repeated claims from the Right that raising the minimum wage stifles job creation. I know (and like) both of the experts cited in the Times article linked above; I'm much closer to James Parrott's position that a higher minimum wage serves as stimulus by circulating more money within communities where low-wage workers are concentrated. (It's kinds of disconcerting that Rus Sykes, who's an old friend and a former co-author of mine, is now on the anti- side of this issue; from the wording of the article, I'm hoping that Rus's concern is with the magnitude of the wage.)
That said, there is one aspect of a prospective minimum wage increase in New York City that really concerns me: what the impact would be on youth employment.
The City administers and, at this point, provides a plurality of the funding for the Summer Youth Employment Program, a six-week, 30-hour work opportunity for eligible NYC residents ages 14 to 24. Participants are paid the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. SYEP is by far the largest youth employment program in the country, but the crap economy accelerated a long-term trend of disinvestment and the program enrolled only 30,628 participants in 2011, down from a high of more than 52,000 in 2009. (Don't let anyone tell you the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act--the "stimulus"--didn't do anything. That thing did an enormous amount of good, and its reversal, albeit temporary, of the trend toward falling rates of youth employment was among its big wins.)
The math that follows is hacky and not meant to be taken literally (for instance, few participants work the full 180 hours), but illustrates the point:
Total funding for SYEP in 2011 was $43.5 million. The cost per participant was $1,420.27. Wages at the minimum for six weeks and 30 hours per total to $1,305, with the rest going toward administrative costs. If the wage is $8.50 rather than $7.25, the total cost for 180 hours of work becomes $1,530, and keeping the admin costs steady the total per-participant tab rises to around $1,650. Divide $43.5 million by that number, and suddenly you only have 26,364 young New York City residents working summer jobs.
This matters because the labor market in NYC is such that if you're a poor kid and you don't get a summer job through this program, you're not likely to work at all. Extensive research conducted by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University has shown that the likelihood of working as a teen rises with household income (and is higher anyway for whites than non-whites). More than three quarters of the SYEP participants surveyed reported that they wouldn't have worked were it not for SYEP; if anything I suspect the kids were too optimistic about their chances of finding alternate employment. Poor kids from poor communities simply aren't as likely to have the social capital or neighborhood opportunities that often lead to summer work as a teen.
In turn, this matters because work, as the CLMS also has found, tends to be habit-forming: do it at 15 and you're more likely to do it at 16. Work at 17 and you're probably have a job at 18, and so on. Part of this is probably that one gets accustomed to and expectant of having that extra spending money; more of it is that one starts to figure out how to function in a workplace, and having had a job once, it's not so unreasonable to expect to secure a different one again. This doesn't always work out, but the odds both of subsequent employment and at least baseline academic attainment rise with incidence of work in the teen years.
Which brings us back to the minimum wage question. My strong belief is that it's more important for kids from low-income families in New York City--which had the lowest teen employment-to-population ratio by far among the 20 biggest American cities as of 2005, with no reason to think it's changed much since--to have any paid work experience than that they earn the same wage as an adult who's very possibly the main or co-equal wage earner in the household. I wouldn't trust myself to do it, but I'm fairly sure one can monetize the gains and costs attached to different levels of early work experience for youth from disadvantaged backgrounds, in terms of subsequent educational attainment, employment and contributions to the tax base versus costs for social services provided, incarceration, and shelter. An extra four or five thousand kids each year who don't work as a consequence of the higher minimum wage likely would undo a lot of the good brought about by a higher minimum wage for everyone else.
I'm not sure what the answer is. I suppose a lower minimum wage for teens, or some kind of tax benefit for businesses who hire youth workers, might serve the goal of maximizing teen exposure to the job market without altogether having to forego the benefits of a wage increase. Whether this is legal or politically palatable, I'm not sure.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Quick Takes on the Republican Race
Once again I'm finding myself caught between satisfaction at Republican actions that would seem to harm their chances of winning the presidency this November, and dismay-bordering-on-horror at the unprecedentedly horrible consequences if they do somehow win. It's hard to contemplate a Gingrich presidency without venturing into H.P. Lovecraft territory; even George Will this morning made reference to the nauseating prospect of entrusting nuclear launch codes to that unwell man.
To their credit, the "Republican establishment" pretty surely won't allow that to happen. Sure, they might be happy enough to countenance environmental catastrophe that mostly will be felt in their grandchildren's time, or to allow the accumulated unfairness of our economic system to push toward eventual destabilization and something like revolution--again, after they're gone. But when Newt has a case of the sads and nukes Iran, or even just calls Nancy Pelosi a See-You-Next-Tuesday in the middle of the State of the Union, they'd own a piece of that, and they can't find that acceptable.
So I don't think Gingrich ultimately will get much closer to the White House than he is right now. But who will they nominate? It must now be clear to the Republicans just how poor a politician Mitt Romney is, and how particularly mismatched he is to this moment. The core Republican premise since 1968 has been that the American electorate will countenance economic elitism so long as their leaders can portray cultural populists with conviction.
Thus their most successful presidential candidates have been really rich and/or politically experienced guys who nonetheless have the performance chops to connect with the pissed-off white Christian masses: Nixon (eventually), Reagan, George W. Bush. The guys who couldn't do it as well were Jerry Ford, who from history's distance just seems like too nice a guy; and George H.W. Bush, who won a race he probably shouldn't have in 1988 because of a personally beloved predecessor and an utterly inept Democratic opponent and lost a race he probably shouldn't have in 1992 because he faced a master politician in Clinton and the same inability to connect that now threatens Mitt Romney's prospects.
The more people see of Romney, the less they like him. Will also noted that Mitt now has competed in 25 elections in his career; his record is 6-19. True, neither Iowa nor South Carolina was very friendly ground for him--but I'd argue that those states are more representative of the sort of voters he'd need to win jump-ball states like Ohio, North Carolina and maybe Pennsylvania than the more favorable electorate in New Hampshire where he won. The paradox is that the more he chases those hardcore, less educated, white cultural conservatives, the more he probably damages himself with the moderates in both parties and independents who theoretically might choose him over Obama.
Why is Romney so ineffective as a politician? I think much of it has to do with how transparently hard he's trying! My brother-in-law among many others has made the point that, at bottom, he's kind of similar to Obama: seems even-keeled, digs on data, a moderate by temperament, bit of a cold fish. I guess to make up for this, he's attacked Obama in such over-the-top and factually incorrect terms that even (especially?) those who really do hate the president must feel they're being "sold to."
Probably this sense is reinforced when Romney shows his glass jaw--most obviously on the taxes, but in general when he's pushed on the predatory capitalism he helped create. This exposes a bug in the RomneyBot program: he's proud of what he did at Bain Capital, but knows on some level that it's politically disadvantageous to express this. Of course he hates the construct of "the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent"; he's in the 1 percent of the 1 percent! At the same time, he's clearly smart enough to understand how difficult it's going to be to make a substantive case both that he accumulated his wealth as a result of adding tangible value to the world, as a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates did, or that he's "earned" his absurdly favorable tax rate through the good his money has done. In both cases, he's been "successful" under the rules of a crooked game--rules, in some cases, that he helped create. So you get bumbling, stumbling, mumbling responses like this one.
I guess the theory of Romney's campaign and his establishment supporters is that the energy on the Republican side would come from opposing a president they revile, particularly if the economy remains tepid or, even better for their purposes, declines again. But you can't beat something with nothing, and Romney seems as close to nothing as we've seen in American politics in a very long time.
If the economy is bad enough and Romney is able to tack back to the middle, he still could win. But he's not loved and he's not trusted, even (especially) among the voters who should comprise the core of his support. Given that Gingrich, Frothy Mix and Ron Paul are all unacceptable and almost certainly unelectable, one is pushed toward the conclusion that the eventual Republican nominee for president might not even be in the race right now.
