Conservatives have historically argued against progressive policies on a variety of fronts: the unintended consequences of change, the primacy of the individual over government, the dangers of a growing bureaucracy (or more generically, "big government"), the importance of traditional values and local control, the worry of people growing too dependent on government, etc. With increasing vehemence, though, conservatives have begun to argue that kind-heartedness, compassion, and a sense of community are actually evil: that they lead inevitably to Nazism and death camps.
Political debate has always been hot and heavy in this country, with conservatives swinging hard and heavy and making some pretty wild claims: the pro-British Tories in the 1770s decried the "rats of democracy"; the pro-slavery Southern planters in the first half of the 1800s said that slaves were better off than if they were free; the Social Darwinists said society would be better off if the poor were allowed to starve to death, because their death would improve the gene pool. But the compassion equals evil argument didn't really get laid out in detail until Ayn Rand's writings, where she actually did argue that people with compassion and concern for others were leeches who drained society of its competitive life blood.
Just as Ayn Rand took the Social Darwinist argument and made it more virulent, the conservative author Jonah Goldberg brought a new, more extreme twist to the argument, literally saying that progressives like FDR were ideological soul mates of Hitler and Mussolini's brand of fascism. This easily debunked book has become the right's excuse for accusing everyone arguing for progressive causes of being a Nazi.
Glenn Beck is, of course, the present day leader of the pack when it comes to this kind of invective. Here's his latest insight on the subject:
The Washington Post this morning had a story on the front page about how President Obama may be treating some states as a no fly zone during this election year because he is so unpopular in those states. And on page two, they have a big article titled "Anger Doesn't Stop at Health Care Reform," about all the conservatives so very, very angry at Obama over everything. And on page three, they have a big article all about the tea partiers because, well, I guess the Washington Post editors were just feeling like the tea partiers hadn't gotten enough attention.
As one of the first people to start warning my fellow Democrats (back in Feb of last year) about the foul mood voters were in because of a broken economy not improving fast enough and special interests still seeming like they controlled DC, I have to make the observation that the traditional media still is not getting the story right. Yeah, no kidding, there is anger out there, but it's not all anti-Obama, it's not all based in the tea party, and there is a lot more nuance to it than the traditional media understands.
Here are some things to keep in mind about the anger thing:
1. Obama's approval rating has been hanging around 50% for a long time, not great, but given a tough economy that's not bad either. In fact, the latest approval number I saw was 53% - exactly the same percentage of the vote he got winning a big, impressive victory in November of 2008. His numbers are not plummeting, and most voters are in fact not incredibly angry with him. Mixed feelings, some disappointment, some discouragement, and a little cynicism for sure. But outside of the hardcore Republican right, not so much anger.
2. Speaking of the hardcore Republican right, there is nothing new or dramatic about the tea partiers. The same anger, the same demographic (white Christian men, tending more rural and older than the rest of the population) was around in 1993-94 when Clinton was in office, and the same demographic was the heart of the angry backlash against civil rights and peace protesters in the 1960s. The only thing new about this is the fact that the President is a black guy with an immigrant father might gin them up a little more than usual. But these angry white males (as the media called them in the early 1990s) represent about the same sliver of the electorate as they did then, maybe 20%.
3. To be clear, the tea partiers aren't the only angry people in America. There are plenty of working class swing voters who aren't inclined to buy into the tea party stew of racism, nativism, and Ayn Rand style libertarianism, but are deeply troubled that the jobs situation isn't improving and that no one in government seems to be looking out for them. There are plenty of progressive activists angry at the Wall Street bankers, the health insurance companies, and the other corporate interests that are screwing them, and are angry that too many politicians seem to be in their pocket. In both cases, Obama and his fellow Democrats still have the opportunity to reach them, still have the ability to make absolutely clear whose side they are on. If Democrats show those voters that they will reject those special interests, and fight hard for average folks' interests, they can still win this election. If they show voters that they are just as angry about what's been done to regular people as the regular people, they will have a better 2010 than anyone is predicting right now.
The media loves-loves-loves this tea party story, but the tea partiers really aren't anything new, and they don't represent a very big group of voters. There is a lot of anger out there, but most of it is righteous anger that Democrats can and should tap into - anger that Wall Street and other bad actor big companies have been allowed to destroy our economy, and that no one is taking them on for it.
Conservative philosophy has been on full-throated display in recent days. Between the Republican talking points at the Health Care Summit (which essentially boiled down to "we don't care about the uninsured or less healthy people, especially if it might cost any rich people a penny in taxes"), the Senate floor where Republicans held hostage a bill to help unemployed people because they wanted a chance to let mega-millionaires off the hook on inheritance taxes, and the speeches at the CPAC conference, the last few days have allowed us all to see the modern conservative philosophy in all its undisguised glory. My reaction to all this is that I owe Ayn Rand an apology. Given that she's been dead for a while, she's not likely to care, but even so Ayn: I'm sorry. I underestimated your influence. Where I wrote my book about the history of the American political debate, The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be, I neglected to mention Rand. I did this for a couple reasons. One was because her extreme form of libertarianism seemed to me only one modest strand compared to the intellectual and/or political giants of historical American conservatism such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John C. Calhoun, the Social Darwinists, or even the modern day conservative movement builders like Buckley, Helms, Goldwater, or Reagan.
