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Anti-American

“Ironic, isn’t it, Smithers?  This anonymous clan of slack jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail.  That’s democracy for you.” – C.M. Burns

Precisely one year from today, millions of Americans will vote in the 2012 election.  Despite having voted in previous elections, many more, the exact number is unknown and the subject of much speculation, will not.  In the last few years, before and after the catastrophe in 2010, many states have passed laws that make it more difficult for Americans to vote.  I’m going to repeat that, because it is perhaps the most disgusting thing happening today.  American legislatures are passing laws that make it more difficult for people – Americans – to vote.

There’s nothing novel or un-American about keeping people from voting, of course.  This country was founded by people who wanted to be able to vote on their future, but for as long as it has existed, American voting has been restricted by those who think they are wiser than the rest.  Though such restrictions have come in many guises, they are always based on the unholy trinity: race, gender and property.  The betters of our society, whatever the fashionable guises, have never been comfortable with the rest having a real say in things.

In our time that base, neverending anti-Americanism has hidden itself behind the fig leaf of “voter fraud”.  Under that flimsy justification, a number of states have passed odious laws whose barely concealed purpose is to keep the wrong people from being full Americans.  However couched in modern language, it’s the ancient argument that some people are unworthy to have a say in how we run things in this country.  Behind it is and always has been a distrust of other Americans.

That distrust has always and will always lead us into trouble.  America is its best self when everyone is involved, when, to use the parlance of our times, everyone has skin in the game.  And while there have been several elegant denunciations of this rancid trend’s modern revival, Ta-Nehisi Coates got to it better than anyone.  Taking a run around the monument heavy part of D.C., with his life, his parents’ lives, and his son’s life swirling in his head around a ton of American history, he belted out something magnificent.  I do it injustice to quote it even at length, but here it is:

Out there, on the Mall, among the monuments, in this state, it all came at me, the recent readings of American history, my own movements through  life and congealed into the oddest thing — an intense pride in country. I spend much of this blog discussing race, and teasing at the problems of American history. I think that it would be easy to see in that a scornful, pessimistic and cynical view of the country. On the contrary, I was much more scornful and pessimistic in my nationalist days. It’s easier to attack the alleged fallacies of American democracy in the abstract. I’ve found it increasingly harder to do when measuring the country against the breadth of human history.My roots are radical and nationalist. I regularly depend on the skepticism gifted to me by the radical/nationalist tradition, still my cynicism has been dulled by my excursions into history.

I don’t know if “American Exceptionalism” means much in this age, but it did, once. In The Feminist Promise, Christine Stansell notes that in 1850, America was the last standing democracy in the Atlantic world. That claim must be qualified by the broad swath of Americans — blacks, immigrants women — who were disenfranchised. At the end of the 19th century, Stansell notes that Utah and Colorado were two of the only places in the entire world where women could vote. The hackneyed notion that “America is a beacon for democracy” is usually deployed in arrogance. But in the time of Abraham Lincoln, it was a demonstrable fact.

I think of my parents born into a socially engineered poverty, and I think of their children enjoying the fruits (social mobility) garnered by the nonviolent, democratic assault on that social engineering. And then I consider that for centuries, over the entire world, if your parents were peasants, you were a peasant, as were your children.

I think it is proper to be proud of that change. I would not argue for a pride that insists America has worked out all of its problems, and evidences that work by exporting its institutions via tank and bomber. I would argue for a studied pride, a gratitude, that understands all that was sacrificed, that we could have easily tilted the other way, that the experiment is still, even now, fragile, and remains in constant need of the lost 19th century concept of improvement.

That sentiment is what these vote suppression laws are an affront to, that is what makes them anti-American.

The High Cost of Loyalty

“You play pretty well for someone with no real problems.” – Bleeding Gums Murphy

On Tuesday, on the topic of why the Blues freely and routinely trash their core constituencies while the Reds live in perpetual fear of theirs, Glenn Greenwald asks a question to which he doesn’t have an answer:

But what I do know is that Rachel’s optimistic proclamation that “only the base itself will ever change” this dynamic cannot be fulfilled without giving the Party and its leaders a true reason to pay attention or care about disenchantment (and, some day, to fear alienating their base). For those who are hopeful that this will happen, what do they envision will cause it? What would ever make Democratic Party leaders change how they view this dynamic?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there is no answer, that it will always be thus.  This relationship, whereby the Democratic Party can crap all over its biggest supporters year after year because it knows that they have no alternative, is set in stone for as long as politics in this country is fundamentally about rich versus poor.