Once again I'm finding myself caught between satisfaction at Republican actions that would seem to harm their chances of winning the presidency this November, and dismay-bordering-on-horror at the unprecedentedly horrible consequences if they do somehow win. It's hard to contemplate a Gingrich presidency without venturing into H.P. Lovecraft territory; even George Will this morning made reference to the nauseating prospect of entrusting nuclear launch codes to that unwell man.
To their credit, the "Republican establishment" pretty surely won't allow that to happen. Sure, they might be happy enough to countenance environmental catastrophe that mostly will be felt in their grandchildren's time, or to allow the accumulated unfairness of our economic system to push toward eventual destabilization and something like revolution--again, after they're gone. But when Newt has a case of the sads and nukes Iran, or even just calls Nancy Pelosi a See-You-Next-Tuesday in the middle of the State of the Union, they'd own a piece of that, and they can't find that acceptable.
So I don't think Gingrich ultimately will get much closer to the White House than he is right now. But who will they nominate? It must now be clear to the Republicans just how poor a politician Mitt Romney is, and how particularly mismatched he is to this moment. The core Republican premise since 1968 has been that the American electorate will countenance economic elitism so long as their leaders can portray cultural populists with conviction.
Thus their most successful presidential candidates have been really rich and/or politically experienced guys who nonetheless have the performance chops to connect with the pissed-off white Christian masses: Nixon (eventually), Reagan, George W. Bush. The guys who couldn't do it as well were Jerry Ford, who from history's distance just seems like too nice a guy; and George H.W. Bush, who won a race he probably shouldn't have in 1988 because of a personally beloved predecessor and an utterly inept Democratic opponent and lost a race he probably shouldn't have in 1992 because he faced a master politician in Clinton and the same inability to connect that now threatens Mitt Romney's prospects.
The more people see of Romney, the less they like him. Will also noted that Mitt now has competed in 25 elections in his career; his record is 6-19. True, neither Iowa nor South Carolina was very friendly ground for him--but I'd argue that those states are more representative of the sort of voters he'd need to win jump-ball states like Ohio, North Carolina and maybe Pennsylvania than the more favorable electorate in New Hampshire where he won. The paradox is that the more he chases those hardcore, less educated, white cultural conservatives, the more he probably damages himself with the moderates in both parties and independents who theoretically might choose him over Obama.
Why is Romney so ineffective as a politician? I think much of it has to do with how transparently hard he's trying! My brother-in-law among many others has made the point that, at bottom, he's kind of similar to Obama: seems even-keeled, digs on data, a moderate by temperament, bit of a cold fish. I guess to make up for this, he's attacked Obama in such over-the-top and factually incorrect terms that even (especially?) those who really do hate the president must feel they're being "sold to."
Probably this sense is reinforced when Romney shows his glass jaw--most obviously on the taxes, but in general when he's pushed on the predatory capitalism he helped create. This exposes a bug in the RomneyBot program: he's proud of what he did at Bain Capital, but knows on some level that it's politically disadvantageous to express this. Of course he hates the construct of "the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent"; he's in the 1 percent of the 1 percent! At the same time, he's clearly smart enough to understand how difficult it's going to be to make a substantive case both that he accumulated his wealth as a result of adding tangible value to the world, as a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates did, or that he's "earned" his absurdly favorable tax rate through the good his money has done. In both cases, he's been "successful" under the rules of a crooked game--rules, in some cases, that he helped create. So you get bumbling, stumbling, mumbling responses like this one.
I guess the theory of Romney's campaign and his establishment supporters is that the energy on the Republican side would come from opposing a president they revile, particularly if the economy remains tepid or, even better for their purposes, declines again. But you can't beat something with nothing, and Romney seems as close to nothing as we've seen in American politics in a very long time.
If the economy is bad enough and Romney is able to tack back to the middle, he still could win. But he's not loved and he's not trusted, even (especially) among the voters who should comprise the core of his support. Given that Gingrich, Frothy Mix and Ron Paul are all unacceptable and almost certainly unelectable, one is pushed toward the conclusion that the eventual Republican nominee for president might not even be in the race right now.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
My Year in Books 2011
So as we masticate the last few orts from the turdburger platter that was 2011, I'll finish this year here as I started it: with a list of books I read. Maybe it's an appropriate indicator of incremental progress that I had the 2010 list on the first day of 2011, but present the 2011 list on the last day of this same year.
Not that this is about raw counts, but I seem to have read, or at least completed, significantly fewer books this year than last--22 compared to 26. The difference might reside in books I got fairly far into this year before abandoning, a group that includes Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought, a lengthy comprehensive survey of early 19th century American history that I got maybe 350 pages into before deciding I'd had enough, and River of Gods, a high-concept sci-fi novel of maybe 800 pages that I got a quarter through and concluded that it just wasn't coming together for me. I read, and loved, about half of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, a book of non-fiction essays; no doubt, I'll read the rest over the next few years. (With DFW, sadly, there's all too much motivation to stretch it out.) I also had a stretch this summer where I was reading quite a bit on my iPhone; a couple of the shorter selections noted below came through that format, as did a bunch I didn't finish: Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Devil's Dictionary, and The Prince, among probably others.
What's cool about the e-books is that you can download many of these classics for the low, low price of "free," making it even easier (at least psychologically) to start something you've always been curious about but never quite wanted to pay for or even haul out of the library, and go as far with it as you'd like. Thus I have, among others, Siddhartha and Paradise Lost sitting on my iPhone, against the day I might decide to give either a spin.
The novel I read this year that most strongly resonated with me was the first one I finished: Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel. The best non-fiction was the first volume of Robert Caro's LBJ biography, The Path to Power. (I'm about 340 pages into volume three now.)
The list, in rough order and as I recall or can reconstruct. Starred items are particularly recommended...
Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel)*
Super Sad True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart)
Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)*
Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (Steven Weisman, editor)*
1960 (David Pietrusza)
Old Man’s War (John Scalzi)*
The City and the City (China Mieville)
American Pastoral (Philip Roth)*
Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)*
The Mysterious Stranger (Mark Twain)
Losers (Michael Lewis)
The Fall of Paris (Alistair Horne)
The Wind-Up Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi)
A Place of Greater Safety (Hilary Mantel)
See a Little Light (Bob Mould with Michael Azzerad)*
The Path to Power (Robert Caro)*
Means of Ascent (Robert Caro)*
Man in the Dark (Paul Auster)
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
The Enchantress of Florence (Salman Rushdie)*
Chronic City (Jonathan Lethem)
So as we masticate the last few orts from the turdburger platter that was 2011, I'll finish this year here as I started it: with a list of books I read. Maybe it's an appropriate indicator of incremental progress that I had the 2010 list on the first day of 2011, but present the 2011 list on the last day of this same year.
Not that this is about raw counts, but I seem to have read, or at least completed, significantly fewer books this year than last--22 compared to 26. The difference might reside in books I got fairly far into this year before abandoning, a group that includes Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought, a lengthy comprehensive survey of early 19th century American history that I got maybe 350 pages into before deciding I'd had enough, and River of Gods, a high-concept sci-fi novel of maybe 800 pages that I got a quarter through and concluded that it just wasn't coming together for me. I read, and loved, about half of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, a book of non-fiction essays; no doubt, I'll read the rest over the next few years. (With DFW, sadly, there's all too much motivation to stretch it out.) I also had a stretch this summer where I was reading quite a bit on my iPhone; a couple of the shorter selections noted below came through that format, as did a bunch I didn't finish: Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Devil's Dictionary, and The Prince, among probably others.
