Back during the Bush administration, many Democrats, including Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden, opposed warrant-less wiretapping. But now that the Democrats are in power, there has been a change of mind.
It is a great example of how much politics is a matter of group loyalty rather than loyalty to principle. Obamaphiles are in favor of whatever President Obama favors, and Obamaphobes are opposed, no matter what.
Presidents Ronald Reagan was noted for “dog whistles”—phraseology that the general public didn’t notice, but that reassured conservative Christians that he really was on their side. President Obama has a genius for liberal dog whistles. Liberals believe he is on our side at heart in spite of all the things he actually does.
President Obama is fortunate in his right-wing enemies. They help him more than they hurt him. When they attack him for minor and imaginary misdeeds, as they almost always do, they divert attention from the worse things of which he really is guilty.
For example, I can’t see what is so terrible about Internal Revenue Service auditors looking extra carefully at Tea Party groups claiming tax-exempt status on the grounds that they are non-political educational organizations. It seems to me that this is an obvious thing to look at closely. As I understand it, the IRS didn’t actually challenge the tax exempt status of any Tea Party affiliate, just put them to the inconvenience of filling out extra paperwork. Maybe the IRS inquiry was justified, maybe not, but I don’t see it as important. The result of the controversy will be that IRS agents from now on will think long and hard before questioning a tax-exempt application from any right-wing organization.
The government’s reading of Associated Press and Fox News e-mails without warrants is a more serious issue, but it is a well-known fact that the U.S. government has developed a universal electronic surveillance system that operates outside the Fourth Amendment. Why would they be except? The whole affairs reminds me of Senator Joe McCarthy’s investigation of the U.S. Army in 1954 (which I am old enough to remember). McCarthy could get away with smearing the reputations and ruining lives of individuals, but when his attack on a key part of the U.S. power structure proved to be his downfall. My first thought was that President Obama overreached himself in a similar manner, but my sober second thought is that the Washington press corps is not a key part of the U.S. power structure, they only think they are.
The Benghazi attack, in which U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed, is a legitimate issue. It is reasonable to inquire whether better security could have been provided and whether the State Department intentionally presented misleading information. But to me, these questions are much less important than the question of why the sdministration sponsored the overthrow of the Libyan government in the first place. Muammar Qadaffi, the rule of Libya, renounced terrorism and efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction, and the overthrow tells other dictators there is nothing to be gained by cooperating with the United States.
The Tea Party wing of the Republican Party says President Obama is a socialist who wants to redistribute income to the lower classes and call off the war on terror. The truth is that the President is a corporatist who has bailed out Wall Street, offered to cut Social Security, done nothing for black people as such while proposing to continue the war on terror indefinitely. But it is hard to use these facts to point out that the Tea Partiers are wrong, without making Obama’s policies seem like good things rather than bad things.
The biggest problem in making the true case against Obama is the false case against Obama.
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Click on How Arrested Development Explains the Obama Presidencyfor Conor Friedersdorf’s complaint that the U.S. public’s choice is between President Obama, who is committed to a state of war lasting for the indefinite future, and opponents such as Rep. Peter King, who complains that Obama says the war will someday have to end.
Click on Drones for “Regime Protection”for Philip Girardi’s article in The American Conservative about how the Obama administration plans to keep the Maliki and Karzai regimes in power after the troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan by the use of flying killer drones against their enemies.
The people in the upper 1 percent income bracket are getting richer, and most of the rest are falling behind or barely keeping even. But I don’t think wealth or income as such need to be redistributed. What this country needs is a redistribution of political and economic power.
I would like to see a world in which labor unions, producer cooperatives and consumer cooperatives are equal in power and status to business corporations, and labor unions, consumer and environmental associations and community organizations are equal in power to business assocaitions.
Then it would be possible to deal with issues of corporate governance, monopoly power, labor relations, election laws, government transparency, conflicts of interest and all the other systemic means by which a tiny elite can milk the system for their own benefit.
As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. supposedly said, there can be no freedom of contract without equality of bargaining power. If power is widely distributed, the distribution of wealth and income will take care of itself.
Economic anthropologist David Graeber was one of the early participants in Occupy Wall Street. He wrote an interesting article in the current issue of The Baffler in which he argued that the power of the political and economic elite is based on their ability to convince the rest of us that there is no alternative to the status quo. He said that is why they have such fear of dissent and protest.
One often hears that antiwar protests in the late sixties and early seventies were ultimately failures, since they did not appreciably speed up the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina. But afterward, those controlling U.S. foreign policy were so anxious about being met with similar popular unrest—and even more, with unrest within the military itself, which was genuinely falling apart by the early seventies—that they refused to commit U.S. forces to any major ground conflict for almost thirty years.
