The Republic of Dissent

The limits of political magic

Ah!:

In truth Mr Obama’s problems extend well beyond the confines of the capital’s Beltway. The president’s headache is that his winning majority resembles the hamlet in “Brigadoon”. It exists all right, twice sending him to the White House. But, like that Highland village, it is hard to see or touch most of the time. (...) The magic at the heart of Mr Obama’s two victories was his ability to expand the electorate itself, mobilising sporadic voters who shun politics most of the time, notably the young and minorities. Now that he is no longer on the ballot, his loose coalition risks being no match for the intense ideologues who fight and oversee Washington’s partisan battles.

 

The American constitution as a toxin

The best sentence I read this week from Sandy Levinson over at Balkinization:

(...) the Constitution is evermore a clear and present danger to the health of the American Republic.

Politically correct approach to counter-terror

Foreseeable crap from Eugene Kontorovich:

Russia only succeeded in suprresing the Chechen Islamists with extremely brutal tactics that would never find support in the U.S – essentially leveling the Chechen capital. Yet dealing with such a threat would also be impossible with a politically correct approach to counter-terror that, for example, turns away from talking frankly about the terrorists profiles and motives.

Yeah let's transform America into Russia, it won't be too difficult for Obama has at least one thing in common with Putin.

Is it possible to wait to now more facts before advocating ideological measures in the name of security?

For profit American health care

Sugary excerpt of the day from Charles Simic on the American health care system:

Today, when the acquisition of wealth, quickly and in large amounts, is admired above any other human endeavor, every medical emergency or catastrophic illness is seen as an opportunity for some to enrich themselves beyond their wildest dreams. It’s no wonder that our healthcare is so much more expensive than that of every other developed country in the world, where the costs are not only much lower, but people also live longer than we do. Unlike us, other countries have the peculiar notion that profit has no place in any situation in which the basic decencies that human beings owe to one another ought to be the first consideration, and for that reason regulate the cost of lifesaving drugs and operations. In other words, they are less greedy than we are and far more humane.

Softness and diplomacy

From Vali Nasr, author of a new book on Obama's foreign policy The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat:

The White House was ever afraid that the young Democratic president would be seen as ‘soft’ (...) It did not want to try anything as audacious as diplomacy. It was an art lost on America’s top decision makers.

Sudden change

I disagree strongly with Professor Bainbridge on this:

Former Democratic Congressman, Clinton Administration White House Counsel and federal judge Abner Mikva once explained that: "I support the result of Roe v. Wade. … But … in retrospect, I wish the court had stayed its hand and allowed the political process to continue, because we would have legislated the effect of Roe v. Wade in most states — not all of them, but in most states — and we wouldn’t have had to pay the political price we’ve had to pay for it being a court decision. The people who are angry at that court are angry beyond measure. As far as they are concerned the whole system is rotten because they’ve lost their opportunity to slug it out."

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has likewise stated that "Roe v. Wade ... halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue."

Because it is custom, tradition, and long familiar patterns that enable people to live together peaceably, social change needs to come slowly. Change and progress are necessary, of course, but sudden change disrupts social bonds, induces stress and engenders controversy as old and vested interests are upset.

Sudden change by a cabal of unelected and largely unaccountable judges is particularly likely to engender controversy.

Sometimes, and I will argue almost always, sudden change is necessary in a society as complex and entrenched as America's. The trouble of course is that change in America is more often than not symbolic (cough Obama cough) when it is sudden and spectacular and in the political process, its effects are diluted at best for many reasons, one of which is that America isn't a nation-state.

I guess my inability to find sudden change troubling explains why I can't become a conservative no matter how hard I try.

Summum malum

I agree with Corey Robin on this:

During the Vietnam era, liberals and leftists believed not only in social justice but also in mass protest. Whether the cause was democracy at home or liberation abroad, men and women afflicted by oppression had to organize themselves for freedom. Yes, some of yesterday’s activists were blind to coercion within these movements, and others joined elite cadres bombing their way to liberation. Still, the animating faith of the 1960s was in the democratic capacities of ordinary men and women, making it difficult for liberals and leftists to believe in conquering armies from abroad or shock troops from on high.

Many liberals, and some leftists, no longer hold these views. Their faith is guided not by the light of justice but by the darkness of evil: by the tyranny of dictators, the genocide of ethnic cleansers and the terrorism of Islamist radicals. Despite their differences—some of these liberals and leftists support the war in Iraq, others do not; some are partial to popular movements, particularly those opposing anti-American governments, while others favor constitutional regimes, particularly those supporting the United States—theirs is a liberalism, as the late Harvard scholar Judith Shklar put it in a pioneering essay in 1989, that seeks to ward off the “summum malum” (worst evil) rather than to install a “summum bonum” (highest good). Reversing Augustine’s dictum that there is no such thing as evil—evil being only the absence of good—today’s liberal believes there is only evil and progress is measured by the distance we put between ourselves and that evil.

