A Mike Lux Golden Oldie
From Mar 15, 2010. Original HERE I have done a lot of writing, in my blog posts and my book, about the historic differences between conservatives and progressives in political battles, but almost equally fascinating to me is that between conservative and progressive religious traditions. The exact same fault lines, most importantly in terms of individualism vs. community, play themselves out in theological debates which sound very much like our political debates- and indeed, a lot of the same people operate in both realms.
Glenn Beck and Jim Wallis got into this debate over the last few days, and because Jim actually knows something about the Bible, he easily won the debate. Beck's classic conspiracy-minded starting point- that because both Nazis and Communists have used the phrase "social justice", that any religion that uses the term must be bad too- has a similar logic to saying that if a really bad teacher said two plus two equals four, because he or she was a bad teacher it must be false. Or saying that if a politician you don't like says "God Bless America", then any politician who says that is terrible. But leaving aside Beck's incredibly stupid logic, the point he makes about "social justice" is in keeping with conservative ideology: it is all about a self-focused view of religion and politics that, like Beck's ideological hero Ayn Rand, proclaims selfishness as the ultimate virtue.
Conservative Christians manage to ignore the literally many hundreds of Biblical quotes about social justice by making Christianity a religion solely focused on one very selfish goal: whether they get into heaven or not. That's it, that is the entire goal and purpose and meaning of their faith. And because St. Paul argued that faith is more important than "works" (what you do good in the world), they think that believing a certain doctrine is the only thing that matters in terms of whether you make it into heaven or not. Since everything is about getting themselves to heaven, and the Earth will be destroyed soon in Armageddon anyway, nothing that happens here matters very much. The one thing that matters to their God is having more people worship Him, so they try to convert people, but all that other stuff Jesus and the Old Testament prophets and Moses and James and all those other folks in the Bible talked about in terms of kindness, mercy, forgiving debts, being your brother's keeper, helping the poor, and all that other liberal socialistic stuff just isn't much of a priority to them compared to: me getting to heaven, and (second most important) converting others to my God. These so-called "Christian" conservatives live in a state of paranoia that somewhere, somehow some dollar of their taxes might go to some undeserving poor person, ignoring the fact that Jesus' entire ministry was targeted to the "undeserving" poor.
Not all Christians think this way, of course. There is another kind of thinking about the Christian faith: one that actually takes what's written in the Bible (beyond the Book of Revelations) seriously. The Jewish Torah (for Christians, that's their Old Testament) and the Christian New Testament have a wide variety of ideas and voices in their pages. Written by scores of authors over a span of probably a couple thousand years, one of the things I love about the Bible is the wide range of beliefs and perspectives within it. A lot of fundamentalists are desperate to find ways to explain away the contradictions in the Bible, because they believe every word is inspired by God and it's all literally true, but in fact the authors of the Bible disagree on both the details of what actually happened and the interpretation and philosophy behind the events they write about. If you take the Bible seriously, you see the debates and differing perspectives. Some Biblical writers were more conservative in their thinking, and some were more progressive. But the most consistent and enduring theme that runs through virtually every book in the Bible is that we are expected to love and be kind to our neighbors, especially the poor, hurting, and oppressed of the earth.
From the God of Genesis punishing Cain for not being his brother's keeper to Nathan the prophet rebuking King David for taking from the poor; from the Psalms that over and over proclaim the need to help the poor, and condemn those who judges, government officials, and wealthy people who mistreat them, from the prophets like Isaiah and Amos who deride those who engage in ritual sacrifice while refusing to help the oppressed (Isaiah I: "Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.") to Jesus very first sermon proclaiming that he had come to "bring good news to the poor" and "liberty to the captives"- virtually every book of the Bible demands justice and mercy and community.
People who take the Bible seriously and respect its words, as opposed to being obsessed with whether they personally will get into heaven by following a certain kind of dogma, understand that community and compassion are in fact far more central to it than any specific metaphysical belief system. And that is what the Pat Robertsons, Glenn Becks, Sarah Palins, and the other false prophets of conservatism don't understand.
In an excerpt from his Sept 27 "Government Deficits and Debts Lecture", Brad DeLong lays out his "Five Rules for Public Finance," and a conservative critique that he gives too much credit to. Why is that? Because the conservative critique is less an objective observation of how governments in the welfare state era had acted up to that point than a prospective justification for the conservative looting that was to come.
