I could support this platform...

1. Universal, equal, and direct suffrage with secret ballot in all elections, for all citizens of the Reich over the age of twenty, without distinction of sex. Proportional representation, and, until this is introduced, legal redistribution of electoral districts after every census. Two-year legislative periods. Holding of elections on a legal holiday. Compensation for elected representatives. Suspension of every restriction on political rights, except in the case of legal incapacity.
2. Direct legislation by the people through the rights of proposal and rejection. Self-determination and self-government of the people in Reich, state, province, and municipality. Election by the people of magistrates, who are answerable and liable to them. Annual voting of taxes.
3. Education of all to bear arms. Militia in the place of the standing army. Determination by the popular assembly on questions of war and peace. Settlement of all international disputes by arbitration.
4. Abolition of all laws that place women at a disadvantage compared with men in matters of public or private law.
5. Abolition of all laws that limit or suppress the free expression of opinion and restrict or suppress the right of association and assembly. Declaration that religion is a private matter. Abolition of all expenditures from public funds for ecclesiastical and religious purposes. Ecclesiastical and religious communities are to be regarded as private associations that regulate their affairs entirely autonomously.
6. Secularization of schools. Compulsory attendance at the public Volksschule [extended elementary school]. Free education, free educational materials, and free meals in the public Volksschulen, as well as at higher educational institutions for those boys and girls considered qualified for further education by virtue of their abilities.
7. Free administration of justice and free legal assistance. Administration of the law by judges elected by the people. Appeal in criminal cases. Compensation for individuals unjustly accused, imprisoned, or sentenced. Abolition of capital punishment.
8. Free medical care, including midwifery and medicines. Free burial.
9. Graduated income and property tax for defraying all public expenditures, to the extent that they are to be paid for by taxation. Inheritance tax, graduated according to the size of the inheritance and the degree of kinship. Abolition of all indirect taxes, customs, and other economic measures that sacrifice the interests of the community to those of a privileged few.

(Yes, its the demands put forward by the German Social Democrats in their 1891 Erfurt Program. Ah, smell the progress!)

The Anti-Political Pathology of the American "Left"

I haven't linked to anything Glenn Greenwald has written in a very long time. This is partly because I have not been paying nearly as much attention to US politics since Obama's election. This is partly the recoil from paying way too much attention to everything in the lead-up to the election, and partly an attempt to inoculate myself against the mind-numbing depression caused by the daily ups and downs of the political "conversation" in the US. My dad works for a senator, and I can see the toll taken on him by the ceaseless chatter and clatter of the thousands of little Don Quixotes at work slaying the dragons of their political opponents, and by the nauseating stew of opinion and analysis served up by the news media. I sort of made up my mind that the guy I wanted to win had won, and I wasn't ready to be disheartened by attending to the daily atrocities committed by the best-guys-available-at-the-time.

But here is a link to something Glenn Greenwald has written.

His basic claim is that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party sucks at politics. They suck at politics because they are incapable of making a credible threat to vote against the tiniest incremental improvement on some issue where they would like to see major reform. Their mantra is, "Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good," but the effect is that the "better than nothing" becomes the enemy of the good. The HCR debate has guaranteed that the Obama administration will never make any major moves to placate progressives within the party because they know full well that the progressives will always back them no matter what. The progressives have destroyed any leverage they might have had with the administration because they have proven themselves unwilling to sink the health care bill, even though it lacks any of their "must have" provisions.

First of all, I think this analysis is spot on.

Second, I think it can be generalized to cover much of the dynamic that obtains between (relatively) liberal and (relatively) conservative blocs in most major political debates in North America. In short, liberals suck at politics because they aren't willing to accelerate the contradictions. The notion that things might have to get worse in order to get better, and that a responsible effort to make things better therefore has to accept making things worse as a valid strategy -- this is beyond the pale of most liberal thought.