What's cool about the e-books is that you can download many of these classics for the low, low price of "free," making it even easier (at least psychologically) to start something you've always been curious about but never quite wanted to pay for or even haul out of the library, and go as far with it as you'd like. Thus I have, among others, Siddhartha and Paradise Lost sitting on my iPhone, against the day I might decide to give either a spin.
The novel I read this year that most strongly resonated with me was the first one I finished: Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel. The best non-fiction was the first volume of Robert Caro's LBJ biography, The Path to Power. (I'm about 340 pages into volume three now.)
The list, in rough order and as I recall or can reconstruct. Starred items are particularly recommended...
Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel)*
Super Sad True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart)
Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)*
Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (Steven Weisman, editor)*
1960 (David Pietrusza)
Old Man’s War (John Scalzi)*
The City and the City (China Mieville)
American Pastoral (Philip Roth)*
Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)*
The Mysterious Stranger (Mark Twain)
Losers (Michael Lewis)
The Fall of Paris (Alistair Horne)
The Wind-Up Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi)
A Place of Greater Safety (Hilary Mantel)
See a Little Light (Bob Mould with Michael Azzerad)*
The Path to Power (Robert Caro)*
Means of Ascent (Robert Caro)*
Man in the Dark (Paul Auster)
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
The Enchantress of Florence (Salman Rushdie)*
Chronic City (Jonathan Lethem)
Friday, December 30, 2011
Trying to Resist an Awful Pun
(See if you can guess what it is; answer at the end of the post.)
I was talking with a colleague recently, a woman in a same-sex marriage, about the election next year and Obama's record. She said she planned to enthusiastically support him even though she wishes he'd done more to advance gay rights. I agreed on both counts, but added that civil rights aren't for him to give, but for her (or any unjustly denied constituency) to take.
Was thinking about that again just now when I came across this article about the president's position on gay rights heading into the 2012 race:
The original basis of my support for Obama during the 2007-2008 campaign cycle was a hunch I had that, like great past presidents, he had a compelling vision for where he wished the country to go on certain issues; a clear sense of where it was at the moment; and an idea of how to move it in the direction he supported. At various times on various issues, I've had reason to doubt not just the overall concept here, but all three components of it. On this one, though, I wonder if maybe the paradigm actually holds.
There's just no way I believe that Obama really doesn't support fully equal rights for same-sex Americans. The circumstances of his upbringing, the political circles in which he came of age, the totality of his known views about social justice and the grounds to be at least somewhat skeptical of his Christianity--by which I do NOT mean that he's a "secret Muslim," but rather that he embraced churchgoing for social and political reasons at least as much as from personal epiphany--add up to a very strong case. But while the trend is unmistakably positive, any lead of a (small-c) conservative temperament would be aware of the dangers inherent to pushing too hard, too fast. Thus it's politically logical, if not particularly admirable, for Obama to maintain this pretense of his views "evolving"--and to let the New Yorkers, Clinton and Donovan, walk point and convey the message to a deep-pocketed and increasingly powerful constituency.
Another point, which is actually very consistent with Obama's conduct through the first three years of his presidency: his personal views don't really matter! He can't issue an executive order mandating marriage equality. He has the bully pulpit, and in that sense his public statement might have some positive impact--but it also would additionally politicize an argument that really should transcend partisan battles. Remember that marriage equality passed in New York only because a small number of Republican state senators went along with it. Of course, they had numerous pragmatic reasons to do so--log-rolling by Gov. Cuomo, campaign contributions from Mayor Bloomberg--in addition to whatever part principle played. But if taking that stance would have put them on the side of a president hated by many if not most Republicans, it's very possible at least one or two of those Republicans would have declined to do so.
At the same time, I think Obama only can get away with this coy posture because he's already delivered on some major if lesser points: the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the non-defense of the abhorrent Defense of Marriage Act. And while I don't know for sure, I think he's also solid on the one function of the presidency most consequential to his personal views on equal rights: judicial appointments. There are larger problems here, especially the slow pace of nominations, but I'd be very surprised if even one Obama nominee to a judgeship is positively known to be hostile to equality. The progress might be slow, but it's sure.
(The bad pun? "Leading from behind," of course.)
(See if you can guess what it is; answer at the end of the post.)
I was talking with a colleague recently, a woman in a same-sex marriage, about the election next year and Obama's record. She said she planned to enthusiastically support him even though she wishes he'd done more to advance gay rights. I agreed on both counts, but added that civil rights aren't for him to give, but for her (or any unjustly denied constituency) to take.
Was thinking about that again just now when I came across this article about the president's position on gay rights heading into the 2012 race:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told an audience of diplomats in Geneva this month that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” And in an interview in November, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of housing and urban development, said that he was “proud” to support the right of same-sex couples to marry.
The president enthusiastically endorsed Mrs. Clinton’s message, issuing a presidential memorandum directing all federal agencies to promote gay rights overseas. And while he said nothing publicly about Mr. Donovan’s declaration — which went further than Mr. Obama’s own position on the issue — a senior administration official said that Mr. Donovan enjoyed “the trust and respect of the president.”
Mr. Obama’s strategy, administration officials and gay-rights advocates said, reflects two conflicting forces. He recognizes that support for gay rights and same-sex marriage is growing, particularly among young voters.
But he is reluctant in an election year to be drawn into a culture-war issue — one that reliably helps Republicans turn out evangelical voters in their favor and that also strikes a particular nerve with religious black voters, a bedrock Obama constituency in battleground states like North Carolina and Florida.
The original basis of my support for Obama during the 2007-2008 campaign cycle was a hunch I had that, like great past presidents, he had a compelling vision for where he wished the country to go on certain issues; a clear sense of where it was at the moment; and an idea of how to move it in the direction he supported. At various times on various issues, I've had reason to doubt not just the overall concept here, but all three components of it. On this one, though, I wonder if maybe the paradigm actually holds.
There's just no way I believe that Obama really doesn't support fully equal rights for same-sex Americans. The circumstances of his upbringing, the political circles in which he came of age, the totality of his known views about social justice and the grounds to be at least somewhat skeptical of his Christianity--by which I do NOT mean that he's a "secret Muslim," but rather that he embraced churchgoing for social and political reasons at least as much as from personal epiphany--add up to a very strong case. But while the trend is unmistakably positive, any lead of a (small-c) conservative temperament would be aware of the dangers inherent to pushing too hard, too fast. Thus it's politically logical, if not particularly admirable, for Obama to maintain this pretense of his views "evolving"--and to let the New Yorkers, Clinton and Donovan, walk point and convey the message to a deep-pocketed and increasingly powerful constituency.
Another point, which is actually very consistent with Obama's conduct through the first three years of his presidency: his personal views don't really matter! He can't issue an executive order mandating marriage equality. He has the bully pulpit, and in that sense his public statement might have some positive impact--but it also would additionally politicize an argument that really should transcend partisan battles. Remember that marriage equality passed in New York only because a small number of Republican state senators went along with it. Of course, they had numerous pragmatic reasons to do so--log-rolling by Gov. Cuomo, campaign contributions from Mayor Bloomberg--in addition to whatever part principle played. But if taking that stance would have put them on the side of a president hated by many if not most Republicans, it's very possible at least one or two of those Republicans would have declined to do so.
At the same time, I think Obama only can get away with this coy posture because he's already delivered on some major if lesser points: the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the non-defense of the abhorrent Defense of Marriage Act. And while I don't know for sure, I think he's also solid on the one function of the presidency most consequential to his personal views on equal rights: judicial appointments. There are larger problems here, especially the slow pace of nominations, but I'd be very surprised if even one Obama nominee to a judgeship is positively known to be hostile to equality. The progress might be slow, but it's sure.