The other reason that I discounted her was, well - how do I put this diplomatically? She was such a freak. Her twisted novels extolling selfishness and cruelty - apparently based in part on her admiration of a kidnapper and murderer who dismembered his twelve year old victim and threw her head and torso at the girl's father as he sped away in a car - are so twisted and nasty that I had trouble believing she really merited note in a discussion of influential conservatives. But the victory of libertarian Ayn Rand disciple Ron Paul at the CPAC straw poll, the strong influences of her thinking on such CPAC heroes as Michelle Bachman and Glenn Beck, and the increasingly strident me-first-and-only-me rhetoric of a Republican party utterly captured by Tea Partiers have made me realize just how big Rand's influence is. Rand's philosophical magnum opus was a book she entitled "The Virtue of Selfishness." In it she argues not only that selfishness is moral and good, but that altruism, charity, and even kindness are evils - a "moral cannibalism" is what she called it. Like Glenn Beck, who glorified (to the laughter and cheers of the CPAC audience) the "lion eating the weak," people who are poor or weakened or in trouble for any reason are just parasites, nothing more.
Rand went even further, writing that people who place even their families and friends above their own work and desires are immoral. Rand and Beck's philosophy that selfishness is the ultimate virtue, and that any kindness or generosity or compassion toward others - even your own family and friends - is so the opposite of what all the world's great religions and moral traditions teach us that you would think Bible toting conservatives would run from these beliefs. You'd think that the contradictions would be too great, and there are certainly rifts at times between the true libertarians and the Christian conservatives. But for political reasons conservatives try hard to keep a combination of these two philosophical strains in place at the same time, a sort of hybrid conservative that scours the Bible for quotes that can be somehow interpreted as pro-free market and against taxing the rich. My personal favorites in this genre include a Christian Coalition issues guide which argues against labor unions by quoting a verse about how slaves should obey their masters, and a guy named David Barton who argues that the Parable of the Talents (which some Bible readers might have thought was an analogy about spiritual matters) means that there should be no Capital Gains tax.
Homo sapiens, that means us, is what's known as an ultrasocial species. That means we're so cooperative that groups of hundreds, even thousands of us, can distribute tasks, share rewards, have common goals and tolerate each other's proximity in abundance. We're the only ultrasocial species whose groups operate more on reciprocity than kin relationships.
If we were the creatures Ayn Rand's disciples think we are, we would live like bears, who have no civilization to speak of, no language in which to speak of it, and never will.
Which is why the current incarnations of plutocracy, patriarchy and all other 'screw you, I've got mine' politics are, in the deepest sense, antisocial. They're anti-civilization. What betrays the reciprocity of the social compact betrays the most useful trait of our species, the one arguably most responsible for our success. The people who hold these views are free riders, parasites, if you will, on the public good of basic human nature.
Our greatest good is the presence and well-being of other humans. Maybe in a spiritual sense, but definitely in a hardwired, biological sense. Consider that a person in jail can literally go mad from a lack of contact in solitary confinement, in ways that prisoners in contact with inmates or guards who are torturing them will not.
Humans just need each other.
Not only isn't there anything wrong with that, it's the only basis for policy that can stand the test of time. Just in case anyone still gives as much of a damn about building civilizations as blowing them up.
I saw it Friday night. I considered it important to see it on the first weekend rather than wait until it came to the $2.00 movie house. It is important to show our solidarity with him.
And then I had all the mixed feelings afterwards. Not feeling sorry for people who used long time family homes as an ATM machine. Particularly when one family had pictures of Bush on the wall. People suffering need to know that their vote has consequences.
The pay of pilots under $20,000 astonished me. And just barely in the $20,0000 was not less so. I knew about the juvenile detention center before and was relieved to see it included. And the Wisconsin coops were a wonder.
Two extremely interesting articles were published this week that shine a light on current wave of conservative lunacy. First, at Salon, Alexander Zaitchik has a fascinating article, "Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life", with the sub-head, "Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him". The subhead is actually misleading. It wasn't conservatives who despised Skousen--it was ultra-conservatives like J. Edgar Hoover and the elders of the Mormon Church. More on Skousen and Beck in Part 2. But first, I want to ruminate on some new-to-most-of-us information about Ayn Rand, whose books have been selling like hotcakes since Obama came to power.
On Tuesday, author Tim Wise--a leading authority on deconstructing white supremacy and white privilege, from the blatant to the subtle--posted a fascinating diary at DKos, Sociopathy on the Right: Ayn Rand and the Triumph of Conservative Cultism, the most shocking aspect of which was the revelation that an early heroic model for Rand was a notorious sociopathic child-kidnapper and killer, William Edward Hickman. This is actually not a new revelation. Wise cites an online essay by Michael Prescott written in 2005, "Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman", which goes into considerable detail. (Prescott, btw, is a conservative crime novelist, so there's no way this can be construed as a leftwing attack on Rand. See, for example, his 2005 blog post "Welcome back, CNN", in which he announces his abandonment of Fox, because it's become a tabloid sewer--not because they lie like dogs.)