If the anti-war "left" had decided to make life really hard for Bush, they could have. Obstructionism is obviously not an entirely lost art in US Congress, and those opponents of the war who had the misfortune of not being elected members of the legislature could have been infinitely more extremist in the expression of their opposition to the war than they were. But that would have entailed making life worse for people other than Bush as well -- soldiers, one's fellow citizens, one's family, etc. It would have meant taking on board the responsibility for causing deaths, even. Being anti-war could not be passed off on one's conscience as being anti-killing, or anti-suffering, or the like. It would mean taking a decision against a concrete policy or act, rather than against only abstract generalities. (If you've decided to oppose this war, then nothing prohibits you from making war against those who would take us into this war, but if you have "decided" to oppose War, there is very little you can do to stop any actual war, which will always be a concrete course of action, carried out by people with guns.)

This unwillingness to make things worse in order to get what you have decided upon as your goal means the progressive left will always get steamrolled by those who are willing to say "Give me what I want or I'll destroy something both of us care about."

We're All Israeli Now

...and it has nothing to do with the easy availability of good falafel.

I just watched Waltz with Bashir (an excellent movie, by the way), and was struck by the contemporaneity of the depiction of Israel's 1981 invasion of Labanon. The catch-all extension of "terrorist" was central to this feeling, I think. But I would go further and say that Israel is now, in many respects, the exemplar of the West, in the way that the US used to be, and Britain was before that. The striking difference is that previous exemplars have also been military hegemons, even if exemplarity and hegemony have not been completely synchronous. Israel remains a client state of the US militarily, but nonetheless articulates in the sharpest way the experience of being Western at the current moment. It is ideologically hegemonic without being militarily or economically so.

What I mean is that the Occupied Territories, the terrorist, the border wall, the settlements, the car bomb -- all originally Israeli phenomena -- are now archetypes of Western life in the same way that cowboys and Indians, the frontier, and the goldrush used to be. What it is to be European or American now takes its reference, to some critical extent, from what it is to live in the midst of enemies who are at once akin to you and alien, and whose mode of life and struggle confound the partitions between secular and religious, military and civilian, national and international, which confounding leads us to question the very reality of those seemingly foundational distinctions in our own societies.

One of the fairly explicit lines of thought advanced by one character in the movie is that Israel has such a hard time remembering and facing up to its role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre because the whole complex of mass murder and camps is overwhelmed by the memory of the Holocaust. According to this argument, there is among Israelis a massive psychic investment in seeing themselves as the victims of the camps, an investment that makes it impossible to see and recall their complicity with anything that resembles the camps in any way.

Regardless of whether this is a good or bad descriptive account of the Israeli psyche, it suggests to me in the context of the present that one of the reasons for Israel's new centrality to Western consciousness is the liberal repudiation of violence. To whatever extent liberalism cannot acknowledge its own complicity --not an accidental or mistaken involvement, but an essential and necessay participation -- in the violence of the past, neither can liberal Westerners see or recall the violence of the present as their own.

"Conservatives" -- bad liberals, authoritarians -- are thus so far necessary for the Western liberal psyche that if they didn't exist they would have to be invented. Conservatives do the things that liberals can then repudiate as merely accidental to Western liberalism. This sort of point is made by liberals about conservatives all the time: that no failure of conservatism is possible, since failure can always be attributed to insufficient conservatism. But this is just one more sign that "conservatives" are liberals in the broad sense; the same structure of repudiation is endemic to liberalisms left and right. Every liberal liberal says they wouldn't bomb Afghanistan, wouldn't invade Gaza, wouldn't target Hamas leadership with missile strikes, wouldn't build a wall, wouldn't hold people without due process, etc. But every liberal liberal who has the chance to do otherwise ends up doing all of these things -- perhaps with greater circumspection than would a conservative liberal, but doing them nonetheless.

To be Israeli, in this sense, means to struggle with self-recognition in this way, to hate and condemn what one does, and yet not be able to do otherwise.

On Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

I think a lot of the commentary on Obama's peace prize is well off the mark. The major theme, from the left and the right, from the major pundits and my facebook friends, is that Obama hasn't done enough to deserve this prize. After all, Obama has only been President for a few months, still presides over two wars, one of which is escalating, and, while he has made some gestures towards international diplomacy on several fronts, the critics left and right are fond of saying that he has only given a few good speeches, and hasn't actually done much.