Ah good intentions and the obsession with evil...

Absolute justice

Pertinent stuff from Any Davidson on the Steubenville's rape trial:

There is something deeply harmful in all of the adults reinforcing the idea that the lives of teen-age boys are destroyed when a girl says what they have done. There is also something incomplete about just replying that they deserved the consequences (as much as they do). For one thing, it can mean asking a sixteen-year-old to be the one to judge the weight of her own trauma. It isn’t trivializing the seriousness of the sentence to say that teen-agers always think, when one door is closed, that everything is over, and that it’s the job of grownups to explain that it isn’t. A different life is not a worthless one. (Absent parents, not incidentally, are a theme of this story.)

The problem is that Americans are as obsessed with absolute justice as they are with absolute freedom.

The dangers of hero politics

I  agree almost totally wth Brendon  O'Neill on this:

If America’s failure to shunt Chavez aside in Venezuela spoke to its impotent international reach, then its inability to counteract the idolisation of Chavez everywhere from Hollywood to Western literary circles spoke to its failure to win over large swathes of the cultural elite to American values. It is through loving Chavez that many a modern youth and respectable commentator really communicated their fashionable hatred for America, and more importantly for the modern values it is seen to represent.

Western leftists are in mourning for Chavez, never stopping to ask why they invested so much hope in such a faraway figure in the first place. And those of a more right-wing, pro-capitalist persuasion are celebrating his death, not bothering to ask why it took 14 years and cancer to do to Chavez what their political forebears would have done to a leader they didn’t like in a matter of months.

In a way, everything about El Comandante is in his burial and his mourning, which overshadow the people and the causes he purported to defend.  Hero politics as Hero balling is always flashy, but seldom wins games although it wows crowds.

Nous restons tous américains

Pertinent stuff from Glenn Greenwald:

It's certainly true that Americans are justifiably proud of certain nationalistic attributes: class mobility, ethnic diversity, religious freedom, large immigrant populations, life-improving technological discoveries, a commitment to some basic liberties such as free speech and press, historical progress in correcting some of its worst crimes. But all of those virtues are found in equal if not, at this point, greater quantity in numerous other countries. Add to that mix America's shameful attributes - its historic crimes of land theft, genocide, slavery and racism, its sprawling penal state, the company it keeps on certain human rights abuses, the aggressive attack on Iraq, the creation of a worldwide torture regime, its pervasive support for the world's worst tyrannies - and it becomes not just untenable, but laughable, to lavish it with that title.

Assertions of one's nation's exceptionalism are banal and create more obligations than privileges. 

The word is american and America is increasingly going to have an issue with how much others have learned from its recent years.

America is a problem

From Peter Temin and David Vines, authors of The Leaderless Economy: Why the World Economic System Fell Apart and How to Fix It:

The United States set the example for bank bailouts during the crisis itself, but then it vanished as a world economic leader, (...) Like Britain roughly a century earlier, America has become part of the problem, not the solution.

Extensive, perpetual, and cheap wars

I agree with David Cole's comment on the now infamous US Justice Department's Drone White paper :

Drone technology has made it possible to use lethal force in many situations where we could not or would not have even considered it in the past. Unlike conventional military operations, drone attacks require no “boots on the ground,” and therefore do not pose a risk to American lives. Unlike bombings, they have pinpoint accuracy; they therefore reduce the collateral costs of killing and may be easier to disavow. Because drones can effectively travel the world while being controlled remotely from home, they permit the “war” to move far beyond the battlefield. And drones have made it possible for the US government to do something that was unthinkable before, and should be unthinkable still—to kill its own citizens in secret. In short, drones radically reduce the disincentives to killing. And that may well make a nation prone to use military force before it is truly a last resort. That certainly seems to be what has happened here.

Kenneth Anderson has a interesting take on the subject.

 

Itchy tolerance

From Elissa Strauss:

According to Gawker, [Michael] Bloomberg once told a female colleague to “kill it” when she announced her pregnancy, only after teasing her about being too ugly to be engaged. Another Bloomberg employee complained of the institutional harassment at Bloomberg LP in the late 1990s, and believed that the misogynistic workplace culture was linked to her being raped by her superior in a hotel room. Also, “in 2007 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit against Bloomberg LP on behalf of 78 women who claimed that Bloomberg — who at that point was not involved in the day-to-day company operations, despite being a majority shareholder — and Bloomberg LP ‘fostered, condoned and perpetuated’ a hostile work environment for female employees.”

This is pretty bad, right? Nevertheless, nobody seemed to really care when they elected him to mayor the first, second or third time. And nobody seems to really care now either.