First, here's DeLong's rules (with some shorting that cuts out some interesting, but not essential details in #4 and #5):
Five Rules for Public Finance: And so now we have arrived at five rules for public finance:
(1) The government must do whatever is necessary in order to make sure that people have confidence it will pay back its debts.
(2) You really ought to have budget balance over the business cycle. It is fine to run cyclical deficits in times of high unemployment, but you really should balance them with surpluses when the economy is in a boom.
(3) That implies Milton Friedman's Pay-as-You-Go principle that he set out in his late 1940s framework for fiscal and monetary stability: whenever the government takes on a mission to do some long term spending program, it also needs to match that by imposing some tax large enough to fund the spending. Changes in government spending plans over time should be accompanied by changes in taxes so that when politicians make decisions and when voters evaluate politicians there is no gaming the system.
(4) You need to keep plenty of headroom in your debt capacity in normal times. In normal times you should aim to keep your debt-to-GDP ratio fairly low. There will come emergencies and opportunities during which you will want to increase your debt-to-GDP ratio. Remember 1803: Thomas Jefferson was president and Napoleon I was about to become Emperor and was willing to sell French "rights" to the entire Louisiana territory. The United States had plenty of debt capacity and could easily afford to borrow--and Jefferson did. Thus we have a United States that doesn't end at the Mississippi river but instead continues all the way on from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast. The War of 1812, Civil War, World War I, World War II--in all of them we were very grateful that we started with a low national debt-to-GDP ratio. The government wanted to fight these wars for reasons that it thought were sufficient. It was able to borrow in order to build the armies and navies and air forces to fight them, It could not have done that if the debt to GDP ratio was really high. The Great Depression and the current Great Recession--we want to respond to them by deficit spending as well....
(5) But that does not mean that countries should not borrow except in emergencies. It is perfectly okay for a government to borrow and run up its debt when it is undertaking projects that are going to primarily benefit future generations.Taxing the citizens of the East Bay and San Francisco right now to pay for the entire reconstruction of the Bay Bridge seems unfair--the new Bay Bridge will still be there and be earthquake-safe 50 years from now. People who are going to move into the San Francisco area 40 years from now will benefit from the bridge. They should pay some part of the cost. Thus you should finance infrastructure projects that build up productive capacity through borrowing and debt.
You should also finance current spending through borrowing and debt if you think the future is going to be a lot richer than the present....
So here we have our five rules for public finance.
On Christmas Eve Day, Paul Krugman wrote a brief diary, "Yes, There Are Prisons" in which he reproduced the following graph by Mike Konczal, from "The Conservative World View and Prison Populations, Broken Windows", which he describes as "a cross-section of countries and the strong correlation between their prison population per capita and an index of their 'economic freedoms' [per Cato Institute], with a plot of the United States since 1970 over it":
The graph is arresting in itself, because of what it tells us--(1) that libertarian "economic freedom" is correlated with putting people into prison at the international level, and (2) that the growing power of movement conservatism is even more strongly correlated with putting people into prison, at the national level. But Krugman and Konczal both have more to say. Konczai has a number of points to make in support of "why I think we can think of our current prison population dilemma as a conservative project," and why, therefore, anyone who thinks that criminal justice reform might be an agenda item for the new Republican House is sorely mistaken. But let's take Krugman first, as his remarks are briefer:
I'll have to think about exactly what's going on here. But the discussion brings to mind something I ponder on now and then: what happened to the inevitable collapse of American society?
All through the 70s and 80s, and some way into the 90s, it was almost a given that all of America - or at least all of our central cities - would turn into something like the South Bronx, or worse. It was practically a cliche of popular culture; it was also a theme propounded solemnly and at great length by writers like Gertrude Himmelfarb, who insisted that only a return to traditional moral values could arrest our decline.
And then a funny thing happened. Values continued to shift: we kept on having premarital sex and getting divorces, gay and lesbian couples went out in public, relatively few Americans went to church (although a larger number claimed that they went.) Yet crime declined sharply, big cities (New York in particular) became safer than they had been in many decades, and in general society seemed to hold together.
Actually, this is not the least bit surprising. Conservatives have been proclaiming the imminent end of civilization since at least Heroditus, in Works and Days with his five ages of man, each one more debased than the one before. Liberals, on the other hand, have been telling tales of progress--unsteady progress, to be sure, but progress, nonetheless--for almost as long, as Eric Alfred Havelock argued in The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics. We cannot tell what the future holds, and there's been a great preponderance of folly lately, but historically so far, conservatives have repeatedly vastly under-estimated human resilience and our powers of renewal, and whatever the precise details this time, the big picture seems quite familiar.