I think this is analysis is wrong-headed for two reasons. First, the Nobel Peace Prize is as much about encouraging and supporting agents of peaceful change as it is about recognizing already accomplished deeds. Several commentators have quoted the statement of former Nobel Committee chair Francis Sejersted:

The prize [...] is not only for past achievement. [...] The committee also takes the possible positive effects of its choices into account [because] Nobel wanted the prize to have political effects. Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act.

In other words, the Nobel Committee is, by confering this award, endorsing and encouraging Obama's efforts at international diplomacy, especially in the Middle East and regardign nuclear nonproliferation. They like the direction Obama is heading, and they want him both to succeed in the endeavors he has undertaken and to take his diplomacy further. Whether or not this success and expansion of diplomacy takes place, the Nobel Committee has done the only thing they can to make it so. That is both a legitimate use of the prize and a fairly taditional one.

Ronald Krebs, the author of the Foreign Policy essay I linked to above, lumps aspirational bestowals of the prize in with bestowals upon intranational dissidents and activists in order to conclude:

When the Nobel Peace Prize rewards past accomplishments, it is to be welcomed -- not because it changes the world, but because it celebrates and reaffirms liberal ideals. But in the increasingly frequent cases in which it is bestowed for actors' aspirations and in which it seeks to promote democratic political change, winners beware.

First of all, I don't see anything especially liberal about Alfred Nobel's charge that the prize be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." Modern liberalism has never been especially opposed to standing armies (republicans and communists are the ones who worried about those), and international fraternity and peace congresses are the purview of no particular political philosophy. But whatever. The more important things to note are that 1) the award to Obama seems to fit Nobel's intention quite well (except for that abolition or reduction of standing armies thing), and 2) all of Krebs' data regarding the perverse effect of the prize pertains to the promotion of democratic political change, not to aspirational awards per se.

This brings me to the second reason the dominant take is so wrongheaded. Without a doubt Obama's biggest accomplishments to date have been speeches, especially the Cairo speech. This is what Obama does -- he talks, and he listens to others talking, and he talks in such a way that his audience knows he has listened. Far from being negligible, this is actually a very big deal. I have mentioned this before; Obama is good at politics because he is good at talking to people who are not like him. Not to go completely Arendtian, but speaking is the substance of political action. There is no divide between "giving speeches" and "doing things," and those who think there is reveal themselves to have a technocratic, antipolitical streak.

This is why diplomacy is interesting -- in a world full of nation states given over largely to technocratic administration, one of the only spaces given over to political action is the diplomatic arena. In his "Critique of Violence," Walter Benjamin indicated "the conference, considered as a technique of civil agreement," as one of the only venues for the deployment of purely discursive means of agreement, unalloyed with any violence. Although it would be a stretch to say that any conference with the executive of the US, holder of more military might than the rest of the world combined, is unalloyed with violence, it remains true that diplomacy, giving rise as it does to no law, and employing the whole range of linguistic communication, seems more political and less violent than anything else in the world right now. And if the reemergence of this power, after the last eight years in which diplomacy seemed to vanish from the face of the earth, does not merit a Nobel Peace Prize, I'm not sure what does.

Keep Your Pants On

This last week saw something of a collective tizzy fit on the liberal/progressive blogosphere over the fact that Obama seems poised to nominate a bunch of not-so-progressive insiders to his cabinet. The Rahm Emanuel pick caused a similar, if smaller, stir. reactions seem to run the gamut from horror through disappointment to "I told you so" and "What else did you expect."

I've touched on this before, but Obama's appeal has always been both that he is a game changer and a competent player. For this reason, I think it's a little early to be reading the tea leaves, whether to find signs of Obama selling out or to find signs that he's always been a Washington insider, centrist type (i.e., not a true progressive).

Does anyone remember the beginning of the Clinton administration? Clinton made all sorts of outsider-y, aesthetically pleasing staffing choices...and was promptly rewarded by Congress bucking him and the beltway media treating him like one of the rude mechanicals. Maybe Obama's always been a centrist technocrat, or maybe he's selling out for the sake of the power, but I really don't think anyone can tell from what has happened so far. Let the man actually do something, and then we'll see.

