A Safeway in Arizona
by Tom Zoellner
Viking Penguin, pp276, ~$17 (Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon)
“And, Mr. Fry, I sentence you to the home for criminally insane humans.” – Judge Whitey
“Your honor, that facility has been full ever since you ruled that being poor is a mental illness.” – Bailiff
“Order! Order! The only poor people I want to hear about the people who tend to me pores at the spa.” – Judge Whitey
As the political world waits for John Roberts and the rest of the Justice League to get back to us on whether or not Barack Obama’s healthcare law is kosher (probably some time next month), it’s worth pondering one of the law’s least examined aspects. As the Reds and their supporters are fond of forgetting (or denying when they remember), the law actually saves the government and the nation a shitload of money. It does this in a number of ways, but the basic philosophy behind it all is one of simple efficiency. Without the law, the uninsured end up costing everyone for the simple reason that Bush the Younger was right when he said people without insurance could just go to an emergency room.
As a country, we are not so inhumane as to deny healthcare to people completely, we just deny it to them until it’s much worse than it needs to be. Lack of things like preventative checkups, cancer screenings, and follow up care lead to ineffective medicine, which in turn leads to the need for more drastic and expensive medicine after things get worse. Boiled down to its essentials, it isn’t a question of whether or not Citizen A (insured, middle/upper-middle conservative taxpayer) pays for treatment for Citizen B (someone other than that).
Citizen A is already paying, in emergency services, public hospitals, and other indirect ways. The only question is whether he wants to pay $1 out of his front pocket, or $2 out of his back. The indirect costs of not having healthcare reform dwarf the direct costs of having it, but the mechanisms are difficult to explain and thus easily defeated politically.
As has been noted for a generation, the same resistance to fitting on a bumper sticker that afflicts healthcare reform (specifically) plagues other liberal projects (generally). Whether you’re talking about genuinely cutting our insane war budget, worrying about inequality, or sewing up the festering wound that is the Drug War, it’s always easier to say something nuts than something rational. Terrorism! Socialism! Blacks!
Though he can’t quite get himself to admit it, that is the theme of Tom Zoellner’s “A Safeway in Arizona”. Zoellner is a writer and a journalist, but he is also a friend of Gabrielle Giffords, the Congresswoman who had half her brain blown up on 8 January 2011 by a mentally debilitated kid named Jared Lee Loughner. “A Safeway in Arizona” reflects both of those facts. It is a personal account of the time up to and after the shooting, as well as a well reported piece of journalism on the same topic.
Loughner suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and is, by any measure, a very sick man. Even before he opened fire on Giffords and a host of other innocent people that day, he was insane. He was isolated from his friends, couldn’t hold even meager employment, and got thrown out of Pima Community College for constantly disrupting classes by chattering away about the evils of government controlled grammar, the illegitimacy of any commercial transaction that didn’t use gold or silver, and the way he thought certain numbers didn’t sound right. Even a short conversation with him revealed someone who was quite literally debilitated. And yet Loughner was never once treated for his illness, nor even referred to a doctor.
Zoellner’s book is about how that happened, how someone like Loughner could reach the age of twenty-two without anyone in a position to do something being aware of just how crippled he was. A native of Arizona, Zoellner knows what he’s talking about as he describes endless subdivisions that isolate families from one another, stores and public spaces in large cities that cannot be reached other than by car, poisonous political discourse aimed at government and immigrants, and all the other quotidian aspects of a society that lets a store clerk be the only official between the mentally ill and a semi-automatic pistol.
Though Zoellner states explicitly that these things didn’t make a case like Loughner’s inevitable, they were also necessary for it to happen. Loughner isn’t sane enough to have direct political or social motives for his actions, but the serial ways in which the society and government of Arizona failed him make his actions political and social nevertheless. A state that slashes services for the mentally ill while making it as easy as possible for anyone to own a handgun that can hold a thirty round magazine is asking for trouble, ditto a society that doesn’t so much as notice when a troubled young man isolates himself from most people while ranting incoherently about the government.
“A Safeway in Arizona” isn’t about Jared Lee Loughner, it’s about the context that made his sad life possible, the context that got a little girl, a federal judge, and several other perfectly nice people killed for no reason other than that they were participating in one of the tiny few civic opportunities available to them. The book makes clear that, inevitable or not, Loughner was a byproduct of his time and place. His actions weren’t a bolt from the blue, nor can they be dismissed as a freak occurrence, they were as much a part of modern Arizona and modern America as air conditioning and vast parking lots.
To be sure, the book has some problems. Zoellner’s person travails, while necessary when it comes to describing growing up in the endless anomie of Arizona cul-de-sacs, aren’t always justifiably relevant to the larger story. That knocking on doors for one of Giffords’ campaigns helped the author better understand his father, for example, is hardly meaningful to the average reader. Zoellner also treads far too lightly when it comes to drawing conclusions from the sad things he observes and explains. The summation in his final chapter is a raft of plaintive paragraphs that start with the word “If” where sterner stuff is clearly warranted:
If there had been, for example, a law in Arizona that required just one hour of safety training before a handgun could be purchased, Jared Loughner would never have acquired the Glock. His disease was uncontrollable by that point, and even the most liberal gun-rights advocate in the world would not have put a pistol into his hands after looking into his eyes. Instead, all that stood between him and the means to kill six innocent people was a clerk at a Sportsman’s Warehouse.
If there had been a federal ban on arm’s-length magazines that carry thirty-three bullets, a ludicrous amount, Loughner probably would have been stopped before he killed so many people.
If more listeners realized that partisan talk radio is not a genuine public policy forum but a money-oriented business designed explicitly to attract an audience through gross exaggerations and invented grievances, elected leaders would not be so easily vilified and thought of as subhuman.
If the state’s electoral system were configured in a way that rewarded those who tried to build coalitions and seek common ground instead of playing on the fears and resentments of the base, the quality of the state’s governance would rise. A culture that prizes competence would be less welcoming of histrionic figures such as Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
If there were an understanding that the changing demographics of the state is a historic inevitability and that immigration from Mexico has to be seen as an economic reality, the chances of seeing a humane solution to the problem would be vastly improved.
It goes on like that, a wishy-washing liberal critique that dares not name villains or explicitly call for solutions. It doesn’t even point out that the reason those mental health resources have been slashed to the bone is numerically illiterate anti-tax rage.
The milquetoast conclusion and a few other minor problems aside, however, “A Safeway in Arizona” is an excellent way to understand why those bullets flew, why they flew at a Democratic Congresswoman, and what kinds of societal neglect set them loose. Jared Lee Loughner will spend the rest of his life in prison for what he did, but it’s naive and dismissive to simply say that he was nuts and leave it at that. The severely mentally ill are an inevitability; ignoring them isn’t a solution. Loughner was a group failure.
Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse
by Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Regnery Publishing, pp232 ~$17 (Powell’s, Barnes & Nobles, Amazon)
“I’m having a little trouble with the government.” – Hank Scorpio
“Aww, those jerks, always walking over the small businessman. Don’t get me started about the government.” – Homer Simpson
There are few things less constructive in public debates than idealistic oversimplification. Given enough commentary, most issues can eventually be reduced to a single pithy quote or rejoinder. Not only does this reinforce political tribalism by making it easy for people to display their team colors, but it conceals complicating truths and makes a mockery of critical thinking. Most contentious issues are complicated for the simple reason that life is complicated, and trying to elide that with clever phrasing or ideological stubbornness doesn’t help anyone but self aggrandizing blowhards.
More than any specific policy position or personal quirk, that kind of simple minded rigidity is the greatest flaw of Ron Paul and the newly prominent libertarian movement that has sprung up around him since his colorful but doomed bid for the 2008 Red nomination. It is also the only unifying theme of “Rollback”, the latest from libertarian intellectual Thomas E. Woods Jr., and a book that puts a quote from “The Honorable Ron Paul, Member of Congress” right on its cover.
From start to finish, the book is an embarrassment of absurd reductions, misleading thought experiments, and intellectual dishonesty. Woods is a big fan of silly hypotheticals which he mistakes for profound arguments. Thus do we learn that taxation of any kind is tantamount to slavery (because you never really own something that is subject to a tax they actually own you) and that the government’s monopoly on printing money is a kind of rolling, non-stop theft.
Money, and specifically the government’s touching any of it ever, is Woods’ chief bugaboo. He’s convinced that the United States and much of the rest of the developed world are hurtling toward a cataclysmic debt default, have crippled their economies with restrictions on the “free market”, and are generally places that live above their means. What he doesn’t present is much evidence of this, or even any evidence that he understands much of what he’s so fulsomely decrying.
For example, Woods takes almost as an axiom the idea that the United States is perilously close to being unable to pay its bills. To support this contention, he cites billionaire Peter Peterson, billionaire Peter Peterson, and then billionaire Peter Peterson. These are the footnotes for Woods’ description of the looming collapse of Social Security in his opening chapter:
13. Peter G. Peterson, Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America – And the World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000), 5.
14. Ibid., 13, 42-43
15. Ibid., 33.
16. Peterson, Running on Empty, 58-59
17. Ibid., 38, 45.
18. Ibid., 58.
19. Ibid., 62.
20. Ibid., 75.
21. Ibid., 76. Emphasis in original.
22. Peterson, Gray Dawn, 34.
23. Peterson, Running on Empty, xxx.
24. Ibid., xxxiv.
Woods claims degrees from Harvard and Columbia on the book jacket, but this kind of lazy, single sourced research isn’t worthy of a high school term paper. Good schools are supposed to beat these kinds of intellectual shortcuts out of people, but he didn’t even bother to conceal his incuriosity very well. (The cited page numbers are mostly sequential, for fuck’s sake.) This isn’t study, it’s paraphrasing, and it’s one of the cornerstones of the book.
But obtuse stenography isn’t the only failure that’s poorly hidden in the footnote section. The next citation is from a wingnut think tank in Texas, but this is the text that precedes it:
The Congressional Budget Office calculated that for the federal government to balance its budget while continuing on the same trajectory of expenditures, marginal income tax rates would need to skyrocket. The lowest marginal rate of 10 percent would have to rise to 26 percent. The 25 percent marginal rate would have to be increased to 66 percent. And the top rate of 25 percent would need to be raised all the way to 92 percent.
Only in the very narrowest sense is it true that the Congressional Budget Office calculated this. The CBO puts out a ton of scenarios based on different budget assumptions and different ideas and plans given to them by members of Congress. This one, dire though it looks, is just one of them. But here it is, plucked, striped of context and caveats, and present as inevitable fact. Of course, it sounds a lot more authoritative to say “Congressional Budget Office” than it does to say “wingnut think tank”, so naturally that’s what Woods does.
Another notable footnote folly involves The New York Times, a publication at which Woods repeatedly sneers with obvious relish. In the process of minimizing the many 19th Century panics and economic crises that preceded the creation of the Federal Reserve, Woods writes:
However, the modern consensus is that there was in fact no “Long Depression” after all. Even the New York Times, which admits nothing, admits this:
There is then a long block quote that leads to a citation that leads not to an editorial or a news report, nor even a book review of some relevant tome. It leads to an op-ed piece from 2006. Presumably Mr. Woods knows that the op-ed page does not reflect the official opinion of the Paywalled Lady, but based on this example, one cannot be sure.
Nor are the above isolated examples, “Rollback” operates on an intellectual level that can best be described as “dinner party”. Provided nobody at the table knows more about a subject than he does, Woods can rephrase someone else’s argument as his own deep thinking, safe in the knowledge that by the time anyone bothers to check if his facts are wrong or misleading he’ll be halfway home with the taste of the after dinner mint still in his mouth. Unfortunately, the book isn’t a dinner party, and many of his citations collapse under even the simplest scrutiny. But let’s get back to the dumb stuff that’s actually in the text.
Distinct from (but related to) the sloppy research is the glaring innumeracy of the book. There are numbers sprinkled here and there, but the highest mathematical function he uses is multiplication. He’s so certain of his diagnosis of doom that he doesn’t even use probabilities point out that future budget and economic forecasts are estimates, not hard and fast numbers. It seems silly to put this in such superficial terms, but you can tell that this is more of a rant than a work of serious budgetary argument by the simple omission of even a single chart or graph.
The book’s penultimate chapter is a fifty-one page harangue titled “The Myth of ‘Good Government’”. (In a 189 page manuscript that makes it just shy of 27% of the text! See? division isn’t hard.) It reads like a bloated and anonymous radio address, and beyond the problems brought on by poor research and numerical aversion, it charges over logical cliffs like a blind horse that keeps running in midair. Consider this little gem from the “no government regulation ever!” section on page 147:
Airline deregulation, which has been closer to the real thing, has been an unmitigated boon, uninformed complaints to the contrary notwithstanding. Fares are 25-44.9 percent lower in real terms than they were before deregulation. Service has expanded dramatically, in terms of both flights and destinations. Flying is safer.(65)
The ignorance of the economics of the air travel those sentences bespeak is staggering. (Incidentally, footnote #65 there leads to a book by noted airline industry experts Steve Forbes and his ghostwriter.) There’s no mention of the fact that routes to small destinations are often directly subsidized by the government. Nor is there any hint of the enormous hidden subsidies airlines receive in the form of municipal infrastructure and federal security and traffic control, and nevermind the fact that every major American airline has gone through a bankruptcy in the last thirty years.
Speaking of bankruptcy, it’s another topic on which Woods is clearly more familiar with his beautiful theories than he is with observable reality:
So while bankruptcy is most unfortunate for a particular firm, it is of no significance to the economy in the aggregate. It does not matter to economic activity who the particular owners of firms happen to be. If ownership changes hands from one group of people to another as the result of bankruptcy proceedings, this does not matter from the point of view of the economy as a whole. From the economy’s perspective, nothing has changed. Production continues as before.
Yes, because if there’s one thing bankruptcy in the real world never is, it’s disruptive to production.
The pre-emptive response Woods repeatedly gives to objections like the one above is that the cumbersome nature of bankruptcy, the failure of all the airlines, and just about anything else that has gone wrong in the last hundred years is a result of government meddling in the “free market”. In “Rollback”, as in much of what passes for libertarian intellectualism, there has never been a truly free market, and, if only we’d leave businesses alone, they’d expertly police themselves and the economy would become super duper awesome for ever and ever. Any deviations from this orthodoxy are scoffed at as mushy headed and foolish.
The bright, blinking neon irony in all of the talk about how silly and childlike it is to put trust in government of any kind is that Woods makes the exact same mistake when it comes to the “free market”. His free market utopianism is so naive that you could create an easily trashed Marxist tract out of “Rollback” with hardly any alterations beyond swapping the words “free market” for “communism”. Either way, it’s dinner party intellectualism, cute in its way, but hardly the stuff of serious thought or study.
The Crisis of Zionism
by Peter Beinart
Times Books, pp289 ~$20 (Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon)
“And for you, sir?” – Izzy’s Deli Waitress
“Oh, let’s see, I want a nice sandwich, but the Joey Bishop? Eh, too fatty. The Jackie Mason? I don’t know, sauerkraut makes me gassy. The Bruce Willis? I don’t even like his work. What is this, Krusty the Klown?” – Rabbi Hyman Krustofski
“That’s ham, sausage and bacon with a smidge of mayo.” – Izzy’s Deli Waitress
“What?” – Rabbi Hyman Krustofski
“On white bread.” – Izzy’s Deli Waitress
When it comes to advocating unfashionable liberal realities in the face of harsh and sustained assaults from fantasy based right wingers, no one has more credibility than Paul Krugman. Since even before the terrible reign of Bush the Younger, Krugman has been attacked for telling unpleasant truths in just about every way imaginable short of someone actually slugging him. If there’s anyone in America who knows what it’s like to be the target of orthodox ire, it’s him; and last week he put up a blog post in which he basically said that Peter Beinart’s gotten it worse of late.