Before turning to Konczal, who has a more complicated argument, I just want to supplement Krugman's observation with a brief presentation of some international data about the rise and fall of broad categories of crime rates, which unfortunately only start in 1988, but show a sharp 1991 peak for everything, followed by an almost equally broad, if slower decline ever since, thereby showing that the US was not alone:
I'll have more to say about DeLong later, but first, I want to say something about Sanchez's piece, and particularly about a theme struck by a couple of commentators.
It occurs to me that there's an obvious link here with the idea that the contemporary populist right is heavily driven by ressentiment-and that a lot of our current politics has less to do with actual policy disagreements than with resolving status anxieties. You can think of patriotism as a kind of status socialism-a collectivization of the means of self-esteem production. You don't have to graduate from an Ivy or make a lot of money to feel proud or special about being an American; you don't have to do a damn thing but be born here. Cultural valorization of "American-ness" relative to other status markers, then, is a kind of redistribution of psychological capital to those who lack other sources of it.
I thought he might be about to say something genuinely interesting--the earlier (late 2009) post he linked to did, to a certain extent, including the quip:
Conservatism is a political philosophy; the farce currently performing under that marquee is an inferiority complex in political philosophy drag.
In short, he specified that it was conservatives in particular (though not exclusively) who leaned heavily on American exceptionalism as a crutch. He went to explicate a bit, and wrote:
The pretext for converting this status grievance into a political one is the line that the real issue is the myopic policy bred by all this condescension and arrogance-but the policy problems often feel distinctly secondary. Check out the RNC's new ad on health reform, taking up the Tea Party slogan "Listen to Me!" There's almost nothing on the substantive objections to the bill; it's fundamentally about people's sense of powerlessness in a debate that seems driven by wonks.
Of course, not only were the policy problems "distinctly secondary," the most incendiary were purely hallucinatory, and most of the rest simply delusional, since Obama's policies were grounded in RomneyCare and its 1990s origins in the Heritage Foundation, so there really wasn't a whole lot for conservatives to legitimately oppose.
In short, Sanchez had a pretty strong case to make, which he distinctly undersold. (He is a libertarian, after all.) But his current post didn't really do much of anything to bring up the more subtle dynamics discussed in his earlier post.
What I found more interesting, actually, was the reaction of several commentators piling on to justify American exceptionalism, and to do so in distinctly tribalistic anti-leftist ways (all of which, I would argue, is at root driven by ressentiment, including the claim that conservatives are the real Americans by virtue of allegiance to founding values and principles that are either actually liberal in origin or else invented more recently by conservatives--such as remaking America as originally a "Christian nation") :
Over the weekend, I played catch-up with a couple of DVRd episodes of Bones, classic nerd show that it is. If you don't know the show, it's centered on a forensic anthropologist ("Bones") and her team at a Smithsonian Institute knock-off--the "Jeffersonian Institute", in crime-fighting partnership with an FBI agent. In one of the episodes I watched, a sunken slave ship has been recovered, and the remains are brought to the Jeffersonian to be analyzed. The lab's supervisor, Dr. Camille Saroyan ("Cam", played by Tamara Taylor) is black, and why I'm writing about this is the way her co-workers responded when they first learn about the ship.
Although dealt with quickly, it was a complex mixture of shared revulsion and horror over the past it represented and special solicitude for Cam, who, it turns out, had a family ancestor on board. On one level, they all respond as one at a common human level, reacting as horrified as if they themselves were black, while on another level, because Cam is black, they know it's much more intense for her, even before it's known that she has an actual personal connection. They are simultaneously drawn together as a group and aware that Cam is naturally feeling isolated as well. It struck me as a typically liberal group response, intensified by their pre-existing relationships.
They are, of course, a team of scientists (primarily) and the tensions between scientific observation and analysis on the one hand and life its own self on the other are a constant presence in the show. The slave ship instantly cuts through the customary scientific detachment for all of them, and yet that scientific perspective in a way is what makes them take it seriously in a way that others might not. They know that they are part of the same historical and cultural fabric as the slave ship, those who owned it and those who drowned in it. Their shared professional identities serve to reinforce their shared cultural identities as racially integrated contemporary urban Americans. Their sympathies naturally transcend race out of lived experience, yet remain conscious of it. Both tensions and unforced sympathy are part of the mix.
