Reading through this story coming out of Iran, I find myself increasingly agreeing with Maziar Bahari about pressing engagement with Iran in terms of pointing out how the actions of the current government have “consequences”. As more and more stories like the aforementioned, along with Bahari’s Jon Stewart story come to light via the various people both inside and outside Iran pierce what remains of the veil of secrecy around Iranian culture/internal ongoings, I think we are exposed to a picture of a regime of rapidly vanishing legitimacy that is flailing in all directions to avoid/delay the inevitable.

To my mind, letting that process play out (ie. allowing the current regime to collapse under the weight of its own internal inconsistencies) while diplomatically gesturing towards the obviousness of the situation is the only sane best of all possible, if not far more challenging than it is often given credit, courses of action.

It remains true that throughout the Middle East there are real instances of attitudes and actions towards human rights that constitute reasonable causes for concern. While we might be in a place where most aren’t interested in making the Middle East over in the West’s image (were such a thing even possible), that doesn’t mean that we also cease to be concerned about the rights afforded women in Saudi Arabia or homosexuals in Dubai or the like. And if those reasonable concerns are to really be addressed and the security risks posed by animosity between the so-called “clash of civilizations” averted, then a real partner is needed in the Middle East.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, it makes sense to me that Iran represents the greatest possibility for that partner. [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 →]

Not long ago, Mark posed a question about the responsiveness of divided government in relation to the discussion that he, Freddie, and I had about size, scope, and effectiveness of government generally. In that post, Mark, with his usual aplomb, suggests that in theory, divided government is generally a desirable state of affairs for citizens of a democratic republic.

Said Mark,

This isn’t to say that divided government is a cure-all that ensures that all our problems will be competently dealt with. Instead, it’s just to say that divided government makes three things more likely: 1. Where there is no national consensus on the existence of a problem, no legislation will try to fix that alleged problem; 2. Where there is a national consensus on the existence of a problem, legislation will be strongly pushed that seeks to solve that problem; and 3. Legislation that passes will be the result of good-faith negotiations about how best to solve the problem.

The challenge with this assertion is that it works in theory. In practice; however, it is, like so many other things, rarely such a clean state of affairs. While I’m not disagreeing with Mark per se (though we tend to agree on so damned much that it would be nice to get a good row going between us), I think looking at a real life example of divided government and the impacts it has on the populace might be instructive.

In keeping with my “home-grown” theme lately, it just so happens that I live in one such instance: oh, Canada… [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 →]

It concerns me every time I hear someone talk about “President Obama getting us out of this economic mess,” as if any one human being can get an entire country out of anything, or even wrap his/her head around the entirety of what the economic mess really is in its entirety, frankly. Understanding though I do that the calls for the necessity of government acting to avoid a complete bottoming out of the country’s economy, it is in this regard that I’m most worried about the behemoths that both Obama’s stimulus package and  budget wound up being. It’s not just that they increase dependence on government as the means by which people prosper, my treatment of David Brooks and moderatism yesterday should indicate that like him I’m a fan of the idea of  limited but energetic government — which is to say that I agree that government has some role, and not insignificant, to play in plugging the holes to this ever cracking dam. It’s more that government becomes housed in the trusted visage of Barack Obama and the cult of the presidency hits new soaring heights of misplaced hero worship.

There are a lot of problems with said cult in and of itself, but the one that worries me the most is that in this instance in particular it won’t work. The enormity of this economic crash is such that no president with any cadre of expert advisors really knows what’s going on down to the last detail and therefore doesn’t really what measures to apply. Efforts by Obama et al are educated shots in the dark and they have the best chances of succeeding if average-everyday Americans are convinced to see the problems as something they have a role in addressing. It will be some unknown combination of elements that are likely to turn things around; the work in which some motley crew of unnamed Americans engages that will couple with the work in which some motley crew of unnamed Chinese/Germans/Brits/whatever engages and that patchwork of different, not wholly understood activities will be what really pulls the global economy out of its hurtling nosedive. But as it stands right now, every is poised watching Obama and everything he does seems to have the exact opposite effect on the markets because it’s not the confidence of the President that really matters, it’s the confidence of average-everyday folks. Right now, they have no confidence because they feel helpless, and there’s no wondering why. [Read more →]

by Kyle Moore

(Note: this post is MOSTLY ripped straight from my comments to one of Scott’s earlier posts)

I wanted to make I suppose an emphasis to this great post. Early on you posit that in order for good partisanship to occur, all sides have to do so respecting essentially the multiple facets of an issue, and appreciate what people outside of one’s own ideology can bring to that discussion.

I would like to emphasize a slightly different angle because I think it’s a little more important. You talk about it, but in sort of a roundabout way. Positive partisanship comes from willfully recognizing that one’s own ideology can be wrong. [Read more →]

In responding to my post about a legal victory for same-sex couples being a necessary but not sufficient first step towards broad cultural equality, Andrew Sullivan writes,

An argument that rests on a simple resort to the legal status quo is not a very strong one. It’s perfectly possible (and logically necessary) to craft a compelling and winning case for marriage equality in the absence of its legality in any particular state. That’s especially true once the principle has been established somewhere in America. I think the progress we’ve made in such a short space of time leads to the opposite conclusion: that this is an area which can be won culturally before it is won legally.