UPDATE:

To clarify a bit, I was not attempting to say that Obama's appointees (or potential appointees) should not be scrutinized and criticized for their past positions and actions. I'm as happy as anyone that John Brennan is out of the running for both CIA Director and DNI. The only thing I was trying to caution against was drawing conclusions about how Obama would govern and which policies he would pursue based solely on news reports about appointees.

UPDATE 2:

Nate Silver says what I tried to say, but more clearly, and even backs it up with a nifty chart.

There is, to say the least, a lot of jumping to conclusions about just which type of President Barack Obama is liable to be, by which I mean whether he'll govern from the left or the center. This speculation has been principally based on his cabinet appointments, a subject that people may be reading too much into. The initial Bush cabinet contained a number of people who could be described as moderate or center-right, including Colin Powell, Tommy Thompson, Norman Mineta, Christine Todd Whitman, Paul O'Neill and arguably Mitch Daniels and Ann Veneman. Obviously, this was balanced out to some degree by the Rumsfelds and the Ashcrofts, but it is not clear that Bush's 2001 cabinet was any more right-wing than Obama's 2009 cabinet is left-wing. Bush ran a very conservative government -- but the authority came from the top down.

Most of this discussion, moreover, has dwelt in the realm of tactics, presentation and salesmanship rather than grand strategy. One can "govern from the center" and implement a number of liberal policies -- by shifting the Overton Window a couple of panes at a time, and selling classically liberal policies as commonsensical and centrist.

The whole post is excellent.

The Workers' Paradise To Come

Of course we all know by now that the US is posed to elect its first Marxist president one week from today. Admittedly, the evidence for Obama's Marxism is, uh, peculiar. For example, he buys large slots of prime-time TV. You know, just like Stalin used to. Also, he and his running mate both "shrug off accusations of liberalism." Honest.

(Actually, my favorite bit of this "essay" is the inset photo of Marx, the caption of which informs us that:

German philosopher Karl Marx, author of "The Communist Manifesto," advocated redistributing wealth in order to achieve a classless society. (AP Photo)

I think it's actually the "(AP Photo)" that gets me. Like there's some AP stringer somewhere who caught Marx on camera.)

Nonetheless, there are slightly less fantastical grounds for thinking that an Obama administration would be better for workers than a McCain administration. One of which is Obama's support of card-check legislation.

Right now, if workers want to organize a union at their workplace, they have to go through two steps: 1) a card campaign, in which they get at least a majority of their fellow workers to sign cards indicating that they want a vote on whether to have a union; and 2) a secret-ballot vote, ordered by the labor relations board, which is an up-or-down vote on whether to accept union organization. Card-check legislation would do away with the second step.

Today the Wall Street Journal, that bastion of pro-worker sentiment, farmed out its editorial page to a scribe from the National Right to Work (for Peanuts) Committee, who decries the more-likely-than-ever card-check era by claiming that unions prolonged the last depression, and if we get card-check, by gum, they'll prolong this next one, too! The argument is that the Wagner Act (that great bugbear of all who want the right--the RIGHT, I say!--to work for peanuts) caused the recession of 1937. Whatever. My favorite paragraph:

Given the reality of unions in the workplace, the law meant that efficiency and profitability were compromised, by forcing employers to equally reward their most productive and least productive employees. Therefore subsequent wage increases for some workers led to widespread job losses.

Yeah, and Mussolini made the trains run on time. I like the notion that in modern large-scale industries, the employers know who their most and least productive workers are, and that weeding out the lazy ones is teh key to profitability and efficiency. The boss, he just like Santa Claus! As Edmond Burke observed a long, long time ago ("Thoughts and Details on Scarcity"):

Unquestionably, there is a good deal of difference between the value of one man’s labour and that of another from strength, dexterity, and honest application. But I am quite sure, from my best observation, that any given five men will, in their total, afford a proportion of labour equal to any other five within the periods of life I have stated; that is, that among such five men there will be one possessing all the qualifications of a good workman, one bad, and the other three middling, and approximating to the first, and the last. So that in so small a platoon as that of even five, you will find the full complement of all that five men can earn.