Now, I'm quite aware that many conservatives might respond the same way. But it would not be similarly typical and consonant with their political ideology. Thinking about it further, thinking about Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and the Tea Partiers, I was struck by the thought that Limbaugh is just fundamentally uncomfortable with black people, at a level just as deep and uncontrollable as the level at which Cam's co-workers are comfortable with her specifically and blacks in general. Of course, Limbaugh is uncomfortable with blacks because he's uncomfortable with himself, they aggravate all his inner uncertainties, all the doubts he does not allow himself to consciously recognize, much less entertain, examine, and act to do something about. Liberalism--reinforced by science--is about critical reflection: on ourselves as well as our social surround (Kegan's level 4). Conservatism--traditional conservatism--is not. It is unreflective, defined by the social surround (Kegan's level 3).
But movement conservatism is reactionary, it is not just unreflective, but anti-reflective, and dominated by level 2 thinking, which sees the world in terms of durable categories (Kegan's term), or natural kinds, one of which is race. Now, not all conservatives are reactionaries. Not all are racists. But they recognize Limbaugh as one of their own--indeed as one of their cultural leaders. And they are as comfortable with him as Cam's co-workers are with her. And though not all Tea Partiers are racists, they are comfortable with racists in their midst. As comfortable as Cam's co-workers are with her. This is what it comes down to, I think: who, exactly are you comfortable with? Who do you look at and see as basically like you? Who is "us"?
You choose who you identify with. And in so choosing, you choose who you are.
A perfect counterpoint to these thoughts was provided by The Simpsons this Sunday, and noted by Chris Hayes, sitting in for Rachel Maddow last night:
If progressives have learned anything about conservatives, it's that conservative attacks on liberals are near-perfect predictors of what conservatives themselves are up to. Conservative projection is highly reliable. So it's hardly surprising that almost 80 years of accusing liberals of trying to destroy America is a tip-off that destroying America has been what conservatives have been up to all along.
He notes that American conservatives have more in common with Islamic Fundamentalists than with American liberals.
While Publishers Weekly dryly noted:
Charging that liberals aid terrorists while sympathizing with the terrorists' culturally conservative worldview, D'Souza's critique of American cultural excess trips over its own inconsistencies.
A recent article in Grist by David Roberts, "The right's climate denialism is part of something much larger", provides another perspective on this same phenomena. He begins by citing another piece at Grist, "Stupid goes viral: The Climate Zombies of the new GOP" by RL Miller, which gives a rundown of some of the GOP's latest crop of climate-denying candidates for Congress. And he cited a Gallup poll showing the sharp ideological slant of recent growth in "climate skepticism" in the public:
After which he proceeded to broaden his scope to encompass a wide-ranging attack on reality-based institutions:
The Washington Post Outlook section this weekend had as its leading feature article on the front page a column by Gerard Alexander, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, on how conservatism has gotten a bad rap for being racist. While familiar in its defense of conservatism, the arguments raised deserve a response, as they go to the core of American conservatism's nature.
I am certainly not a person who believes that being a conservative automatically makes you a racist, but the protests of conservatives about the "race card" also have to be seen as cynical given the history of political tactics on this issue. The use of racism as a tool for conservatives goes way back, and it has not been limited to low brow politicians in the South. The intellectual godfather of American conservatism, Russell Kirk, in his cornerstone book The Conservative Mind, granted that his hero Edmund Burke "was not ashamed to acknowledge the allegiance of humble men whose sureties are prejudice and prescription". This acknowledgement of Burke's reliance on bigotry is critically important to note, because Burke's great cause in the late 1700s was the defense of monarchy against those in America and elsewhere who were rebelling against it. Conservatives who have appealed to bigotry have generally done so in alliance with the defense of tradition and the powerful.
A couple of generations after Burke was defending French and English kings against Tom Paine's rabble and welcoming the allegiance of the bigoted, another giant of the conservative movement revered by Kirk and modern conservatives, John C. Calhoun, arose. Before Calhoun, the states' rights debate had been used by a variety of politicians on a range of issues, but Calhoun forged the link between the states' rights doctrine and the politics of race and slavery. Like Burke, he argued that equality was a myth, that tradition was a virtue above all other things, and that the powerful - in his world, wealthy slave owners like himself - in society should remain powerful.
Throughout American history, conservatives have used issues of race to argue against change and for the existing order. Stephen Douglas wielded racial language like a cudgel against Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Conservatives argued against the 14th Amendment by attacking the idea of establishing citizenship for both the freed slaves and Chinese immigrants working on the railroads out west. Segregationists used racist rhetoric to keep Jim Crow in place for almost 90 years.
