Should the people of a given country be allowed to vote in free and fair elections, even if the people they elect are fundamentally hostile to the United States?
That is the great question which is facing America today, as protests have toppled the leader of Tunisia and now threaten the presidency of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Imagine trying to visit your favorite website, only to find -- BZZT! -- the site's been blocked by the government. It happens every day in China and Iran, but now the U.S. Senate wants to bring Internet censorship home.
This week the Senate Judiciary Committee is planning to pass a bill called COICA which would let the Attorney General force all American ISPs to block particular websites. It'd be the first time the we'd set up an Internet censorship regime in the US, and yet most senators don't seem to see any problem with it. Can you sign our urgent petition today?
(1) The Civil Rights Movement was much more involved in fighting private discrimination that Rand Paul acknowledges, which means there is no way that Paul would have marched with Martin Luther King.
(2) The Civil Rights Act was much more involved in fighting private discrimination that Rand Paul acknowledges, which means there is no way that Paul would have supported it.
(3) Barry Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act was largely based on the same broad reasons that Rand Paul has a problem with it.
(4) Private discrimination has played a significant role in conservative politics in the years since the Civil Rights Act was passed, which means it is anything but an historical irrelevancy.
(5) Libertarians have a very different vision of "freedom" from the Civil Rights vision, although they take great pains to obscure the fact. In fact, the libertarian vision of freedom was part of what helped keep slavery in place, as well as what helped justify opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.
In the end, because of length, I did little more than state the last point. In this diary, I will complete what I started.
In his book Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, George Lakoff lays out the argument that liberals and conservatives mean very different things when they talk about "freedom", which has a common core meaning that liberals and conservatives flesh out in very different ways.
Lakoff's argument is developed in terms of concepts, and how they how they emerge from concrete physical experience into realms of increasing abstraction. While the root meaning of freedom, common to virtually all of us, is grounded in the physical reality that freedom of movement is fundamental to our well-being, and that physical restraints are the most fundamental restrictions on our freedom as creatures, the ways that liberals and conservatives flesh out the meaning of freedom diverges so fundamentally that neither can understand the other.
Rather than go through Lakoff's arguments, however, I want to take this general perspective he lays out and apply it to the history discussed in the previous diary. In particular, I want to stress that the civil rights struggle for freedom was grounded in much longer historical struggle, which had its origins in the initial resistance to becoming slaves in the first place. It was, in short, a struggle that was directly about the most fundamental physical meaning of freedom that is common to all definitions of it.
On April 7, 2010 the people of Kyrgyzstan, a far-away country straining under an increasingly oppressive president, liberated themselves. In a revolution recalling those of 1989, protests unexpectedly toppled the authoritarian government. The opposition quickly took control, promising free and fair elections.
The United States government promptly asked if the new administration would allow America to keep its air base in the country.
I have a Thanksgiving story for your consumption that has nothing to do with turkeys or pumpkin pie or crazy uncles.
Instead, in an effort to remind you what this holiday can really stand for, we'll meet some people who are thankful today for simply being free.
It's a short story today, but an especially touching one, so follow along and we'll take a little hop across the Atlantic for a trip you should not miss.
It may come as no surprise that I am unsympathetic to the libertarian position. I find it intellectually incoherent - things like the free market cannot exist separate from a stable society, the underpinnings of the free market (things like contract and property rights) cannot exist absent some form of stable government to enforce them; the infrastructure needed for businesses to operate includes not just a stable legal environment but a civic infrastructure such as transportation systems, sewer and water systems, utilities and so on - all of which require a basic, stable society, one which is created by a stable government. When libertarians say things like "If you want a fire department, contract for one" my response is "We already did. We created a the government." More practical libertarians wish to limit government to an absolute minimum of activities - usually those specifically mentioned in the Constitution (for all intents and purposes this usually involves the military and little else).