Anyway, it's unsurprising to find that NRO is riding the same hobby-horse today. They do it with a thought experiment: imagine that Joe the plumber is a hard-working, ill-informed, anti-union, friendless schlub; as such, he might get press-ganged into a union without even knowing it! Why, it's fasco-communist! My favorite bit:

The Union leaders are pretty sophisticated at organizing. After all, it's what they do. Pretty quickly they identify both the employees most receptive to unionization as well as those most opposed. Joe falls into the latter group so the Union never even attempts to get him to sign a card. In fact, since most of the pro-union employees work a different shift, Joe's not even aware a union drive is going on. The Union gets 51 employees to sign cards and gets certified by the NLRB as the collective bargaining representative for all employees — including Joe, who had absolutely no say in whether he wanted a union.

Obviously Peter Kirsanow (one of the B-listers, apparently) has never been in a union, or he never would have written those first two sentences. My question for Peter: Did Joe have a say in whether or not he was such an unbelievable ass?

I have no doubt that card-check will change the terrain quite a bit for unions. These changes will not all be in the direction of making unionization easier, either. Tactics on the other side will change to reflect the new regime, and I would guess there will be an increase in militancy on both sides. I for one, will welcome our new soviet overlords!

Neo-Hobbism and Conservative Paranoia

My thinking about the liberal-conservative divide in US political ideology has been immensely clarified by teaching this term. The two major factors: teaching Hobbes and Locke again, and reading Michael Zuckert's Launching Liberalism in preparation for the latter (Zuckert is a sweetheart, and a thoughtful, intelligent fellow, to boot, I happen to know). Anyway, the one-two punch really drove home how well the distinction between Hobbes and Locke maps on to the distinction between conservative and liberal (even though there are also crucial non- and even ounter-correlations).

Right now, conservatism in the US is deeply committed to Hobbes' claim that authority, not truth, makes law. In international relations, conservatism has become the assertion of US global sovereignty and the derisive dismissal of appeals to any international law that would transcend and check rather than emanating from this sovereign. In domestic affairs, conservatives are much more concerned about lawlessness among the common-folk than about lawlessness among the law-enforcers--Dirty Harry, Judge Dredd, and George W. Bush are all conservative icons because they go outside the law in order to uphold the law, stepping in for the sovereign who is so lamentably absent. This goes alll the way back to conservative opposition to Martin Luther King, Jr., whose civil disobedience looked like lawlessness to the Right precisely because King appealed to natural law. Natural law is no law at all ot the Hobbist.

I'm less interested in the liberal side of the comparison for now than in the connection between Hobbist conservatism and the raving-looney act going on on the Right at the moment. Three exemplary posts at National Review Online will suffice for now.

First up, Andy McCarthy defends himself for posting about the Pittsburgh hoax:

Sen. Obama has expressly tied community organizing to "direct action." As he stated in the chapter he contributed in 1988 to a compendium about organizing in the post-Alinsky era, “[G]rass-roots community organizing builds on indigenous leadership and direct action.” (Emphasis added.) Obama's confederates, especially at ACORN, concede (indeed, brag) that "direct action" is sometimes violent lawlessness. One of his ACORN partners and most ardent admirers, Madeleine Talbott, led an attempt to storm the Chicago City Council in 1997. Some Obama supporters, like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, have actually been terrorists who tried to kill people. All that aside, there have been various reports of harrassment against McCain supporters (just as there have also been reports of harrassment against Obama supporters).

Taking all this into account, I don't apologize for thinking it was possible that an Obama supporter could conceivably have attacked the woman who made the false report. I also don't apologize for believing that a "direct action" culture is likely to lead to violent attacks, regardless of whether this particular attack happened. I'm glad it didn't happen and I hope the woman is prosecuted for obstruction of justice. I wish I had waited a few hours longer to do a post on the allegation, for then there would have been no post. But my brain is not ruled by political correctness, and if you are saying that you instantly concluded the story could not possibly have been anything but a hoax, it's you who are kidding yourself.