So in the modern era, when the back of Jim Crow was finally broken and operatives were looking for tools to win over working class whites in defense of polices that would benefit mostly the wealthy, they knew where to turn. They saw an opportunity, and they went for it: William Buckley strongly defended Southern segregationists in a column; Barry Goldwater had voted for other civil rights bills, but saw an opportunity and started pounding the table about states' rights; Ronald Reagan started his general election campaign by giving a speech extolling states' rights, in a small Mississippi town famous for being the place where three civil rights movement youth were killed. Republican ad makers put up a picture of the scariest black criminal they could find (Willie Horton) to talk about crime policy. Jan Brewer talked about (non-existent) beheadings in the dessert by Mexican drug cartels. Fox News suggestively links Muslims and terrorists as if they are the same thing.
It is in no way racist to have a thoughtful debate about immigration policy, crime, affirmative action, and terrorism. But the language and tactics and symbolism being used by conservatives on these issues strays way too often into that territory occupied by the racists of the past like Calhoun and Wallace and Jessie Helms. Today, big business conglomerates like Koch Industries fund the Tea Party movement, whose leaders seem very reluctant to denounce the people coming to their rallies with racist signs. The conservative movement, big business special interests, and the Republican Party made a deal with the devil many years ago to welcome, as Burke put it, "the allegiance of humble men who sureties are prejudice and prescription". That deal with the devil makes the complaints of conservatives about being perceived as bigots sound pretty hollow. You reap what you sow, friends, and to complain about it now doesn't wash.
What's notable here is not necessarily whether or not Murkowski runs; it's the ferocity with which the Republicans have already struck back at a member of the leadership team in the Senate. Not only have they openly expressed their opposition to Murkowski running (even though polls show it would make McAdams less likely to win, not more), not only have the top PACs already started donating to Joe Miller, but Roll Call reports that Murkowski would have to give up her leadership position if she persists:
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) will likely be forced out of her party leadership position should she decide to launch a write-in or third-party candidacy, a Senate Republican said Wednesday [...]
Although Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other GOP leaders have not yet formally discussed what to do if Murkowski does run, the Senate Republican said there is likely no scenario in which she would be allowed to remain Republican Conference vice chairwoman.
According to this source, Murkowski could simply resign her position, or McConnell and other leaders could press her to resign. The conference could also formally vote to strip Murkowski of her leadership mantle.
All the sources are anonymous, which is a bit cowardly, but none of them equivocated whatsoever. "She's an adult. She lost the race," said one senior GOP aide.
David goes on to note that if Murkowski does run and wins, she'd probably be welcomed back into the fold, but for now, the GOP response is dramatically at odds with Dems' response to Lieberman in 2006:
Not only did no member of the Democratic leadership even think about stripping Joe Lieberman of his seniority when he lost his primary, but several Senators openly supported his third-party run. And Ned Lamont's support from the party and the Senate leadership was tepid at best.
But I think David's conclusion--though close--doesn't quite hit the bullseye:
It's the old story. National Republicans are either afraid of their base or a part of it, and either way they openly align with it; National Democrats are contemptuous of theirs.
It's true, of course, but it's not the deepest truth.
"The Case for Impeachment: Why Barack Hussein Obama Should be Impeached to Save America" by Steven Baldwin covers all of these issues and more in making its arguments....
"This is the beginning of the end for the United States unless the people exercise their precious remaining liberties and stand and demand that their elected representatives impeach this president before further mortal damage is inflicted upon America," the report concludes....
And the report reveals how rapper Jay-Z and Beyonce were photographed sitting around the "Situation Room" - the confidential White House location filled with top secret communications equipment that allows the tracking of terror threats worldwide.
Access to the room normally requires a high security clearance level.
"Many of Obama's actions, if they do not flat-out violate the Constitution, certainly undermine the spirit and intent of the Constitution as envisioned by our Founding Fathers," the report explains.
Why sure, letting Jay-Z and Beyonce into the Situation Room is an impeachable offense, no question about it!
After all, as more than one top Republican explained during the Clinton impeachment, an impeachable offense is anything that a majority of the House says it is.
Some may think I'm being facetious, but I'm not. Conservative ideologues have never believed that liberals have a legitimate right to rule, no matter what the people say. If people vote for them, then there must be something wrong with the people, and they shouldn't be voting in the first place. That's why suppressing minority votes comes so easily to them. It's why you even hear sporadic calls to repeal women's right to vote. And, of course, it's part of what's behind recent calls to strip birthright citizenship out of the 14th Amendment.