The reason the Red base is so much more frightening to its party establishment than the Blue one is because the Red base can, quite literally, afford to sit out an election here or there.  If the Blues win the presidency every now and then, none of them suffer economically.  They get pissed off and they don’t like it, but no one’s food supply is threatened.  Crotchety white people can sit and stew at the continued progress of the “gay agenda”, the fact that abortion remains legal, and the way black people keep ascending to the highest echelons of society, but they’re still going to have a roof over their heads while they do it.  The Blue base doesn’t have those luxuries.

The economic catastrophe of Bush the Younger and his fanatical cabal of supply side deregulators has been borne overwhelming by Blue voters, and if a similarly inclined wingnut comes out ahead in 2012, it will get even worse.  It warms the heart of college educated liberals to think of the Democratic Party establishment flinching like an abuse victim every time it sells labor or women down the river, but the great majority of Democratic voters are so close to the edge economically that sitting out an election is tantamount to suicide.

The “Fuck the Poor” ethos of Friday’s Blue capitulation is only the most recent example of this wretched situation.  The final number of billions cut from the federal budget, and its distance from each side’s relative starting point, is all but meaningless.  Mostly it serves to camouflage the fact that what’s really been agreed upon by the two parties is how much money to take away from poor people.  None of the spending cuts are on things like agricultural or fossil fuel subsidies, are they?

This is rapidly becoming known as the “hostage strategy”, and for good reason.  The Reds can act like suicide bombers because when they fail, no real harm comes to their supporters.  The Blues can’t because, whether we’re talking about extending unemployment insurance or preserving Medicare, when they fail people suffer and die.  If the Blue base ever reaches the level of social and economic security that the Red base already enjoys, that allows it to credibly threaten its party elders, the politics of this country will have become so different than they are now as to make all current models obsolete.  So, no, it’s never going to change.

Victory for Me, None for Thee

“Um, uh, what town did we just crush?” – Krusty the Klown
“Shelbyville.” – Principal Skinner
[Enthusiastic Cheers] – Everyone

In a day when a major party Senate candidate advocates a return to a barter economy and a state legislature hears serious testimony from a woman who believes the government implanted a microchip in her body, the bar has been set very high for outright denial of reality.  Sentiments like these used to be confined to the less respectable tabloids and the occasional syndicated conspiracy show.  Now they’ve gone mainstream.  But they all fall short of the lunacy of Iraq War revisionism.

Not that any was needed, or that those inclined to think things turned out alright between the rivers will listen, but further proof of this folly recently appeared in the obscure pages of The New York Review of Books in the form of a damning article about the continued marginalization of Iraq’s massive refugee population.  That refugees are rarely a part of the discussion is nothing new.  Like most of the post-invasion problems, this one was completely ignored by the geniuses who started the war.  Once the war was going, the Bush Administration actively ignored it because the mere existence of refugees clashed with their officially rosy view of the war.  And now that it’s winding down, those same people are an unpleasant reminder of how out of hand things got.

Now that the wrongs have been done, the only decent thing left is to make sure that they are not compounded. As much as the Bush Administration failed to plan for post-invasion Iraq, the Obama Administration must plan for post-withdrawal Iraq, and that includes helping the people whose homes and lives we destroyed.  It does not seem to be happening, and this does no augur well:

With US government resources stretched by the economic crisis and the war in Afghanistan, the Obama administration has provided only a fraction of the $2 billion in refugee aid promised to host governments in the Middle East. Iraq itself has been far less generous, despite sizable revenues from oil. For their part, humanitarian groups worry that when US troops begin to go home this summer, there will be even less reason to devote political capital to helping refugees. What was once a middle-class society without democracy may, for some time to come, be a democracy without a middle class. For talented Iraqis now scattered around the world, this would amount to a double betrayal: abandoned in their own country by the American and other forces that were supposed to give them a central place in a new Iraq, they now risk being abandoned again outside it.

$2 billion?  That’s it?  $2 billion is a rounding error on the War Department’s budget.  It is a number so pitifully small that there needn’t even be a debate about it.  And if Obama is serious about improving America’s image, this would be an extremely cheap way to buy a motherlode of global good will.

But there is no glory in respecting the dispossessed; there is no rah-rah in comforting those we wronged.  So we’ll abandon them to the wind, and should the subject ever come up in diplomatic conversation, we’ll throw our weight around and make it disappear.  However little attention it gets, it is still real.  Lives destroyed by us are as destroyed as those by anyone else.

Acknowledging them, it’s – literally – the least we can do.