Imagine if there was a similar history of his saying or condoning disparaging remarks against blacks or Jews. Our inboxes and Facebook feeds would be filled with celebrity-endorsed pleas to sign online petitions pressuring him to resign from office. He would feel obligated to at least mutter some public apology, even if it clearly wasn’t heartfelt. But talk down to women like this, and the outrage is barely existent. (Think I am over exaggerating? Remember what happened with serial misogynist Charlie Sheen? The actor’s career was derailed by a single anti-semitic comment, after years of reports of domestic abuse and porn addiction.)

Sure, sexism can be more difficult to define than racism or anti-semitism (because humans + sex drives = messy), but when there is a pattern of misogynistic behavior like Bloomberg’s, albeit alleged, I wonder why we are so darn tolerant.

Well, the answer to that question explains in part why Obama is president.

Sexual Revolution and Counterrevolution

Sugary excerpt of the day from Kathryn Joyce:

Even among nonhysterics, John Kerry’s 2004 defeat was attributed by liberal writers in part to his outspoken wife, and the excesses of the Tea Party are denounced most vigorously by Republican moderates who ridicule the movement’s female politicians as unserious.

Even in the Democrats’ 2012 convention, lauded for women’s central role, First Lady Michelle Obama’s otherwise powerful speech discounted her entire professional life in favor of her role as “mom in chief.”  Listening to that speech, I don’t hear hysteria but rather calculation, which is sadly realistic at that. Understanding why it’s still necessary means understanding what continues to drive the backlash. And it demonstrates that, if the sexual counterrevolution is ever over, the unfinished work of the original revolution is still waiting.

Expressive politics

I agree with Sandy Livinson on this:

What I want to do now, though, is simply to vent about the patent irresponsibility of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick in appointing his friend Michael Cowan to replace John Kerry as senator, apparently for no other reason than his (Gov. Patrick's) desire to have an African-American Democratic senator for at least four monts or so, and regardless of the fact that there is no reason at all to believe that Sen. Cowan, as I presume he'll become tomorrow or very shortly thereafter, has any real knowledge about national political issues that may in fact come up in the next four months.  This is "expressive politics" at its absolute worst, and Gov. Patrick should be ashamed of himself.  Frankly, it is the kind of self-indulgent gesture by someone with power that gives "affirmative action" (which I support) a bad name with many Americans.  He has, in one instant, disserved his state, his party, and the nation (even if, as I presume, Sen. Cowan is an extremely fine and able person whom all of us would be proud to have as a friend or, if governor of Massachusetts, an aide, as he was.)  Nothing in my remarks should be read as casting aspersions on Mr. Cowan's personal character (other, frankly, than that he didn't have the personal self-discipline to exercise what Madison might have described as the "civic virtue" to tell the Governor that he is highly flattered but not really qualified for the job). 

All politics nowadays is expressive politics, which is almost always a potent and dangerous form of identity politics.

Deval Patrick is Obama 1.0, he hasn't yet updated his operating software to make his errors of judgment appear to be brilliant avant-gardism and awesomely historic.

Mali, Niger, France, US, Whac-A-Mole

From the great Stephen W. Smith:

The bigger question is not why France decided to intervene but why America has held off. Is it simply imperial overstretch and war-weariness? That seems a little thin, given the hue and cry in Washington about ‘ungoverned spaces’ and ‘terrorist safe havens’. After all, the Sahara is six times as big as Afghanistan and Pakistan combined. And why sink money into the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership – more than $1 billion since 2005 – or foot the bill for Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahara, if at the end of it all al-Qaida is allowed to march on Bamako? Why would Obama order more drone strikes than his predecessor against the leaders of Somalia’s al-Shabaab, a group with relatively weak links to international terrorism, but not lift a finger to stop AQIM from taking over Mali? Unless, of course, in addition to a division of labour with the French, the point is to ‘disaggregate’ the multiple terrorist threats in Africa, tackling each individually rather than addressing any common denominator, and so deny jihadism a chance to coalesce. In this regard, even if the French were drawn into the quicksand in Mali, Nigeria would most likely remain the region’s focal point for the US: with 150 million inhabitants, it is the most populous state as well as the biggest oil producer south of the Sahara, and has an active homegrown salafist-jihadist group, Boko Haram (‘Westernisation Is Sinful’). When I put these thoughts to a US military staffer involved in anti-terrorism in Africa, he replied tersely: ‘What we’re doing in Africa is a sort of Whac-A-Mole’ – a reference to an arcade game in which players force moles back into their burrows by hitting them on the head with a mallet. He went on to quote the sixth president of the United States, John Quincy Adams: ‘America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.’ Well, not any longer perhaps. But France has done precisely that.

THIS can't end well!

Southern dignity

From Garry Wills:

Tradition dies hard, hardest among those who cannot admit to the toll it has taken on them. That is why the worst aspects of the South are resurfacing under Obama’s presidency. It is the dignity. That a black should have not merely rights but prominence, authority, and even awe—that is what many Southerners cannot stomach. They would let him ride on the bus, or get into Ivy League schools. But he must be kept from the altar; he cannot perform the secular equivalent of taking the Lord in his hands. It is the dignity.