Today, the GOP is deeply in the grip of ideological conservatives, who don't really need any reason to impeach Obama, other than the fact that he's a Democrat. Jay-Z and Beyonce will do just fine as reasons.
No progressive movement will make any progress until we understand the battle we are fighting. Our income is a cost to the rich. They will look to cut it wherever they can, whether this is wages for private sector workers, pensions for public employees, or Social Security for retirees. That is their target.
We have to fight back using the same logic. Their income is our cost -- the multimillion dollar bonuses for the Wall Street wizards is a direct drain on the economy. So are the bloated paychecks of top executives and their lackey boards. Progressives must be prepared to use all the same tactics to bring down the income of the rich and powerful that they have used to reduce the income of everyone else.
Regarding the bolded passage, I then wrote:
Keep that passage in front of you at all times, and you'll save yourself enormous amounts of grief.
Not least of all, it will help you recognize when someone's trying to distract you by pitting you against some other poor soul who's in exactly the same sort lose/lose negative sum situation that you are. Pitting one generation against another? Workers and/or taxpayers from one state against another? Employed against unemployed? Insured against uninsured? Oil rig workers against fishermen? (Especially when both are one and the same workers!) All these and more just different forms of the same class war game, the oldest one in the book: Let's you and him fight.
Oaktown Girl later wrote a comment picking up on this, along with a comment by VLaszlo quoting from a similarly themed piece by Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford.
Regarding different types of workers being pitted against one another: What's most upsetting to me is the "war" between workers with decent wages and benefits against those without. More and more, people without the fair wages and benefits see those who have them as overly privileged. So instead of saying, "Hey! We want those good wages and benefits too!", they're saying,"Hey! How come they get those sweet wages and benefits when the rest of us don't? The rest of us don't get that, so why should they?"
There are, of course, multiple casualties for this attitude which has steadily gained steam in post-Reagan era, and which seems to get stronger every year. But regardless of what's to blame, it's clear that not only have people forgotten how to fight for something better, or that they even can fight for something better, worst of all they've forgotten that they even deserve something better - and that "something" is a key part of what used to be seen as the basic social contract of this "great" country of ours.
This is a very important point, and well worth devoting another diary to. I can think of a number of different examples of when the the right wing has actively worked to pit one group of workers against another like this. The first was their attack on the United Auto Workers, when conservatives were actively advocating for the destruction of the American auto industry. The second was a lot less high profile, but it's more long-lasting attack on public employees. And the third is the more recent attack on the unemployed, particularly those who decline to take jobs that pay so little they will lead to inevitable banksuptcy. Let's take a more detailed look at what this conservative strategy looks like in action....
That post "Newt Gingrich Is A Bigot--and the face of conservatism & the GOP", was motivated by the jarring juxtaposition of Taranto denialism with Newtie's acting out. But it's probably even more jarring to consider the entirety of the racist rightwing attack on Obama over the past couple of years and the sudden anti-Islamic eruption of the past couple of weeks.
You see, the racist attack on Obama not only involved denialism, but projection: It was, Glenn Beck assured us, Obama who was the racist--a theme that Beck has taken so seriously that he's organizing his very own white conservatives' march on Washington this weekend to mug Martin Luther King's memory and steal his dream. It's a very carefully crafted argument that's been worked on for decades, though in Beck's incarnation it's rather slipshod. Still, projecting conservatives' racism onto blacks and liberals is a central aspect of this sort of racist crusade.
In contrast, the anti-Muslim furor raised over the Park51 Cultural Center has none of that careful craftmanship behind it. It's raw, unfiltered racial bigotry, complete with threats and even acts of violence. It totally gives the game away.
Still, this does raise the question of what it would like if there were a conservatism free from racism. In one sense, theoretically at least, it's quite possible. Different researchers have repeatedly found that political conservatism correlates with racist attitudes or with attitudes--such as Social Dominance Orienation and Rightwing Authoritarianism--that in turn correlate with a broad range of group prejudice: racism, sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry, etc. But even as these correlations show that actually existing conservatism is inextricably bound up with prejudicial attitudes, they also indicate that there is an identifiable set of beliefs separate from prejudicial attitudes that at least in theory could constitute a non-racist, non-sexist, totally non-bigoted form of conservatism.
So what would it take to bring such a form of conservatism into being? To be honest, I'm extremely doubtful that it could be done, but I'm willing to give it a shot. And to do so, I want to go back to two of the terms I've already referred to: denialism and projection.