The Potential Power of Shame

“I feel so full of . . . what’s the opposite of shame?” – Bart Simpson
“Pride?” – Marge Simpson
“No, not that far from shame.” – Bart Simpson
“Less shame?” – Homer Simpson
“Yeah.” – Bart Simpson

Bob Herbert, who really should get more on-line love than he does, had one of his typically great/depressing columns yesterday.  In it he goes another round on the crumbling nature of our physical and social infrastructure.  This time the specifics are about the horrendous state of some of our public schools.  Long story short, they’re bad and getting worse.

Herbert catalogues some rather embarrassing facts about the ancient and dilapidated nature of some of our school buildings.  It’s the kind of depressing horror story that an American eye is more accustomed to reading in relation to Third World shitholes.  Except that it’s not some equatorial, post-colonial kleptocracy, it’s the United States of America.

That we’ve allowed the physical foundations of our country to molder and decay is not exactly news.  It’s right in your face every time you see a story about sinkhole opening up or a bridge collapse, or even if you just hit a big pothole.  What’s interesting here is the angle Herbert takes, one that seems to be cropping up more and more often: shame.

Americans, traditionally, love few things more than lording how kick ass our country is over other people.  We spent most of the 20th century doing it, from sending strapping six foot tall Doughboys to fight against and alongside the malnourished poor of Europe through landing men on the moon and giving the world the internet while our former enemies eroded into oblivion.  One of our most cherished self confidences is the essential awesomeness of the U.S. of A.  And yet we store kids in asbestos laden school buildings that have been in service since their grandparents were learning the alphabet.

As fantastically wealthy as we are, our ability to afford to delude ourselves about (or simply ignore) these problems is beginning to run out.  Not that long ago, a mere three decades or so, California had a higher education system that was the envy of the world.  Now the right wing lunatics in the cockpit have put the thing into a cataclysmic dive while Stewardess Schwarzenegger tries to placate the screaming passengers with off brand cookies and filthy pillows.  The story is the same from sea to shining sea.

The objective realities Herbert’s describing are so shameful, so flat out embarrassing to any American who thinks America is a great country, that no argument should be necessary.  It’s the same tack that was once used by Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and though it’s fallen out of favor here in Nixonland America it might be time for shame to make a comeback.  It’s been away for far too long.

No School Like the Old School

“Dear Advertisers, I am disgusted with the way old people depicted on television.  We are not all vibrant fun loving sex maniacs.  Many of us are bitter, resentful individuals who remember the good old days when entertainment was bland and inoffensive.” – Abe Simpson

Anyone with cable or satellite has more election eve watching options than you can shake a stick.  Unfortunately most of them involve morons yelling at each other and until a few days before the election I wasn’t sure which pack of morons I was going to grit my teeth and suffer through.  Then, last Thursday, I was reading FiveThirtyEight.com and came across a video of Dan Rather interviewing one of the site’s two main contributors, Nate Silver.  For regular FiveThirtyEight readers the interview didn’t contain any new information, but at the end was a promo for Rather’s election night coverage on HDNet.  This sentence caught my attention, “We can’t promise you fancy touch screens or glitzy graphics, but we can promise you that we’ll let our guests finish their sentences.”  As soon as I heard that I knew which channel I would be watching on election night.  They didn’t disappoint.

Rather hosted the evening from a central chair with a rotating cast of two people on either side of him.  Some of the names were familiar to me, some of them weren’t, but all of them were political professionals with long experience working for campaigns, and not one of them was sporting the word “strategist” or “consultant” as a title.  Here’s how they were described in the HDNet press release:

Those guests include Terry Nelson, who was Political Director for Bush/Cheney 2004 and the first of John McCain’s Campaign Managers in 2008; Dahlia Lithwick, who is the Senior Editor of Slate Magazine; and George LeMieux, who served as Chief of Staff to Florida Governor Charlie Crist and who also writes “The LeMieux Report,” analyzing key business and political issues in Florida. Also joining the broadcast is Drew Westin, political psychologist and author of “The Political Brain,” who studies they way voters make decisions.

Doesn’t that look like a nice guest list?  Not a single nationally famous pundit trying to get in one more zinger, just a couple of writers with long political experience and a couple of politicos.  Even better, Rather lived up to his tag line; no one interjected to score a debate point, they didn’t all laugh uproariously at each other’s bad jokes and whenever one of them started to speak they were allowed to finish their thoughts even if it took a minute or more.  It was calm, rational and sober analysis, the antithesis of the NFL Sunday Countdown pre-game show atmosphere on the cable news channels and their network brethren.

The broadcast wasn’t flawless by any means.  Rather is now seventy-seven and his age is showing, he can’t transition from one topic to another seamlessly and he frequently misspoke in a way they he didn’t used to.  There were some minor technical problems as well; his usual program on HDNet isn’t done live and there were several times where the camera angle was wrong or an incorrect graphic would be displayed.  But these are minor trifles.