Beinart vaulted to pariah status two years ago when he published an article in The New York Review of Books titled “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment”, the main thrust of which was that younger American Jews (say, roughly 40ish and below) are losing interest in Israel because of that country’s less than humane actions towards the Palestinians and that mainstream Jewish organizations aren’t keeping up. For people too young to really remember 1967 and 1973, Israel isn’t a vulnerable nation surrounded by powerful enemies, it’s a regional bully that routinely beats up its weaker neighbors and treats civilians with contempt.
His new book, “The Crisis of Zionism”, is an expansion and reinforcement of that thesis that traces the origin of the generational disconnect to a misunderstanding on the part of Jewish leaders, in Israel and America. Beinart’s main point is that Jews generally, and Israel in particular, are vastly more powerful than they were just fifty years ago, and that the thinking of what passes for Jewish leadership hasn’t kept up with the times. That world changing increase in power doesn’t mean that Israel is invincible, or that anti-Semitism no longer exists. But it has radically altered the relationships between Jews and non-Jews the world over, and the Jewish establishment’s stubborn failure to recognize those changes is now a far more immediate threat to Israel’s existence than Hamas, Hezbollah and all the rest of Israel’s enemies put together. In other words, Israel’s foes have lost the power to destroy it, but Israel itself has not, and Israel’s leaders haven’t realized it yet.
What makes “The Crisis of Zionism” different than most popular writing that emphasizes that practical evaluation is the way it roots those arguments totally within the context of Jewish history, culture and morality. No doubt many gentiles will read this book, but Beinart’s target audience is fellow Jews. The book is his argument – his plea – for the leaders of Israel and the leaders of the most prominent American Jewish organizations to change course before it’s too late.
Beinart faults them for abandoning the explicitly liberal origins of Zionism, which he argues (quite convincingly) are necessary for the long haul survival of Israel. “Jewish power” is now a real force, but unless it is wielded in a way that’s non-discriminatory, just and humanitarian, it won’t be for long (p188):
Better Jewish education is essential to American Jewish survival, and thus to our ability to fulfill our obligations to the Jewish state. But its impact will be slow, perhaps too slow to stop the settlement process that menaces Israel’s future. In the short term, preserving Israeli democracy will require something else: direct action against the occupation. The idea will unnerve many American Jews. It unnerves me. But we must weigh this discomfort against the very real prospect that Israeli democracy will die. The hour is late. We can no longer afford our old comfortable ways.
Beinart is a believer in the two state solution, which he sees as the only way to secure Israel’s future existence. He knows that there isn’t much time for it to be implemented; he knows that doing so will require wrenching sacrifices on the part of Israel; and he knows that the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank are poisons that have weakened Israel and will eventually destroy it as a Jewish democracy. As he points out, the electoral success of the naive Israeli right is wholly attributable to votes from settlements, where Palestinians have no rights and no voice.
In a brisk two hundred pages, Beinart makes the case that the illiberal dichotomy between Israel as a country (with independent courts, free speech and the other strengths of a decent government) and the occupied territories (as armed camps amid a ghetto of the oppressed) is a national death sentence. He bases that conclusion on a deep and personal knowledge of America and Israel, and he’s keenly aware of how unwelcome it is. To starve his knee jerk critics of intellectually defensible arguments, he repeatedly has to do a kind of three-step waltz. He’ll state something that’s factual but typically unmentioned, make a “to be sure” statement, and then reiterate that the anticipated objection doesn’t change the basic point. An example (p76):
In November 2008, the cease-fire began to unravel, with Hamas claiming that Israel had not significantly lifted the blockade and Israel demanding a complete halt to attacks by all Palestinian groups before it did so. Hamas was not innocent in all this: it had abducted an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, and refused to release him until Israel released Palestinians in its jails (a deal finally carried out in 2011). But the basic point remains: the Israeli government did not do everything it could to find a diplomatic solution that would have quieted Hamas’s guns. It was neither politically creative nor politically brave. And as a result, it gave Hamas what the group’s most militant members wanted anyway: war.
The book doesn’t cringe before its opponents, but phrasing like that allows it to acknowledge that the ideas it contains aren’t going to be welcomed with open arms, and are even unlikely to be given an honest consideration. Along the way, it makes the case that President Obama agrees with much of this analysis, but has been so thoroughly outmaneuvered and gelded by Benjamin Netanyahu and his wingnut allies that he can’t do anything about it. The result is an American policy that harms Israel by kowtowing to it.
But the most damning accusation isn’t that Obama is a toady or a fool, but that he and the rest of America, including most young Jews, are indifferent to Israel. With anti-Semitism less acceptable than ever and the Holocaust fading into history, the importance of Israel’s existence isn’t as obvious as it once was. For Beinart, that apathy is both grotesque and terrifying, and “The Crisis of Zionism” is his way of combating it. The book is courageous, fascinating and necessary, and it leaves only two questions unanswered. Can it help reshape the discourse and policies about Israel? And, is it too late?
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson
Oxford University Press, pp 245 ~$20 (Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon)
“By the power vested in me, I hereby strip you of your ceremonial bell . . .” – Mayor Quimby
“No! Nooo!” – Homer Simpson
“. . . and tri-corner hat. . . . You will have the hat cleaned, and then return it.” – Mayor Quimby
There are few things that the grassroots leg of the Tea Party hates more than Harvard academics, and since “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” was written by two of them, there’s an awkward irony underlying the whole book. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson go out of their way at several points in the text to note that the local activists they interviewed and observed were unfailingly polite to them, and that as a whole the people they encountered were nice, sociable and generally welcoming.
That humanizing affinity is import to note, because it can quickly get lost when anyone, outsider or insider, tries to make sense of all the things that get lumped under the rubbery heading of “Tea Party”. Skocpol and Williamson have done as well at that task as can be expected given the hash of misperceptions, incomplete data, and general confusion that surrounds it. Having deconstructed the surveys, done the reading, analyzed the media, and gone out and observed a genuine American political groundswell first hand, they’ve identified three main components of the “Tea Party”. The first are those affable people who hold meetings, attend protests, and follow the legislative process at the local, state, and federal levels. The second are the lavishly funded astroturf groups like FreedomWorks and Tea Party Express that existed long before the word “Tea Party” meant anything more than little girls playing with stuffed animals. The third is the well oiled right wing media machine that picked up and promoted the “Tea Party” label when it was convenient for them to do so.
The book covers all three legs of the Tea Party tripod in detail, noting, for example, that the “Tea Party” label existed long before CNBC ghoul Rick Santelli’s famous rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange catalyzed right wing opposition to the then freshly inaugurated Obama Administration. FreedomWorks, which was founded way back in 2004 as yet another billionaire backed, D.C. advocacy shop, had been pushing the “Tea Party” idea for years, and they were ready to go with “Tea Party” ideas and slogans the day after Santelli’s little conniption. FOX News and its lesser vassals were slower on the uptake, but once they realized what they had on their hands, they promoted it as relentlessly as their considerable resources allowed.
The result was the “Tea Party”, a term that was popularly misunderstood at one point or another to mean a new political party, a centrist-populist awakening, a libertarian back-to-basics movement, and just about everything else that it really wasn’t. The people at the core of it, those nice folks who make signs and go to meetings, were in fact longstanding conservatives, the rightmost of the righties. The only thing about the “Tea Party” that was novel was the fact that those ordinary citizens had never gotten together like that before.
The rest of it, the cash rich advocacy groups that have someone ready to spring into a green room at a moment’s notice, and the right wing media outfits that own those green rooms, aren’t the least bit new. They’ve been around for a long time, and they used the Tea Party gatherings to further their existing jihad of lower taxes on the rich and less regulations on big business. The only major problem with “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” is that Skocpol and Williamson treat those organizations (FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots) and the right wing media they use (FOX News, AM radio and wingnut magazines) as separate entities, two parts of the three. But while they play different roles, any sober observer of American politics and discourse would be hard pressed to defend the notion that they aren’t so tightly coordinated as to be one.
As the “Tea Party” label gained recognition, it mostly wasn’t the volunteer leaders and organizers of local organizations that appeared on FOX News and CNN; it was professional advocates who’d long been accustomed to the bright glare of television lights. When Michele Bachmann appointed herself head of the “Tea Party Caucus”, no one questioned whether or not a sitting Republican Congresswoman really represented the views of those people at the town hall meetings, they just put her on television.
The people themselves, the ones Skocpol and Williamson spent so much time with, are far more interesting than Bachmann and the rest of the Red media machine. The rank and file Tea Partiers don’t want Social Security, Medicare and veterans benefits privatized or changed (they draw a harsh line between the benefits they’ve “earned” and the handouts those other filthy fuckers take). They don’t think much of Wall Street, and have an inherent distrust in the way many Republican politicians cozy up to big donors in exchange for favors and legislation. Mostly they match the stereotype: older, white, and generally affluent, if not actually rich. They are hardworking people who believe that they’ve earned everything they have and that kids these days are a bunch of entitled layabouts.
Perhaps the only real flaw of the Tea Party regulars is that they’re too scared and ignorant to understand the harm that the things they advocate will do to them and their offspring. Many would no doubt bristle at being called “ignorant”, but no other word serves. For the most part they are smart and well educated people who live in a world of make believe. Apocalyptic fantasies run rampant on wingnut media outlets, and the result is millions of Americans who think the end is nigh.
To be sure, many of them live in dream worlds already. One of the people Skocpol and Williamson interview is a retired geezer who literally sits in a saddle while he watches John Wayne movies. The “Tea Party” is the result of taking that kind of embarrassing goofiness public. After all, if you’re the type to believe that Barack Hussein Obama is an Islamo-fascist sleeper agent, then the Duke taking the reins in his teeth while he wields guns in both hands begins to seem like policy instead of a scene from a satirical novel.
Ultimately, the only real problem with the lay Teabaggers is that they’re convinced that they’re the last of the (capitalized) Real Americans. The word “eliminationist” does not occur in the book, but that is precisely how they see themselves. For the average white, late middle age Tea Partier, today’s kids are too dark and too different to ever be alright. Skocpol and Williamson have to dance around the issue of race because they’re academics, and sociological data on racial attitudes is notoriously fickle, but the universal revulsion that the grassroots leg of the Tea Party feels at Obama and the dusky America he represents seep into every issue.
The political effect of the “Tea Party” has been to push the Reds ever farther to the right, mostly to the benefit of the two tightly bound Tea Party legs of professional groups and right wing media rather than the foolishly nostalgic third leg of interested citizens. More than anything else, the shameless use of decent people as cover for grotesque political ends that most of them wouldn’t agree with marks the Tea Party as a thoroughly modern American institution. It ain’t pretty, but it gets results. That those results, pushing the Reds into self destructive right wing lunacy like privatizing Social Security, are different than the ones originally intended, is just the nature of politics. The “Tea Party” didn’t fundamentally change anything, it’s just the latest exploitation of the scared and the well meaning.
Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive
by Bruce Schneier
John Wiley & Sons, pp 366, ~$20 (Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon)
“Isis headquarters makes Fort Knox look like a gingerbread house. Only two means of ingress, the first, at street level, impenetrable after six. The second, through an access door on the roof, inexplicably unprotected.” – Sterling Archer
Noted security expert Bruce Schneier was scheduled to testify before Congress on March 24th. Just a few days prior to the hearing, he was disinvited at the request of the Transportation Security Administration. On his blog, Schneier explained:
On Friday, at the request of the TSA, I was removed from the witness list. The excuse was that I am involved in a lawsuit against the TSA, trying to get them to suspend their full-body scanner program. But it’s pretty clear that the TSA is afraid of public testimony on the topic, and especially of being challenged in front of Congress. They want to control the story, and it’s easier for them to do that if I’m not sitting next to them pointing out all the holes in their position.
As a man with a deep interest in “security”, pointing out holes in things is Schneier’s bread and butter. Ironically, though he didn’t say as much in his blog post, the TSA’s ability to prevent him from testifying against them can be seen as a security success, at least from the TSA’s point of view. Schneier is a threat to them and their budget, and minimizing the damage he can do to them makes the TSA as an organization more secure, at least bureaucratically. Insulating them from criticism doesn’t aid air travel safety, but that’s a different kind of security. Those kinds of unusual perspectives, and the ability to see the competing security interests of different groups, individuals and organizations, is at the heart of Schneier’s superb new book “Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive”.
As a concept, “Trust” earns its place in the subtitle by being central to every issue in the book; however, a more descriptive subtitle may have been “The Professional Paranoiacs Field Guide”. Schneier has set down what the world looks like to the security obsessed, and that vision is one where everything, from your mannerisms and physical appearance to social customs and competing moralities, are all security mechanisms. He begins the book by noting the layers, some nested some not, of security that make him comfortable allowing a plumber into his home to do some repairs; and what the same mechanisms look like to the plumber.
Can the plumber trust the check? Can Schneier trust him not to rob the house? Can both of them safely turn their back on the other without fear of attack? In that example, the answer to those questions is “yes”, but it is asking those questions about everything in every scenario that is the running theme of the book. When you look at any interaction in terms of trust, be it with another person, with a group of people, or with a large, faceless organization, you’re thinking like a security expert. And because the answers are always risky to some degree, the only solution is trust itself, which makes doling out trust the essence of security.
What “security” manifestly is not, a point Schneier laces throughout the text, is the elimination of risk. Moreover, even minimizing risk is a logical impossibility. No amount of ruinous social and economic costs can drive risk to zero because there are always tradeoffs.
Acknowledging that reality is difficult, especially on politically facile topics like crime and terrorism. The last time a nationally prominent politician even raised the idea was when John Kerry stumbled into it in 2004, saying terrorism could be kept to nuisance levels, and we all know what happened to him; but it’s the truth. At some point (one we long ago passed on both crime and terrorism), you reach diminishing returns, where the extra effort costs you more than not doing anything further. Worse, as Schneier has pointed out many times (including in the book), you can misspend precious and finite security resources and end up less secure than if you’d done nothing.
Schneier is careful to weave that axiom into the many examples and charts of “Liars and Outliers”. He’s very fond of game theory (his explanation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is one of the clearest and best I’ve ever read), and makes excellent use of deceptively simple examples to illustrate complicated points. The charts get a bit much at times, but make for an incredibly handy reference source, which is good because “Liars and Outliers” deserves an easily reached spot on the bookshelves of the world’s influential and powerful. Society would be spared many humiliations and inefficiencies if the people in charge had a more practical understanding of security.
But Schneier’s book isn’t a polemic against one stupidity or another. In fact, the book treads lightly around most real world subjects. Even the TSA, surely the most grotesque and ineffective security apparatus in America today (and a frequent whipping boy of Schneier’s), only comes up a few times. Rather, “Liars and Outliers” is a clean and understandable outline for rational thinking about security, which means that when it does bring up actual events, they fit neatly into a well thought out design.
For example, the recent cheating scandals to surface around every level of student testing from grade school to college aren’t moral failures, or bad apples, or indications that testing regimes need to implement more draconian security policies. They’re the natural outgrowth of raising the stakes for the tests so high that cheating (or “defecting” in the parlance of security) becomes rational for greater and greater numbers of students and teachers. But simply increasing “security”, as the ACT and SAT recently vowed to do, isn’t an action taken in a vacuum. It may catch more cheaters and it may deter others from cheating, but it also ratchets up the importance of the measurements, which increases the desirability of cheating. Schneier writes:
Teachers were always able to manipulate their students’ test scores, but before the No Child Left Behind law, the competing interests were weak. People become teachers to teach not to cheat . . . until their jobs depended on it. When the competing interests became stronger, the school districts should have increased societal pressures, probably security systems, to restore balance.
