Jane Hamsher has been taking a lot of flak in recent days for coming out against the Senate health care reform bill as well as for suggesting that “both the [progressive opponents] and the tea party activists are saying almost the exact same thing about the Senate bill” and that the ”painfully obvious left/right transpartisan consensus that is coalescing against DC insiders of both parties appears to be taking everyone by surprise.”  Although not actively opposing the final Senate bill, Glenn Greenwald offered similar sentiments about the common ground between the Tea Partiers and the far left, noting:

Whether you call it “a government takeover of the private sector” or a “private sector takeover of government,” it’s the same thing:  a merger of government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else’s expense.  Growing anger over that is rooted far more in an insider/outsider dichotomy over who controls Washington than it is in the standard conservative/liberal ideological splits from the 1990s.  It’s true that the people who are angry enough to attend tea parties are being exploited and misled by GOP operatives and right-wing polemicists, but many of their grievances about how Washington is ignoring their interests are valid, and the Democratic Party has no answers for them because it’s dependent upon and supportive of that corporatist model.  That’s why they turn to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh; what could a Democratic Party dependent upon corporate funding and subservient to its interests possibly have to say to populist anger?

Hamsher then followed through on her assertions by agreeing to take her case to Fox News, for which she was criticized as being “naive.” Finally, today we learn that she has teamed up with none other than Grover Norquist to call for Rahm Emanuel’s resignation due to his actions with respect to Fannie and Freddie.  The criticisms of Hamsher and to a lesser extent Greenwald, have been echoed by several of my fellow Gents here at the League. 

Underlying these criticisms of Hamsher seems to be an assumption that: 1. From a liberal perspective, it is inarguable that the Senate bill at least makes things better; 2.  Hamsher is insane for finding common ground with Tea Partiers in opposition to bailouts that were sold as necessary to prevent a Great Depression; and 3. Hamsher is insane for thinking the Tea Partiers have any actual common ground with her, and that they may actually have similar values to her. 

The first two of these criticisms, however, demonstrate precisely why Hamsher and Greenwald are ultimately correct about the common ground with the Tea Partiers.  Specifically, these criticisms assume that “the experts” are always right, and that the average voter is unqualified to assess the normative merits of a particular government action.  So, the message is sent that progressives like Hamsher should STFU since Paul Krugman thinks that the bill, while imperfect, is at least an improvement from the status quo.  Similarly, on the bailouts, Hamsher (as well as, I assume, all the Dem legislators that voted against them last year) should STFU and support them because the experts say things would have been really, really bad without them [NOTE: I am not offering an opinion here as to my thoughts on TARP].  In each case, Hamsher is expected to weigh the acknowledged normative costs less than the claimed normative costs because, well, she’s neither an expert nor an insider; she’s dismissed as being unrealistic and unserious merely for assigning different moral weight to the acknowledged normative costs from the experts.  Unfortunately, last I checked, being an expert economist or scientist doesn’t give one authority to tell people how to make moral calculations. 

[Read more →]

Wow, lots to dig into with Chris and E.D.’s respective posts. In the spirit of keeping things short and sweet, though (and to hasten the opportunity for someone else to pick the ball up and run with it), I’m going to focus my first offering on Erik’s contention about the ideological tendency towards absolutism, which I think cuts nicely across both posts.

My own diagnosis would take Erik’s focus on the cultural absolutism of prevailing political and cultural perspectives and call for a quarter turn in re-identifying this malady as one of essentialism. As I’ve often griped, overtly ideological thinking seems to persistently exhibit a tendency to speak in unwarranted certitudes about having figured everything out. Much of that false certainty, by my lights, is derived from a belief in the ability to deduce the essential nature of any number of things, be they government, the free market, freedom, or democracy, via one’s particular brand of ideological calculus. [Read more →]

Back in late July, Kevin Drum had a smart post up talking about the process behind successfully driving legislative initiatives like health care reform that dovetails in some fashion with Mark’s post about Democrats losing control of the debate,

But underneath that, it’s all about how it’s sold.  Everything has to have a constituency if it’s going to get passed.  For ag subsidies it’s farmers.  For lax financial regulation, it’s banks.  For tax cuts it’s rich people.