(The bad pun? "Leading from behind," of course.)
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Hitchens' Death
Like many people, I found Christopher Hitchens' writing both infuriating and irresistible: the smugness, the more than occasional gratuitous cruelty and flat-out wrongness (not inaccuracy, mind you, though sometimes that too) on the one hand, the usually superb construction of arguments, the erudition and the almost-always superb prose on the other. His last regular column, in Slate, was a regular pleasure even though it fell on the bad side of that line at least once or twice a month. When his cancer diagnosis became known, I always wondered how long he'd be able to keep it up; when he missed a week or two, I'd start wondering if the end was here. But it still came as a surprise when I read yesterday morning that Hitchens was dead, about two weeks after I'd read his column on the Republican presidential debates. There was no indication whatever that it would turn out to be his final one.
I find this easy to admire: while no doubt Hitchens was a world-class egomaniac and self-aggrandizer, the narcissism was untouched (at least in print) by self-pity at what happened to him. I love that he was unrepentant about all the drinking and smoking, though maybe even more that "I would have quit earlier hoping to get away with the whole thing." That's exactly reflective of a man who felt he was on his own in the universe, responsible for himself above all else and delighted at that prospect. You don't get the sense with Hitchens that he died feeling a great deal of regret about work left undone or much left unfinished.
The reaction to his demise has been interesting. For the most part it's been love and admiration, though not totally unmixed with reference to Hitchens' peevishness, disingenuousness and various other faults. Others have noted that Hitchens himself wasn't in the habit of deference to the deceased; his takedowns of the likes of Mother Teresa were legendary. Perhaps with that in mind, Glenn Greenwald has fired off the harshest postmortem on Hitchens that I've seen:
Fair enough, and to me at least Hitchens' cheerleading for the war against "Islamofascism" was his most obnoxious, unjustified and flat-out ugly position. (His over-the-top support for the hypocritical bastards who tried to impeach Bill Clinton in the late '90s, seemingly based on personal loathing for his fellow Boomer hedonist, was a fairly distant number two.) His willingness--his eagerness--to fellow-travel with the neoconservatives and provide intellectual and moral support for a global interfaith war was both tragic and, given his very public atheism, head-spinningly ironic. That he never stepped back and came closer to recanting the view than the occasional concession that the war in Iraq wasn't prosecuted all that well seems more evidence of his ego-mania than anything else. (It's a fascinating and, as far as I've seen, not-noted irony that Hitchens died within hours of the Iraq War coming to an official end.)
Even in his apostasy from the left, though, Hitchens refused to cede his intellectual or political agency. He favored Bush over Kerry in 2004, yet argued--at no personal or political advantage and probably to his disadvantage--that Bush probably stole the election in Ohio. The same stubbornness that bound him to the war in Iraq even after all its justifications collapsed had its root in the man's absolute and uncompromising resistance to totalitarianism in all its forms; in fact, I'm pretty sure that Hitchens hated Saddam Hussein for the same reason he hated the Catholic Church, and indeed organized religion in any form and flavor. He resisted control; he wouldn't accept any yoke whatever goodies, from a think-tank sinecure to the promise of eternal life, came with it.
As legacies go, this strikes me as a pretty fucking great one.
Like many people, I found Christopher Hitchens' writing both infuriating and irresistible: the smugness, the more than occasional gratuitous cruelty and flat-out wrongness (not inaccuracy, mind you, though sometimes that too) on the one hand, the usually superb construction of arguments, the erudition and the almost-always superb prose on the other. His last regular column, in Slate, was a regular pleasure even though it fell on the bad side of that line at least once or twice a month. When his cancer diagnosis became known, I always wondered how long he'd be able to keep it up; when he missed a week or two, I'd start wondering if the end was here. But it still came as a surprise when I read yesterday morning that Hitchens was dead, about two weeks after I'd read his column on the Republican presidential debates. There was no indication whatever that it would turn out to be his final one.
I find this easy to admire: while no doubt Hitchens was a world-class egomaniac and self-aggrandizer, the narcissism was untouched (at least in print) by self-pity at what happened to him. I love that he was unrepentant about all the drinking and smoking, though maybe even more that "I would have quit earlier hoping to get away with the whole thing." That's exactly reflective of a man who felt he was on his own in the universe, responsible for himself above all else and delighted at that prospect. You don't get the sense with Hitchens that he died feeling a great deal of regret about work left undone or much left unfinished.
The reaction to his demise has been interesting. For the most part it's been love and admiration, though not totally unmixed with reference to Hitchens' peevishness, disingenuousness and various other faults. Others have noted that Hitchens himself wasn't in the habit of deference to the deceased; his takedowns of the likes of Mother Teresa were legendary. Perhaps with that in mind, Glenn Greenwald has fired off the harshest postmortem on Hitchens that I've seen:
[F]for the public at large, at least those who knew of him, Hitchens was an extremely controversial, polarizing figure. And particularly over the last decade, he expressed views — not ancillary to his writing but central to them — that were nothing short of repellent.
...
Subordinating his brave and intellectually rigorous defense of atheism, Hitchens’ glee over violence, bloodshed, and perpetual war dominated the last decade of his life. Dennis Perrin, a friend and former protégée of Hitchens, described all the way back in 2003 how Hitchens’ virtues as a writer and thinker were fully swamped by his pulsating excitement over war and the Bush/Cheney imperial agenda...
There’s one other aspect to the adulation of Hitchens that’s quite revealing. There seems to be this sense that his excellent facility with prose excuses his sins. Part of that is the by-product of America’s refusal to come to terms with just how heinous and destructive was the attack on Iraq. That act of aggression is still viewed as a mere run-of-the-mill “mistake” — hey, we all make them, so we shouldn’t hold it against Hitch – rather than what it is: the generation’s worst political crime, one for which he remained fully unrepentant and even proud.
Fair enough, and to me at least Hitchens' cheerleading for the war against "Islamofascism" was his most obnoxious, unjustified and flat-out ugly position. (His over-the-top support for the hypocritical bastards who tried to impeach Bill Clinton in the late '90s, seemingly based on personal loathing for his fellow Boomer hedonist, was a fairly distant number two.) His willingness--his eagerness--to fellow-travel with the neoconservatives and provide intellectual and moral support for a global interfaith war was both tragic and, given his very public atheism, head-spinningly ironic. That he never stepped back and came closer to recanting the view than the occasional concession that the war in Iraq wasn't prosecuted all that well seems more evidence of his ego-mania than anything else. (It's a fascinating and, as far as I've seen, not-noted irony that Hitchens died within hours of the Iraq War coming to an official end.)
Even in his apostasy from the left, though, Hitchens refused to cede his intellectual or political agency. He favored Bush over Kerry in 2004, yet argued--at no personal or political advantage and probably to his disadvantage--that Bush probably stole the election in Ohio. The same stubbornness that bound him to the war in Iraq even after all its justifications collapsed had its root in the man's absolute and uncompromising resistance to totalitarianism in all its forms; in fact, I'm pretty sure that Hitchens hated Saddam Hussein for the same reason he hated the Catholic Church, and indeed organized religion in any form and flavor. He resisted control; he wouldn't accept any yoke whatever goodies, from a think-tank sinecure to the promise of eternal life, came with it.
As legacies go, this strikes me as a pretty fucking great one.
Saturday, December 03, 2011
When the Entertainers Run the Asylum
So it sounds like Herman Cain has shucky-duckied his way out of the Republican presidential contest, but thankfully we've got someone else returning to fill his sizable clown shoes: The Donald, who will be moderating a Republican debate with the frothing right-wing outlet Newsmax.