There’s a rule at work here. When you start measuring something and then judge people based on that measurement, you encourage people to game the measurement instead of doing whatever it is you wanted in the first place.
Exactly. The SAT and ACT are now going all out for photo identification to prevent test fraud, but that measure will inevitably be offset by other ways to game the system. Increasing direct security isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s called for in plenty of situations, but it also isn’t completely cost free. It’s more expensive; it will probably deny some legitimate students the ability to take the test; and it will cause cheaters to look for other weak spots in the system.
Effective security implementation has to take all of those reverberating consequences into account, as well as be flexible enough to change in the future as circumstances and unintended consequences result in certain threats waxing and waning. Perpetually adding new layers of security – the TSA model – is simpleminded and counterproductive.
The book concludes by noting that the rapid technological change of our current era has opened vast new security gaps that are easily exploited. Information technology increasingly allows for unprecedented concentrations of risk in ways that old systems and laws simply didn’t anticipate. In that light, the 2008 financial crash is a perfect example of a security failure. Whether or not any individual was aware of the impending doom of the real estate bubble, it was the interconnected nature of the financial institutions that caused virtually every major bank on the planet to crash at the same time and for the same piddling cause. That’s bad security, and all the vaults and guards in the world didn’t make a difference.
“Liars & Outliers” has enough pertinent examples like that, where abstract security concepts meet day-to-day reality, to keep things grounded amidst all the charts and theories. And while other security experts would no doubt quibble or disagree with this or that, this is not a book for other security experts. This is a book for laity, and it manages the supremely difficult tightrope act of being both short and economical as well as thorough, convincing, and deeply informative. Bruce Schneier has written an extraordinary book, and one that should be required reading for anyone whose job involves implementing, overseeing or funding any of the things that we lump under “security”.
Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World WE Live in Now – Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything
by David Sirota
Ballantine Books, 276pp, ~$15 (Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon)
“You know, that dance wasn’t as safe as they said it was.” – Fry
Syndicated columnists employ a variety of tricks to fill their mandated space, and one of them is to come up with a simple metaphor relating this aspect of popular culture or that part of their personal history to whatever weightier topic is at hand. With only a few hundred words to worry about, broad correlations that might not stand upon closer or more detailed scrutiny can be used to make a simple point. These sorts of tactics don’t often result in outstanding contributions to the literary canon, but there’s nothing inherently terrible about them either.
However, problems arise and quickly multiply when that simple structure is asked to bear the load of more than an ephemeral magazine or newspaper column. More than any specific flaw, of which there are many, that structural weakness dooms David Sirota’s “Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now – Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything”. The premise is cute enough, using the movies and television of the Reagan era to illuminate some of the more pernicious problems that afflict us three decades later. That could work in a five minute essay, but over two hundred pages of text the correlations become thin, and the grand generalizations that a column can get away with become glaring omissions and inane leaps of logic.
To take just one example, Sirota makes much of the 1986 racial comedy Soul Man, a dumb piece of fluff about a white guy who darkens his skin to get a minority scholarship:
“It’s the Cosby decade! America loves black people!”
That was the exclamation of Mark Watson, the white college grad from Soul Man, one of 1986’s top-grossing movies, and, for its preposterous decision to put C. Thomas Howell in blackface, one of the year’s most controversial films.
Sirota cites the movie (a couple of times) as an example of how the 1980s papered over real racism by pretending that all prejudice had already ended. But there are more than a few problems with his example. For starters, it’s not like white people thinking racism was either over or not that bad anymore was invented in the 1980s. That shit is ancient.
More concretely, he calls Soul Man “one of 1986’s top-grossing movies”, which is hardly true. According to Box Office Mojo, Soul Man ranked just 37th in 1986, behind such meaningful cultural touchstones as Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School and Steve Guttenberg’s Police Academy 3: Back in Training. Soul Man’s $28 million wasn’t even a sixth of Crocodile Dundee’s $175 million.
Making far too much of typical but hardly definitive cultural products is a problem throughout the book. Sirota frequently confuses things like Soul Man, and 1986’s actual top grossing movie Top Gun, as causes rather than side effects. He uses Top Gun as the ultimate example of naked military propaganda infiltrating the culture, which is fine; but then he tries to turn that popularity into a genuinely important event, which requires far more proof than he’s even pretending to offer (p108):
Following the loss in Vietnam and a botched hostage-rescue mission in Iran, just 50 percent of the country said it had confidence in the military in 1981.
After ten years of hypermilitarist agitprop, though, Gallup’s survey found 85 percent of Americans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the same institution. That’s more than one out of every three Americans radically changing their views, a previously unheard of statistical swing in mass opinion in such a short time.
That certainly sounds dire, but if you flip back to the woefully underdone list of citations, you’ll see that the second poll was conducted in 1991, at the height of post-Desert Storm, Greenwood draped American military popularity. Sirota doesn’t even get around to mentioning the actual war that boosted those numbers until much later in the book. He’d have you believe that Tom Cruise and C. Thomas Howell are causes rather than effects.
But Sirota’s love of that kind of cultural determinism isn’t limited to wildly overstating the importance of entertainment fluff. He treats the examples of 1980s culture he cites as complete – the book begins with him recalling how he and his brothers watched and incessantly quoted Hollywood’s 1980s – and while there’s nothing obscure about The Cosby Show or Red Dawn, his selections hardly made up the totality of the decade. After all, the 1980s were the heyday of the “Star Trek” franchise, when it produced a hit movie every couple of years and made a triumphant return to television with Star Trek: The Next Generation. All of that take place in a futuristic socialist utopia where there’s no money and peaceful science is the highest calling.
For every militarist, anti-government, authoritarian example he cites, there’s an equally popular counterexample he doesn’t mention. He brings up Family Ties as a gung ho Reagan infused show where the jokes were at the expense of the hippies and their failed revolution, but he doesn’t mention Night Court, a loving, multicultural paean to decadent city life and the lax liberal justice system that was on the same network, won the same awards, and was nearly as popular in the ratings. He talks a lot about G.I. Joe, but doesn’t mention the many iterations of the Care Bears or My Little Pony, all of which were enormously popular. (Though, one presumes, not with Sirota and his brothers.) He brings up many movies and programs that starred authoritarian, and often anti-government, heroes, but hardly mentions anti-war or anti-military films like Platoon or WarGames that were big hits and came out at the same time.
If he were limiting himself to using his cherry picked examples as a guide to the way race, politics, and war are handled in our culture, that would be one thing. But he goes beyond that, trying to say that these things developed in the 1980s, and that the cultural output of the time has had meaningful and lasting effects, which just doesn’t wash.
Despite all the unsupportably heavy implications “Back to Our Future” piles on movies like Back to the Future, its biggest failing is one of omission rather than over analysis. Outside of Sirota’s selective pop history, commercial art has always loved the Army and non-threatening black people. That no more started in the 1980s than it did in the 1880s. But he leaves what may be the only lasting and impactful cultural innovation of the 1980s all but mentioned: the Drug War.
Governments have tended to dislike popular experiments with recreational chemistry since time immemorial. This holds true for everything from tea and tobacco to caffeine and cocaine. But, Reefer Madness notwithstanding, the biggest piece of American culture and policy that existed in 1990 that didn’t exist in 1979 was the “War on Drugs”.
It was the 1980s that saw local police forces begin equipping themselves like small armies. It was the 1980s that saw an entire generation of minority children demonized as “crack babies” before they even got out of diapers. It was the 1980s that saw the government start thinking that the military was the right tool to combat unpopular agriculture. Most grievously, it was the 1980s that generated popular support for discarding the Fourth Amendment.
For all his talk about the authoritarian nature of much of 1980s pop culture, Sirota totally neglects to mention the rise of “drugs” as the go to villain. He talks about the Lethal Weapon franchise, but doesn’t even note the way that Danny Glover, in Lethal Weapon 2, is so shocked and disgusted by “drug money” that he can’t even conceive of using the money for a better purpose. Seemingly every time the simplified catchall “drugs” was mentioned on a screen, big or small, in the 1980s, it meant that the perpetrators were irredeemable fiends who enjoyed human misery. More importantly, it meant that any anti-“drug” actions were warranted, however illegal or unjustified. As Sirota notes, there were a lot of happy stories of extrajudicial justice in the 1980s, but his book seems deliberately obtuse about one of the major justifications for those ludicrous fairy tales.
Ultimately, those are the two fatal flaws in “Back to Our Future”. It treats 1980s cultural plops as vital, yet manages to ignore the one truly important disaster that came out of the decade.
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
by Bill McKibben
Times Books, 261pp, ~$10 (Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon)
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
by Bill McKibben
Times Books, 253pp, ~$10 (Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon)
“And I found the new Al Gore book!” – Lisa Simpson
“Sane Planning, Sensible Tomorrow.” – Marge Simpson
“Yeah, I hope it’s as exciting as his other book, Rational Thinking, Reasonable Future.” – Lisa Simpson
One of the most consistently frustrating aspects of life here in the early years of the twenty-first century is the short-shrift given to the way we are murdering ourselves. In terms of our overall culture, our immediate social lives, and the overarching political discourse, climate change (a/k/a global warming, a/k/a greenhouse effects) only rarely merits mention. Scientists, as a group the calmest and most rational people on the planet, are running around screaming about the end of the world, and hardly a serious fuck is given.
Just this week, dozens of people were killed here in America by tornados . . . and it’s barely March. Nasty weather of that sort is a well accepted fact of life in North America, but the kind of storms that obliterate long established homes and lives aren’t supposed to happen until Spring and Summer. This year, they killed in Winter. Despite that notably mortal fact, accounts of the destruction hardly mention the rise in carbon dioxide that brought them about.
That grotesque and enduring ignorance is the bane of people who are decently informed about climate change. One of the few who can count himself among their first tier (accompanied only by the likes of James Hansen and Al Gore) is Bill McKibben. For audiences of the gossipy foofaraw that passes for mainstream news, that name mostly draws silent shrugs of “who?” and “huh?”. But despite his popular obscurity, McKibben is one of the most widely read and respected experts on the increasingly warm habitrail we call Earth.
In fact, McKibben is so far ahead of the general discourse on this that he no longer refers to our little speck of cosmic dirt as “Earth”. In his most recent book, “Eaarth”, his main point is that we must shed the illusion that we are still living on the same planet our grandparents inhabited. This new planet, warmer, wetter, more prone to violent weather, is our home now.
Eaarth isn’t nearly as habitable for people as Earth was, but McKibben isn’t the least bit dour about our prospects on it. As he sees it, life in the future will be very different than life now, but that doesn’t mean it has to be worse. There simply isn’t enough – oil, land, water, take your pick – to keep living the way we’ve been living, but just because we might have to make do with less, doesn’t mean we won’t be living healthier, happier, and generally better lives.
That idea, that our relentless obsession with economic growth is silly and self defeating, was the central idea of McKibben’s 2007 book “Deep Economy”. Though predating “Eaarth” by three years, “Deep Economy” is all about how we might live decently on our new planet in ways that won’t shortchange our kids, our neighbors, or anyone else. In McKibben’s telling, we already have the technology we need to live a life that is far more local – i.e. you won’t be getting most of your calories from things that were shipped a thousand miles – all we need to do is realize it.
The future he describes does indeed sound like a rather nice place to live, even if it is on Eaarth rather than Earth. For one thing, you’ll eat better. The large scale and fossil fuel intense monocultures that feed us a steady diet of just a few things (wheat, soy, and that endless river of corn) will give way to fresher and more varied local crops that rely more on human labor and intense cultivation. McKibben stacks up a ton of evidence from all over the globe that it’s simply impossible for us to feed seven plus billion people with industrialized agriculture that exhausts soils, relies on vast amounts of energy to produce artificial fertilizers, and creates enormous amounts of unsafe and unsanitary byproducts. In place, we have to make the land work more efficiently, and the only way to do that is with human labor in place of gas guzzling mega tractors.
In addition to eating better, you’ll also get to know your neighbors better. The resources required to keep us all in gargantuan houses with huge, water hungry lawns will be too precious to squander on those kind of silly monuments to consumerism. McKibben makes much of the idea that in our quest for every man to have his own starter castle, we’ve actually made ourselves less healthy and less happy through the social isolation that results.
It’s a compelling vision, both because it sounds nice and because he’s right. Our current society simply isn’t going to be able to continue. It’s built on cheap hydrocarbons, which are not only quickly raising the planet’s temperature, but which we are also rapidly depleting. One way or another we’re going to have to adapt, and the best way to do that is to keep the good things modernity has brought us, abundant and secure food supplies, modern medicine, the internet, while discarding things like endlessly bigger cars that sell well but don’t actually make us any happier or safer.
But for all McKibben’s talk about telling hard truths about the way we live now (some might even call them inconvenient), he virtually ignores what may be the biggest hurdle of them all: the growth interest. Exxon, Archer Daniels Midland and all of the vested interests they own and represent don’t have a place in his local future, and they aren’t going to go quietly. He openly says at one point that he doesn’t know what Las Vegas is going to do, which is a snarky (and accurate) way for the environmentally informed to dismiss something as foolish as giant fountains and golf courses in a place that gets five inches of rain per year. But what he neglects to mention is that Las Vegas, as stupid as it is, has two United States Senators and a bevy of wealthy pricks willing to purchase a few more. All the charts and evidence in the world aren’t going to convince people whose lives and livelihoods depend on cheap energy and cheaper water.
That political elephant in the room lurks beneath the surface of both books, which is all the more strange considering that his involvement with things like 350.org and the opposition to the riotously stupid Keystone XL pipeline have given McKibben plenty of experience in the trenches. His desire, especially in “Deep Economy”, which came out during the dark years of Bush the Younger, to avoid the pettiness of Red vs. Blue is very understandable. One’s ability to get killed by a tornado has nothing to do with one’s opinion on marginal tax rates, after all. But it does limit the plausibility of his local, sustainable vision. Big agricultural firms are going to fight against it, and Wal-Mart is going to do everything in its considerable capacity to retard restorations of intra-local commerce as a mainstay of the American economy.
That kind of opposition barely makes the book. Only in the occasional aside does he note that the land grant colleges that should be leading the charge are mostly doing business as subsidies of the corn industry, that the FCC has ceded control of the nation’s airwaves to concentrated, national syndicates. The general public ignorance about climate change and things people can do about it isn’t an accident, it’s a deliberate policy by those who stand to lose financially from the kind of societal reformation McKibben is advocating.
That kind of narrow, short-sighted self interest is by far the biggest obstacle to a pleasant future, but the best McKibben has to offer by way of countering it is the idea that local cooperation will bubble up in the form of land trusts, CSA agreements and other grass roots actions. That’s a nice thought, and in the changing future he may be right, but it flies in the face of everything we know about how politics works on a state and national level.
That nagging problem makes the books a little less compelling than they otherwise would be, but it doesn’t change the fact that their central premise is undeniably correct. A change is gonna come. Dealing with it intelligently will mean a good life for us and our kids. Dealing with it stupidly, as we are mostly still doing, is going to mean war, famine, and generally set us up for every problem imaginable. If nothing else, McKibben has done well to make the former seem just as achievable as the latter.
Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives
by Michael Specter
Penguin Press, 294pp, ~$15 (Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon)
“But first, we all stink.” – Kent Brockman
“We all? Hey!” – Citizen
“That’s according to a national survey ranking Springfield as the least popular city in America. In science, dead last.” – Kent Brockman
“I’m telling you people, the Earth revolves around the Sun!” – Principal Skinner
“Burn him!” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson
The first chapter of Michael Specter’s book Denialism describes the tragedy of Vioxx, the blockbuster arthritis drug developed by pharmaceutical giant Merck that helped millions, killed thousands, and is today unavailable because of the blundering inhumanity of its parent company and the unscientific media world we all trudge through. Beginning the book with the story of Vioxx, now synonymous with the evils of the pharmaceutical industry, was a good choice. It’s a perfect illustration of how the cracks in the organizational structure of our society can line up to greatly disserve the public. For while Merck’s behavior was criminal and astonishingly amoral, the reaction to it – full of righteous indignation – was actually the greater harm. Vioxx was extremely effective, but it wasn’t as safe as Merck said it was, and through escalating levels of stubbornness, it’s now gone, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of its users suffered no side effects.