For healthcare it’s…..I dunno.  Who?  But that’s the point.  Everyone has been so hung up on congressional process that they seem to have forgotten that Congress responds to the public.  If constituents are mad as hell that their healthcare isn’t as good as France’s, they’ll flood congressional offices with phone calls.  But if they think America has the best healthcare in the world, while the rest of the world is a socialist dystopia of ramshackle hospitals, yearlong waits for hip replacements, and harried doctors who can’t see you for months and treat you like a postal customer when you finally get in — well, who’s going to get pissed off about the occasional scuffle with their insurance company?  And if the public isn’t worked up, then Congress won’t get worked up either.

This has always been about public opinion.  Everything is about public opinion.  It’s about public opinion being strong enough to overcome the resistance of whatever corporate interests are on the other side.  For some reason, though, liberals don’t seem to get that anymore, and because of that we don’t spend enough time on either side of the basic vox populi equation: (a) hammering home why individuals, personally, should be unhappy with the status quo, and (b) promising them, personally, lots of cool new stuff if they buy into change.

You don’t have to lie to accomplish this.  But you do have to sell, the same way any salesman anywhere sells stuff.

Certainly Kevin’s formula has accurately predicted the state of the health care debate. It is Republicans and (some) conservatives who have gotten their base riled up and have; therefore, come to take control over the contours of the debate. And insofar as Kevin’s analysis is descriptive, I think he makes a lot of sense.

But I think that said analysis also contains within it many of the explanations about why it seems to many people as though the health care debate has gone so far off the tracks. [Read more →]

So, lately I’ve been trying to branch out a bit more – to see what the movement conservatives have to say and pay it a little more heed (rather than focusing only on the really silly things) and not just wander about the realms of the dissidents and libertarians and localists (even though these are typically the more serious voices out there, and the only voices which I think promise any real reform agenda, any real possibility of limited government and liberty, and all that jazz).

The thing is, I sometimes begin to feel a little bit too contrarian, or as Kara Hopkins put it a while back: “I snipe much and affect little.”  As easy as it is for the movement types to demonize and excommunicate the dissidents, it is just as easy for the dissidents to do the same.  (Thus my post a while ago on ‘the big tent.’)

But a couple thing keep tripping me up in this quest to expand and broaden my horizons.  A couple not-insignificant obstacles remain between any meaningful alliance of the dissident and movement conservatives.  Probably the most glaring is the hawk and owl divide – or if you prefer, the realist/neocon divide.  You see, to me no true conservatism can embrace the sort of hawkish, militaristic policies that the neoconservatives lay claim to.  These are liberal internationalist policies sprinkled heavily with right-wing machismo.  Conservatives are supposed to be wary of “statism” yet nothing says statist like a security or police state built on the back of the global war on terror overseas contingency operation.  Nothing promises Big Government like a Really Big Military.  (Well, except for maybe Really Big Bailouts and Really Big Entitlements…) [Read more →]

Freddie and Mark have recently gone a couple of rounds over the effectiveness of the counter culture and its protest modality for expression of concern and frustration about any variety of issues. In many ways I think that both are simultaneously spot on in their analysis and way off-base.

Firstly, let me just say that I think it was wholly unfair of Freddie to extrapolate the very last line of Mark’s post in order to conveniently conjure up one of his favourite axes to grind. That’s precisely the kind of rhetorical voodoo for which  Freddie has regularly criticised his more dishonest nemeses, and rightly so.  As Mark has subsequently gone out of his way to point out, his criticism about the incoherence and subsequent lack ineffectiveness of protesting was leveled equally at participants from both the left and the right. I personally would have thought that his extremely funny “Pardon Scooter” line made that fact abundantly clear.

That said, I think Mark analyzes the function of protesting from a distressingly one-dimensional perspective that misses an entire component of its value. Ironically, such an analysis is of precisely the same kind for which Freddie called me out some time back at The Politics of Scrabble (sorry, no link – I really should have migrated the content before letting to site go dark), so I’m somewhat surprised that he failed to offer the analysis here, especially insofar as I think it’s compelling and has re-shifted my own perspective on the subject.