This is the thing that makes the South the distillation point for all the fugitive extremisms of our time, the heart of Say-No Republicanism, the home of lost causes and nostalgic lunacy. It is as if the whole continent were tipped upward, so that the scattered crazinesses might slide down to the bottom. The South has often been defeated. Now it is defeating itself.

It is easy, comforting, and convenient to blame American idiocy on the South, it fits perfectly in the dumb culture wars narrative.

Primus inter pares

From Kevin Jon Heller:

Fortunately — though I know this comes as a shock to the US, which likes to pretend that it is primus inter pares — the US doesn’t get to unilaterally determine whether Palestine is a state. Nor does Israel (and note that that Rice’s “direct negotiations” lament is simply designed to give Israel a veto over Palestinian statehood by continuing to avoid negotiating in good faith).

My suggestion: at all future UN meetings, [Ambassador Susan] Rice should avoid turning her head toward the seat with the State of Palestine placard.  That will make it much easier for her to pretend that more than 70% of the world’s states didn’t recently vote to recognize Palestinian statehood.

Bien envoyé mais c'est plus compliqué !

Gender bias and denial

The absurdity of the day from Heather Mac Donald:

Absent a showing that gender discrimination is causing the selection of inferior leaders, the sex of politicians and government officials is of no public import. And feminists’ cherished conceit that women today face a wall of overt or unconscious bias rests on deliberate blindness to the facts. No elite organization today fails to incorporate oppressive gender and race consciousness into its every hiring and promotion decision. Any woman in the public realm not acutely aware that her gender is a plus in getting selected for panels and media appearances, in all likelihood catapulting her ahead of more qualified male participants, is living in a state of denial.

Well, America is particularly in a state of denial when it comes to gender...

Cheap

Ah:

Though a majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal, several states retain trigger laws that would come into force if Roe v Wade were ever overturned (see map). Leaving them in place is a cheap way for politicians to place themselves on one side of a culture war without having to accept the consequences of their position.

Nowadays, in America and elsewhere, being successful in politics means being cheap!

The Hollywoodization of torture

Quote of the early morning from Karen J. Greenberg:

Hollywood, that one-time bastion of liberalism, has provided the final piece in the perfect blueprint for the whitewashing of torture policy.  If that isn’t a happily-ever-after ending, what is?

Hollywood has never really been about liberalism as much as it has always been about triumphalism. It embraces torture through Zero Dark Thirty because it has no memory (it gets in the way of good and fluffy stories and of the romanticization of history) and believes that everything did indeed changed after 9/11 including what is permissible and forbidden. 

Sex makes Americans stupid

Great stuff from Katherine Franke:

In an ironic sort of way, sex and sexuality have been collateral victims of recent advances in the rights of gay people to the extent that their claims have been framed as a right to family, not a right to sexual freedom.  Whether by design or by accident, some of the advocates of marriage equality who have defended and celebrated the sanctity, dignity and special-ness of marriage have fortified the rather conservative notion that sex outside of marriage (whether it be adultery or hook ups with people you find out the internet) is somehow indecent and worthy of reproach.

            Thomas Friedman famously observed that “9/11 made us stupid” – well, sex, it seems, makes us even stupider.  At precisely the moment when gay people’s right to marry seems to be reaching a positive tipping point, sexuality is being driven back into the closet as something shameful and incompatible with honor (in the case of Petraeus) or decency (as in the case of Clash).   How did we get to this curious place, a place with a politics that would be almost unimaginable to the sexual freedom fighters of Stonewall?

I wish Franke hadn't used Tom Friedman to ake such a poignant point.

Excessive trust in one's own judgment

Sugary excerpt of the day from Conor Friedersdorf:

Obama and [John] Brennan may both be more thoughtful men than most, as their supporters argue. The problem with both is their excessive trust in their own judgment. A prudent person does not trust himself with the unchecked power to kill in secret, nor does he trust the executive branch with so extreme an unchecked power in a system constructed around checks and balances.

Our era is the one of Me so nothing new here.

 

 

 

Rien ne change

Obviously, I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

t is a perfect illustration of the Obama legacy that a person who was untouchable as CIA chief in 2008 because of his support for Bush's most radical policies is not only Obama's choice for the same position now, but will encounter very little resistance. Within this change one finds one of the most significant aspects of the Obama presidency: his conversion of what were once highly contentious right-wing policies into harmonious dogma of the DC bipartisan consensus.

Quelle surprise!

Newtown and Nakedness

Best thing I read about the Newtown tragedy so far from Bill Benzon:

Remember the story of the Emperor's New Clothes? The Emperor parades before the town proudly display his costly and gorgeous new outfit, NOT! For, as everyone sees, he's naked. But no one says anything for fear of displeasing the Emperor. And then one little boy blurts out "he's bloody naked!" and the whole delusion collapses.