The story of Vioxx is complicated, but the lesson to be drawn is relatively simple. When hysteria combines with poor science and a few legitimately bad actors, real people suffer. The book’s subtitle is “How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives”, and that is what Specter means when he talks about “denialism”.
Through six cleanly written chapters, Specter, a longtime New Yorker science writer, thoroughly exposes and debunks some of the more prevalent and harmful cases of scientific denialism that beset us. He takes on well publicized flights of fancy like the anti-vaccination and anti-genetically engineered food movements, and less generally known ones like the foolishness of vitamin and herbal supplements, the overblown benefits of “organic” foods, and the taboo on race based medicine despite clear differences in how patients with different genetic backgrounds respond to different treatments. Like the feature writer he is, each topic gets a few humanizing examples, some layman explanations of the underlying science, and a couple of choice refutations from scientists who actually know what they’re talking about.
The problem with Denialism is that while it’s all well and good to show why anti-vaccination is deadly foolish and genetically modified foods have gotten an unfair rap, Specter doesn’t delve into the deeper reasons for why certain scientific advances prompt such unscientific reactions while others don’t. Consider wireless data technology, everything from cell phones to the Wi-Fi hotspots that continue to spread like weeds across public and private spaces. That’s (scary music) radiation penetrating your skull and genitals at all times, and yet the best the denialists can do is muster up a few inconclusive studies about brain cancer and cell phones and the occasional nutbar who refuses to use them.
The scientific case against cellphones is just as weak as the one against engineered foodstuffs, but the latter generates a cottage industry of reprisal and the former is relegated to the crank file. Why is that? Specter glances at these issues briefly in his introduction, but after that he rigidly sticks to his chosen examples. Only occasionally does he hint at the deeper causes of things (p226):
For nearly fifty years Americans have challenged the very idea of progress, as blind faith in scientific achievement gave way to suspicion and doubt. The benefits of new technologies – from genetically engineered food to the wonders of pharmaceuticals – have often been oversold. And denialism thrives in the space between promises and reality. We no longer have the luxury of rejecting change, however. Our only solutions lie in our skills.
That a book titled “Denialism” spends so little time explaining that “space between promises and reality”, on why advancement has “often been oversold”, and how “suspicion and doubt” came to fall so heavily on some topics is a serious flaw.
The other significant flaw in Denialism also relates to what doesn’t get said rather than what does. Specter is very aware that climate change is the biggest problem we face, and one of the most dangerous aspects of it is how we feed billions of mouths on a planet that is increasingly inhospitable and agriculturally marginalized. The hunger problem, easily one of the deadliest wild cards of climate change, is a big reason why defending genetically modified food and lambasting the halo of righteousness that encompasses organic food is worth doing. If those things were mere preferences in a world of plenty, there’d be no harm and no foul. But the population goes up and the planet gets warmer every day, and those people need to be fed. Not feeding them is not only cruel and immoral, but likely dangerous as well. Hungry people have a way of moving until they get somewhere there’s food, whether or not the people already there want them or not.
Despite that, climate change is hardly mentioned. Perhaps climate denialism is less interesting a subject because it’s so nakedly venal and corrupt. (After all, no oil billionaires and extractive industries are paying people not to vaccinate their kids.) But surely a book dedicated to the idea that we live in a world where we need science more than ever, and where denialism is, as he says, a “luxury” we can no longer afford, should mention what is easily the most damaging denialism of all. Even evolutionary denialism, the mother of them all, gets touched on only once.
The book is far from useless, of course. And anyone wishing to arm themselves against the burning stupid about its various subjects would do well to read it and take notes. The subjects which are covered are done so well, and Specter’s assaults on the denials he deems worthy are multifaceted yet easy to follow. But the book feels like it’s missing a few chapters, and while it serves well as a work of narrative reference, it doesn’t explain the causes of its titular problem or some of its most pernicious and harmful manifestations.
Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
Simon & Schuster, pp 368, ~$15 (Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon)
The Great Risk Shift: Why American Jobs, Families, Health Care and Retirement Aren’t Secure — and How You Can Fight Back
by Jacob S. Hacker
Oxford University Press, pp 256, ~$10 (Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon)
“Like the cleaning of a house, it never ends.” – It Never Ends Announcer
Back in 2006, when the darkness of Bush the Younger, Speaker Hastert, and Majority Leader Frist still ruled the land, political scientist Jacob Hacker published a book called The Great Risk Shift. In it, he made a persuasive and disheartening argument that one of the biggest trends in the American economy since its heyday in the 1960s and 70s was the systemic, deliberate, and relentless undermining of “insurance”, defined as the ability of ordinary people to have a fallback position should something go wrong professionally, medically, or otherwise. Defined benefit pension plans shrank and became harder to find. Health insurance became increasingly shoddy and expensive. Unemployment assistance fell apart and real education became more expensive, requiring more and more debt. Each trend reinforced the others, and put ever greater numbers of formerly solidly middle class people close to a precipice they often couldn’t see until they’d gone tumbling over it.
The book was an academic roar against the then trendy Red idea of an “ownership society”. Its main point was that “ownership” was a piece of aspirational bullshit, a shining utopia whose only real purpose was to sparkle brightly enough to distract people from the increasing amount of danger in which they found themselves. The idea that we as a society cannot afford “insurance”, cannot afford to ensure that everyone has health care, that everyone has a decent standard of living, that everyone has access to the rungs of economic advancement, was a politically motivated spin job whose real purpose was to allow those who already had to get even more. In 2010, Hacker and Paul Pierson, another political scientist, published a book called Winner-Take-All Politics, which explained how that shift came about.
Similar to The Great Risk Shift, Winner-Take-All Politics explains a tectonic shift of American politics over the last thirty years that has gone largely unnoticed. In The Great Risk Shift it was the way that the pillars of societal support for non-wealthy Americans had been yanked away while no one was looking. In Winner-Take-All Politics it’s how the organized interest groups of the extremely wealthy conquered Washington in order to yank those pillars. Again, no one was looking.
Two of their key examples of the power of sustained organization come from Reagan’s presidency. First there was the great limitation of losses in 1982. Hacker and Pierson take a lot of interest in what is usually an overlooked election. Where a lot of people see a ho-hum setback for a newly elected president, they see a Red victory that significantly limited Congressional losses in what should have been an outright slaughter.
The second is the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which broadened the tax base, closed loopholes, and was widely seen as a setback for “Gucci Gulch”, the euphemism for lobbyists that predated “K Street”. Hailed as a triumph, its best, most pro-middle class features were eaten away in subsequent years as the well organized big money boys kept nibbling and the champions of everyone else were too weak and distracted to even try to stop them. When modern day Reds talk of Reagan never raising taxes they aren’t entirely wrong, he (and his buddies and followers) just set things up in such a way that the taxes he did raise didn’t stay raised, at least not on the right people.
But Hacker and Pierson don’t date this behind the scenes slippage to Reagan. Nor do they see Richard Nixon as the progenitor of this kind of under the table policy making. For all he did to change American politics, Nixon ruled in a time when labor unions were the behemoths of the Potomac and other working class organizations – everything from veterans associations to Rotary and Elks clubs – had the numbers and the skills to pressure Congressional representatives.
Instead, amidst taking a potshot at Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, they make a convincing case that things really fell apart in “Carterland”, not Nixonland. (Though, of course, “Carterland” would’ve been an awful book title.) Discussing the collapse of liberal government after the supposedly great victories of 1976, they write (p 99):
1977 and 1978 marked the rapid demise of the liberal era and the emergence of something radically different. Tax reform: defeated. A new consumer protection agency: defeated. Election Day voter registration: scuttled before reaching the floor of the House. Health-care reform: defeated. A proposal to tie the minimum wage to the average manufacturing wage to prevent its future erosion: defeated. An overhaul of outdated labor relations laws: successfully filibustered in the Senate, despite the presence of sixty-one Democrats and a Republican minority containing some genuine supporters of organized labor, not to mention far, far more moderates than in the GOP we know today.
This is where the American government, which had been focused on and listening to ordinary people since the New Deal, began to turn its attention towards well organized and well funded groups that almost exclusively represented the interests of big businesses and the stratospherically wealthy people who run and own them. This was the time when lobbying money began to explode, when the National Organization of Manufacturers moved its headquarters from New York to Washington, when Republicans began building a monetary advantage over the Democrats that reached obscene multiples in just a few years. By the time Reagan got to Washington, the liberal consensus that businesses needed to be regulated and that the middle class should always get a fair shake had already been shattered.
That lead Irving Kristol, conservative intellectual, massive asshole, and father of airheaded former New York Times columnist William Kristol, to come up with what may be the single best description of the back and forth of politics of the last thirty years. Writing in May of 1980, Hacker and Pierson cite him dropping the ultimate neo-con quote (p 233):
And what if the traditionalist-conservatives are right and a … tax cut, without corresponding cuts in expenditures, also leaves us with a fiscal problem? The neo-conservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums. He wants to shape the future, and will leave it up to his opponents to tidy up afterwards.
“The neo-conservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums.” Jebus H. Vishnu, that should be inscribed on Reagan and Bush the Younger’s tombstones.
Nor is that the only great citation in the book. Hacker and Pierson take as their axiom that the kind of wealth disparity that currently prevails in the land of the free and the home of the brave is incompatible with anything that can be called democracy. They mention everyone from Aristotle to Hume to back up the contention that large gaps in wealth ruin republics. They’ve got Plutarch sating “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”, and Montesquieu eerily anticipating the current whining from Wall Street, “to men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury.”
What they make painfully clear is that none of this was inevitable and neither is it irreversible. This truly radical shift from a politics where members of Congress cared what their constituents thought to one where they only really care what their wealthy constituents think is a recent development, and one that can be rolled back, but only with great difficulty. They identify a familiar litany of horrors faced by any attempt at serious reform: the abuse of extra-Constitutional Senate rules (the filibuster primary among them), the ease of political obstruction and the tendency of the electorate to punish its targets rather than its perpetrators, the difficulty of sustaining organized political pressure over time, and all that damn money.
One thing this 2010 book makes frightfully clear is that this year’s election is more important than is conventionally thought. The problems identified in the book are accelerating rapidly, and if the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan was vastly to the right of Richard Nixon’s, and the party of Bush the Younger even further to the right than Reagan’s, it staggers the mind to think what the party of the next Red president will look like. One need only look at the crazed loons John Boehner can hardly control in the House to get an idea. There’s no telling how much damage the next batch of Kristol’s successors will do before a Democrat has to come in and start tidying up again.
“Isn’t that just pointless busy work?” – Lisa Simpson
“Bulls eye. Get cracking.” – Miss Hoover
A little digging into the archives tells me that it’s been more than three years since I did anything resembling site maintenance around here. Hopefully that’s a testament both to my laziness and to the relative decency of this site as a means for doing little more than reading and writing. With those concepts in mind, there are going to be a few changes.
First, there’s a new graphical theme. I think I’m in the minority on this, but I prefer light text on darker backgrounds, and the site now reflects that. Second, I’ve removed the sidebar list of links. A number of the sites there haven’t been active in some time, and there are several more I no longer visit. Keeping them up is unlikely to produce much traffic for those that are still active, and timely updates to reflect my current reading habits is more housekeeping than it’s worth.
Finally, the current schedule of new posts every Wednesday and Sunday is going away for at least a little while. There are a few reasons for that, but the most important is that I’d like to try something new. Starting with today’s post, I’m going to try out a schedule of posting every other Sunday, and having those posts primarily be book reports. Up to now, book posts have been scattered here and there, and I’d like to change that. I find that they tend to be among the most enjoyable and educational to produce, both in terms of actually reading the book and writing down my take on it, and I’d like to do more of them.
As always, I’m making this up as I go along, so the new schedule might not last. But until further notice, that’s what’s going to be happening here at Tethered Swimming.
“You know, you humans are so scared of a little robot competition you won’t even let us on the field.” – Bender
On Monday, in an event that was equal parts participatory democracy and election stunt, President Obama took questions via Google Plus that had been voted on by Americans connected enough to know and care what the hell that is. Naturally, he ignored the question about America’s new populist crusade, legalizing weed. But he did answer a question about our robot war in Pakistan, which, remarkably given the number of deaths involved, appears to be the first time he’s done so.
The New York Times managed to write it up deep into the A-section of the paper version on Tuesday, but the article was nowhere to be found on the homepage of nytimes.com on Tuesday morning. Similarly, Kaplan Test Prep Daily and the McClatchy home pages didn’t have the word “drone” anywhere yesterday. It did appear on the home page of The Los Angeles Times, but it was buried as the third story in the “Politics” section, wedged between two equally important items, “In a final salvo, Gingrich blasts Romney’s ‘pathetic’ campaign” and “Seeking an upset in Florida, Gingrich turns to Herman Cain”.
By contrast, Obama actually talking about robot war in Pakistan was among the top stories on both BBC and Al Jazeera, both of which are read and watched by far more people around the globe than the Paywalled Lady and its maidens in waiting. And while it’s no secret that the United States sees itself rather differently than most of the rest of the world sees it, this is a remarkable difference of opinion about what is and is not news.
Beyond even the standard complaints that gossipy and meaningless ephemera dominates our political “news”, the fact that our program of openly bombing one of our putative allies hardly rates a mention at home while meriting headlines abroad is a stark indicator of a frightfully deep international chasm. Our inattention is partly explicable by the ongoing torpor of the American economy, but there is more at work. Both political parties are cool with it, and as long as that’s true then there isn’t anything for the blow dried chatterers to pretend to fight about. Who isn’t against killing terrorists? Sure we’re attacking Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, places the U.S. isn’t even kinda sorta at war with, but good luck finding anyone to argue in their favor between commercials.
This kind of mindless imperial abnegation is invisible to most Americans, but it has profound and potentially fatal consequences elsewhere. On BBC World Service the other night, as the United Nations Security Council was debating what could or could not be done about the civil war in Syria, the professionally polite BBC anchor had on a French diplomat who had to repeatedly stress that any further UN action would not amount to “regime change”.
The irony of a French(!) official having to speak his way around one of Bush the Younger’s favorite euphemisms may or may not have been lost on the bulk of the global audience, but anyone familiar with the history of the sorry decade we just left had to laugh. Our hubris and carelessness with our unparalleled military abilities are now being used as a rhetorical device to defend the kind of regimes and practices we’re supposed to be against. (Thanks, George.)
Ironies like that, often with fatal and far reaching consequences, are going to continue as long as our government is given carte blanche by both political parties and the press to go traipsing around the world with missiles and commandos (and don’t even bother trying to raise the many issues of Afghanistan). At present, there isn’t even enough institutional friction among supposedly opposing groups (Reds and Blues, press and politicians) about drones to wonder whether or not our pilotless planes are doing more harm than good, much less start doing the real work of figuring that out. Meanwhile, we may be content to ignore our robot wars, but the rest of the world isn’t and doesn’t, and the word “drone” is rapidly becoming synonymous with America as a global assassin answerable to no one. That certainly isn’t doing us any good.