So I agree with Andrew that people who premis their argument on the legal status quo aren’t presenting a very strong argument, but, look, that won’t stop them from doing it. As a proponent of marriage equality I might be willing to acknowledge that there are stronger and weaker oppositional arguments, but I hold the views that I do because at the end of the day I believe that are no strong arguments against marriage equality that aren’t eminently out weighed by arguments in its favour.

As mentioned further down the post and, actually, the primary thrust of the post, is my belief that marriage equality proponents must go about making cultural arguments not just against the discrimination against same-sex marriage, but also articulating why legalizing marriages presents a significant boon to society. I think those arguments can be made convincingly and I have on several occasions attempted to make them myself. But I think we need to recognize something about discussions that happen on a cultural plain, especially insofar as those discussion involve discrimination: they are extremely difficult conversations to have.

People whose discrimination is rooted in cultural reasoning are generaly fairly adverse to debating those reasons. There is the pervasive sense that people ought to be allowed to adhere to whatever cultural norms and customs they so choose, without exposure to recrimination. So if you choose to then go ahead and push the issue, the likely outcome is that your interlocutor will respond with defensiveness. People hold tightly to the cultural signposts that help to provide some maning to their lives and are loathe to give them up, even when it has become eveident that those signposts are out dated and poining in an unhelpful direction. So folks will tend to use whatever is within their reach to defend those held beleifs, preferably the more disposable arguments and reasoning first.

At the end of the day, the ball with regards to cultural equality for same-sex marriage lies largely in opponents courts. I say this by way of recognizing that you can’t really force people to alter their cultural beliefs. People may choose to hide those beliefs from the light of day in response to overwhelming pressure, but history shows us that this kind of victory really only gives rise to a more nuanced and insidious forms of discrimination. No, as Freddie warns, people cannot be coerced into accepting same-sex couples, they have to be persuaded. The choice, like it or not, is up to them. So my argument is that the fewer obstacles you have standing in the way of that genuine engagement — and the more you recognize the necessity for that engagement — the better equipped you are to realize your overall goal of full-bodied equality for same-sex marriages.

I also don’t quibble with Andrew around the strides that marriage equality proponents have made in recent decades, but I think it is important that we bear a realistic picture of the work in front of us in mind. While great strides have been made in race relations, culminating in the election of the first African-American President, no one serious about securing broad equality for traditionally marginalized minorities would suggest that the work is done. This more than a century after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation and several decades after the zenith of the civil rights movement. Great strides, yes, but the work of securing broad cultural equality is long, arduous, and pervasively tricky.

So I celebrate with Andrew how far marriage equality and gay rights activists have come, but am conversely humbled by the realization that in this work the hardest and most difficult push always comes at the end.

Since quoting animated characters seems to be the order of the day, let me playfully respond to Freddie’s latest on same-sex marriage with a line from one of my favourites, “suffering succotash!” Freddie is quite correct when he says,

To some degree this is a debate in search of a problem because legal and social acceptance will inevitably be deeply linked.

John Schwenkler and E.D. Kain aside, I think this especially true of Freddie’s take on the issue of marriage equality as compared to mine. While I acknowledge that the whole idea of developing distinctive nomenclature for same-sex marriage tugs at my philosophical ear, I have acknowledged that practically speaking it seems like a doomed project, at least in the short term. And I don’t differ with Freddie in believing that the current focus and primary focus in terms of marriage equality must be legal.

Look, to some degree this dichotomy of the “cultural work” and the “legal work” is just false. The work of legalizing same-sex marriages happens on the legal and cultural fronts simultaneously. And so E.D. is right when he notes that there are some cultural shifts necessary before we might expect to realize a legal victory for marriage equality. But the reason I identify legal victory as “the first step” is that I think its realization marks, in some senses, the beginning of a renewed and focused push for cultural equality. It strikes me that truly uncovering and addressing some of the more buried cultural elements of discrimination against same-sex couples is next to impossible so long as opponents have a legal basis to fall back on.

And this is where I tend to get pensive around Freddie’s arguments. On the whole I think we are on the same page, but statements like, “I do think, though, that the history of various civil rights struggles suggests that a passionate minority fights for and wins legal rights, and then, over time, social acceptance grows[,]” leave me feeling like part of the picture is being left out. What I mean is to say that, to my mind, legal equality is necessary but not sufficient for broad cultural equality. This notion that over time people will just come around doesn’t strike me as realistic. Rather, with legal rights secured, same-sex couples and their allies are enabled to take their cause beyond the realm of just the legal and push into some of the more embedded and, frankly, more difficult elements of realizing a robust equality that embodies both legal underpinnings and the respect and dignity that ought to be available to any loving relationship.

I recognize at this point that we are tangling the weeds of marriage equality and gay rights generally speaking, but as with cultural an legal work, I’m no sure to what degree the two aren’t inherently intertwined to begin with.

In response to my earlier post o the subject, commenter Josh pushed me on what exactly I meant by focusing on cultural elements to achieve some sense of full equality. It’s a good question and one that caused me to think more deeply about what exactly I meant by the statement. [Read more →]