Honestly, every time I read a political message of substance delivered via Twitter from Sarah Palin that looks like this, [Read more →]

You may well have noticed that my Canadian content has been on the rise of late. I find myself in the grips of a sort of strange bout of nationalism at the moment, which I denote as strange for reasons that will be at least partially outlined in this post. I just can’t muster much enthusiasm for writing about US politics and feel drawn to contributing to the degree of critical dialogue in this frozen tundra I call home.

You’ll have to bear with me, but I’m trying to find ways to satisfy my own Canuck impulses while still making what I write accessible and, perhaps more importantly, engaging to our primarily American audience.

To wit, the revived discussion around same-sex marriage via the squeakers in either direction that have recently occurred in both Maine and Washington prompted me to do some thinking about the same issue north of the border.  Riffing off of Jamelle’s post, I decided to check my intuition around  the degree to which the issue of marriage equality is, in fact, a non-issue in Canada, contra the state of affairs in the US.  It would seem that my intuition is born out by the data of a recent Angus Reid poll on public opinion around same-sex marriage in Canada, Britain, and the US,

Canadians are generally more tolerant to the idea of same-sex marriages than Americans and Britons, according to a poll by Angus Reid Strategies. 61 per cent of Canadians say couples of the same gender should continue to be allowed to legally marry in their country.

In contrast, only 33 per cent of Americans and 41 per cent of Britons say that same-sex marriage should be made legal in their respective countries. 36 per cent of respondents in the United States say that such couples should not be granted any type of legal recognition, and 18 per cent of Britons agree.

The poll itself doesn’t go on to the explore the reasons behind the differences of opinion, but I have a working theory that first occurred to me when Reihan Salam made an offhanded comment about the number of South East Asian politicians represented in the Canadian political system at the end of the podcast on race and politics that he, Jamelle, and I recorded a ways back. Pivoting off of E.D’s post on the matter, for a lot of people, the obvious go to answer is religion — i.e. Canada is a lot less religious and, religion being a key factor in determining an individual’s stance on homosexuality, the degree of religiosity exhibited in a country will directly correlate to the attitudes of its citizens towards homosexuality and marriage equality. [Read more →]

It’s interesting to watch how conservatives and liberals treat each other.  How they categorize one another.  I’ve tried to distinguish between the two – since it seems they each have different methods of dehumanizing the other side.  I’ve boiled it down to the title of this post: caricatures and demons.

Conservatives demonize liberals, and liberals caricaturize conservatives.  And perhaps I’m picking at nits with this, but there does seem to be a difference between the two.

In popular conservative myth, liberals “hate America” and long for some neo-Stalinist socialism.  Liberals are painted as weak and yet entirely capable of running a massive state/media coup of the nation in order to redistribute wealth and impose draconian regulations and taxation on honest, hard-working Americans.  And the motivation for this?  Dread “multi-culturalism” and America hatred for hatred’s sake.

Liberals, on the other hand, act as though the loudest and most verbose of their critics in fact represent not only the conservative movement, but the very philosophy upon which conservatism draws.  Certainly the phrase “conservatism is dead” is second only to its younger cousin “rock is dead” in frequency of use.  And second, only because “rock is dead” makes for a far better t-shirt.  This supposition is drawn, often as not, from a caricaturization of the movement or philosophy based mainly on its chest-thumping class of pundits.  If Rush Limbaugh is a conservative, after all, then certainly this is how all conservatives must be – ergo, conservatism is dead.  (Man cannot live on Rush alone, after all!) [Read more →]

During the election, much of the talk in regards to then candidate Obama was about post-partisanship. There was a pretty steady refrain about how the presidency of Obama was going to herald the beginning of a post-partisan politics where finally Washington would find a way of putting aside its differences and work together for the greater good of the country.

And don’t get me wrong, I was all ears. The fact that this promise of post-partisanship formed the  much of the foundation of Obama’s campaign was what drew me in and made me a fan from pretty early on.

Needless to say, that promise hasn’t really come true and while it was exciting to have a candidate running for President who at least felt like utilizing that message was important, it never really had much of a chance of coming true, realistically. Not to be deterred, some folks have now moved the goal posts as a result, talking endlessly about the importance of and Obama’s unerring commitment to bipartisanship.