David Graeber
It took 9/11, an attack that led to thousands of civilian deaths on U.S. soil, to fully overcome the notorious “Vietnam syndrome”—and even then, the war planners made an almost obsessive effort to ensure the wars were effectively protest-proof. Propaganda was incessant, the media was brought on board, experts provided exact calculations on body bag counts (how many U.S. casualties it would take to stir mass opposition), and the rules of engagement were carefully written to keep the count below that.
The problem was that since those rules of engagement ensured that thousands of women, children, and old people would end up “collateral damage” in order to minimize deaths and injuries to U.S. soldiers, this meant that in Iraq and Afghanistan, intense hatred for the occupying forces would pretty much guarantee that the United States couldn’t obtain its military objectives.
And remarkably, the war planners seemed to be aware of this. It didn’t matter. They considered it far more important to prevent effective opposition at home than to actually win the war. It’s as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.
I think this is true. The reason the United States government is moving heaven and earth to capture Julian Assange and punish Bradley Manning is the fear of letting the American public know what the government really is doing. Fear is the reason for the massive police response to the Occupy movement and to protests generally is so out of proportion to what is actually being done.
Urban police departments have military equipment and are encouraged to use military tactics, as if they were an occupation force in a hostile foreign country. It is as if the powers that be are preparing to suppress an uprising among the citizenry.
The United States government has, for more than 30 years, been dismantling government regulation of corporations and Wall Street banks, dismantling the social safety net and reducing taxes on rich people, with the promise of economic growth and prosperity for all, and that this promise has not been fulfilled. It also is true that the optimism and hope for a better future, which has characterized American life since before the United States was an independent nation, is vanishing. And historically, disappointed hopes were what inspired revolutions. So it is no wonder that the elite are fearful.
Democrats are gloating over the divisions and self-destructive path of the Republican Party, but their own party’s leaders are equally divisive and self-destructive. President Obama and the rest of the party’s top leadership are dismantling everything that would give an ordinary working person or middle-class person a reason to vote Democratic.
I have in mind Obama’s attacks on the social safety net, his “too big to fail” and “too big to jail” policies toward lawbreaking Wall Street banks and his support for treaties that would give corporate-friendly international courts the authority to override U.S. laws protecting workers, public health and the environment.
I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 when he promised to seek a public option for health insurance, to defend Social Security and Medicare, to revise the North American Free Trade Agreement to protect the interests of workers, to support “card check” to protect the rights of workers to form labor unions, to bring the national security apparatus under the rule of law and the Constitution and to keep the United States out of “dumb wars.”
I voted against him in 2012 because he did just the opposite of these things. He never even considered a public option. He has repeatedly offered to cut Social Security and Medicare. He supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, now being negotiated in secret, which is worse than NAFTA. He did not support card check, nor has he done anything to defend the rights of labor to organize. His record on civil liberties and warmongering is worse than that of President Bush.
For quite some time progressives have ceased to defend President Obama’s policies on their merits. They say we should support President Obama because his policies are not as bad as Paul Ryan’s or Darrell Issa’s. This puts President Obama in a position to offer what the blogger “Digby” called a Sophie’s Choice.
The White House and the Democratic centrists are holding hostages. … [T]hey’re basically telling the progressives that a hostage is going to get shot no matter what: Head Start and food inspections today or the elderly, the sick and the veterans tomorrow and they have to choose which one.
As she wrote, sometimes the best choice is to just say “no”.
Back during the Bush administration, I read What’s the Matter With Kansas? by Thomas Frank and Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant, which were about why working people in Kansas and southwest Virginia voted Republican when the Republican Party pursued policies counter to their interests. Their answers were not so much that these voters gave priority to cultural and moral issues over their economic interests as that neither party championed their economic issues.
Now cultural and moral issues are working more to the advantage of the Democrats than the Republicans, but it is still the case that (with a few honorable exceptions) neither party’s leaders defend the interests of working people. The Democratic leaders hope that people will vote for them because they are the party of abortion rights, gay rights, gun control and affirmative action (I agree with the first two, but not the last two) and forget about jobs, wages and the social safety net. I think this is wrong and, on purely pragmatic grounds, I don’t think this is sufficient for a winning electoral coalition.
Public opinion polls show that the majority of Americans blame the Bush administration and not the Obama administration for the Great Recession. But the fact is that the Obama administration’s economic policies are continuations of the Bush administration policies. What has President Obama done or proposed that will help wage-earners and the unemployed, or prevent another and worse Great Recession? I can’t think of anything except the stimulus package, which did not achieve its object but may have prevented an even worse decline.