“Nuc-u-lar, it’s pronounced nuc-u-lar.” – Homer Simpson
“Oh, whatever.” – Drill Sergeant
“Nuc-u-lar.” – Homer Simpson
Even before the Iraq War started, there was a fantasy on the right for using military force against the Islamic Republic of Iran. After our Mesopotamian adventure went tits up, any chance of that being a full scale ground invasion vanished, so the dream was modified to accommodate a world where small bombs set off by cell phone stopped our invincible military in its tracks. These days it’s all about nuclear deterrence from 30,000 feet, with the subtext always being that this sort of thing might also result in an Iran that’s more friendly towards the West. No convincing explanation of how that happy outcome will occur is ever given, but that doesn’t stop the laptop bombardiers from staring at maps while they masturbate.
That history doesn’t come up very often whenever someone uses the words “nuclear” and “Iran” in a story in The New York Times or Kaplan Test Prep Daily, but it is a crucial piece of context. Not only does it expose the lie of the supposed immediacy of confronting the threat, but it’s a nice reminder that the people who are breathlessly speculating about an American, Israeli, or American-Israeli strike on Iran are the same ones who were 100% wrong and lying when it came to Iraq. In a more rational political climate, that would be all that’s necessary to destroy their credibility. Sadly, in our time more is needed. Happily, there’s plenty of it.
For starters is the oft forgotten distinction between a nuclear enrichment program, which Iran has, and a nuclear weapons program, which even the U.S. government doesn’t think they have. The New York Times and plenty of other outlets forget that with alarming frequency.
No matter how many intelligence reports about Iran’s lack of a weapon program become public, that distinction doesn’t hold water for plenty of war mongers because they simply assume Iran is lying. Less deniable is the question of whether or not airstrikes would have any meaningful impact on the Iranian nuclear program. Iran is not Syria or Iraq. There isn’t one building sitting out in the middle of nowhere you can hit with a single plane. Iran has many more places to hide things and their nuclear facilities are spread out in multiple locations and hardened against attacks. It wouldn’t be a lone strike on some moonless night, it would need to be a sustained air campaign involving air defense suppression, command and control disruption, the whole nine yards. It would be a real war.
Because of all that, it wouldn’t be something that could be done without prior public knowledge and debate. You’d need to gin up popular support, get members of Congress on board, hold negotiations at the United Nations. Describing that as “bombing Iran” or “airstrikes” is wholly inadequate. It’d be a rerun of 2002-2003, only this time the country isn’t freshly traumatized, there isn’t an empty headed sociopath in the White House (yet), and we have the massive waste of the Iraq War to show what happens when things inevitably go wrong.
With all those formidable obstacles to actually attacking Iran, it’s no wonder that Israel, the CIA, or whoever is resorting to things like the Stuxnet worm and murdering Iranian scientists. A bombing campaign simply isn’t in the works. Not now, not five years ago, and not unless the political situation in the United States changes a lot more than some low level bullshit like this can manage. Until then, all the harping about Iran is just empty theater.
“Gentlemen, we’ve got to sink this Lisa Lionheart doll, and fast! It’s time to call in a favor from Washington.” – Malibu Stacy Executive
“Yes. Yes, I understand. I’ll take care of it personally.” – Congressman
“Dad, did you hear something?” – Lisa Simpson
“I-unno.” – Homer Simpson
After last Wednesday’s unprecedented strike and the Congressional panic it induced, the internet – roughly speaking – took something of a victory lap. Some of these were better than others, but most had the decency to point out that the struggle was far from over. Even among that sober strain, however, fundamental stupidity about politics in early 21st Century America seeped through the cracks.
The day after the blackout, TechCrunch ran a guest post by a guy named David Binetti, whom they described as:
the CEO and co-founder of Votizen, a consumer technology company based in Mountain View, CA, focused on giving voters a greater voice.
Binetti notes the size of the protest as well as the remarkable turnaround in the fortunes of SOPA and PIPA; but he loses the tether to real politics rather quickly when he uses the success of the blackout to argue against more sustained internet lobbying in Washington. His operating assumption is that, should the vile ideas in SOPA and PIPA ever rear their heads again, the internet will come down from its mountaintop fortress, kick some ass, and then order will be restored. This indicates a level of ignorance about how Congress works on a par with Congress’s ignorance about how the internet works:
In truth, for SOPA this is more likely a retreat than a surrender. The fight will continue, and here’s where things will really get interesting. Professional lobbyists are no doubt approaching the venture capitalists who have supported the anti-SOPA movement, explaining in compelling terms why they will need to have effective representation, a permanent organization to support their interests, and a budget to match the $50M+ coffers held by the MPAA. Most inside the Beltway are likely to interpret yesterday’s activities as a flash in the pan, will hunker down to wait out this phase, and insist that this is a K-Street battle that must be fought on K-Street.
This is understandable — arms merchants, more than anything else, want people shooting at each other — but doing so would likely be a mistake for the movement. If the tech community plays the lobbyist/money game and hires its own lobbyists, then it is playing on their opponent’s game on their opponent’s turf.
Instead, they should see what is happening in this rising opposition to SOPA in more familiar terms; namely, that the political industry itself is under massive disruption, and this is just the beginning. Once the population at large appreciates its newly found influence and starts to see that getting involved really does make a difference, it is likely to generate more activity and activism, leading to greater results. In fact, I believe historians may look back on SOPA as an early example of a new era of political engagement based on social media, much as how the 1964 Daisy ad precipitated a new era of political activity based on television.
That is hopelessly childish and the exact opposite of what champions of the internet as a medium should be doing.
People who just dip in and out of the news have the impression that Congress has debates, and then every once and a while there’s a big vote, and those things are talked about by informed people. But that isn’t how Congress works at all. Whenever it’s in session, Congress is voting. It’s voting on things no one cares about, it’s voting on things that will never be reported by anyone outside of the Congressional Record, it’s voting on amendments to amendments and the movement of bills within committees. Congress is always voting, which is why the spectacular protest theory of pressuring Congress will always lose to the steady, day by day, cocktail by cocktail, vote by vote theory of pressuring Congress.
There is no rule anywhere that says that the various provisions of SOPA and PIPA have to be placed in one big bill that the internet can take notice of. Little things can be slipped into a budget bill here, a farm appropriation there, and the only way to keep an eye on those things is to pay very well connected people a shitload of money to have your interests always at heart. It’s not pretty, and it’s even less democratic, but for now that is the way that things work.
Consider 1964, which Binetti invokes as a similar dawn of a new era. The big legislation of the day, Medicare, the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, didn’t get passed because Lyndon Johnson gave a speech or Martin Luther King led a march. They got passed because of ground level lobbying and organizing by labor unions, activists, and deep pocketed organizations that knew how to make members of Congress squirm. Moreover, those things took sustained effort over years, not just one spectacular event.
Wikipedia cannot maintain that kind of engagement. It doesn’t have the budget or the personnel. It isn’t a site designed to foster political engagement, and neither is Reddit or Tumblr. Those sites, the uncountable others that went on strike last week, and most importantly their user bases, simply aren’t designed with constant Congressional action in mind.
To his credit, Binetti’s startup “Votizen” is geared toward that kind of relentless pressure. But in addition to only being a tiny startup, it’s also roughly three thousand miles off target:
Contact
Votizen
548 Market Street
San Francisco, Calif. 94104
The only way to keep an eye on Congress is to have a constant physical presence in Washington, D.C. There is no alternative. Hands need to be shaken, aides and members of Congress need to be harassed and taken out to lunch. Meetings and hearings need to be attended. And all of this needs to happen year round.
The proponents of SOPA, PIPA, and all the anti-internet provisions they still hold dear understand this. Here’s the MPAA’s contact page:
Contact Us
Washington, D.C.
1600 Eye St., NW
Washington, D.C. 20006
They list nine other cities on that page, but Washington is right at the top.
The internet is a wonderful long distance communication tool, and last Wednesday’s blackout was a spectacular and wonderfully effective display of that. But if you want representation in the U.S. government, even if all you want is to be left alone, you need to be in Washington, greasing the right palms, all the time.
“That cactus is right!” – Homer Simpson
Four years ago, South Carolina did more than any other state to set up McCain-Obama, the best possible matchup. And while Mitt Romney is still the most likely Red nominee – even after last night’s Palmetto drubbing – if he is going to lose, this is pretty much how it has to happen. The South is the stronghold of the Reds, and no one can ascend to the Throne of Skulls without its support. Eyes turn to the Sunshine State, and the guy many in the byline brigade thought unstoppable needs a win. If Mittens loses in America’s Wang, he’s in serious trouble.
The political press will be filled with stories about just that for the next week and a half, but the only important consideration is whether or not Romney’s support in Florida collapses the same way it did in South Carolina. If that happens, then at the very least we’re in for a long nominating process, and we ought to have a good idea about how that’s going by next weekend. In the meantime, it’s worth pondering the man who’s making Mitt sweat through his high thread count magic underwear. He’s #94 in your programs, but #1 in your heart: Newt Gingrich.
Even by the standards of all the Not Romneys who came and went over the last six months, Gingrich is improbable. To sober eyes, he has more strikes against him, personal, ethical, and otherwise, than the rest of the pretenders put together. His campaign operation is just this side of non-existent, he’s disliked by a majority of the voting public, his ideas are the definition of hackneyed, and he looks like a bridge troll. Despite all that, he is the preference of his party’s true home. New Hampshire is unlikely to be in the Red column this November, Iowa even less so. South Carolina, however, wouldn’t vote Blue even if George Wallace came back from the dead.
That’s why Mitt’s South Carolina problem – and his potential Florida problem – are his electoral weaknesses writ small. He can’t get to 1600 without the quarter of the population that never stopped backing Bush the Younger. And those Americans don’t trust him, and never will.
Make no mistake, they want that black – black! – son of a bitch kept away from the state china, but they also don’t think milquetoast Mittens is the man to do it. Their televisions and radios tell them that Barack Obama is unpopular and hated; their friends agree. The mid-term elections support this idea. So why not Gingrich? The man hurt Clinton better than any other Republican, and that matters more to them than all the divorce lawyers and jewelry clerks in the world combined. For them, Gingrich is easy to picture as Mighty Casey, poured into his uniform and bat in hand, stepping up to the plate.
Those are the people who gave Gingrich his big plurality in South Carolina, and while they will punch the Red ticket regardless of who’s on it, they’d prefer a champion. In that regard, Gingrich is baggage free. He’s back after a decade of irrelevance, still fighting. The insults, the jokes, the pain, all of it works in his favor. For people who believe that they’re restoring America, he couldn’t be better fit.
Mitt Romney may yet hang on to win this thing. And the issues and economy that will tip the scales in November are still unclear. But while Mittens can be the nominee, he can never be their champion. The question now is whether or not that matters.
“Stop it, you two, this is Thanksgiving, so glue friendly or I’ll take your glue away and then no one will have any glue to glue with!” – Homer Simpson
“Dad, this isn’t about glue. It’s about territoriality. He only wants the glue because I’m using it.” – Lisa Simpson
For the first time in its eleven year history, Wikipedia is deliberately offline today. The site that, more than any other, believes in making reliable information free to everyone has deliberately disabled itself to protest the potential stupidity of the American government. It’s been joined by many others, everything from big name sites like Boing Boing and Reddit down to little personal blogs. You’ve got to give the noxious twins of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act credit for one thing, they’ve made the great, brawling cacophony of the internet angrier and more unified than it has ever been.
That alone is a worthwhile moment in the still fresh history of humanity’s most expansive tool, and there are a lot of ways it can be interpreted. Charitably you can see it as a protest of the informed and active against the ignorant and lazy, of people who work to make life better for others against those who would use their position to benefit themselves and their free spending colleagues. Less charitably you can see it as a chest thumping exercise in self congratulation, the amorphous internet community openly declaring that it really is smarter than everyone else.
It goes almost without saying that I tend toward the former view, but that’s why the latter interpretation, pushed by bought off politicians and the shamelessly mendacious idiots they serve, is more interesting. There really are people of great power out there who think that fucking with DNS – the good faith backbone of the system that supports almost every major transaction we conduct – is a good idea. That’s like forcing people to legally change their names for a speeding ticket, and so what if no one ever gets their mail again.
Of course, it’s actually worse than that. They think that mentioning something should be the same as doing something. That’s like imprisoning someone for mentioning crime. They think that freezing the money of a group is an appropriate response to unpopular speech. That’s like bankrupting someone for saying the emperor has no clothes. They think helping people conceal themselves from the worst governments on Earth should be punishable because someone, somewhere, might see a movie without paying $8.95. Worst of all, they want all of these measures to be enforced not through the courts or by the government, but by private organizations and whatever vicious dogs they see fit to hire. Oh, and it stands almost no chance of actually curbing intellectual property piracy, in the U.S. or elsewhere.
There’s a reason these two bills have sparked such universal and vitriolic opposition. They are fundamental attacks on not just the internet, but on the very idea that someone else doesn’t have a right to tell you what you can and cannot say. That these attacks come in the form of authorizing one private entity to tell another to shut the fuck up or else is simply a sign of the times.
Like so many other political battles of this day and age, it’s about those who already have. In this case, it’s media companies who publicize television shows, movies and music wanting to keep things going the way they have been. They’re afraid of the future because it might mean less (though nothing close to penury) for them, and they’re perfectly willing to burn down everything else if it means stopping that from happening.
It’s the same story that’s characterized our politics since the dawn of the Republic, and it’s grown wildly out of control in the last few decades. Whether you’re talking about banksters keeping their unjustifiable and enormously expensive tax loopholes (carried interest, anyone?), the insurance industry writing itself into health care reform as a legally required skimmer, extractive industries exploiting the government to avoid paying for the things they take out of the ground and the messes they leave behind, or any other large, established and deep pocketed group, the government is at an historic level in terms of ease-of-bribing. The specifics vary – the last time the media colluders got this excited it was yet another copyright extension – but the overall pattern is always the same. A small group, a veritable special interest, gets favorable treatment for the government at the expense of everyone else.
When called on this, as they have been to an impressive and heartwarming degree on SOPA and PIPA, their response is always the same: trust us, we know what we’re doing and you don’t. They’re lying, of course. They always are. Environmental regulations won’t bankrupt the oil industry anymore than minimum wage laws bankrupt small businesses or financial regulation cripples banks. Nor, for that matter, has on-line piracy substantially hurt movies, television or music. It isn’t just that the problem is smaller than they say, it’s that the problem might not exist at all, and it certainly isn’t worth blowing up the internet to not fix a non-problem.
Today there’s been a real fight against censorship and for free speech, and it’s nice to have corporate behemoths like Google on the side of the good guys. But while messing with the internet arouses more attention than most of these fights do, it’s important to recognize that this is just another battle in the very old war of a tiny group reaching into everyone else’s lives for their own narrow benefit. If SOPA and PIPA die, then that’s a real accomplishment. And if, when they are inevitably resurrected (and this isn’t the first time the media cowards have tried this) they are defeated again, those too will be real accomplishments. But amid the cheers, it should be noted that this is a rare win for the public good, and that these sorts of fights shouldn’t have to be this damn hard.
“I work like a Japanese beaver!” – Homer Simpson
“Oh, really? I came to see you three times today. Twice you were sleeping and once you were kicking that ball of electrical tape around.” – Marge Simpson
The main political internet brushfire this week wasn’t New Hampshire. It was the pathetic, hat in hand, please-sir-can-I-have-some-more, The New York Times public editor genuinely questioning whether or not the most respected newspaper on the planet should actually do its fucking job. As anyone even vaguely familiar with how the world works west of the Hudson River would know, the mealy mouthed clarifications didn’t help matters. A resounding “Yes!” arose from the masses, and Paul Krugman – cited in the original post – was studiously silent.