Normally at this point I'd probably emit a sad sigh and say something about how this reflects the country's steep downward plunge. But while that sentiment is in there somewhere, right now I'm feeling more inclined toward schadenfreude: the chickens of Republicans turning over their party to its most entertaining and least serious elements are coming home to roost, and it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.
Trump essentially will be holding a televised contest for his endorsement: it probably will attract more attention than any other debate this year, and no doubt he'll make them work for it in full view of a public that mostly will be horrified at just how nutzo the Republicans have become... a point I don't think is generally appreciated. Because Trump is nuts--and the way to get his endorsement will be to ape him as closely as possible. For his part, is there any doubt at all whether Donald Trump cares more about the fate of the nation or the gratification of his own ego?
Two Republicans already have announced that they won't attend: the social moderate (but economic uber-con) Jon Huntsman and the libertarian Ron Paul. While Paul is pretty repulsive on a lot of fronts, he does seem to grasp the idea that the presidency is a dignified and important office that probably shouldn't be sullied by immersion in the spectacle of reality TV. (That said, Paul's flack seems to suggest that the old Texan would consider joining were Trump to publicly apologize for a past diss of Iowa Republicans... which is kind of clever if rather oily.) For Huntsman's part, he probably realizes he's got nothing to gain by fishing in that pool; his hope at this point is for Republicans to take a second look and realize that, one, the guy is a true conservative, and two, he probably could win. There's some reason to believe this is starting to happen.
Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich already has accepted the invite to Trump's debate show, making it that much more likely Mitt Romney will join as well. The other two Fox candidates, Frothy Mix and Batshit, surely will go and could emerge with the endorsement of their fellow entertainer. (If Trump doesn't give his nod to one of them, it's likely because he realizes they won't win and worries that his brand will suffer by association with a loser. When it comes to that sort of thing, the guy is legitimately sharp if no less repugnant.) Rick Perry, if he's not out by then, probably will go too; he's got the mammoth self-regard and sneering hatred of "libburls" that Trump will recognize and gravitate to, and it actually wouldn't shock me if Trump wound up supporting Perry.
I don't doubt that "establishment Republicans" are having a bad couple days with all this. They seem pretty conclusively to have lost control: when Karl Rove goes on TV to attack Republicans like Bachmann and Perry, you know The Plan has gone awry. They're still hoping for Romney, of course, but the guy inspires neither excitement nor trust.
Were this somehow all happening on the Democratic side, where shitting on the base is expected and in fact cheered, the likely result would be at least one or two candidates joining and delivering a "Sister Souljah moment": in this case, maybe taking Trump to task for his focus on Obama's birth certificate or other manifestations of Trump's unseriousness. But for every candidate other than Romney, this will be a case of like visiting like: Gingrich probably did more than anyone in the last thirty years to transform our politics into the zero-sum blood sport game that rightly disgusts so many Americans, and Bachmann and Santorum are both mostly known for extreme statements and personal eccentricity. (Well, maybe not in Santorum's case; he's best known as the deserving victim of the greatest political trick of the modern era.)
Romney is in a different and probably unique category. As I've written before, he passes the "me test": I don't for a second doubt that he's far smarter than I am, has better judgment and is incalculably more organized, so I'd rather see him in the presidency than me despite my disdain for his views. One recent New York magazine article presents a fascinating story of how Romney can make a pretty substantial claim as the architect of the modern "1% percent economy"--an accomplishment that's impressive whatever you think of its tangible results.
But he's got an evidently uncontrollable impulse to pander--which I think is at the core of why everyone, left and right, mistrusts him. Robert Draper's profile in this weekend's Times magazine leaves the reader equally with respect for Romney's intellect and managerial skills, and astonishment at his difficulty committing or connecting. Add in some recent signs of pique and the general and I think involuntary air he projects of being somehow too good for the (admittedly draining, depressing and disgusting) process of running for the presidency, and you're left with the impression of a candidate much stronger on paper than in reality.
It's almost enough to make you feel bad for the guy--and then you remember what he's actually for and the incredible damage his preferred policies already have done, and you're suddenly thankful for Donald Trump's ego and the rapacious stupidity of his co-partisans.
So it sounds like Herman Cain has shucky-duckied his way out of the Republican presidential contest, but thankfully we've got someone else returning to fill his sizable clown shoes: The Donald, who will be moderating a Republican debate with the frothing right-wing outlet Newsmax.
“Our readers and the grass roots really love Trump,” said Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media. “They may not agree with him on everything, but they don’t see him as owned by the Washington establishment, the media establishment.”
...
[D]espite being derided by liberals – President Obama likened Mr. Trump to a “carnival barker” for his repeated assertions that the president was actually foreign-born – the real estate mogul carries weight with a certain element of the conservative base. And that sway seems particularly strong with the Tea Party wing of the base, which will be a decisive factor in the early primaries that are likely to determine the nominee. The debate, which unlike many recent ones will not be limited to a specific topic like national security or the economy, is set to happen just a week before the Iowa caucuses.
Newsmax sent candidates the invitation on Friday afternoon. It began, “We are pleased to cordially invite you to “The Newsmax Ion Television 2012 Presidential Debate,” moderated by a truly great American, Mr. Donald J. Trump.” Spokesmen for several candidates did not immediately respond to questions from The New York Times about whether they would accept.
Though presidential candidates may initially balk at the idea of appearing in a debate where Mr. Trump – with his bombast and The Hair – is the one posing the questions, they may ultimately see it as an invitation they can’t refuse. In fact many of the candidates have already met with him, some more publicly than others. Representative Michele Bachmann has sat down with Mr. Trump several times this year. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas had dinner with him at Jean Georges, the posh Manhattan restaurant. And Mitt Romney paid a visit but carefully avoided being photographed.
And Newsmax is a powerful player itself. It has a broad reach into the conservative base, with monthly Web traffic second only to Fox News among sites with conservative-leaning audiences.
Normally at this point I'd probably emit a sad sigh and say something about how this reflects the country's steep downward plunge. But while that sentiment is in there somewhere, right now I'm feeling more inclined toward schadenfreude: the chickens of Republicans turning over their party to its most entertaining and least serious elements are coming home to roost, and it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.
Trump essentially will be holding a televised contest for his endorsement: it probably will attract more attention than any other debate this year, and no doubt he'll make them work for it in full view of a public that mostly will be horrified at just how nutzo the Republicans have become... a point I don't think is generally appreciated. Because Trump is nuts--and the way to get his endorsement will be to ape him as closely as possible. For his part, is there any doubt at all whether Donald Trump cares more about the fate of the nation or the gratification of his own ego?
Two Republicans already have announced that they won't attend: the social moderate (but economic uber-con) Jon Huntsman and the libertarian Ron Paul. While Paul is pretty repulsive on a lot of fronts, he does seem to grasp the idea that the presidency is a dignified and important office that probably shouldn't be sullied by immersion in the spectacle of reality TV. (That said, Paul's flack seems to suggest that the old Texan would consider joining were Trump to publicly apologize for a past diss of Iowa Republicans... which is kind of clever if rather oily.) For Huntsman's part, he probably realizes he's got nothing to gain by fishing in that pool; his hope at this point is for Republicans to take a second look and realize that, one, the guy is a true conservative, and two, he probably could win. There's some reason to believe this is starting to happen.
Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich already has accepted the invite to Trump's debate show, making it that much more likely Mitt Romney will join as well. The other two Fox candidates, Frothy Mix and Batshit, surely will go and could emerge with the endorsement of their fellow entertainer. (If Trump doesn't give his nod to one of them, it's likely because he realizes they won't win and worries that his brand will suffer by association with a loser. When it comes to that sort of thing, the guy is legitimately sharp if no less repugnant.) Rick Perry, if he's not out by then, probably will go too; he's got the mammoth self-regard and sneering hatred of "libburls" that Trump will recognize and gravitate to, and it actually wouldn't shock me if Trump wound up supporting Perry.