Everyone saw what the boy saw, but no one knew that their neighbor saw the same thing. Everyone was quaking in their boots in fear that they, and they alone, couldn't see the Emperor's fine raiment. Therefore, there must be something terribly wrong with them. But there wasn't. Their eyesight was fine. The little boy's cry showed them that.

These terrible gun tragedies are like the little boy's cry. Now we all can see IT. But what is this IT that we can see, and why do we so quickly forget that we saw it? Why does seeing IT seem to make this failure of vision even worse? For that's what it does: "But after moments of healing, the partisan divide in attitudes toward guns has seemed only to accelerate after similar past events, as in Columbine, Colo." Just what is it that's been polarizing the American body politic over the last forty years?

The “Yes We Can” president

From Arundhati Roy:

What good are weapons if they aren’t going to be used in wars? Weapons are absolutely essential; it’s not just for oil or natural resources, but for the military-industrial complex itself to keep going that we need weapons.

Today, as we speak, the U.S., and perhaps China and India, are involved in a battle for control of the resources of Africa. Thousands of U.S. troops, as well as death squads, are being sent into Africa. The “Yes We Can” president has expanded the war from Afghanistan into Pakistan. There are drone attacks killing children on a regular basis there.

Well, America and the world for that matter love charlatans who are solely great orators!

 

 

Guns don't kill people, people kill people

Two quotes that show that the American normal when it comes to guns is peculiar:

The first from Ann Althouse:

I'm seeing a lot of post-Newtown proposals for more gun control — and resistance to these proposals. It's not surprising that each new massacre becomes an occasion to restate positions on gun control, with redoubled enthusiasm.

But why isn't there more talk about institutionalizing the mentally ill? Adam Lanza's mother needed to be home with him? What 20-year-old needs pervasive supervision from his mother? I suspect the mother, who is now dead, had very serious problems of her own. I can't understand her keeping those 3 weapons — pictured at the link — in the home along with a 20-year-old man who — in her view — required her stay-at-home motherhood.

We're so sympathetic to children, and now we're distracted by our sympathy for the dead children, but what about all the deeply troubled young people? Why are we so sympathetic to them up until the point where they act? Or... I mean... why does our sympathy toward the mentally ill take the form of regarding them as socially awkward and weird and leaving them alone?

The second one from Eugene Volokh:

So it appears that civilians armed with guns are sometimes willing to intervene to stop someone who had just committed a mass shooting in public. In what fraction of mass shootings would such interventions happen, if gun possession were allowed in the places where the shootings happen? We don’t know. In what fraction would interventions prevent more killings and injuries, as opposed to capturing or killing the murderer after he’s already done? We don’t know. In what fraction would interventions lead to more injuries to bystanders? Again, we don’t know. Finally, always keep in mind that mass shootings in public places should not be the main focus in the gun debate, whether for gun control or gun decontrol: They on average account for much less than 1% of all homicides in the U.S., and are unusually hard to stop through gun control laws (since the killer is bent on committing a publicly visible murder and is thus unlikely to be much deterred by gun control law, or by the prospect of encountering an armed bystander).

Just one comment, well no two: only in America, is it possible to ignore the obvious when it comes to gun violence to focus on fluff and peripheral issues (God, prayer in school, evil, the mentally ill, etc...)! That said, gun control advocates aren't very good, they are terrible and condescending!

American empire building

The sentence of the day is from Dan Drezner:

(...) I still think Americans are awful at empire-building.

Americans are awful at empire-building because they view themselves or rather their country solely as a benevolent and reluctant empire devoid of any 'selfish' self-interest.

The right to be hateful

From Wendy Kaminer:

Death, disease, war and genocide are tragic; famine is tragic; climate change is potentially tragic. An isolated incident of anti-Semitic graffiti is unsettling and lamentable, but it is hardly a tragedy. It is human nature. Few of us will go through life without being insulted or disliked on account of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or other immutable characteristics. People can be mean and stupid. People harbour biases; they always have and always will, and their right to believe in the inferiority or sinfulness of particular groups is the same as your right to believe in equality.

America's, and for that matter the world's, increasing obsession with purity bugs me. It kills debate with self-righteousness and the idea that being right affords one the right to be ignorant, intolerant, and obnoxious.

 

The vices of American higher education

Sugary excerpt of the day from Tim Black:

(...) if many of those passing through higher education are not only taught to believe that there are certain things you must not say, but are also actively discouraged from engaging in vigorous intellectual debate, is it any wonder that national debate is so often intellectually flaccid, and divided by sides that seem incapable of hearing the other’s argument. While the incredible political and cultural polarisation evident in the US, with people seeming to live in almost entirely separate moral communities, as [Charles] Murray put it, might not have been caused by campus censorship, it has certainly not been helped by it. The uncritical self-certainty of campus life has at least served to reinforce the hyperpolarisation of public debate. (...) It is as if higher education helps to draw the battlelines in the Culture Wars, with the disputatious but prejudiced mass on one side, and the enlightened illiberal elite on the other.