And I can’t help but think that all this talk of bipartisanship is really just another plank in our politics of distraction, about which I tweeted last night and about which I intend to write further once I have my thoughts more accurately in order. [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 →]

I’ve held off commenting directly on the last round of Palin-mania surrounding her resignation and speculations about reasons and future directions because, frankly, I just don’t think it matters all that much. Sarah Palin resigned… okay, that’s semi-interesting, I suppose. Can we get back to talking about the burgeoning subset of challenges and issues facing both the US and the world right now?

But Andrew Sullivan’s latest tell-all missive about his unparalleled obsession with all things Palin demands, to my mind, a response. It demands a response not just because I think Andrew’s handling of Sarah Palin has been unbalanced, but more importantly because it fails to take account of how that handling fundamentally plays into Palin’s hand, reinforcing and feeding into the style of politics that Andrew claims to be battling. [Read more →]

So I’m pretty thoroughly on record around these parts as having a certain distaste for political labels and have a variety of arguments about why to mixed reviews. Over the past while I’ve essentially dropped the argument, seeing it as a losing battle and conceding that there are some useful applications of those labels. But the requests of commenter Michael Drew for some clarification around each of the contributors’ political identity has caused me to revive the topic in my own mind and prompted this post. Ostensibly, Michael (if I may call him by his first name alone) is challenging the site’s assertion that we have contributors from across the political spectrum. Admittedly, we are a little light on the liberal side of the street having lost Kyle Moore a few weeks back, but on the whole I would say that our claim remains true.

Michael has repeatedly called for some kind of bio that outlines each contributors’ political leanings, or at least a post by each contributor similar to the series in which E.D has offered a few posts working out the various kinks in the trajectory of his political identity. I have been toying with posting a similar piece and have written these types of posts before at my older digs, but upon reflection have decided to stick to my guns in telling Michael to read through my various posts if he wants to get a sense of where I stand politically. Michael’s complaint is that he doesn’t have time to read through all of my, let alone every contributors’, posts to get that sense and I don’t frankly begrudge him that response.

[Read more →]

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” – Nietzsche

It is a popular notion to suggest that the problem with American politics is that they have been taken over by a a virulent strain of hyper-partisanship that rendering its victim paralyzed Opinions vary as to the appropriate vaccine, but I would like to suggest that any course of treatment for the malady will fail to be effective because the thrust of the prognosis is off-base.

It is certainly true that the American political process is characterized by alternating bouts of ideological paralysis and pendulous oscillation that in many regards is counterproductive. But as Matthew Yglesias reminded us just a year ago, partisanship isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, this post appears in the League’s  sustained discussion about what might constitute the “good side of partisanship”, wherein we’ve attempted to carve out the ways in which our ideological differences can be leveraged to the benefit of all.

No, in the discussion about what ails our political process, hyper-partisanship is properly understood not as the virus we seek to eradicate, but rather just another symptom of a much deeper affliction: laziness. [Read more →]

It seems in some circles that the cool thing to do is to brand a certain category of writers and thinkers with whom you disagree as nothing more than Andrew Sullivan wannabes, fallen lock-step with his Borg-like proclamations of conservative impropriety, in whose analysis nary a critical bone can be located. Such argumentation has certainly been hurled at the doorstep of this site with somewhat increasing frequency, giving me cause to examine it in more detail.

I have been an out-of-the-closet fan of Andrew Sullivan from the first semi-coherent note I posted on Facebook over a year ago that launched my foray into blogging. It was Sullivan’s often cited long-form essay on Barack Obama that simultaneously caused me to get off the fence in regards to Obama v. Clinton, develop an interest in expressing myself in political discourse, and take an immediate interest in how Sullivan was doing the same. Often not present in quite the same way when one reads his blogging output, what blew me away in the essay was the interesting and off-the-beaten-path lines of thought that ran through the article, the thoughtful consideration that was offered, and, more prominently on display in his blogging, the intense personal narrative that sought to transcend an article simply about a politician, and provide an account of a man. Following on the heels of my skeptical break with political activism, Sullivan’s was the first writing I had encountered in a while that moved me to action (both mental and physical) on so many different levels.

So I’m disinclined to place much stock in those folks who feel like epitheting via Andrew’s name is a damning criticism of anyone’s writing or thought process, anymore than I am inclined to place much stock in those folks who do the same with, say, Rush Limbaugh’s name. Look, the fact of the matter is that it is a rare (perhaps non-existent) human being who isn’t influenced by someone’s body of work and thought, and the beauty of our modern polities is that we have free rein to decide for ourselves who it is that we choose to be influenced by. The “group think” meme seems to assume that those of us who respect and even — dare I say it? — admire Andrew Sullivan, do so without any speck of criticism for what Andrew says or how he says it. Of course, that simply isn’t true of 99% of the cases, and it certainly isn’t true of this site, where as much criticism gets layed at Andrew’s feet as does praise. [Read more →]

I can utterly relate to what E.D. is saying when he writes,

Sometimes I’m overwhelmed with this sense that all of this is an exercise in futility – that there is simply too much to know, too much I don’t know, too much I don’t or can’t understand.  My ignorance on this or that subject is laid bare by the revelation of some new fact, some history unearthed that changes the entire game.