Humans are creatures with imagination. We are all, in part, who we imagine ourselves to be, in varying ways and varying degrees. Delusional politics follow from delusional self-imagining, as exemplified, but not limited to the 101st Keyboard Brigade. But healthy politics is also based on imagination--freedom, justice, equality have all been imagined long before they have been achieved. In this diary, I want to combine three different strands of thought:
(1) In my diary, "Demos Reports: Airline Deregulation Isn't Good For You. Thoughts On Transportation & Freedom Ensue ", I wrote about the contrasting liberal and conservative notions of freedom, and their connections to the contrasting ideas of "negative liberty"--freedom from restraints--vs. "positive liberty"--freedom to engage in pursuing our hopes and dreams. Behind these differences lie simple historical facts: liberal notions of "freedom" derive from historical struggles of commonfolk to be free to follow their dreams, while conservative notions of "freedom" derive from the freedom of feudal elites to do what they damn well please to whoever they damn well please. Getting lowly peons to buy into this notion of freedom is quite a feat of engineering their imaginations.
Some people may never have had the experience of passionate desire. To them, "love" and relationships are akin to a personal contract, a transaction (I'm looking at you Mrs. Sanford). When it hits them for the first time mid-life they have no experience dealing with it. It's as if their experience of the world up to this point has been AM Radio and all of a sudden they are exposed to Color TV. I say we should pity them.
She goes on to expand on this, reflecting on how there's a deep relationship between "having a colorless life and having dreary social conservative views, too", and, of course, the converse:
If you've experience the neediness that desire can instill in a person, it's a lot easier (if you're straight) to understand how being gay isn't a choice, but a deeply felt need that has to be expressed, even if you face severe social costs.
the closer I get to seeing who thrives in DC, the closer I get to the culture, the more the shrink in me sees Narcissistic Personality Disorder rampant and writ large. It's warp and woof of what makes most people want to become public political figures, be they elected officials, tv talking heads, hot shot consultants and lobbyists. . . the whole ecosystem.
Not everyone in the system is an NPD type, but the milieu, the culture and tone, is set by the dynamics of the personality type. And the personality type requires a large coterie of weak egos who try to attach themselves or associate themselves with the dominant personalities and thereby feel big and important themselves. So, they flatter and follow the power to manage their own deeply felt insecurities.
This is, I think, the extreme end-point of what Amanda and I were both touching on. On the flip I ruminate further on how these three stands interconnect, and how the politics of our country may well turn on just how we imagine who we are.
While the report focuses attention on the current sorry state of the airline industry, and its underlying structural problems that lie behind the recent rash of airline crashes and near-misses such as the crash of the Continental/Colgan flight to Buffalo, it traces current conditions back to the decision, 30 years ago, to deregulate the airline industry.
How's this for an astonishing fact: Since 2000, U.S. airlines have reported net losses of more than $33 billion--almost twice their accumulated profits from 1938 to 1999!
Of course, the trump card for the deregulators is the claim of low fares, and broad affordability, but the executive summary notes:
[Economist Alfred] Kahn [the "father of airline deregulation"] and others have taken refuge in the argument that deregulation has produced lower airfares and wider access to air travel. The Demos report concludes that even this benefit is widely overstated. "While the price of flying has come down over the past thirty years," the report notes, "it decreased at a comparable rate from the 1940s through the 1960s. In any event, low airfares are as much a problem as an achievement if they leave an industry without the resources to maintain service standards and make crucial investments in equipment, technology, and human capital."
If anything this understates the case. If deregulation has resulted in net industry losses, those fare reductions were paid for by the airlines creditors! What kind of a business model is that? Considering the amount of technological innovation, and the increased traffic volume, it seems altogether possible that fares would have fallen more without deregulation! Heck, the food might even have been edible!
This is only one industry, but the story's the same everywhere you look: the deregulation mania has been a disaster for America. Sure, stupid regulations can be a pain in the ass. But that's about stupidity, not regulation per se.