The American infatuation with innocence

I agree strongly with Corey Robin on this:

Only a country steeped in myths of innocence would find the most conventional and boring kind of realism about politics to be the trumpet blast of Truth, Brave Truth.

We see these quicksilver shifts, from innocence to cynicism or realism, in the culture all the time, especially its more elite sectors—though sometimes they go in the reverse direction. Think of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, how the wise-cracking cynic Jean Arthur becomes a true believer. Or Dave, where the Sigourney Weaver character makes the same pilgrimage. (Interestingly, in both cases it’s a woman who loses her cynicism and discovers her innocence via falling in love with a man.)

But whether it’s the cynic discovering or recovering her innocence, or the innocent losing his innocence, the story of politics among cultural and political elites in this country is always the same, toggling back and forth between two positions that are little more than the competing wisdom of juveniles.

Oh America, I have news for you even innocence can be sinful dirty complicated. As a matter of fact, in America, innocence is a way to fight the terrifying realization that purity in the modern world is impossible.

All this reminds me of the awfully good movie Agnes of God with Jane Fonda in which a young and yes innocent nun gets pregnant and there is throughout the strong suggestion that she had sex with God, which makes it more than ok, not an exploitation, not a perverted act or a worse not one of a sexual discovery and empowerment but a religiously wonderful occurrence for the Mother Superior (Anne Bancroft )  declares solemnly and fanatically in the end of the movie that to be innocent is to be god's victim.

The ignorance of voters

From the great Ilya Somin's comment on Citizens United or rather to a comment by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni in Slate on that infamous case:

The problem with modern voters is not that they are selfish, but that they are often ignorant and irrational. That problem cannot be solved by restricting corporate and union-funded political speech. Obviously, corporate and union-funded speech sometimes seeks to exploit political ignorance. But the same is true of speech funded by the media, political parties, activist groups, and others. In a political environment where the electorate is often ignorant, whoever is allowed to engage in electoral speech has a strong incentive to take advantage of that ignorance.

I agree with Somin even though I am trouble by the elitism (but right) of our shared viewpoint. However, my discomfort is soothed by the realization that America and Americans don't want an educated citizenry because of the belief, that politics is about identity and that illusory thing called culture. In other words, people should always vote who they are and never what they know.

In Obama's America it isn't knowledge that is power, but identity.

Convinced of their own goodness

From Glenn Greenwald:

Political leaders and political movements convinced of their own Goodness are usually those who need greater, not fewer, constraints in the exercise of power. That's because - like religious True Believers - those who are convinced of their inherent moral superiority can find all manner to justify even the most corrupted acts on the ground that they are justified by the noble ends to which they are put, or are cleansed by the nobility of those perpetrating those acts.

Political factions driven by self-flattering convictions of their own moral superiority - along with their leaders - are the ones most likely to abuse power. Anyone who ever listened to Bush era conservatives knows that this conviction drove them at their core ("you are with us or with the Terrorists"), and it is just as true of Obama-era progressives who genuinely see the political landscape as an overarching battle between forces of Good (Democrats: i.e., themselves) and forces of Evil (Republicans).

Well, four more years...Bush + Obama = ?

Moral distance

I agree with professor Bainbridge on this:

After all, the moral distance between Bush and Obama has gotten quite narrow.

Unrealistic

La phrase de la nuit from Pankaj Mishra:

It is extremely unrealistic to set out an agenda for an American president who is neither inclined nor has the capacity or the political will to fulfil that agenda.

Well, denial and being unrealistic are essential to Hope, aren't they?

Dixie

This from John Quiggin disturbs me:

It strikes me that the best way to understand the distinctive characteristics of US voting patterns is to to treat “Southern White ” as an ethnicity, like Hispanic. With that classification each of the major parties becomes an coalition between a solid bloc vote from an ethnic minority and around half the votes of the “non-Southern white” ethnic majority, which is more likely to vote on class lines. The question then is which ethnic/class coalition is bigger. As in other countries, voting for the more rightwing party is correlated, though not perfectly with higher incomes and (conditional on income) lower education, and to shift according to broader ideological movements.

Is it legitimate to treat Southern Whites as a separate ethnic group? Certainly, plenty of Southerners thought so at the time of the Civil War. Since then, Southern whites have made strong claims to a separate cultural heritage, defined in opposition both to blacks (and also through historic and recent conflicts with Hispanics) and to Northern Whites.

(...) To the extent that white Southerners vote on ethnic lines, hostile to key Democratic ideas, it makes little sense to try for a class-based message that panders to (for example) Confederate nostalgia. Rather, the best hope is that younger generations will cease identifying with the South and regard themselves just as Americans or even (Utopianism alert) just as human beings.