That the Times should hold its news stories to at least the same verifiable standard that Wikipedia uses is blitheringly obvious and no further endorsement is necessary. But beyond the snarky affirmatives, consider what doing that would mean for the Times, and what it would mean for the rest of the establishment media that looks up to the Times the same way the rest of the Ivy League looks up to Harvard.
Routinely using paragraphs like the one the public editor suggested – “The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.” – would cause the Paywalled Lady a lot of grief. It would lead to enough talk radio dudgeon to cause a few subscription cancellations, it would be the de rigueur topic of cable gossip news for days (and likely become a running theme), and it would give even the clumsiest Red politician a roaring applause line. The Times is, of course, long accustomed to right wing criticism, but this would be a new order of scorn. Fact checking Red politicians in the Times might lead to the same thing happening in other coverage, and that makes it a declaration of war.
The fantasy-based worldview of the American right has long preyed on the good faith assumptions of the press. As the evidence mounted against things like supply side economics and abstinence only sex ed, the Reds simply refused to budge, made up their own truthy statistics, and dared big city reporters, who think of regular America as an extended scene from Hoosiers and are feel guilty for not living there, to call them on it.
It certainly helps that most media companies are owned by billionaires, but the self deceiving Dudley-Do-Right naivete of mainstream reporters, and their cloyingly childish cynicism, is the main problem. The awful cocktail party guest list of “analysts” that CNN touts as the best in the business is evidence enough of that. Which all means that if the Times follows through on fact checking speeches, it means not only going to war with the professional right wing, it means humiliating and rebuking all of those other journalists in the press pool.
Reporting and publicly commenting on the news is and always has been fraught with ethical conundrums. Even the simple and unavoidable act of deciding what gets covered and what doesn’t opens one up to charges of bias. The vestal virgin attitude of outfits like the Times are naive at best and war enabling at worst, any crack in them is a welcome sign. Now if we could just get television news to start fact checking something other than Saturday Night Live, we might really be getting somewhere.
“Nothing beats a stroll in cattle country. Hi, I’m Troy McClure! You may remember me from such educational films as ‘Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun’ and ‘Firecrackers: The Silent Killer’.” – Troy McClure
As the Granite State anti-climax echoes among the politically engaged today, heavy with themes about the inevitability of Mitt Romney and the last stand of the Not Romneys in South Carolina, there will be no room for any discussion of the small text box that appeared on page A9 of yesterday’s New York Times:
The Department of Defense has identified 1,853 American service members who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations.
Yesterday’s announced toll was seven men, ranging in age from 20 to 44. (You know, voters.) And, of course, neither the Times nor any other news outfit is keeping careful track of the number of Afghans killed, though it seems safe to assume it was greater than seven.
Whether or not Romney can wrap things up in the next couple of weeks, it’s becoming undeniably clear that our shooting war in Afghanistan is going to be a total non-issue in the 2012 election. It remains a war that’s been forgotten despite the fact that even the most optimistic estimates say we’re still going to be fighting it for at least another two years. Nor are there any indications that it will be an electoral issue in 2014 or 2016.
The Iraq War got its moments in the electoral spotlight in 2002, 2004 and 2006, and had a strong supporting role in 2008. Even though Afghanistan was going on during that time, it could never outshine its younger sibling. The most attention it got in 2008 was when Obama used it as cover for his position on ending the Iraq War, citing his desire to continue it as proof that America’s first black President wouldn’t abandon our long tradition of bombing brown people. Now that Iraq is behind us, Afghanistan has no avenue to break through a bad economy and the studied indifference of both parties.
In a year that will see countless television ads, innumerable political discussions and speeches, and probably three live debates between President Obama and his opponent, Afghanistan is likely to get no more than a bare minimum of attention. A journalist or op-ed piece will bring it up from time to time, but no one in a position to do so is going to press either of the candidates on any of the war’s intractable problems: the hapless Karzai government, the unsustainably huge and still ill trained Afghan army, the continuing deterioration of our relations with Pakistan that the war causes, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Both parties have the same position, as unchanging as it is bloody and naive: that in a couple of years the Afghan government and army will be able to take everything over and then we’ll be able to leave. In a very cynical sense that’s true. Since we’re unable to have a discussion about alternatives, we are very likely going to continue propping up that government for a couple of years before slinking off in the middle of the night like we did in Iraq. Of course, the country is equally very likely to collapse again into civil war and chaos whether we leave in 2012, 2014 or sometime later. But even though that’s what pretty much everyone expects to happen – how is Afghanistan supposed to pay for that huge army? – no one is going to talk about it.
As a sign of the times, that silence is not particularly novel. Ignoring the Afghan War is an American pastime that’s been going on almost as long war itself. But whether we finally depart the field in 2014 or later, it’s going to be a war that was never an American political issue. It’s the longest war in our history, but neither starting it, continuing it, nor ending it will ever have been the main issue in an election. In the meantime, there will be a lot more text boxes in The New York Times, silently keeping score.
“I’m not saying it won’t work, I’m just saying it’s dishonest.” – Marge Simpson
“Well, if we agree, then why are we arguing?” – Homer Simpson
There’s an old saw about academic fights that says that the reason they can get so vicious is because there is so very little at stake. The same rule generally applies to internecine quarrels on what can broadly be defined as the American Left. A particularly nasty such spat has erupted recently as Ron Paul made his Quixote-like charge to relevance in Iowa. Paul’s toxic positions on things like the Civil Rights Act, women’s health, and minorities generally rendered all praise of him heretical to some. Others, most notably Glenn Greenwald, whose uncompromising nature will always make him a lightning rod for this kind of attention, have said that Paul is the only major national political figure raising any kind of serious objection to the Terror Wars, and that for that alone he is doing something valuable.
Greenwald himself ran down the whole thing, complete with links to many of his critics, a few days ago, and there’s no point spinning any of those lines out any further. At one point in his exhaustive post he quotes criticisms from Kevin Drum, and concludes:
But the most important point to make about Drum’s response is that he never bothers to identify the alternatives to Paul’s candidacy when it comes to challenging these bipartisan pieties. If Paul is such an inadequate vehicle for having these ideas heard — and everyone pointing to the benefits of Paul’s candidacy, especially on the Left, understands perfectly what his faults are — why doesn’t Drum unveil the roster of national political figures with a serious platform who are making these points instead?
The answer is obvious: there are none.
This is the real nub of the issue, and it’s what spawns these kinds of fights. Among the tiny handful of politicians with real national stature, and at any given time there’s probably less than a dozen of them, there isn’t a single one other than Ron Paul who seriously objects to things like imprisonment without trial, unlimited eavesdropping, and our policy of undeclared war anywhere in the world. To be sure, Paul’s advocacy on these issues comes with a lot of problems and isn’t nearly as strong as it could be, but he’s leaps and bounds better than anyone else. Just as importantly, he’s actually willing to debate and discuss his positions in front of voters, which makes him a damn sight braver than most.
Looked at in that light, debating the relative shortcomings of Ron Paul is a red herring. The real question is how do we get someone who isn’t a fringe candidate to make some of the same points he’s making? How do we get a viable presidential contender who doesn’t think we can spy on our own people willy-nilly? Who doesn’t think that it’s none of the public’s business where America sends its commandos and bombers? Who is willing to point out that America is safer now than at any point in history and that the national security fears that so pervade our discourse are a naked emperor?
Right off the bat we can strike the Reds from this question. The idea that a viable Republican presidential contender, now or in 2016, wouldn’t slavishly adhere to the Terror Wars is laughable on its face. And even if there was such a person, he’d come with the same kind of poisonous domestic baggage as Ron Paul. No, the candidate has to come from the Blue team, and one way or another there’s going to be a Blue opening in four years.
Starting from that, the useful course of action, the one with the highest chance of actually changing some of our disgusting national security policies before mid-century, is to make sure that caring about these issues is important in the 2016 Democratic nomination. If Paul’s popularity is indicative of anything, it’s that there is a real constituency for an anti-Terror Wars, anti-Drug War candidate. Any Democratic politician espousing such heresy would be sure to make Wolf Blitzer, David Gregory and the rest of the coiffed airheads nauseous, but there’s no denying that there is a significant foundation of support there for someone who is willing to make the argument.
Sadly, Barack Obama isn’t going to do that, but on pretty much every other issue he is far and away the best option in this fall’s election. That roadblock to progress causes a lot of frustration, which manifests itself in those nasty but meaningless Lefty fights. But the undeniable fact is that the next opportunity for actual change will be the 2016 Democratic nominating contest. Debating the nuances and niceties of 2012 is a meaningless exercise because as far as the Terror Wars go, there isn’t a choice to be made. But there will be soon, and that’s where the time, effort and conversation should be focused.
“Homer, I’m as permissive as the next parent. I mean, just yesterday I let Todd buy some Red-Hots with a cartoon devil on the box.” – Ned Flanders
The people of Iowa are waking up to a Santorum-Romney hangover this morning, and the political gossip press is a whirling dervish of pointless analysis. Romney’s reflexive mendacity is so well established and documented that people hardly notice when he ups the ante. Santorum is just now getting attention, so his batshit is a bit more novel, but since he’s been Google famous for years it doesn’t seem as though there is anything new under the Red sun.
Indeed, there may not be, but that doesn’t mean a good phrase can’t crystallize those old, messy ideas into a few razor sharp words. And the ever eagle eyed Amanda Marcotte caught just such a sharp edge yesterday:
“You know, it’s so honest,” Sister Dorothy told Hoffman after reading it, “but sometimes Satan cloaks himself in truth.”
“Satan cloaks himself in the truth.” I can’t think of a better summation of right wing attitudes about basically everything. No matter if truth conflicts with their ideology, because Satan is behind that truth. If you see how the candidates are campaigning, you’ll see that “Satan cloaks himself in truth” is basically their mantra. Everyone is clawing past each other to see who can demonstrate their fealty to right wing myth over truth.
It doesn’t come much clearer than that, though Marcotte errs slightly in not including the “sometimes”, which allows Sister Dorothy to pick and choose the things she likes and doesn’t like. Hypocrisy is rarely consistent, it prefers to be selective. This is how anti-evolution people justify taking antibiotics.
What makes “sometimes Satan cloaks himself in truth” so descriptive is the way it allows righteousness, piety, and a general attitude of disdain, disgust, and resentment to flow freely. It’s the inverse of the old saw of “god told me”. Instead of inspiring action, it’s used to oppose others. It’s also a much cleaner way of getting to the heart of that not quite disagreement between Corey Robin and Mark Lilla, which John Quiggin at Crooked Timber wrote up on Sunday. Quiggin basically sides with Robin:
Robin’s thesis is that claims like Oakeshott’s about conservatism (and also, those of Hayek about classical liberalism) are nothing more than a mask for attempts to resist, and where possible, roll back the claims of the working class against their rulers.
I think this is broadly correct.
[…]
There is an accidental association reflecting the fact that, taking the last two or three centuries as a whole, the ruling class has mostly been losing ground.
But Quiggin’s general agreement with Robin masks something a bit deeper:
The crucial test comes in periods such as the Bourbon restoration, or the neoliberal resurgence of the last thirty years or so, when the direction of change is reversed. Genuine conservatives in these circumstances seek to preserve those advances that have been embedded in the way society works (such as the New Deal in the US). Conservative politics on the other hand, is dominated by reactionaries seeking to restore (an idealised version) of the status quo ante, and gains the support of those with a radical disposition (Newt Gingrich is an ideal example). It’s certainly possible to find examples of the first kind (the “Wets” who resisted Thatcher for example) but they are clearly in the minority.
This is where Satan’s truth cloak comes in, because it is the peculiar wildcard of culture that has found its widest expression here in the New World. This is why it’s a lot easier to find whole movements within self described conservatism that are open about their desire to roll back decades old civil rights than it is to locate even a single conservative individual who is serious about preserving those gains. How many pro-choice Reds are there? How many black Republicans are there? How many stood up – even just symbolically – for centuries long enshrined civil liberties while they’ve been effectively stripped from American Muslims?
It’s tribalism, pure and simple; and in a very un-“conservative” way it’s a tribalism based on resentment. The nun who sees Satan, the Prince of Lies, as someone who can use the truth to further his evil schemes may be a dupe, but she knows for sure who is and isn’t on her side. The specific reasons for that are probably complicated (and the general perception of anti-choice people as being either anti-sex or sexually frustrated seems basically accurate), but the resentment in “sometimes Satan cloaks himself in truth” is as clear as a bell on Sunday morning.
Without speaking to Thatcher’s Britain or that damned French Revolution, in modern America the resentment within the right wing is a strictly cultural phenomenon. It’s about people who feel that their tribe has been losing, not because they’ve been out of power (Jebus knows they haven’t been), but because all their power hasn’t gotten them what they really want. Non-white immigrants can’t be kept out. Women are still allowed to have sex. Gays keep coming out of that closet. Black kids are still allowed in the schools.
Those are the main battles of the culture wars, and conservatives have been losing them left and right for so many decades that they can’t even keep track of their defeats any longer. That’s literally true in the case of Rick Perry, who forgot recently that Lawrence v. Texas was argued while he was governor. And while the country at large greeted Lawrence with yawns (just another wacky Southern state with a weird old law on the books), imagine what that decision looks like to those resentful right wingers. Sodomy! The sin for which Angry Old Testament God destroyed two entire cities is now protected by the United States government. It’s no wonder these people are convinced the apocalypse is coming.
Rick Santorum, the newly minted Not Romney, openly hates Griswold v. Connecticut, which was decided just eleven years after Brown v. Board of Education, which itself came just six years after that unelected Communist Harry S. Truman desegregated the military. And let’s not even get started on Roe v. Wade, which twenty years of uninterrupted Republican appointments couldn’t get overturned in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
And while all that was happening, the culture at large marched on, increasingly brazen in ignoring their howls of outrage. Once upon a time there was the Hays Code and the Legion of Decency, to say nothing of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which scared the holy hell out of anyone in movies and television. It wasn’t that long ago that it was a scandal to see a swear word or more skin than faces and hands. Now all that’s left are the increasingly toothless Parents Television Council and those leering perverts at the MPAA. Nudity is acceptable even on commercially supported shows and you can get away with saying “fuck” in PG-13 movies. Why, women will often wear things in public that don’t even conceal their – gasp – bra straps!
All that power, all those elections won, and all they have to show for it is a few restrictions on abortion that fall almost entirely on the poor and a Drug War that overwhelmingly hurts minorities. Those are certainly nice things to have if you’re the resentful type, but it doesn’t get sodomites off your television or your radio. It doesn’t keep harpy lesbian Hillary Clinton from being the most admired woman in America for over a decade. And even those last strongholds are weakening. With a majority of American adults now favoring legalized marijuana, the Drug War is starting to crack. And even Mississippi, the Mordor of the conservative resentment, soundly rejected an anti-choice referendum last fall.
As Santorum nemesis Dan Savage wrote yesterday (via):
what does it tell us about this moment in the struggle for LGBT equality that even homophobes like Elizabeth and her dad perceive a political risk in being perceived as homophobic?
Just eight years ago Bush the Younger made gay bashing a big part of his election strategy. Now even people who are willing to say they think contraception should be illegal and that any orgasm that can’t result in a pregnancy is “counter to how things are supposed to be” – which by definition includes every time two women or two men have ever gotten it on – has a daughter who feels the need to lie about having right wing gay friends to avoid sounding too much like the bigot she clearly is.
It’s no wonder Satan needs to cloak himself in truth. Sister Dorothy’s allies have used up all the lies, and they did it because no matter how much they rig the tax code, squeeze the poor, or punish women, they know that the world they want to live in is already gone, if it ever existed. Santorum, Romney and the rest of them will pound and holler to keep the fantasy going in exchange for a few votes, but even if one of them (or someone like them in 2016, 2020, etcetera) slimes their way into 1600 doing so, he won’t be able to deliver on his cultural promises any more than Nixon, Ronnie or Bush the Younger did.