I don't doubt that "establishment Republicans" are having a bad couple days with all this. They seem pretty conclusively to have lost control: when Karl Rove goes on TV to attack Republicans like Bachmann and Perry, you know The Plan has gone awry. They're still hoping for Romney, of course, but the guy inspires neither excitement nor trust.
Were this somehow all happening on the Democratic side, where shitting on the base is expected and in fact cheered, the likely result would be at least one or two candidates joining and delivering a "Sister Souljah moment": in this case, maybe taking Trump to task for his focus on Obama's birth certificate or other manifestations of Trump's unseriousness. But for every candidate other than Romney, this will be a case of like visiting like: Gingrich probably did more than anyone in the last thirty years to transform our politics into the zero-sum blood sport game that rightly disgusts so many Americans, and Bachmann and Santorum are both mostly known for extreme statements and personal eccentricity. (Well, maybe not in Santorum's case; he's best known as the deserving victim of the greatest political trick of the modern era.)
Romney is in a different and probably unique category. As I've written before, he passes the "me test": I don't for a second doubt that he's far smarter than I am, has better judgment and is incalculably more organized, so I'd rather see him in the presidency than me despite my disdain for his views. One recent New York magazine article presents a fascinating story of how Romney can make a pretty substantial claim as the architect of the modern "1% percent economy"--an accomplishment that's impressive whatever you think of its tangible results.
But he's got an evidently uncontrollable impulse to pander--which I think is at the core of why everyone, left and right, mistrusts him. Robert Draper's profile in this weekend's Times magazine leaves the reader equally with respect for Romney's intellect and managerial skills, and astonishment at his difficulty committing or connecting. Add in some recent signs of pique and the general and I think involuntary air he projects of being somehow too good for the (admittedly draining, depressing and disgusting) process of running for the presidency, and you're left with the impression of a candidate much stronger on paper than in reality.
It's almost enough to make you feel bad for the guy--and then you remember what he's actually for and the incredible damage his preferred policies already have done, and you're suddenly thankful for Donald Trump's ego and the rapacious stupidity of his co-partisans.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
On God Telling You to Run for President
Three of the Republican presidential candidates now have 'fessed up to be just following orders from the Almighty: Michele "Batshit" Bachmann, Rick Perry (who apparently needs more specific instruction), and now Herman Cain.
My first thought about this was to admire God's sense of humor. What if they're all telling the truth? I imagined Him and His buddies sitting in the divine version of a man-cave (switch the pronouns if you'd like), pounding brews and cracking up over how He's jerking these dopes around. Granted, the Simpsons already did this in the one where Lisa is Joan of Arc, but if you're going to excise the full Simpsons oeuvre from the realm of dramatic consideration, you've got very little left.
I posted something to this effect on BackSheGoes, and someone responded with the fair-enough point that in the milieu of the Republican primary voter, this both bestows cred and serves as a signifier of humility, because it suggests a motivation other than ambition. In the cases of Perry and Cain, any indication of something other than unlimited self-regard is probably welcome. Then again, humility is usually connected to self-awareness, and Bachmann falls terribly short on that score: I wouldn't be surprised if she literally started flinging poop at one of these debates, and no doubt she'd assert that also was on celestial instruction.
Of course, the thought I've always had regarding most of these folks and their conversations with God is that it's uncanny how often He tells them what they want to hear. I figured George W. Bush's vision of the Almighty was as a smarter version of W. himself, presumably without the daddy issues. That they view themselves as worthy of being God's instrument on Earth also suggests to me something different than, and in fact more like opposed to, humility.
In my admittedly limited grappling with theology, I never totally grasped the doctrine of unconditional election, the idea that God saved some while condemning others. I never wanted to understand it, I think; it felt too much like a blank check, a cosmic cop-out. If you're certain you're saved, you have nothing at stake; by the theory, there's no limit to what evil you can do without consequences, at least not the ultimate, eternal consequence. The twist, I suppose, is that nobody can be certain. But given the very evident self-regard of the individuals we're discussing here, can there be any doubt where they'd place themselves? We know what these people have done: Bachmann's hysterical homophobia, Cain's alleged acts of sexual aggression, Perry's pay-for-play despoiling of the earth. If they're all in God's good books, it's all forgiven... in fact, it's all encouraged: it's all Part of the Plan.
I guess there is another, more sympathetic view one could take. By most accounts, Lincoln's faith evolved while he was in office. This is understandable, of course; the life-and-death decisions he made every day surely created a powerful psychological pressure to find larger meaning, and the thought that all the suffering and destruction and extinguishing of life might have no larger purpose or higher sanction must have been unbearable. He famously said: "My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side." The doubt suggested by that framing seems far more resonant with Christian humility as I understand it than the bleating of the Republican presidential candidates. But perhaps there's a similar, very human, very vulnerable, yearning for certainty buried in what seems so much like bluster. Who would want to act--let alone vote, much less run--against God?
Three of the Republican presidential candidates now have 'fessed up to be just following orders from the Almighty: Michele "Batshit" Bachmann, Rick Perry (who apparently needs more specific instruction), and now Herman Cain.
My first thought about this was to admire God's sense of humor. What if they're all telling the truth? I imagined Him and His buddies sitting in the divine version of a man-cave (switch the pronouns if you'd like), pounding brews and cracking up over how He's jerking these dopes around. Granted, the Simpsons already did this in the one where Lisa is Joan of Arc, but if you're going to excise the full Simpsons oeuvre from the realm of dramatic consideration, you've got very little left.
I posted something to this effect on BackSheGoes, and someone responded with the fair-enough point that in the milieu of the Republican primary voter, this both bestows cred and serves as a signifier of humility, because it suggests a motivation other than ambition. In the cases of Perry and Cain, any indication of something other than unlimited self-regard is probably welcome. Then again, humility is usually connected to self-awareness, and Bachmann falls terribly short on that score: I wouldn't be surprised if she literally started flinging poop at one of these debates, and no doubt she'd assert that also was on celestial instruction.
Of course, the thought I've always had regarding most of these folks and their conversations with God is that it's uncanny how often He tells them what they want to hear. I figured George W. Bush's vision of the Almighty was as a smarter version of W. himself, presumably without the daddy issues. That they view themselves as worthy of being God's instrument on Earth also suggests to me something different than, and in fact more like opposed to, humility.
In my admittedly limited grappling with theology, I never totally grasped the doctrine of unconditional election, the idea that God saved some while condemning others. I never wanted to understand it, I think; it felt too much like a blank check, a cosmic cop-out. If you're certain you're saved, you have nothing at stake; by the theory, there's no limit to what evil you can do without consequences, at least not the ultimate, eternal consequence. The twist, I suppose, is that nobody can be certain. But given the very evident self-regard of the individuals we're discussing here, can there be any doubt where they'd place themselves? We know what these people have done: Bachmann's hysterical homophobia, Cain's alleged acts of sexual aggression, Perry's pay-for-play despoiling of the earth. If they're all in God's good books, it's all forgiven... in fact, it's all encouraged: it's all Part of the Plan.
I guess there is another, more sympathetic view one could take. By most accounts, Lincoln's faith evolved while he was in office. This is understandable, of course; the life-and-death decisions he made every day surely created a powerful psychological pressure to find larger meaning, and the thought that all the suffering and destruction and extinguishing of life might have no larger purpose or higher sanction must have been unbearable. He famously said: "My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side." The doubt suggested by that framing seems far more resonant with Christian humility as I understand it than the bleating of the Republican presidential candidates. But perhaps there's a similar, very human, very vulnerable, yearning for certainty buried in what seems so much like bluster. Who would want to act--let alone vote, much less run--against God?