Much, much more after the jump. [Read more →]

Esteemed co-blogger Chris Dierkes has a challenging post on the democratic process. Here’s a decent summary:

In our late modern (or postmodern if you like) world, with the proliferation of many interests and sub-interests, causing fragmentation across society (”the long tail” phenomenon), aligning interests becomes nearly impossible. There are too many interests, too many too narrowly focused, too many too tightly held ,propped up by the professionalization of the lobbying class and the sea of money that bears down on the shores of our politics.  Clearing the deck and prioritizing becomes a Herculean task beyond the mere mortals who hold the power these days.

I admit I’m drawn to bloggers (like Chris) who wear their conservative pessimism on their sleeves. But I’m not sure I find this analysis all that compelling. As a purely descriptive statement, I suppose I agree – our fragmented political culture has a damnably hard time getting anything of consequence done. But is this a result of a terribly flawed process or the fact that none of the issues facing our government are incredibly important?

The correct response lies somewhere in between, but I’d wager that most of the problems facing the United States don’t rise to the level of national emergencies. For all our security-related hysterics, terrorism has never posed an existential threat to the United States. Likewise global warming, which will probably be dealt with through a combination of private innovation and intelligent, government-sponsored mitigation strategies. Other problems – endemic poverty, the economic crisis – are certainly important, but I’m not sure they represent anything approaching a true crisis.

In fact, recent history suggests that our biggest blunders have been thoroughly bipartisan – witness the Iraq War’s near-universal support circa 2003 or the ongoing, argument-proof consensus in favor of the drug war. So is widespread political agreement really that desirable? I won’t complain if consensus is reached through considered deliberation, but that doesn’t seem to happen  in the political sphere, where agreement is emotive rather than policy-driven. We all know that terrorists are bad people, so we declare war on them. Is this the best policy response? Probably not, but hey, at least our discourse isn’t so fragmented!

This is not to say there aren’t serious problems facing the United States, but I don’t an increasingly diverse political conversation is to blame. As things stand, the most difficult issues are consistently pushed aside precisely because those most affected are not engaged in the political process. If anything, more fragmentation would be genuinely beneficial if it would help expand the spectrum of acceptable political discussion. Elsewhere, Freddie has ably documented the ongoing marginalization of the anti-imperialist left, who, despite having leveled a critique of American power that was largely vindicated by events, continue to be left out of foreign policy. In much the same way, those most affected by the drug war don’t even have a seat at our political table. How many congressional hearings have examined the impact of aggressive drug enforcement on inner-city communities? How many bills have been introduced to address our burgeoning prison population? Jim Webb’s admirable legislative agenda notwithstanding, these aren’t the sort of things that get talked about with any regularity on Capitol Hill.

Instead of trying to forge an unwieldy political consensus, I’d rather focus on diversifying our policy-making process. Maybe we won’t agree on everything, but at least we’ll hear from those of us who would otherwise get left behind. Inclusion isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Sonny Bunch’s calling out Freddie for his take down of Robert Stacy McCain struck me as on target, particularly when Bunch pulls out the underlying point of David Denby’s book Snark saying,

[D]iscourse in the age of the Internet is fundamentally nasty and mean-spirited for no good reason and both the nastiness and the mean-spiritedness retards decent conversation

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m in full agreement with Freddie’s critique of McCain and having read John Schwenkler’s post that kicked all of this up I am at a loss to see what McCain chooses to read into it. So there is little question that on some level McCain deserved to be challenged on his reading of John’s post, but the question that stands out is: how best to do that?

The way that Freddie chose is one option, but I quote him back to himself talking about the approach of aggressive atheists,

You don’t argue your way out of niches by constantly thumbing your noses at the people who you’re trying to convert. The question then becomes, are they converting at all? Or are they merely asserting superiority?

Now, Freddie might respond that he’s not seeking to convert McCain and that, in fact, McCain isn’t the type of person who is capable of being “converted”. Fair enough, but then what is the point of thrashing him? I wonder why the  effort put into something that is unlikely to yield any meaningful results.

And I think that Bunch is absolutely correct about this kind of aggressive and ultimately pointless communication permeating the Internet by my lights. It frankly shocks me how often I run into someone commenting on a post who thinks that the only thing he or she is required to do in order to further a conversation is rhetorically pistol whip whomever they happen to disagree with. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that American culture, for all my reading American focused blogs and magazines and the like, remains partially opaque to me, but the sheer lack of civility that informs so much of our online discussion is disheartening for someone who wants to believe that things like blogs and online magazines can act as a means of truly forwarding discourse in meaningful ways. It’s hard to hold out hope for that belief when much of the effort you witness on sites is peoples’ creative means of calling each other fucking morons (pardon the language).