The real danger to law-and-order is grassroots "direct action," which short-circuits the only possible line of transmission for law itself, from sovereign to subjects.

There is more grist for this mill in my second example, wherein Stanley Kurtz defends himself against Obama's "Fight the Smears" website, which calls him (accurately enough) a "Right-wing hatchet man and conspiracy theorist." Hitting the same nail with his head, Kurtz rails:

Obama has been mightily helped during this campaign by his calm and apparently reasonable demeanor in debate. It’s tough to believe a man this cool could be a supporter or practitioner of Saul Alinsky’s militant intimidation tactics. Yet Alinskyite "direct action" is alive and well at Obama’s "Fight the Smears" website. This site still seems committed to the proposition that I should be barred from radio, television, and media generally–or at the very least barred without direct supervision from an Obama campaign representative. The thugocracy lives at "Fight the Smears."

Same scare-quotes around "direct action," same fear that grassroots organizing amounts to an extra-legal power-grab, that Obama is one step removed from Robert Mugabe.

Final example: Mark Levin's stemwider about the "Obama temptation," being the temptation we all (except Mark and his stalwart band at NRO, that is) feel to give in to this "charismatic demagogue." In what is sure to be a classic, looked back upon for years to come, Levin claims, among other things, that:

There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. [...] Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff.

and,

Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. [...] Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created.

and,

If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good.

and, finally,

Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He's not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks "fundamental change," i.e., to remake society.

Much of this is, of course, hilariously deranged. But there is a method to the madness. Obama doesn't seem to the Right to be someone who would leave the current configuration of sovereignty intact. The bizzaro-world claims about his Marxism are simply the displacement of this sense into the most deeply seated ideological place-holders available to the conservative soul. As a real threat to the this sovereignty, Obama really does seem revolutionary through the Hobbist lenses of the right.

In an important sense, the conservatives are right. Conservatives could dismiss all the appeals to international law and multilateralism during and after the Cold War as so much misleading but generally harmless blather: everyone knew that the US was in charge of the Western sphere, and the friend/enemy distinction was crystal clear.

Now, not so much. The Bush years really have produced a crisis in American sovereignty, and the economic crisis just adds insult to injury. In this situation Obama really looks to an American Hobbist like a usurper who will topple the very authority from which law flows.

Politics is NOT war by other means

I have been struck repeatedly of late by the fact that the right-wing in the US is incapable of telling the difference between war and politics. Their attempts to drum up a controversy around Obama's connections with Bill Ayers demonstrate this. The failure of those attempts demonstrates that the populace at large is not so intent on conflating the two.

According to the right, the failure of Obama to denounce Ayers is proof that Obama is at least unprincipled, if not a terrorist-sympathizing crypto-Maoist. The same goes for Obama's willingness to hold talks with Iran. The implicit premise is that one ought to denounce and refuse to interact with anyone with whom one has fundamental disagreements. But if politics is to be something separate from warfare--and absolute warfare, even--then there must be space to talk to and work with one's "enemies." And to criticize one's friends and loved ones--and this indicates that the persistent right-wing claim that Obama "threw his grandma under the bus" in his speech about race is just the flip side of their conflation of war and politics.

It's nothing novel to say that the right-wing is obsessed with purity and bothered by complexity, so I guess I'm saying nothing novel. Still, it's interesting to see them come completely unhinged over Obama's most prominent trait: his political skill. Politics has become a dirty word on the right, a developmen that doesn't bode well for their immediate future success in electoral contests in the US.

Too Good for Us

Obama is too fit to be President.
Obama is too popular to be President.
Obama is too smart to be President.
Obama is too handsome to be President.
Obama is too good to be President.
Obama is too cool to be President.

Just shoot me.

UPDATE: Apparently, other people are on the same wavelength.

UPDATE 2: I can't possibly be expected to dissect this bit of self-parody. Turns out capitalism is our sugar-daddy, and if we don't show him some love and gratitude, he might kick us to the curb where he found us. Or something.