The whole thing was a wonderfully sane and relaxed acknowledgement of the reality that things don’t happen that fast on election night.  Yes, at the top of an hour a bunch of states close their polls and can be called, and yes in between those times some states can be reliably called as well.  But in the meantime there is a lot of downtime and it was a pleasant viewing experience to see non hyperactive political professionals allowed to explain what they were seeing and what they thought.  In short, Dan Rather’s HDNet election eve broadcast was television coverage done right, the most calm and informative election broadcast I can recall watching in years.  The only real downside is the unfortunate reality that it probably isn’t the start of a trend.

John McCain Enters the Octagon

“The Martin Prince you made a deal with no longer exists!” – Martin Prince

Why is John McCain running for President?  It’s a deceptively tricky question.  We know why Barack Obama is running for President, he wants to end the Iraq War and repair the damage Bush the Younger has done to the federal government.  We know why George W. Bush ran for President in 2000, he wanted spend the budget surplus on tax cuts.  We know why Bill Clinton ran for President in 1992, he wanted to get the economy going.

By contrast, we’re still not sure why Bob Dole ran for president in 1996, something about not liking Bill Clinton and it being his turn.  Substituting Bush the Younger for Bill Clinton John Kerry ran for pretty much the same reasons in 2004 as Dole did in 1996.  Al Gore ran for President because he was Bill Clinton’s Vice President but he never articulated much of a reason beyond keeping the White House Blue.

So, why is John McCain running for President?  Because he wants to keep the White House Red and he wants to keep the Iraq War going.  If there’s more to it than that he hasn’t done much of a job explaining it.  Eight years ago John McCain ran for President, he did it because he thought Bush’s tax cuts were irresponsible and he didn’t think much of Bush personally.  After Bush the Younger was in office McCain spent the next couple of years sulking, apparently very publicly.  He flirted with becoming a Democrat in 2001 and did nothing to tamp down rampant speculation that he might be John Kerry’s running mate on some kind of half assed national unity ticket in 2004.  After that election McCain sold himself down the river and began positioning himself for 2008.

Unfortunately for him 2004 was a very bad moment to begin a political realignment.  At the time there were loud whispers of a “permanent Republican majority” and George W. Bush ruled the world.  Those frightening notions have since been proved the height of foolishness but McCain’s journey was already underway.  He cozied up to the right wingers who had previously despised him.  He wrapped both arms around the War on Terror and George W. Bush.  Now, eight years after he first set his sights on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he is his party’s standard bearer.  He is their champion.  And his timing couldn’t be worse.

All of this was on display earlier this week when McCain went on The Daily Show.  The first part of the interview is McCain at his best.  Jon Stewart, like many other media titans, has made a lot of bread off McCain in the past and McCain is comfortable with the format.  They’re horsing around, joking about McCain having Secret Service protection now, quoting Chairman Mao and generally doing what talk show hosts and guests do.  As they go to commercial Stewart says, “When we come back, you and I, pleasantries over; we enter the Octagon.”

You couldn’t sum it up any better.  McCain is no longer a fun talk show host who can get away with saying unorthodox things because he’s a Senator for Life.  Now he is a candidate for the presidency and the horseplay he’s so good at gets put away.  The second segment of the interview starts with Stewart bringing up McCain’s tortured relationship with Bush the Younger and gets worse from there.  Despite Stewart giving him plenty of opportunities to get out of it, McCain sticks by his slimy assertion that Hamas wants Barack Obama to be President.   He repeats a macho-tough-guy talking point, that even he doesn’t seem to quite believe, about him being terrorists’ “worst nightmare”.  And he finishes it off with a joking reference to The Office that’s literally scripted.

The likeable McCain, the one from eight years ago who wasn’t a Republican robot, the one in whom independents and even Democrats found a lot to admire, is on display in the first segment.  But that is not the McCain who is now running for President.  That McCain is the one in the second Daily Show segment, the one who implies that Obama is a terrorist, who reads jokes he doesn’t understand off of index cards, whose only response to questions about Bush the Younger is to pretend to walk off stage.

That is the John McCain that Barack Obama is running against.  That is the John McCain who will soon find his media friends turning on him.  That is the John McCain of 2008.  It is a sad transformation, but he has a lot of company.  John McCain may be the last person ruined by George W. Bush.  Let’s hope so.

Note:  I am/have been traveling this weekend.  I thought I’d try the new delayed posting feature on WordPress.  If I haven’t screwed it up, then this post went up automatically at 6:00 am on Sunday.  If I have screwed it up, then this post went up around 11:00 pm on Sunday when I got home and saw that it hadn’t updated.
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