And please don’t misunderstand me to be saying that we can’t get into good vehement rows over important issues, because that isn’t the poit of this lamentation. Some of the best conversations I’ve ever had and some of the best interactions that I’ve been privy to online have also been the hardest hitting. In particular, when I first read this response to a post of mine by Helen Rittelmeyer I felt like I’d been punched in gut, especially rereading this line,

Scott doesn’t want to appear more confident in his ideas than he actually feels, but the flipside of his kind of humility is this: While it may be a kind of pride to argue as if you were certainly right, it is more prideful still to nurse an unwillingness ever to be wrong. It takes the sin of pride to be wrong, but it takes the virtue of humility to be revealed to be wrong.

It hurt because it was true and was a valuable lesson to learn about my shadowy tendencies and arrogant pridefulness in always appearing to be right. In my estimation, Helen didn’t pull any punches with her analysis and I emailed her shortly after reading the post to thank her for its candor. But the only reason I got anything out of the post was because Helen had taken the time to frame it in such a way as to be honest in an unflinching way, but constructive and instructive and most of all supremely civil. Helene’s work in that regard is instructive to how we can go about aggressively challenging each other’s ideas with a modicum of respect that actually contributes to some kind of forward movement in our overall discourse. As she said in that same post: slug it out. But remember when people trained in fighting meet to battle, they bring with them a code of honour that infuses the fight. It is of little consequence to win the battle without honour: you’re not fighter in that instance, but rather a cheap brawler.

I believe that McCain’s response to John was an example of this type of brawling. And though I respect him greatly, I think that Freddie’s response took him from his usual stature of a prize fighter and lowered him to McCain’s level. And in that sense, I believe that McCain actually won.

The blogosphere is full of cheap brawlers who like to fancy themselves as prize fighters. And while those brawlers may delude themselves into believing that their efforts are contributing to some kind of larger movement, really they’re just busy feeding their own petty egos at the expense of real contribution. On a bad day its a pretty sad scene.

Something that is increasingly driving me around the bend is the tendency to make appeals to “the people”. Politicians and pundits do this all the time in trying to argue for a particular point of view they happen to be extolling, as if you can reliably count a broad cross section of individuals as thinking in a certain way at all times on particular class of issues. Appeals to “the people” are supposed to be a justifying buttress to one’s argument by demonstrating that you must be right because most individuals agree with you.

Now, in a democracy it is certainly true that a particular course of action or decision on a certain issue requires legitimizing by demonstrating support from those for whom the decision or course of action will have consequences. But on the face of it, the fact that a certain cross section of people agree with and idea doesn’t mean that a particular idea is a good one. Individuals can and have been known to support bad ideas for a variety of reasons. But my distaste for this type of appeal doesn’t just have to do with undermining a good faith debate on ideas based on the merrit of those ideas. Rather, I find the appeal to be disingenuous in terms of the way it describes the content of the subject at which it is aimed.

Talk about “the people” is, by my lights, on par with reference to the “masses”. When appealing to “the people”, one is doing violence to the individuality that is exhibited by thinking citizens of democracy, and thereby disenfranchising those thinking citizens from the process of determining the direction of their polity. It goes without saying that in a democracy there is no way of homogenizing the beliefs and stances of citizens on issues at any time. Not only does the diversity of views means that it is next to impossible, nor desirable, to realize complete unanimity on any given issue, but individuals will change their views on issues over time. So assuming some kind of static consensus on even the most minor of issues within a certain graft of people is nothing more than a convenient rhetorical tool. But the assumption of consensus as a means of justifying an argument/idea/decision/course of action functions as short cut to actually discussing the issue and inviting individuals to consider all of the nuances on a particular topic to arrive at what they might think to be the correct conclusion. The effect is to have prominent voices and personages essentially dictate to citizens what they will think on a particular issues based usually on some kind of ideological identification. The approach is anathema to democracy in the extreme. [Read more →]