“I promise you zombies more raw human flesh than any President since Roosevelt!” – Duke Phillips
The most hopeful conception of the political conflicts of our time is that, three or four decades from now, rational people will look back on our arguments and foibles and conclude that we were harmlessly deranged. After all, what technologically modern people could reject the plainly obvious? In everything from carbon dioxide to human papillomavirus, the arguments of the day are wildly divorced from undisputed facts and our actual problems. The grotesque contradiction of our age is that we live in a world of unprecedentedly effective technology and use much of it to belittle, undermine, and deny the advances that make our world possible.
The classic example of this is people who reject the teaching of basic biology in schools but make use of it every time they go to the doctor. But modern hypocrisies extend far beyond that, in everything from economics to health care to energy collection, there are powerful forces arguing for a rejection of the kind of thinking that got us to this luxurious, healthy, eight-decades-of-life-expectancy plateau we call home.
In no place is this more starkly apparent than in the petulant foot stomping of the Red nominating process, which will finally get underway for read this week. Pick an issue. Economically they ignore history and evidence to debate one another’s fealty to Arthur Laffer’s napkin. Biologically they consider anything more modern than bloodletting heresy. Mathematically we cry about social programs that are multiple decades from distress while villainizeing net positive aid to Americans in need. Physically we rehash settled arguments over whether or not carbon dioxide retains atmospheric heat.
What all of these masturbatory exercises have in common is that they are heretical to anything that can be called evidence based reasoning. Denialism masquerading as ideology is the mark of the day, and we have become so well practiced in it that we hardly notice.
Perfectly illustrating both the angry toddler nature of our discourse and its grim realities is Mark Lilla’s review of Corey Robin’s right wing takedown book The Reactionary Mind. Lilla, an admirably overeducated academic, is slightly peeved that Robin doesn’t share his fine, nuanced appreciation of the intellectual underpinnings and centuries long consequences of the French Revolution and all that it entails for proper noun Western Civilization.
Eyebrows should always raise at the mention of Louis XVI’s downfall. The French Revolution has had a curvaceous and husky voiced appeal to academics since boarding schools were invented. The combination of that many competing philosophies with that much blood and sex gives far too many uniform escapees a wistful eye twinkle, as though the event were the buxom twenty-something who instructed them in the ways of love while they were shy sixteen year olds.
But Lilla’s review, while justifiably scathing about Robin’s hideously swollen historical simplifications, is laughably weak on Robin’s home turf of modern conservatism. It takes an astounding case of rose tinted glasses to refer to Robert Bork as “once-sober”, or George Will as “reality-based”. To anyone who is vaguely cognizant of American politics and hasn’t suffered a recent head injury or infection of Washington, the beard and the bowtie can’t hide the fact that both men can make only the meanest and most self serving claims to anything other than intellectual duplicity. By trying to tie them into a long strain of reactionaries, Lilla commits the same sin of gross oversimplification of which he has accused Robin.
Lilla errs in tracing the rise of the apocalyptic right wing to disillusionment with the Great Society. Today’s right wing is the intellectual heir of the guys who thought Franklin Roosevelt was bringing down the Republic, of the people who sincerely believed that those hopeless fops in Moscow had cunningly infiltrated every office of government up to and including that oval shaped one. They thought the country was falling apart since the income tax was instated, and today’s dizzying catalog of right wing villains, everything from labor unions and feminists to Muslims and the Environmental Protection Agency, is simply the natural outgrowth of that unlimited paranoia.
Robin sees Western history as a conflict between those who have and those who don’t; he doesn’t distinguish between how the rules are rigged in each era and place. Economically, racially, sexually, etcetera, his story is about the many ways the game is tilted against those who aren’t already running it. Lilla sees the same tale of woe and conflict and says that many of the combatants Robin describes are motivated by little more than fear. Be it fear of change, fear of a future after change, or simple fear of a future without change, Lilla sees a world in which defense of the status quo and a want to return to an older status quo (real or perceived) are motivated by the same impulse.
But where Robin’s history is crudely mashed, Lilla ignores the intellectual backflips used to justify the injustices against which Robin’s heroes struggle. Noted posh-head William F. Buckley, whom Lilla cites explicitly, was for segregation and legacy college admissions long before the oft cited radicalization of American politics. Buckley could be right and wrong about this and that, but you could be sure to find him on the side of people who looked, sounded and socialized in much the same way he did.
Ultimately, the two of them agree on the idea that the Red politics of the moment are paranoid, disconnected from reality, and totally insane. Lilla’s not wrong when he writes:
The same faith has been expressed in the Republican presidential candidate debates, where the contenders compete to demonstrate how many agencies they would abolish when in office (if they remember their names), how many programs they would cut or starve, and how much faith they have in the ingenuity of the American people to figure it out for themselves once they’re finished. What’s so disturbing is that they don’t feel compelled to explain how even a reduced government should meet the challenges of the new global economy, how our educational system should respond to them, what the geopolitical implications might be, or anything of the sort. They deliver their lines with the insouciant “what, me worry?” of Alfred E. Neuman.
But he is wrong to draw a distinction between the “conservatism” of old time European aristocrats who wanted to hold on to what they had and the “conservatism” of the culture warriors (sincere and less so) who comprise the Republican presidential field. Both are conservative in that they want the people in charge to remain so, and both are apocalyptic in that they see burning the world around them as being better than losing the authority to which they cling. But ultimately they’re all in it for the same reason, to further themselves within a ruling elite, a project to which the messy, ill informed foibles of the electorate have always been an impediment.
Lilla stumbles because he’s trying to parse the motivation to rig democracy from the mechanics of rigging democracy. There are plenty of differences between 18th Century French aristocrats and the editors of The Weekly Standard, but both groups boil down to the same nub, a belief that selecting the assholes in charge is too important to be left to their lessers. The crazed state of the about to begin Red nominating contest is a pitch perfect example of that. The whole thing is less about what candidates would do with power and more about how they would exclude the wrong people from getting it.
The entire affair has the intellectual depth of a beauty pageant, except that instead of competing to see who looks best in a bikini, they’re trying to outdo one another in sheer meanness. That why they don’t feel the need to explain what any of their actions would mean in the real world where science applies no matter how much they wish it away. The point isn’t rolling back cultural revolutions, it’s about making sure that the right people remain in charge. Everything else is filler; always has been, always will be.
“Cheer up, so you’re not good at sports. It’s a very small part of life.” – Marge Simpson
“Sports, sports, sports, sports, sports, sports, sports, sports.” – Homer Simpson
A few weeks back, The New York Times ran a story about what they called a “sports tax”, which basically boils down to this:
But ESPN is also far costlier than any other channel, earning about $4.69 a month for each cable and satellite household in the United States, according to the research firm SNL Kagan. Next year the firm expects ESPN to cross the $5 a month threshold for the first time (the next highest is TNT, at $1.16 this year).
Every household in the country that pays for television service also pays for channels that they don’t ever watch. ESPN though, is the only one that’s so expensive that it could qualify as its own line item on your bill, which is why the Times basically felt it was okay to use the word “sports” as a synonym for “ESPN”.
Five dollars a month isn’t nothing, especially at the low end of the economic ladder, but it’s a minor cost overall. But the culture of sports is something that people spend a lot of time and thought on, something that affects pretty much everyone directly or indirectly to the equivalent of a lot more than a fiver per month. ESPN is more than a pricy channel, it’s a private company that enjoys an unparalleled primacy over the sprawling and complicated public pastime known as “sports”. And in terms of culture rather than cash, ESPN is practically a monopoly.
ESPN, which began as merely a cable channel, is now a gargantuan attention machine that will use anything that can vaguely be described as athletic competition to generate revenue. Beyond that, they’ve taken the art of talking about sports to new heights. In these days of hour long pregame shows and endless afternoon gab fests that seems as natural as can be, but it was once considered nuts.
People watched sports, why would they want to watch other people just talk about sports? But it turns out that a lot of people do want to watch others talk about sports. It’s the “soap opera for men” idea that’s kept professional wrestling going all these years applied to non-scripted events. There’s drama, revenge and redemption; old friends falling out or competing against one another.
They’ve made sports as much about personalities as it is about points, and in the meantime have made themselves into the indispensible conduit for both. That in turn means that they’ve done something more impressive than simply pile up an all but uncountable stack of money. (Though they’ve done that too). It means that they’ve constructed an unending fountain of cash, of which that $5 per household head tax they’ve levied on the entire country is just one component.
However financially impressive that achievement, it does raise two troubling and ongoing problems. The first is the obvious conflict of interest in both covering and promoting the same subjects. The second is the inevitable question of what does and doesn’t get coverage, and the implications that has for both sports and for culture more generally.
The most spectacular recent instance of the first remains last year’s “The Decision”, an unwittingly voyeuristic display of ego stoking crassness on the part of both its subject and its producers that is unlikely to be equaled any time soon. But incidents of lesser visibility happen all the time, and they’re the primary reason ESPN goes through ombudsmen at such an astonishingly fast clip that earlier this year they elected to outsource the entire fig leaf production department to a Florida non-profit precisely no one cares about. This is what happens when an institution plays at journalism while paying its bills courtesy of its own subjects. Remember, once upon a time legitimate news organizations had a strict rule about not paying for stories. Well, all ESPN does is pay for stories, which makes it, in effect, the world’s largest tabloid.
The second problem is related to the first, but more troubling in its long term implications. Not only does ESPN have enormous influence over who and what gets coverage, but they’re in bed financially with basically all of them. In the short run that means giving fluff coverage or simply ignoring unflattering stories about systemic stories. (Hello NFL and concussions!) In the longer run though, it means ESPN has a billion dollar plus financial investment in the success of certain leagues and sports at the expense of others.
Eighty years ago, boxing and horse racing were American sports royalty. Today boxing is a niche sport and horse racing is the exclusive provenance of silly rich people who like to get dressed up and drink together. Both faded from the scene for a variety of reasons, but neither of them had an ally as powerful as ESPN to prop them up when the public began to yawn.
That’s a very worrisome long term effect because it cuts both ways. ESPN not only pays for and promotes sports that are profitable, but sports that are profitable to ESPN. To take just two recent examples, the last fifteen years or so have seen the rise of both mixed martial arts and Major League Soccer from nothing into endeavors that are profitable and self sustaining. But both have received only minimal attention from the self proclaimed world wide leader in sports. That’s a problem, because any new sport isn’t necessarily in ESPN’s interest if it has the potential to cut into existing ones.
By so dominating “sports”, ESPN has accrued to itself the power of cultural arbiter that used to be diffused across the entire country, from local papers and television stations to simple conversations about what matters when two people are shooting the shit. That is an enormous change, akin to replacing the relatively freewheeling culture of books with the top down monoculture of television or movies, and it’s happened virtually without public comment or notice.
ESPN star Bill Simmons has joked on occasion that he’d like to be made “sports czar” or some such, and it’s kinda funny. But in effect ESPN already is the sports czar. They dictate which opinions and stories get the most play, which sports are deemed important, and, just as importantly, which ones don’t and aren’t. Given the importance we place on sports, that’s an awful lot of power for a single group of people. At the moment it doesn’t show any signs of abating, but it’s worth keeping an eye on, and it’s worth remembering that what’s good for ESPN isn’t necessarily good for sports. The two aren’t actually synonyms.
“I am going on a diet. From this day forward, I pledge there will be no pork chop too succulent, no donut too tasty, no pizza too laden with delicious toppings to prevent me from reaching my scientifically determined ideal weight! As God as my witness, I’ll always be hungry again!” – Homer Simpson
The scenario is so common it ought to be a cliche. Some batch of scientists comes up with a study that suggests something about weight loss and nutrition in humans. A bunch of mostly ill informed journalists misunderstand the findings and write them up with misleading headlines. Then someone shits out a book with a catchy title, and before you know it a new diet craze or exercise fad has been born.
The life cycle of a diet Americanus is the main subject of Susan Yager’s book “The Hundred Year Diet: American’s Voracious Appetite for Losing Weight”. Starting early in the last century, the idea that it was unhealthy and unattractive to sport more than the bare minimum of lipids on one’s person took hold of the American consciousness. The country has been on a diet ever since and Yager’s book is as close to a comprehensive chronicle of that history as you’re ever likely to find.
For example, in a sentence that could have spewed forth from the laziest politician or pundit any time in this or last century with hardly a modification, in 1952 the American Medical Association announced (with grand, anti-Communist panache) that “Overweight among American business executives is threatening destruction of the nation’s productive capacity and free enterprise system.” Similar warnings have been sounded for any number of reasons ranging from military readiness to economic competitiveness, our current “obesity epidemic” is just the latest iteration.
In Chicago in 1920, the city health commissioner recruited twenty-five overweight women to get thin. It was such a successful media circus that, not to be outdone, a female newspaper columnist recruited twenty-five men for the same public shaming. A similar contest was then held in New York City, this time with fifty participants of each gender. Thirty years later, Bonnie Prudden, who died earlier this month at the age of 97, rose to fame and started an exercise hysteria by declaring that America’s kids were failing basic physical fitness. Her report came out in 1955, in what we now think of as the halcyon days of neighborhood kids playing outdoors all day.
You can look back to literally any period of American history since the rise of scientific medicine and industrial food production and find a panic over national obesity. Even nine decades ago there was already a rich history of fads and fanatics peddling ways to “reduce”.
As a result the book does suffer from an almost hyperactive need to jump from one topic to the next. Not only are the chapters extremely short, sections within chapters are sometimes little more than a few paragraphs. Diet fads and equipment, along with the names of their clever creators, are listed at a breathless pace, but little is done to tie them together or situate them in the overall picture of dieting in America.
That’s simply the unavoidable result of the fact that America has, for more than a century now, been awash in ways to reduce. For every pill and supplement there’s a lunatic contraption that claims to help you exercise while you sit on your ass. Every contorted diet plan that demonizes some foods and lavishes praise on others has a doppelganger that reverses the emphasis and promises the same wondrous results. The silver lining to that quick pace and lengthy list is that when you look at all of them together like that the absurdity is more apparent than a supermodel’s rib cage. Things that can sort of seem plausible if taken on their own are revealed to be variations on wild quackery.
Unfortunately, despite the entertaining and exhaustive catalog of fads and fopperies, The Hundred Year Diet shortchanges some of its own conclusions. Specifically, there are two concepts which surely deserve a bigger mention than the relatively brief ones they get in the book. The first is the way weighing less is something that will always be extra difficult and bordering on impossible for some segment of the population. The second is the still primitive nature of our understanding of how nutrition affects individuals.
The former point is one that Yager can’t bring herself to gloss over entirely, but it’s clearly something she doesn’t like bringing up. Yes, it’s true that as a population we are much heavier than we used to be, and it’s true that there are a great deal of negative health consequences associated with that. One need look no further than the expensive and potentially debilitating effects of our high rates of Type II Diabetes to see that.
But some percentage of the population, for reasons ranging from genetics and conditions in utero to levels of gut bacteria and who knows what else, simply cannot lose weight the same way most of the population can. This is closely linked to the ugly cultural realities of being less than twiggy in America, in everything from social shaming to reduced earnings and job opportunities. There aren’t a lot of Americans who think to themselves, “I’ll get that better job/person-to-sleep-with if I just start eating more Oreos”, whoever wants to be the next fat guy on Saturday Night Live obviously excepted.
The sad fact is that we still don’t have a way to identify people who can carry extra pounds safely from those who can’t, nor do we have a way to differentiate those who can’t lose weight from those who simply eat too much and don’t get enough exercise. While we can say with great confidence that most people will lose weight if they develop better exercise and eating habits, there isn’t a reliable way to know what specific tactics will work better for one person or another. Even something as seemingly simple as understanding what causes one person’s metabolism to speed while similar diet and behavior cause another’s to slow remains mostly beyond our grasp.