This is going to sound counter-intuitive at first but I have become convinced in the course of discussions with both conservative and progressive people in recent months that at its core, the surge in anti-government sentiment and the progressive angst in the Obama era so far both come from the same root issue. The heart of the problem is that our government has become captured by a small number of very big and very powerful corporate interests, and that has made the federal government increasingly dysfunctional.
This dysfunction feeds the right-wing plenty of fuel for its anti-government-all-the-time narrative, helping them build their movement. Unfortunately, though, it has also created a crisis point for progressives. Progressives have always understood that government not only has an important role to play in promoting the public good in areas the market doesn't work well, but is sometimes the only entity that can be strong enough to take on monopolistic or oligarchic private corporations who can become too powerful in a free market economy. When government gets captured by these powerful interests and becomes dysfunctional as a result, it puts progressives in a bad spot: defending the role of government when it keeps screwing up doesn't play very well with voters.
Because the progressive movement got used to the federal government playing a mostly positive role in economics, civil rights, the environment, and other issues during the New Deal era and the decades after, and because we don't worship the free market in all things and at all times the way conservatives do, there has been a tendency on our side in these last three decades of brutal attack on all things government to be reflexively defensive about it. As one example, I have had friends argue that progressives should avoid using the term "government waste" because it just feeds a bad frame about government. I have also heard many people talk about how important it is for us to be spending a lot of time explaining to people the positive role of government.
As someone who wrote about the historic political debate between the conservative and progressive movements, I don't agree with these arguments. The role and size of government in our society has changed dramatically over the course of American history, as has the role and size of private corporations, but the bedrock values and goals of the progressive movement have not changed. We stand for more democracy, more equality, and a better economic situation for poor and middle-income people, and we oppose trickle-down economics and the concentration of wealth and power for economic elites. To get better results in terms of those goals, we have frequently turned to government. But government is only a means to those ends, not the ends themselves- and it is not the only means to those ends, either. I want wages to go up for poor and working class people, and that can happen because the minimum wage increases (government) or through workers organizing a union and negotiating (collective action). I want to lessen the concentration of wealth and power of big corporations, and that can happen through regulation and anti-trust and progressive taxation (government), or through class action lawsuits, consumer boycotts, and shareholder resolutions (collective action). Of course it is always better for our purposes to have government on the right side, but we are not limited to government action to improve people's lives, and we also shouldn't be stuck defending government when it is on the wrong side.
When our government screws up, we shouldn't be afraid to say so. When government wastes money, we should call them on it. When government officials favor big business special interests over the rest of us, we should fight them. When government caves to the demands of powerful insider lobbyists, we should raise hell about it.
Social Security and Medicare are government programs which have worked incredibly well to lift senior citizens out of poverty and give them healthier, happy lives. Public education is the only way most children are ever going to get the education they need. Police, firefighters, roads, bridges, our national defense are all functions needed to be done by government. People with mental disabilities and people trapped in long-term poverty and unemployment need a government safety net. And only government has the ability to provide the oversight and check on the power of big corporations who would otherwise wreck our economy, pollute the environment, and make unsafe products. So, yes: government has an important role to play in our modern economy, and the right wing fantasy that government is not good at anything, and that the free market is always the way to go, needs to be thoroughly rejected. But progressives also need to stop being defensive of government in general. Government does waste money sometimes; government doesn't do all things well. And a progressivism that is always defensive of a government that isn't doing its job, that isn't delivering the things people need to make their daily lives better, will find itself at exactly the kind of crisis point we find ourselves in today.
Over the past few weeks, the Catholic Church has found itself mired in controversy, plagued by an ever-growing sexual abuse scandal unfolding in Europe. The pope himself has come under substantial criticism, to such an extent that a leading German magazine titled a report, "The Failed Papacy of Benedict XVI."
Yet the media's growing chorus of criticism reveals as much about itself as it does about the mishaps of Pope Benedict XVI. It reveals much about how the media thinks about itself, and about the media's worldview of what society ought to be like.
Ezra Klein likes Paul Ryan. Methinks that this is the first time Ezra has run into a charming and personable Republican selling deficit-exploding plans as deficit reducing ones.
But some of us have seen this story many times before...