Among other things, Prescott wrote:
In her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement, "What is good for me is right," a credo attributed to a prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman. Her response was enthusiastic. "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard," she exulted. (Quoted in Ryan, citing Journals of Ayn Rand, pp. 21-22.)
Ayn Rand, a murder groupie. Who knew? OTOH, who's surprised, once you stop and think about it?. But this bizarre revelation--which ought to surprise no one--is only one aspect of the profoundly confused and contradiction-riddled state of the American right today. Wise begins his piece with Rush Limbaugh's rant condemning President Obama for speaking about community service on September 11. Community service is for losers, Limbaugh insisted:
"Let prisoners do it, let prisoners pick up the trash. Let prisoners mow some highway grass. This -- this community service, folks, it's insidious. It is nothing more than a well-sounding compassionate label. But it means something entirely different. It means turning you into a robot."
Of course, community service was also a key part of George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism," too. In fact, it was supposed to be an alternative to "big government." This was the entire original thesis behind Marvin Olasky's coining the term in the first place, before Bush picked it up and ran (for President) with it.
Details, details.
Wise segues from Limbaugh's attack on service to his discussion of Rand, which is a natural on one level. But on another, not so much:
Ayn Rand, Murder Groupie--And Other Questionable Delights
Two extremely interesting articles were published this week that shine a light on current wave of conservative lunacy. First, at Salon, Alexander Zaitchik has a fascinating article, "Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life", with the sub-head, "Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him". The subhead is actually a bit misleading. It wasn't conservatives who despised Skousen-it was ultra-conservatives like J. Edgar Hoover and the elders of the Mormon Church. More on Skousen in Part 2 of this diary mini-series. But first, I want to ruminate on some new-to-most-of-us information about Ayn Rand, whose books have been selling like hotcakes since Obama came to power.
On Tuesday, author Tim Wise-a leading authority on deconstructing white supremacy and white privilege, from the blatant to the subtle-posted a fascinating diary at DKos, Sociopathy on the Right: Ayn Rand and the Triumph of Conservative Cultism, the most shocking aspect of which was the revelation that an early heroic model for Rand was a notorious sociopathic child-kidnapper and killer, William Edward Hickman. This is actually not a new revelation. Wise cites an online essay by Michael Prescott written in 2005, "Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman", which goes into considerable detail. (Prescott, btw, is a conservative crime novelist, so there's no way this can be construed as a leftwing attack on Rand. See, for example, his 2005 blog post "Welcome back, CNN", in which he announces his abandonment of Fox, because it's become a tabloid sewer-not because they lie like dogs.)
Among other things, Prescott wrote:
In her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement, "What is good for me is right," a credo attributed to a prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman. Her response was enthusiastic. "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard," she exulted. (Quoted in Ryan, citing Journals of Ayn Rand, pp. 21-22.)
Ayn Rand, a murder groupie. Who knew? OTOH, who's surprised, once you stop and think about it?. But this bizarre revelation-which ought to surprise no one-is only one aspect of the profoundly confused and contradiction-riddled state of the American right today. Wise begins his piece with Rush Limbaugh's rant condemning President Obama for speaking about community service on September 11. Community service is for losers, Limbaugh insisted:
"Let prisoners do it, let prisoners pick up the trash. Let prisoners mow some highway grass. This -- this community service, folks, it's insidious. It is nothing more than a well-sounding compassionate label. But it means something entirely different. It means turning you into a robot."
Of course, community service was also a key part of George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism," too. In fact, it was supposed to be an alternative to "big government." This was the entire original thesis behind Marvin Olasky's coining the term in the first place, before Bush picked it up and ran (for President) with it.
Details, details.
Wise segues from Limbaugh's attack on service to his discussion of Rand, which is a natural on one level. But on another, not so much:
In an era of horrific mooching by the unproductive classes, some of you may have wondered why the Captains of Industry have not yet scaled back their efforts and "gone Galt" to punish us for our looting. Well the answer has been obvious, if you want a bunch of unctuous spoiled 3rd-basers to live in some remote gully somewhere, there had better be unlimited electricity to power their laptops, espresso makers and foot massagers!
In Rand's vision, the solution was Galt's Motor, a magical contrivance that was able to utilize static electricity in the atmosphere to power the enclave of the noble Gulchers.
Now, in the real world, the promise of magical free energy has risen again, in the form of Cold Fusion.
Note to journalists: Please report that this research was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society
SALT LAKE CITY, March 23, 2009 - Researchers are reporting compelling new scientific evidence for the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the process once called "cold fusion" that may promise a new source of energy. One group of scientists, for instance, describes what it terms the first clear visual evidence that LENR devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists view as tell-tale signs that nuclear reactions are occurring.
bold in original
After all, this is the story of people feeling unfairly compensated for their efforts who decide to form a union and go on strike in order to secure better wages and conditions. An injury to one is an injury to all.
When EFCA passes, all the rich people threatening to quit creating jobs and prosperity will find it easier to form a union, and be able to keep scabs from ruining their glorious collective action by taking up all the work they're going to abandon.
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