Nor are the limits of our nutritional knowledge restricted to being baffled by the differences between how much weight one person gains versus another on the same diet. Even calorie counts, those seemingly solid numbers which are the sacred bane of dieters from coast to coast, are probably wildly off the mark (via). The realization of the paltriness of our understanding is disconcerting in a lot of ways. Even people who don’t exercise and eat right are usually confident that if they start, those numbers will guide them along the way.
But what’s clear based on more than a century of “scientific” diets, different ways to measure people, and slick quackery all aimed at slimming people down is that numbers are overrated. For a society that runs on numbers that is a confusingly counterintuitive conclusion. After all, we use numbers to track everything from money to yards after catch. The computers we spend huge chunks of time using are basically just big collections of ones and zeros. Hell, counting is practically the first thing we teach to our blank slate offspring.
Translating that fetish for numbers into the realm of weight loss and nutrition seems natural as can be. You can buy fancy electronic scales that will measure your weight and body fat down to a decimal place, but in doing so we overlook how poor our data is, how fat the error margins on our instruments, how little will still know about the genetic differences between individuals and their interactions with their environments. It looks smooth and modern and reliable, but a quick glance at a century of history of diets and reducing makes a hollow mockery of that idea.
Given that all those unknowns fit smoothly into Yager’s general point that diet fads are about as scientific as other fads, it’s a shame she doesn’t engage them more. All those specific numbers, be they weight, BMI, or calorie counts, are all but useless information. Calorie counts are notoriously inaccurate and the BMI scale is likely skewed such that some purportedly healthy BMIs are associated with more health problems than some heavy ones considered unhealthy.
Most disastrous for mental and physical well being, however, is the relentless focus on weight in pounds. It’s a number almost everyone knows about themselves, and yet it’s far too specific for the kind of day-to-day self regulation most people need. Gaining or dropping ten pounds is, from a health point of view, almost always meaningless, and yet we’re constantly inventing new ways to track ourselves down to a tenth of a pound. No wonder the country is always on a diet.
Smart phones and internet sites that track your diet and training are just the latest incarnation of yesteryear’s contraptions and systems. When we pretend that the “science” of twenty or forty years ago is laughable while ours is advanced we ignore the fact that twenty or forty years from now people will think our science is only marginally less primitive than we do theirs.
The reality is that we have only a very rough outline of what numbers like weight, cholesterol, and body fat mean. We have an even rougher outline of how the nitty-gritty details of our myriad biochemical processes operate. And our understanding of how those processes vary and affect individuals is so skeletal that it doesn’t even qualify as an outline. Some day you may be able to get a quick and inexpensive blood test that will analyze your genes and all those different microorganisms to which you are a host and say something like, “Eat all the pizza you want, but avoid butter like the plague and go swimming three times a week”. But we are very far from that day.
In the meantime, we can only continue to plod along with what we do know while being aware of all that we don’t. For the majority of people, eating less and exercising more will work. It may not cause you to lose enough weight to fit into unrealistic pants, it may not cause you to turn heads poolside, but it will likely make you as healthy as you can be. What you don’t want to do is torment yourself over holiday eating, make grand resolutions tied to specific numbers, or spend money on books and systems that all boil down to basically the same idea, eat less and exercise more.
End Note: As if to prove Yager’s point, a Google search for “hundred year diet” produces her book on Amazon as the #1 result. The #2 result is “The Hundred-Year DIET: Guidelines and Recipes for a Long and Vigorous Life”, yet another entry in the long quest to remain thin and healthy through poorly understood nutritional rituals.
“Don’t get discouraged, Dad, only four vertical miles to go.” – Bart Simpson
The stealthy, unannounced withdrawal of the last American troops in Iraq was done in the dark of night and witnessed, fittingly enough, only by one of our robot warriors, high in the sky. There were no sweets and flowers, no cheering crowds, no dramatic helicopter takeoffs. The expected sort of reactions have followed, too many to list of the “we won”, “it wasn’t worth it”, “Bush lied” and other genres that have become all too familiar over the last nine years.
In particular, Gary Kamiya wrote a better than average lament for the lost and demand that we honor them by not forgetting how the mess came about. He’s rightly pissed off that this incalculable failure – of American government, American institutions, of basic human decency – has been greeted here at home by overwhelming indifference leavened only by a disgraceful minimum of decorum. If anything, he puts too sunny a face on our dreamlike denial. He writes:
To truly honor those brave men and women in uniform – and, even more because there are more of them — the millions of Iraqis whose lives we destroyed, Americans need to look unflinchingly at this dreadful war.
They need to look at the ignorant, twisted and duplicitous men and women who started it, at the institutions that failed to stop it, and at their own complicity in it. Above all, they need to look at its terrible toll.
Nobody wants to think about Iraq. It was a mistake, and no one wants to dwell on mistakes. There are times when national forgetting is healthy. But this is not one of them. We need to remember.
What Kamiya ignores is that we can only fail to remember things that have stopped, and if there’s one legitimate excuse for America yawning as one of its most disastrous wars ever comes to a close, it is that the war is not truly over. Plenty of anti-war people have been calling the end a sham by noting that, despite the flag ceremonies, we still have a gargantuan embassy, enough mercenaries to conquer half of Africa, and a small contingent of “trainers”. (And that’s before you start talking about the openly floated possibility of a later expansion of military ties.) Those things are all true, but they are also little more than trimming. America still has a three course meal of shit yet to eat.
The real war, the Terror Wars, aren’t even close to over. The end of the Iraq War is a totemic milestone in the struggle to end the rest of them, but the road ahead is very long indeed. Despite our official withdrawal from the land between the rivers, the Terror Wars are still going strong in at least three major theaters: Afghanistan, the “homeland”, and wherever the CIA and the military are operating drones and special forces teams.
Those three wounds are still bleeding in ghastly ways. They are un-sewn gashes that cost billions, kill thousands, and, worst of all, poison the best aspects of America. In light of them, what needs to be remembered above everything else is that the Iraq War was never about Iraq, not as a country, a place, or a people. The Iraq War was about America.
Just as no grand strategy for Anbar or heroic action in Tikrit could have won or lost the Iraq War, no effort of the Army or Marines can pacify Afghanistan. Just as no amount of tortured prisoners could ever crack the insurgency, no brilliant intelligence coup can stop the shadowy parts of our government from launching raids and missiles in corners of the world that are worthless to everyone who doesn’t live there. Just as killing and capturing Hussein and his nearest and dearest couldn’t turn the tide in Baghdad, no master plot can ever be foiled that will let sanity return to airports or convince the government that spying on its own citizens is useless, immoral, and self defeating. Since there isn’t a real enemy to beat, there are only our fears and our reactions to the monsters we think are under the bed. The Terror Wars, in all their incarnations, are about America, American choices, and American fuck ups.
The Iraq War was mostly an American fever dream, a mass, national hallucination of hubris, glory and fear. For Iraq, the final echo of that dream can be seen in the empty comments flowing from high officials about how we’ve left Iraq with our heads held high . . . in the middle of the night without telling anyone. That war is over, and it seems unlikely any American Administration, Red or Blue, will muster the stupid to wade back in.
But for the three remaining components of the Terror Wars, that hallucination persists. Airport security and domestic surveillance continually reach new heights of expensive absurdity, and no one can give an answer as to why other than mumbling something about “threats”. Abroad, we’re still freedom bombing many parts of the world in the pursuit of various villains, essentially none of whom have ever demonstrated the ability to attack American civilian targets. And, of course, there’s Afghanistan, where we’re a good three or four years away from finally tucking our tail between our legs and departing, most likely in the dead of night just as we did in Iraq.
The great work of ending the war – all the Terror Wars – remains mostly undone and is no sure thing. Getting out of Iraq is only the beginning. And if no one is happy about it, if no one wants to talk about it or remember it . . . well, that’s to be expected. The fearful and deluded proponents of the Terror Wars saw themselves suffer a great defeat with the American withdrawal; they’re hardly in gregarious mood. The rest of us saw only progress in a task that is far from complete and that remains dauntingly difficult, all but the most circumscribed celebrations are unwarranted.
The blood and the bullets remain an abstraction for most of the American public, several removes from lives that have their own problems and pleasures. For them the Terror Wars are about degradations at the hands of police and security, about jingoistic political commercials and anxiety stoking news coverage, about taxes, bullshit, and internecine conflicts over everything from religion and race to football and politics. That is the real war, the fight for the American people’s faith in the Terror Wars, and it is in no risk of being forgotten.
“So, it seems like we have enough people now, when do we start taking down the corporations?” – Stan Marsh
Writing at TomDispatch, Barbara and John Ehrenreich have produced one of the calmest and most cogent explanations of why “the 99%” has emerged as a resonant political idea. Their take is generally hopeful, but they’re worried that traditional divisions among the non-super-rich will derail whatever political momentum the Occupy movement has built:
If the “99%” is to become more than a stylish meme, if it’s to become a force to change the world, eventually we will undoubtedly have to confront some of the class and racial divisions that lie within it. But we need to do so patiently, respectfully, and always with an eye to the next big action — the next march, or building occupation, or foreclosure fight, as the situation demands.
That’s broadly true, but it takes the slogan of “99%” too literally. Obviously, the Ehrenreichs don’t actually think that everyone below a certain income threshold is going to start agreeing with one another, and they’re correct that the 1% and their stooges in politics and media will look to exploit any division among lesser people who share economic interests. However, and this is a big however, the ultimate effect of America’s newfound sense of class solidarity will depend chiefly on the ballot box, and that’s something which simply cannot be quantified at this time.
Despite what some of Occupy’s more ardent participants may believe, revolution is not on the verge of coming to the United States. Capitalism isn’t going anywhere, and neither is Wall Street. Reigning in the excesses of both is clearly warranted, but that means reforms, not a new system from the ground up, and that means winning elections, both primaries and generals.
That’s why the Occupy movement’s general distaste for electoral politics is a much bigger weakness than a reawakening of “class and racial divisions”. It’s rhetorically useful to discuss “the 99%”, but in terms of the major changes that need to be made to reestablish the middle and working classes, to say nothing of making America a humane place to be poor, the far more important percentage is 51.
That’s grating to a lot of people, in no small part because the Democratic Party is lousy with bought out 1% whores. (Yes, Senator Schumer, we’re looking at you.) But that’s what primary elections are for. They aren’t sexy, they aren’t as emotionally satisfying as camping out with cool, like minded people, but they’re also the ticket to getting real things done. Credible primary threats also have the added feature of keeping incumbents responsive to their base once they are in office. As the old saying goes, “more and better Democrats” really is the only path forward.
None of that means that the Occupy movement hasn’t done truly useful things by focusing cultural attention to the rapacious crimes of Jamie Dimon and company. Democrats have been talking about benefits going to the top 1% since the 2000 election, mostly ineffectively. In just a couple of months the dirty Occupy hippies made the point better than the establishment Blues did in more than a decade.
That’s a real accomplishment, and calling it a “stylish meme” undersells it greatly. But the threat to continuing to make progress isn’t primarily the cultural divisions, it’s that all this energy won’t translate at the ballot box over many election cycles. If at this time next year the Reds are preparing to move into the White House and retake the Senate, then all the media stories about inequality in the world won’t matter a damn because inequality will be about to get much worse. The same will be true two years after that, and two years after that, and so on. A burst of publicity is a very good thing, but without sustained electoral pressure it won’t amount to anything.
“You’re looking at her through a father’s eyes.” – Marge Simpson
“Well, if I could gouge out somebody else’s eyes and shove ’em into my sockets, I would. But to me, she’s beautiful.” – Homer Simpson
“That is so sweet.” – Marge Simpson
Writing on The New Yorker’s main blog yesterday, journalist and practiced political observer Jeffrey Toobin wrote a slightly more intellectual incarnation of the “Why is the Red field so weak?” article that has appeared in just about every serious publication in the country, as well as less esteemed outfits like Kaplan Test Prep Daily and the company that prints kids menus for Big Boy. In a bit of wishful liberal thinking, he draws a comparison between 2012 and the Johnson landslide in 1964 by noting that the positions the candidates have taken are all wildly unpopular with the vast majority of people who aren’t the rabid core of the Red chimera. His rather hopeful conclusion is:
Small government, low taxes, racial resentment—the Goldwater platform was the Reagan revolution in embryo. The voters were not yet ready for it. There is, in short, a lesson about both the long and the short run in the election of 1964. In the long run, a campaign based on unpopular ideas may change the country forever. In the short run, the fate of a platform of uniformly unpopular ideas—like that of the Republicans in 2012—is more certain. It loses.
That’s a pleasant thought, and it’s not necessarily wrong. But Toobin painted himself into a corner from which his conclusion doesn’t provide an exit a couple of paragraphs earlier. Citing a list of issues ranging from gutting Medicare and overturning Roe to getting gays back into the military closet, Toobin points out that these things are enthusiastically totemic beliefs with dyed in the wool Reds but unpopular in the general population. He wonders:
What makes this collective embrace of the unpalatable so peculiar is that the Republican candidates, as well as most Republicans, are positively obsessed with winning the 2012 election. They revile Obama and desire, above all, his ouster. In light of this, wouldn’t they seek out the broadest possible coalition for defeating him? Apparently not. Rather, the working Republican hypothesis seems to be that the damaged economy will trump any specific stand on the issues. Americans will embrace the Republican candidate simply to punish Obama for failing to cure what ails the economy. In this environment, even the Republican id will be an easy sell.
Toobin is overlooking something there, though it’s a mistake everyone makes sooner or later. Everything starts out swimmingly: Republicans want Obama out, “above all”. But the very next sentence “wouldn’t they seek out the broadest possible coalition for defeating him?” is a classic case of seeing Red America through Blue eyes.
Toobin thinks that the tea baggers and their ilk are so convinced that the economy will doom Obama that they’re willing to risk a less appealing candidate for the sake of ideological purity. Multiple polls, however, point to a different conclusion: the Reds think Gingrich is a better candidate against Obama than Romney. In other words, they’re willing to go with the unpleasant doughboy gargoyle because they think he’ll do a better job than Mittens of convincing America that their idiotic ideas are good policy.
What that points to isn’t an electorate that’s made a rational calculation about the economy sucking and the electoral implications of that. It points to an electorate caught in a feedback loop, aided no doubt by the 2010 results, that tells them that their ideas are actually far more popular than they really are. Toobin is too knowledgeable and too rational to see them doing anything but making a mistake, but that’s because he isn’t one of them. He’s trying to put an inherently irrational movement into a rational framework (“working Republican hypothesis”).
The reality is that the Reds are plunging forward at full speed with their unpopular ideas because they think those ideas will win at the ballot box. Trying to explain to them that 2010 was more about turnout than people turning against Obama is a futile exercise. They see confirmation of something they dearly need to believe, that the country at large hates Obama as much as they do, and no amount of facts, figures, and rhetoric is going to change that. When Sarah Palin asked how the “hope-y change-y stuff” was working, these are the people for whom she was speaking.
The obvious caveats here are that we still don’t have a Red nominee, the actual election is eleven months away, and a lot of things can change. But what isn’t going to change in that time is the death grip the delusion of mass popularity has on the Red ummah. Any election analysis or evaluation related to 2012 has to keep in mind that the base of the Republican Party sees Obama as illegitimate, unpopular, and weak, and their own ideas as perfectly simple, wildly acclaimed, and self evidently awesome. That is the world in which they are operating, and if you want to understand why they think nominating someone who’s against child labor laws and wants to lower taxes on the rich is a political advantage, then that’s the lens through which you have to look.