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Some Notes on Occupy Wall Street
We now seem to be at a point with the Occupy Wall Street protest where it's more likely than not it won't just disappear, as those it has targeted no doubt were hoping, but nor is it certain where it's going or what its effects might be.
I think it's fairly clear that OWS at its core is a manifestation of economic populism, both contrasting with and complementary to the reactionary cultural populism of the Tea Party. A somewhat dumb and broadly dismissive compare and contrast article in today's Times almost but doesn't quite hit the core point: both ventures arise from a sense that the game is rigged against "ordinary people." The difference is that in the Tea Party's story, the government is the direct oppressor and "real Americans"--whites, Christians--are victims, while OWS places the blame on the economic elites who have bought the government and progressively concentrated wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.
The way protest movements generally have worked in American democracy is that raw popular energy gradually translates into a policy program championed by political actors. This was true of the Populists (who were absorbed into the Democratic Party in the 1890s through the 1910s, and to whom both OWS and the TP can hearken back); the labor movement (a core element of Democratic coalitions for a century now); the civil rights movement (which initially wasn't partisan, but ultimately did more than probably any other single factor to prompt the ideological sorting that left all liberals in the Democratic Party and all conservatives in the Republican Party); and religious right (which is now a major component of the Republican coalition). It happened with the Tea Party as well--as you'd expect since the TP is essentially the back-engine of the Christian right, with its cultural resentments, attached to the lead car of the anti-tax movement. Most of the recognized champions of the Tea Party, senators elected in 2010 like Pat Toomey and Marco Rubio, are veteran politicians who cannily realized that this was a vehicle they could ride. I don't doubt the sincerity of their support for the movement--but the point is that the Tea Party agenda fit so closely with their pre-existing views as to represent continuity with, rather than a break from, what at least a big chunk of Republicans have sought for many years.
I'm not sure that will happen for Occupy Wall Street--though if it does, I think the impact will be far more fundamental in the direction of reform than has been the case with the Tea Party. In terms of style and culture, OWS is obviously much closer with the popular perception of the Democratic Party than the Republicans. What the protesters presumably want, though--a return to sensible regulation of the finance industry and a reduction of the role of money in politics and government--is as inimical to the Democrats of the last 25 years or so as it is to the Republicans. A core premise of the "New Democrat" movement and Democratic Leadership Council was that with labor's power declining, the party would have to become more business-friendly; otherwise it couldn't remain economically (and thus politically) competitive with the Republicans. The results have included the support of the Clinton administration for massive deregulation of the finance industry, low-lighted by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Famously, Wall Street strongly supported Barack Obama in 2008, and despite the perception that the finance industry now "hates" Obama, it's still not clear that the bulk of finance-sector sentiment and giving will oppose the president next year (though Mitt Romney surely is trying hard for that).
In other words, it's going to be tough for the Democrats to simply embrace (or, if you prefer, co-opt) OWS--because doing so would constitute a direct frontal assault on an enormous resource pool for the party. At the same time, though, keeping some distance from the Dems might bolster the viability of Occupy Wall Street as a real movement of reform. Popular opinion of the Tea Party began to decline as it became clear just how indistinguishable its priorities and goals were from those of the still-discredited an unpopular Republican Party. Views of OWS aren't entirely clear, but it seems like among those who know enough to have an opinion, majority sentiment is broadly positive.
Matt Taibbi points out that OWS is "bigger than left vs. right." This is both its peril and its opportunity--the former because our opinion class doesn't know how to tell political stories other than in that frame, and when it comes to views of how to treat the finance sector, there's little meaningful difference between the two parties; but the latter because, left or right, just about everyone in America realizes that there's something deeply wrong in our economy and politics, and wants to see real change.
We now seem to be at a point with the Occupy Wall Street protest where it's more likely than not it won't just disappear, as those it has targeted no doubt were hoping, but nor is it certain where it's going or what its effects might be.
I think it's fairly clear that OWS at its core is a manifestation of economic populism, both contrasting with and complementary to the reactionary cultural populism of the Tea Party. A somewhat dumb and broadly dismissive compare and contrast article in today's Times almost but doesn't quite hit the core point: both ventures arise from a sense that the game is rigged against "ordinary people." The difference is that in the Tea Party's story, the government is the direct oppressor and "real Americans"--whites, Christians--are victims, while OWS places the blame on the economic elites who have bought the government and progressively concentrated wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.
The way protest movements generally have worked in American democracy is that raw popular energy gradually translates into a policy program championed by political actors. This was true of the Populists (who were absorbed into the Democratic Party in the 1890s through the 1910s, and to whom both OWS and the TP can hearken back); the labor movement (a core element of Democratic coalitions for a century now); the civil rights movement (which initially wasn't partisan, but ultimately did more than probably any other single factor to prompt the ideological sorting that left all liberals in the Democratic Party and all conservatives in the Republican Party); and religious right (which is now a major component of the Republican coalition). It happened with the Tea Party as well--as you'd expect since the TP is essentially the back-engine of the Christian right, with its cultural resentments, attached to the lead car of the anti-tax movement. Most of the recognized champions of the Tea Party, senators elected in 2010 like Pat Toomey and Marco Rubio, are veteran politicians who cannily realized that this was a vehicle they could ride. I don't doubt the sincerity of their support for the movement--but the point is that the Tea Party agenda fit so closely with their pre-existing views as to represent continuity with, rather than a break from, what at least a big chunk of Republicans have sought for many years.
I'm not sure that will happen for Occupy Wall Street--though if it does, I think the impact will be far more fundamental in the direction of reform than has been the case with the Tea Party. In terms of style and culture, OWS is obviously much closer with the popular perception of the Democratic Party than the Republicans. What the protesters presumably want, though--a return to sensible regulation of the finance industry and a reduction of the role of money in politics and government--is as inimical to the Democrats of the last 25 years or so as it is to the Republicans. A core premise of the "New Democrat" movement and Democratic Leadership Council was that with labor's power declining, the party would have to become more business-friendly; otherwise it couldn't remain economically (and thus politically) competitive with the Republicans. The results have included the support of the Clinton administration for massive deregulation of the finance industry, low-lighted by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Famously, Wall Street strongly supported Barack Obama in 2008, and despite the perception that the finance industry now "hates" Obama, it's still not clear that the bulk of finance-sector sentiment and giving will oppose the president next year (though Mitt Romney surely is trying hard for that).
In other words, it's going to be tough for the Democrats to simply embrace (or, if you prefer, co-opt) OWS--because doing so would constitute a direct frontal assault on an enormous resource pool for the party. At the same time, though, keeping some distance from the Dems might bolster the viability of Occupy Wall Street as a real movement of reform. Popular opinion of the Tea Party began to decline as it became clear just how indistinguishable its priorities and goals were from those of the still-discredited an unpopular Republican Party. Views of OWS aren't entirely clear, but it seems like among those who know enough to have an opinion, majority sentiment is broadly positive.
Matt Taibbi points out that OWS is "bigger than left vs. right." This is both its peril and its opportunity--the former because our opinion class doesn't know how to tell political stories other than in that frame, and when it comes to views of how to treat the finance sector, there's little meaningful difference between the two parties; but the latter because, left or right, just about everyone in America realizes that there's something deeply wrong in our economy and politics, and wants to see real change.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
What I'd Be Blogging About If I Were Blogging
Each of these items probably merit a thousand words or so, if not more. But I don't feel like I have the time, and I'm less than sure I have the inclination, to give these topics the attention they deserve. So these summaries will have to do.