A variation on that exact same thought occupied my mind to paralysis on Saturday night, rendering all attempts at writing useless. As is my way in those circumstances, I went on a late night walk to the river by which I live to try to clear my head out and place myself in a context of space larger than my apartment affords. The goal is to provide my thoughts with some room to stretch out and hopefully arrange into some kind of meaningful constellation that might offer something in the way of insight, instead of the clustered muck they appear prior. As I sat on a park bench in the chilled night, looking at the frozen-over river stretching windingly through the centre of the city, my mind calming with the sight of each frozen breath splaying out in front of me, a familiar frustration revisited my awareness.

When I was nine my father passed away. It wasn’t a prolonged and agonizing procession through one sickness or another, but rather a brutally abrupt and sudden occurrence. One night I went to bed and when I awoke the next morning my father was gone, lost to a heart attack. Looking back now with my thirty-two year old eyes I know that there were signs that something wasn’t right, but to the nine year old me those years ago his passing struck without any warning. When I woke up that morning, I remember being able to sort of sense that things were amiss, something about the air seemed heavy and thick. Descending the stairs and walking into our kitchen my mother sat puffy-eyed and distant until her gaze found my face. Crying out loud, she pulled me in as I noticed my grandmother’s presence in the kitchen, as well — there might have been others, I don’t really remember. I began to cry, primarily because my mother was crying as she hugged my brother, who had followed me into the kitchen, close as well. I was awash in confusion, more than tears.

My father’s death left me with an early feeling of dislocation from a linear sort of stability in the world. The lesson I quickly learned was that things, even the stalwart presence of a parent, change; circumstances, even the most important, are highly contingent. But we persist.

That lesson has followed me into my adulthood and informs much of current predisposition to eschew or at least look skeptically at hard and fast political affiliations. There have certainly been times in my life where I thought I had found the end-all-be-all answer to everything in a certain political and social outlook. But as E.D. notes, “suddenly the veil falls away, and the great big universe of doubt washes over me again.” I take that doubt to be a positive thing and a lack thereof to be the sign in political identification to more often than not indicate the futile exercise of intellectual empire building. All empires fall and often times there is much damage that is inflicted in the process of their construction.

But more to the point, the building of an intellectual/political empire strikes me as an inherently absolutizing endeavour, one almost never seeks to build an empire just so that one can discover its fault lines and generally chooses instead to ignore the cracks inflicted by the imposition of reality on one’s smooth edifice. In this way it worries me that too much of our political discourse is more about our own introverted, intra-tribal battles than it is about those spheres of life that politics deeply affects.

At the end of the day I can’t help but see all of us as shivering in the tide of a stunning sea of unknowns, engaged in a beautiful struggle to make sense of our lives, our world, and our very existence. The shifting contexts of that world are nothing if not a Sword of Damocles strung precariously above any hubris we might muster in determining that we’ve figured it all out, or that we ever will.  Our persistence in trying is not in this view to be considered folly or useless, but rather to be approached with the requisite humility about our capabilities in the process. The mystery of life is the dwarfing backdrop against all of our endeavours to categorize and compartmentalize, and our tendency to ingore that mystery is the palpable frustration I feel that renders me speechless and uncertain about the worthiness of saying anything at all.

So can we construct a politics whose trajectory is as much exploratory as it is proclamatory? Can we attentuate our efforts at figuring out how we are to live together to the stage on which those lives play out? Can we engage in this beautiful struggle in a fashion that befits the enormity of our task and cultivate in ourselves a respect for the leviathan we’re attempting to birth?

On nights like last Saturday I wonder and think that I’m simply asking too much of our politics. Perhaps that frustration is destined to persist, as are we.

Despite the seeming jubilation of Barack Obama’s hope/change/yes we can campaign, it seems as though idealism is on the outs in today’s political discourse. There have been a couple of issues that I’ve written on the last little while that have drawn the response, “That sounds nice, but I think you’re being too idealistic about all of this.”