For the past 20 or so years, the Democrats and Republicans have alternated in power. Just 10 years ago, the Democratic future seemed as bleak as the Republican future does now, but they quickly came back. The Republicans could do the same. I think the American people are not satisfied with either party. That is why neither one stays in power for more than a term or two. Eventually either one or both of the two parties will change direction, or one or both of the two parties will break up. I have lived long enough to know I can’t predict the future. The only thing I am sure of is that things can’t go on the way they are now.
This brief TED talk by Lawrence Lessig highlights the power of money in American politics and what a small number of people are able to exercise that power. I recommend the video, but I don’t think things are going to change until there is a populist movement in this country strong enough to challenge the power and question the assumptions of the elite class.
I think the campaign financing reforms that he suggests are a good first step, although they are not a solution. The greater problem is the power of an interlocking elite class in government, high finance and giant manufacturing corporations, in which people move back and forth from high level jobs in Washington and Wall Street and everybody in these circles takes it for granted that Social Security and Medicare are a problem that has to be solved.
The great American reform movements of the past—abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the populist and progressive reform movements, the organization of labor unions, the civil rights movement—came from people who did not accept the choices offered by the two major parties, and whose power did not depend on governmental favors.
Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, wrote in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion that good people are divided because liberals and conservatives fail to understand the moral foundations of each others’ values. Haidt identifies as a liberal, and yet says the conservatives typically have a broader and better understanding than liberals do.
Haidt and his colleagues created what he called a Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which were intended to show how strongly people felt about moral behavior in five categories: (1) Care vs. harm, (2) Fairness vs. cheating, (3) Loyalty vs. betrayal, (4) Authority vs. subversion, and (5) Sanctity vs. degradation. Later they added (6) Liberty vs. oppression.
They found that self-identified liberals and progressives cared most about Care, a lot about Liberty, some about Fairness and very little about anything else. Conservatives, on the other hand, cared about all six Moral Foundations in roughly equal measure. Libertarians, who don’t fall into either category, called most about Liberty, a lot about Fairness and very little about anything else.
Haidt said that while American liberals care about individuals and their welfare, American conservatives balance this with concern for the virtues necessary to uphold social order. You don’t help the bees by destroying the hive, he said. He said libertarians are even more limited; they are liberals without bleeding hearts.
When conservatives were asked to fill out questionnaires based on what they thought a typical liberal would think, they were reasonably accurate. But when liberals were asked to put themselves in the place of a typical conservative, they failed utterly. That finding startled me, and I wonder how many Fox News and Rush Limbaugh fans were included in the survey.
But his basic point is correct. The liberal virtues of freedom, reason and tolerance can be practiced only in a stable society, and a stable society requires the conservative virtues of duty, authority and tradition.
Just as liberals are outliers within American society, Haidt wrote, Americans are outliers among the people of the world. Americans value the well-being of the individual over all else. Most other cultures set a higher value on community and divinity. Haidt became aware of this on a visit to India, where he came to appreciate the virtues of a hierarchical, tightly-knit society in which people weren’t treated equally or even justly, but everyone had a place in society with its duties.
He cited an article on cross-cultural comparisons by Joe Heinrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayen, which coined the acronym WEIRD—Westernized, educated, individualistic, rich and democratic—to define what sets Americans apart from the rest of the world.
Haidt participated with Brazilian psychologists in a survey of moral values of rich and poor people in Recife and Porto Alegre, Brazil, and in Philadelphia. Interestingly, they found that the richer and more educated Brazilians and Americans had more in common with each other than they did with the poor and working-class people of their own countries. The poor people thought breaking rules was wrong regardless of circumstance, while the educated people said that it depended on whether breaking the rule did any harm.
I wish Haidt had followed up on that finding. What it suggests is that so-called WEIRD values are a natural consequence of wealth and education. I would like to believe that liberalism represents the direction of human progress, rather than a fair-weather philosophy that goes overboard in adversity.
Click on YourMorals.Orgto take Jonathan Haidt’s Morality Quiz
Click on Of Freedom and Fairnessfor Haidt’s article in Democracy Journal about the current political situation.
The first two charts below show how Republicans used redistricting to tilt election results in Michigan.
Click to enlarge
Double click to enlarge.
The two charts are in an excellent series of articles by Bloomberg News on how gerrymandering enables Republicans to win a majority of House of Representatives seats even in states where they get a minority of the votes. The concluding article proposed a solution, a non-partisan commission to draw election districts, as was done in California under Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Click on the following links to read the articles.