Each of these items probably merit a thousand words or so, if not more. But I don't feel like I have the time, and I'm less than sure I have the inclination, to give these topics the attention they deserve. So these summaries will have to do.
- Ten Years Gone: Like everyone else, I was thinking about terrorism and its effects last weekend as we reached the tenth anniversary of 9/11. As it happened, I was out of town at a family wedding in Pennsylvania Saturday and into Sunday; at that happy occasion, there was very little talk about 9/11 itself but a surprising number of references, from liberals and conservatives both, to how dysfunctional and depressing our politics are these days. I talked with a very conservative older cousin from South Carolina who's been thinking about running for Congress (he would have primaried Joe "You Lie!" Wilson) who was fully as disgusted with everything as I am; other relatives and family friends made endless passing but blistering references to the mess in Washington.
Nationally, the response to the 9/11--the dumb war in Iraq put entirely on the national credit card, the expansion of the security state, the torture regime and the rest of it--divided the country even more profoundly after the Clinton impeachment and the 2000 election, and further deepened cynicism and despair regarding government. In New York City, though, where we suffered the most in both human and psychic terms, the awfulness of that shared experience--the horror of the day itself and the enormous grief of the days and weeks afterward--brought people together, and continues to do so. There was a sense after the attack, which remains today, of "fuck those fundamentalist assholes--I'm staying right here." Bush famously said that the terrorists "hated us for our freedom." I think closer to the truth is that bin Laden hated NYC for the same reason Hitler did: the diversity, the tolerance, the functionality of an open community in which millions of unplanned human interactions every day conduce to an unmatched volume of economic and creative activity.
New York is like DC in that you'll meet very few people "from" here. But I think it's far more common to "become" a New Yorker than a Washingtonian; for all the expense and inconvenience, the place gets its hooks into you, claims you, and changes you. The experience of 9/11, for all its horror and sadness, did something like that as well. In a weird way, it made New York stronger and more of a community. That this didn't happen for the country I think is part of the national tragedy. - Thanks again, 2008 Phillies. With thirteen games left before the playoffs, the Phillies are on pace to complete the greatest season in their 129-year history. This is the most absurdly loaded baseball team I've ever had the pleasure of rooting for, with three of the five or six best starting pitchers in the league, eight all-stars in the lineup, and tremendously impressive depth--as demonstrated by the fact that they're going to set a franchise wins record despite having lost more than half the lineup to the disabled list at different points this season.
Yet they're still more likely than not to fall short of winning a second world championship in four seasons, owing to a playoff tournament in which the factors that conduce to success over 162 games--depth in the rotation and lineup, a steady managerial hand at the tiller, and the capacity and willingness to change how players are used as circumstances dictate--mean far less than who's hot that week. I'm still pretty sure the 2010 Phillies were the best team in baseball, and they were bounced by a Giants team that had about-as-good pitching and a handful of hitters who were hot while the Phils' mashers went cold. It could happen again--as it did to the Angels in 2008, the 2007 Indians, the Mets and Yankees in 2006, the Cardinals in 2005 and 2004, the Yankees and Braves in 2003... all teams that won the most games in the regular season yet didn't get to celebrate with the big trophy at the end.
If this happens to the 2011 Phillies, it'll suck. The team is both admirable for their accomplishments and likable for who we perceive them to be, and many of their most prominent players--Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Roy Oswalt, Raul Ibanez, Placido Polanco--haven't won it all despite long and accomplished careers. For Philadelphia, though, the psychic necessity for this team to win it all is severely lessened by the fact that their 2008 predecessors already did it... breaking the 25 year championship drought that had even the most rational Philadelphians (admittedly, a low bar) wondering if the town might not in fact be operating under a curse. That such considerations won't be on the minds of fans this October should lessen the tension level to something survivable... though I'll still probably revert to functional alcoholism for the month. I'm not sure how else to do it. - One to watch. I might actually have an aspirant to political office to seriously cheer for in 2012: Elizabeth Warren, the consumer advocate who's running against the very pretty Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts. In theory, Warren should be a strong candidate: at a time when the public detests career politicians, she joins the race as a 62 year-old outsider with modest roots and a great story of economic populism to tell. If she wins--and it's kind of extraordinary that even certain folks relatively far out on the right are open to her candidacy. And I felt this way even before seeing the word "workforce" in the top item on her "priorities" web page. In a time when the Democrats have at best allowed and at worst abetted the destruction of the middle class and a concentration of wealth unprecedented in recent history, Warren's message should resonate. Here's hoping,
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Some Musings on the Campaign
Because watching things fall apart can be fun...
Because watching things fall apart can be fun...
- Tim Pawlenty ended his campaign last week after losing to state-mate Rep. Batshit in Iowa. As he continued on in the race, Pawlenty increasingly reminded me of a fictional Minnesotan: Jerry Lundegaard, William H. Macy's hapless car sales manager/would-be kidnapper in "Fargo." Like Jerry, "T-Paw" seemed constantly to be trying to project a confidence and charisma he didn't feel, and perhaps thought himself smarter than he was. The theory of Pawlenty's campaign was that he could emerge as more tolerable to the Zombie Army than Mitt Romney while remaining acceptable to the money gang whose preferences are usually determinative. But this required showing something to both groups--and Pawlenty delivered for neither, failing to take Romney on in an early debate and proving unable to raise enough money to endure a setback in the silly straw poll.
- I think this probably could have been predicted from Pawlenty's memoir title, "Courage to Stand." To stand for what? I think the silent subtitle is "For Whatever You'd Like Me to Believe." Even there, he was never going to out-pander Romney. That awful title has me trying to think up equally lame political memoir names: Forward to Our Future? My American Adventure? Patriotism and Principle? Blech.
- The new Republican contender who's aiming to be mutually acceptable to the nuts and the greedheads is Rick Perry. He's got a much better chance than Pawlenty, because he's not boring. Perry's problem is that he's so obviously an asshole, and unlike New Jersey governor Chris Christie--another unapologetic asshole, but a pretty clearly intelligent and engaged guy--there seems to be little principle and less thought behind it. The Bush comps are obvious and valid as far as they go, but what the pundits seem to be missing is that the press corps on some level must feel remorse at having given Dubya such a relatively easy ride in 2000; they won't do that with Perry. His personality is just much uglier than Bush's, his politics far more raw, and the public will see all that in high-def.
- I'm starting to wonder if Jon Huntsman has it somewhere in his head to go independent. The mullahs of right-wing radio surely will go fatwa on him after his TV appearance tomorrow morning, if they haven't already. His polling is in Gingrich territory. He's got little institutional support. But he projects reasonableness, he's got some clear admirers in the press corps... and the country is utterly disgusted with politics-as-usual. Also, his family is really, really, really rich. There are efforts in progress to secure national ballot access for independents. What if Huntsman announces in December or early January that he's leaving the Republican Party because our country's problems are too big for partisanship-as-usual--the same logic he can claim for his decision to serve in the Obama administration--and that he'll seek the presidency as an independent? If he could claim endorsements from every disaffected Republican--Colin Powell, Bruce Bartlett, Alan Simpson--and a bunch of civic-minded business leader/officials like Bloomberg? Maybe some of the old Clinton machinery would come around for him. It's a long shot, but I think there's a certain logic to it. He's damn sure not going to win as a Republican, and I think Sullivan is being over-optimistic yet again if he thinks the Rs will be more receptive to a Huntsman campaign by 2016.
- Speaking of Sullivan, he published a letter of mine that essentially covered the same ground as the previous post. See it here, if you'd like. This is where I think both his own biases and his deep investment in Obama--which I readily grasp--blind him; Obama's "restraint" isn't even the issue so much as his willingness if not eagerness to continually shit on his "base." The evidence is coming in that this will be a huge problem for him next year.
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