The charge of idealism has always been an interesting critique for me. When leveled, I usually take it to mean that while people might not disagree with the essence of what you happen to be arguing, they believe the context of your arguments to be naive and lacking in contact with the reality of the situation. In itself, I don’t have much of a problem with the critique, which is to say that I don’t necessarily disagree with its use. But neither do I think it often fundamentally undermines the thrust of the arguments I present.

First of all, I think that in our contemporary political discourse people tend to underestimate the influence and effect that idealism has and has had on the world around them. Many of our most cherished institutions arose out of idealistic notions of how countries and societies ought to organize themselves. In many ways, the American project itself is an exercise in idealism and it is to the spirit of that idealism that many proponents of American exceptionalism point when rallying the citizens of the country, much beloved Barack Obama included. Notions of universal human rights, democracy, and self-determination, these were all once considered idealistic flights of fancy. And yet now these notions underwrite the quality and way of life that we all enjoy and in many ways take for granted.

It is in this regard that I think idealism offers its greatest strengths to us and ought not be dismissed quite so quickly as many would see fit to do: idealism often offers the arena in which some of our best ideas are born. In some senses I think that a failure to cultivate a sense of idealism is one’s intellectual pursuits functions as a sort of intellectual dishonesty. Even political and social intellectualism isn’t a wholly pragmatic affair, there is an element of creativity and visioning that we admire of those who engage the exercise most exceptionally. Closing one’s self off to the possibilities of idealistic intellectual pursuit is not unlike cutting one’s self off at the knees before even beginning to run a race. Banishing idealism from the race is in many respects to deny that the best part of the race even exists. Doing so fundamentally limits what we might expect to uncover from the creative thinking process and at its worst promises to provide a cadre of mediocre options as a result.

To my mind, the fact of the mater is that societies tend to benefit from having people engage in intellectual analysis and exploration free from borders and limitations and so we ought to encourage such an environment to the best of our ability.

Of course, while idealism in intellectual pursuit might be something to be encouraged, its unrelenting presence in terms of practice or application can become something of a hindrance. But here I think the problem is a confusion about what domains we take idealism and realism/pragmatism to best operate and imagine a tension that needn’t necessarily exist because of that confusion. As a self-avowed idealist of sorts, while I may engage in a thoroughly idealistic intellectual exercise about certain issues and ideas, I don’t tend to carry that idealism over into the application component of ideas or addressing certain issues and certainly don’t fall back on a dogmatic reliance on idealism to accurately sum up the circumstances of said application. To do so is to misunderstand the domain in which one is operating. But so too, I think, is the case with the rigid demand for realism in the intellectual exercise of examining and exploring different ideas and possibilities.

While the open creativity of idealism might best serve me in intellectual pursuits, the sober assesment of realism is best equipped to inform me about the circumstances and contexts on the ground. Which is not to say that one doesn’t or shouldn’t take the realities on the ground into consideration when engage in intellectual theorizing. But one not necessarily allow one’s self to be constrained by those realities in the theorizing/exploration process for fear of missing out on some the best possible ideas for discovery. In this sense, the tension between idealism and realism is only real insofar as we misunderstand the values of one or the other to be pervasive across all domains.

Rectifying that potential misunderstanding stands not only to better clarify our discursive project, but also, I think, to cultivate a more productive applicative landscape.

“We left – onto the freeway shoulders – under the tough old stars. In the shadow bluffs I came back to myself. To the real work, to ‘What is to be done.’” – Gary Snyder, I Went into the Maverick Bar

I want to double back to a conversation that was we were having earlier this week regarding how we choose to approach one another in political discourse and the use of snark in that discourse. I came in for some criticism for agreeing with Sonny Bunch that Freddie’s interaction with Robert Stacy McCain, while McCain was certainly due for a take down, was unhelpfully snarky and ad hominem ridden.

In response to E.D.’s defense of snark, Max Socol wrote,

And how many more people have read that post, than would have if it was a mild-mannered suggestion? Drama sells.

Right, I guess it depends on what we understand our undertaking to be when blogging. To get this out of the way, I did not suggest that Freddie’s response needed to be mild mannered and the idea that if one doesn’t riddle one’s comments with snarkiness and ad hominem attacks it is therefore “mild mannered” strikes me as going a bit far. What I said was,

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 point 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.

So, look, civil and mild mannered are not the same thing. By all means, avoid pulling punches, but leave the name calling in the sandbox where it belongs and focus your take downs on the substance of the person’s arguments. [Read more →]