Really does ethnicity make one more likely to be stupid and to vote a certain way? It does in America because ethnicity is treated as a religion.  Quiggin's point just illustrates what is wrong with the America's view of ethnicity and race for they are used to legitimate identical illusions and ignorance. 

Come on now, whether one is a 'Southern White' or whatever else, in America, the fact remains that it is much easier and even comfortable to justify the unjustifiable by using ethnicity, culture, and identity as excuses for one's biases and irrationality and that is a problem for no matter what their heritage, people chose who/what to be.

Benghazi and nothingness

Sugary excerpt of the day from Democracy in America :

The Obama administration could not rationally have believed it would have derived any benefit from inaccurately claiming the attack on the Benghazi consulate grew out of a demonstration; why on earth would they engage in a cover-up of something that makes no difference?

An excuse not to think about war

From a fascinating BBC article on the American cult of the General by Daniel Nasaw:

With Gen Petraeus' public downfall, the American public can begin to grapple with why after 11 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan "we haven't won anything", [Andrew] Bacevich says.

The consequences of the myth of "the great heroic general" have been dire, he says.

"It's an excuse to not think seriously about war and to avoid examining the actual consequences of wars that we have chosen to engage."

Andrew Bacevich is too optimistic. The American public doesn't want to think seriously about war or about politics, economics, race, gender, sex for that matter.

Woman problem

From Rosa Brooks :

It would be fair to say that the military still has something of a woman problem. Although most military jobs are now open to women -- the exception being certain combat jobs -- women still make up only a small minority of all military personnel (about 15 percent) and a still-smaller minority of senior officers (no surprise, given that today's senior women officers joined the military, by definition, in an era in which even fewer jobs were open to women).

The military remains plagued by allegations of sexual harassment and assault, and a number of studies by the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs have concluded that women in the military face higher rates of sexual assault than do civilian women. Here again, no big surprise: The military remains an overwhelmingly male -- and overwhelmingly macho -- institution. Women are outnumbered and often rendered nearly invisible in a culture in which nearly all senior officers are male. (...)Here's something I worry about: Will the fallout from the Petraeus scandal make it even tougher for military women to rise to senior rank? In the military as in the civilian world, career advancement often has as much to do with informal mentoring relationships as with formal education or qualifications. No one bats an eye when the (male) boss goes out running or drinking with his (male) subordinates, but post-Petraeus, how many male senior officers will do the same with female subordinates? Not a lot -- and though such risk-aversion may reduce any appearance of impropriety, it will also reduce the odds that women will get the crucial mentoring that is provided so freely to their male colleagues.

Well, the military is one of the best reflections of America and Americana, which means in short that it is America that has a woman problem not just its military.

Political dumbness

Sugar excerpt of the day from Bret Stephens (hat tip: Professor Bainbridge):

Fellow conservatives, please stop obsessing about what other adults might be doing in their bedrooms, so long as it's lawful and consensual and doesn't impinge in some obvious way on you. This obsession is socially uncouth, politically counterproductive and, too often, unwittingly revealing.

Also, if gay people wish to lead conventionally bourgeois lives by getting married, that may be lunacy on their part but it's a credit to our values. Channeling passions that cannot be repressed toward socially productive ends is the genius of the American way. The alternative is the tapped foot and the wide stance.

Also, please tone down the abortion extremism. Supporting so-called partial-birth abortions, as too many liberals do, is abortion extremism. But so is opposing abortion in cases of rape and incest, to say nothing of the life of the mother. Democrats did better with a president who wanted abortion to be "safe, legal and rare"; Republicans would have done better by adopting outgoing Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels's call for a "truce" on social issues.

By the way, what's so awful about Spanish? It's a fine European language with an outstanding literary tradition—Cervantes, Borges, Paz, Vargas Llosa—and it would do you no harm to learn it. Bilingualism is an intellectual virtue, not a deviant sexual practice.

Which reminds me: Can we, as the GOP base, demand an IQ exam as well as a test of basic knowledge from our congressional and presidential candidates? This is not a flippant suggestion: There were at least five Senate seats in this election cycle that might have been occupied by a Republican come January had not the invincible stupidity of the candidate stood in the way.

Stupid question: does it pay to be smart and to act smart in American politics?  I don't think that it does for the ultimate test remains likeness and the willingness to refuse to listen to reason because of Americanness/manliness.

Lucky not good

From Paul Krugman:

The modern GOP is very much into denial of inconvenient truths, whether those inconvenient truths involve climate change or macroeconomics. Why shouldn’t we expect a party that still believes in supply-side economics after the Clinton boom and the Bush bust to engage in voodoo polling too?

And yet Republicans retained for a long time a fearsome reputation for political prowess. How can these be reconciled?

I know that I’m not alone in believing that a large part of the answer is that they were never actually that good; they were just lucky.

Both American political parties are in denial, one just happens to have been able to make its denial more attractive and more 'hopeful' with the use of magical thinking and marketing .