This is an excellent report, but we need to build on this and other detailed reporting on specific failures of de-regulation to develop a new narrative stressing the positive value of smart, far-sighted regulation in crafting systems that work for everyone. If freedom means anything, it's not just freedom from arbitrary restraints, it's freedom to do things of one's own choosing, and the capacity to do things depends in part on soundly-functioning systems, from cars that won't blow up to government that won't get you killed for reasons they lie to you about. That's why smart regulations expand our freedom, rather than restricting it.
A few juicy tidbits from the report on the flip--along with some broader thoughts on history, transportation and freedom.
Crossposted from Daily Kos These times are like none I have experienced in my 72+ years! I think that we have a unique oportunity to take stock of ourselves and our relationships to each other that may never come again. Old definitions can be trashed and new ones born. It is time for the people of this and every other nation to redefine what we as people want to be our guiding values from this pont on. There are many reasons foy saying this, not the least of which is the disintegration of the language we once held dear in our declaration of independence. A partial list might include "freedom", "liberty", "rights", "government", "people" ... You get the picture. These words had meaning then in a very specific context, yet they have been thoiught to transcend that context. Just how far can that transcendence be carried? Look beneath the fold and explore this notion with me. Maybe we can help ourselves understand what "change" really means.
Can we repair our political practices and achieve something like the popular democracy that has remained always just around the corner? Popular democracy - a democracy in which the wisdom of a self-governing people is translated into policy - was opposed from the beginning of our nation's history by the likes of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was a shrewd authoritarian who had the insight that capitalist elites, protected by federal charter and largesse, could rule safely as invisible monarchs. This, of course, unraveled the naïve hopes of Adam Smith, who attempted to include compassion and human sympathy within his rationalist model, and who thought a free, unfettered market economy would promote human sympathy, equality and understanding.
Today, the elite democracy view is embodied in top-down political practices that diminish the franchise and excuse voter suppression, advantage the wealthy through legal fiat that makes wealth and speech equivalent, reduce citizenship to passive consumerism, and maintain a class of political consultants and pundit elites who believe themselves a cut or two above the people they pretend to represent.
What's loosely referred to as the "netroots revolution" is part of a revitalized progressive, popular democracy movement aimed at the reform of these practices. Its egalitarian emphasis is on engagement and action by the many. Citizens are entering the political sphere in numbers that threaten the hegemony of an elite class that has long dominated the Republican and Democratic parties. A good example of the movement's spirit was seen in the overwhelming grassroots reaction against the patronizing and condescending performances of moderators Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos during the ABC Obama/Clinton debate. Sen. Hillary Clinton revealed the elite's us-and-them feelings of superiority when she told a private gathering of contributors that activists were getting in the way of their old-politics plans: "I mean, that's what we're dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of our positions ..." Clinton said.
This is all well-known to the readers of this site and other movement activists. Still, we need to continue thinking through the theoretical basis of the movement, including the articulation of fundamental progressive moral views. So much needs to be urgently accomplished, so much attention is needed on pressing issues and tactical demands, that the editors and readers of OpenLeft should take pride that they have always made room for such explorations.
Here I want to approach one of the keys to the progressive moral view and to the possibilities of popular democracy, and that is the role of human empathy in our political practices. In Part I of this series, The Promise of Popular Democracy: Origins, I looked at democracy's true ancient roots in human empathy and anti-authoritarian practices. I deconstructed the privileging of austere reason over emotion in the Myth of Democratic Origins, and pointed toward a more authentic picture of the political human being.
Dennis Kucinich will introduce privileged resolution to force a vote on V.P. Cheney's impeachment resolution this week, probably Tuesday. It is critical that we voice our support and contact our Representatives ASAP to let them know how we feel.
However, he is reaching out to us, the American people, to do our part and claim responsibility to reclaim our constitutional democracy. Dennis understands that real change and meaningful reform can't happen without the active support of the people, and so he will be holding a live, national conference call Monday evening, November 5th, to explain how everything will work and what we can do to help. From the Kucinich campaign website:
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