This is yet another--if somewhat milder--example of the sensible center critiquing the "sensible center". As DeLong implies, there's nothing new here. In fact, it's just another incarnation of Lucy with the football. But the really annoying part is when Ezra gets all superior to those like DeLong (hey, I'm staying out of it as much as I possibly can, while not staying out of it all!) who've actually got a handle on what's going on:
And now let's get to the paragraph a lot of you will flay me for: I don't think Ryan is a charlatan or a flim-flam artist. More to the point, I think he's playing an important role, and one I'm happy to try and help him play: The worlds of liberals and conservatives are increasingly closed loops. Very few politicians from one side are willing to seriously engage with the other side, particularly on substance. Substance is scary. Substance is where you can be made to look bad. And substance has occasionally made Ryan look bad. But the willingness to engage has made him look good. It's given some people the information they need to decide him a charlatan, and others the information they need to decide him a bright spot. It's also given Ryan a much deeper understanding of liberal ideas than most conservative politicians have.
So do Ryan's arguments persuade me? Not as far as the Roadmap goes. But I'm glad to give him space to try to persuade all of you, so long as he's willing to let me try and poke holes in his arguments while he's doing it. That's an offer I've extended to every legislator interested in taking me up on it, and it still stands.
Ah, where to begin? Ezra's smug superiority? Or the part where Lucy pulls away the football, and Ezra lands flat on his ass? Or the part where Ezra totally misses the point of everything?
Substance is scary. Substance is where you can be made to look bad. And substance has occasionally made Ryan look bad. But the willingness to engage has made him look good.
Memo To Ezra: Looking good is the only game that Ryan's playing. By saying what you've just said, you've made yourself Ryan's bitch. That's the beginning, middle and end of the story.
And this:
It's given some people the information they need to decide him a charlatan, and others the information they need to decide him a bright spot. It's also given Ryan a much deeper understanding of liberal ideas than most conservative politicians have.
is the same sort of standard-less standard that's standard operating proceedure for making the Obama Administration such a staggering disappointment. (Since most conservative politicians understand liberal ideas about as well as meerkats understand quantum physics, I'm not terribly impressed that Ryan understands them as well as orangutangs understand quantum physics.)
Bottom line: Ezra suffers from the age-old liberal disease of thinking that conservatives are just liberals with a different set of policy preferences. They're not: They come from an entirely different culture: a pre-modern culture of warriors and priests. Not surprisingly, their only interest in ideas is as weapons.
It's one thing for Ezra to be taken in by Ryan's con. But he's actually doing much, much more: by legitimizing Ryan the way he does, he's actually participating in Ryan's con.
Despite--or perhaps because of--all his education and intelligence, Ezra really doesn't get that Ryan is offering excuses, rather than reasons, for doing things that any reasonably smart 13-year old can see are utterly catastrophic.
That is, any reasonably smart 13-year old that doesn't already want to be Paul Ryan or Ezra Klein when they grow up.
During Netroots Nation, we are running Golden Oldies plus a few surprises. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on July 26.
A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Sat Jul 25, 2009. Original HERE.
In early 2006, I began working on a book project that never really worked out. (Got a spare $20k? I'm willing to give it another shot!) I wanted to address the extreme disconnect between the conservative political climate in Washington (remember, this was about six months before the 2006 midterms) and the political attitudes of the American people, which, according to the best social science, had only changed modestly overall since the early Nixon era. During the course of researching and drafting an introductory chapter, the importance of conservative identity politics became blindingly clear as the result of a series of number-driven arguments.
As I've been wrestling with recent manifestations of conservative identity politics that I planned to blog about this weekend--the Birthers, The Family, etc.--I remembered this earlier work, and the hard foundations of data on which it rested. I thought it would make a good companion piece to my contemporary observations to go back and resurrect that argument. So I took a draft chapter, whittled it down a bit, and I'm presenting it after the jump.
There are two overarching points that I hope will clearly emerge from this. The first is that my contemporary focus on conservative identity politics is not just some arbitrary whim. It emerges out of an inquiry that was not originally concerned with it at all. In fact, I was taken by surprise as the logic of it virtually ambushed me. The second point--closely related--is that conservative identity politics cannot simply be ignored, or factored out of other discussions. It lies at the very heart of understanding conservative hostility to liberals, which is the main driving force polarizing our politics today, and interfering with the important work of solving major problems that confront us as a society--such as meeting the challenge of climate change.
This is a long diary, over 4000 words, so feel free to skim the parts that may seem tangential to you. I wanted to preserve enough of the original to accurately reflect the range of factors that I had considered. And I hope that even if this is a bit long for you to read online all at one go, you'll want to bookmark it and return to it again. Heck, maybe even as soon as my next diary posts.
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