Hero worship

I agree with Joanna Weiss on this:

The bigger question is why it took a sex scandal to get the nation to treat Petraeus as a human being.

In fact, when it comes to public figures, media coverage tends to swing between two conflicting narratives. On one hand, there’s the “let’s find out what’s wrong with the guy” school: a watchdog mentality, abetted by opposition research, that largely afflicts people running for office.

But we have a parallel tendency toward hero worship, an inclination — particularly when it comes to people who take admirable risks with their lives — to pick someone generally good and paint him as virtuous beyond compare.

Well America as a nation which believe religiously in its own uniqueness and greatness needs to remake people in its own image.

Sweet justice

The sentence du jour from Glenn Greenwald on the Petraeus affair:

(...) there is some sweet justice in having the stars of America's national security state destroyed by the very surveillance system which they implemented and over which they preside.

I still believe that it is way too creepy how much the state can know private lives.

Mainstream

Sugary excerpt from Philip Delves Broughton:

Perhaps the greatest shock of his second term will be the hardening realisation that Obama’s reality is not his rhetoric. He is a very mainstream, and not uncommonly partisan Democratic haggler, who will become more so the longer he stays in office.

I have to admit that it is hard to accept the fact that America doesn't like reality.  Sometimes, I wish that Amerians were more French than they are and can probably ever be.

America's irrational fear of becoming Europe

From Samuel Gregg:

Yes, the president’s reelection is reflective of enormous and disturbing cultural and economic trends in America. Millions of Americans do, for instance, seem committed to the expansion of government, either because they have intellectually rejected the free-enterprise system or, to be frank, because they personally benefit from interventionist arrangements. Why, for example, bother going through the hard work of turning around a company (which might involve telling unions that we’re not living in 1974 anymore) in order to compete in the global market, when you can get piles of taxpayer money to produce cars that no one apparently wants to buy? Incentives matter, including the perverse ones.

Nor can we deny the clear parallels between particular developments in America and Europe. Whether it is the welfare state’s growth via Obamacare, the ongoing acceleration of public-sector debt, the demonizing of the economically successful, our declining competitiveness vis-à-vis the rest of the world, the spread of crony capitalism, the obsessive living for me-myself-and-now, or our intellectually corrupt universities (which will surely be the next financial bubble to explode, and good riddance) — all the data suggest that, in important ways, we are on the path to becoming Europe.

Assuming that Gregg is absolutely right, which is hard to do,  what is so awful about becoming Europe beside that ignorant and ideological notion that Europe is just not exceptional enough or rather to normal to be a model for America?

Throwing away the bible

I wish this were true:

Though it may be painful, though it may be costly at the polls in the short run, Republicans don't have a future unless they break up with the religious right and the gay-bashing, Bible-thumping fringe that gives the party such a bad rap with every young voter. By fighting to legally ban abortion, the party undercuts the potential to paint itself as a rebel against the governmental-control machine.

It is impossible for the Republicans to break up with the religious right, the best thing to hope for is an open relationship. 

 

Citizens United right

From Gerard Magliocca:

I think the critics of Citizens United should admit that their doomsday predictions about what the decision would mean for substantive political outcomes were wrong.  Tons of money were spent to little effect.  Now this may not be the best campaign system, but in the end people listened to the speech being offered and made up their own minds.  As it should be. 

I disagree. An exception doesn't make the rule or rather Magliocca infer the wrong conclusion from what he believes to be the right outcome of Tuesday's election without taking into consideration that especially in financial matters, spending gazilion amounts of dollars dumbly and ineffectively is almost always fatal.

Theater

Great questions about the coverage of the American political election  from Charlie Beckett via the London School Economics's Polis blog:

(...)Why do political journalists still treat campaigns like theatre or sport when it is now maths? (cf Nate Silver) (...) Was the election really so close, or does the news media need a tight finish to justify their investment and boost ratings? (...) Did editors think electoral college system was too complicated/obscure to bother explaining it fully, sooner? Because citing only a national poll and saying it’s “too close to call” was not really the most accurate account(...) Is media obsession with process (tactics/strategy) getting in the way of meaningful debate on issues e.g level of debt? [I would answer yes, but it's mainly because politicians don't want to debate Big Issues and the public can't be bothered to read the reams of policy detail that was actually put out by both candidates].

 

Falling back on identity

From Sean Collins at Spiked:

In a campaign devoid of ideas, people fell back on identity. Obama’s victory was a victory for the Democrats’ strategy of winning on social values and cohering support among women and minorities, an approach which was very pronounced at their national convention in September.

Identity politics is very much the present and the future of not only American politics, but of world politics. That said, I think Obama's victory was impressive!

The new normal

From llya Somin:

Obama’s reelection victory cements the idea that having an African-American president is normal.

Ah America and its love of symbols to avoid hard work and harsh/difficult questions!