Welcome to the New Wedge Politics: A political calculus.

Well, it's here. (Or, rather, it's back.) White, Christianist * Terrorism (yes, terrorism, since the Right has decided to use this term when it's convenient to its purposes). Charged with plotting to kill police officers and civilians and to set in motion a new American Civil War, the aims of these armed Christianist militiamen were entirely politico-religionist and ideological: they have committed treason against the United States government and its people and engaged in seditious activities. In yearning to start the next Civil War, these militiamen stand alongside the tea-bagger rank and file.

 This is a moment in which the bogusness of the Fox News Right's sham claims to consistency, moral authority and—most deliciously ironic of all—patriotism is exposed for all to see. And I mean exposed in a way that forces the old-fashioned Republican base—the suburban, upper-middle class—to confront the chaos, ugliness and violence in which all supporters of the current Republican Party have been complicit.

The wealthier households of the American suburban bourgeoisie, who have long served as the real political base of the Republican Party—and whose defection to Obama in 2008 helped cost McCain the presidency—basically only care about two things:

1. physical security for themselves and their families at all costs, and
   
   
2. low taxes (i.e.: financial security for themselves and their families at all costs).

Whichever party can scare this still-very-powerful echelon of the American citizenry into perceiving** that either (1) or (2)—in that order—or both cannot be trusted in the hands of the other party, wins.

[***]

Consider, for example, Joe Briefcase. Joe is a medium-level Big Shot in the [whatever] business and is a case study in the mentality of this socioeconomic stratum of American society. He typically—before the Iraq War, anyway—falls for, I'd say, at least 75% of neoconservative scare-mongering lies (i.e.: 'An attack on the USA is imminent if we don't do a, b, and c to stop it...') and is also especially easily flattered by Republican laissez-faire & square charm tactics (i.e.: 'You've pulled yourself up by your bootstraps and deserve to hold onto every precious penny you've earned...')... and has voted Republican ever since he graduated from [whatever] school and entered what is known colloquially as "The Real World."

Joe Briefcase doesn't give two shits about the "restoration of American values" or the "maligned legacy of state's rights" that the brainless, fat, racist, uneducated, neo-secessionist, Fox News-watching hordes seem to care so much about. The fact is that Joe Briefcase doesn't want trouble, and trouble is exactly what he has begun to see that he will get if the Republican Party manages to regain control of the country.

Three additional factors shall flesh out my hypothesis of a new electoral alignment that I believe may be a component of the Democratic Party's (and especially Obama's) electoral strategy, which I shall call the New Wedge Politics:

• All of the "tea party" shenanigans during the health care debate managed to poison the well of public discourse to such an extent that most Americans stopped caring about the content of the health care bill a long time ago and simply grew increasingly irritated by the shrill health care bill debate. And it was the Republicans who, after all, vowed over and over and over and over and over again to obstruct the passage of the bill. Thus—irrespective of most people's inclinations as regards the content of the bill (and irrespective of the likelihood that the Obama Administration shrewdly planned to allow the Republican demagogy to meander until it reached the pinnacle of outrageousness)—Obama gets all of the credit for putting the whole miserable display out of its misery with a stroke of his pen. Meet Obama, the restorer of 'law and order' from the clutches of tea-bagger-fueled chaos and anarchy.
  
  
• The Civil War. Don't forget the Civil War. It's very much on the minds—or in the hearts—of many among the tea-bagger faithful, whether they realize it or not. From incumbent Governor Rick Perry's Texas Secession Rallies to the new revelations of Far-Right paramilitary activities to the ugly racism of so much of the redneck sloganeering, the ghost of the Civil War has returned to the national subconscious in a big way. And it just so happens that Joe Briefcase's great-great grandfather fought in the Civil War. And guess whose side Great Great Grandpa Briefcase fought for? That's right, it wasn't for the Confederacy. Joe Briefcase has always taken pride in the fact that he belongs to the Party of Abraham Lincoln. He has no sympathy for protesters of any kind. He wants the secessionist rednecks to get off his TV already. He most certainly does not recognize the current Dixiecrat Shambles as His Republican Party. This 'Party of No' is not the Republican Party as he has known it.
  
  
• The Iraq War. Don't forget the impact of that war either. The minutia of the USA's continued presence in Iraq under the Obama Administration, of course, fail to capture anyone's interest. But the people of the United States have not forgotten the Iraq War, nor its costliness in lives and dollars, nor the sleazy lies that the Bush Administration told in order to sell it. This still stands as a significant betrayal of trust between the Republican Party and its erstwhile supporters.

To close, some caveats: my analysis here is intended to be hypothetical. Furthermore, it's a hypothesis about long-term political and/or electoral strategy—not a prediction of whether or not such a strategy would work. And when I say long-term, I mean that it's not about the vicissitudes of 'cable news' cycles, which Obama has made it his habit to ignore (or at least to appear to ignore)—a way of doing things that has worked well for him in the past and which furthers the impression of his being 'above the fray' of the bullshit.

Lastly, although I dislike the Republican Party something fierce, and although I'm not as critical of Obama as many others on the Left have been (not having expected him to act as a genuinely progressive president in the midst of our current political/economic conditions and ideological alignments), I'm not saying that it is necessarily a good thing that the Democratic Party might be preserving its spot at the Center by pushing the Republican Party ever-farther to the Right. I'd have much preferred it if the health care bill had been more aggressive and radical, etc., etc. And I'd certainly have preferred to see Obama actually take a firm legal position against torturers, liars and manipulators like Dick Cheney, et al.

Anyway, there you have it. If anyone's actually read this far down, I'd love for you to prove it to me by leaving a comment. Heh.

[N.B.: I updated this post (mostly grammar and formatting edits) on the morning of 3/31/10).]

* Note the distinction here, between Christians and Christianists, Christianity and Christianism, religion and Religionism. Each of these dyads comprises:

1. first, a phenomenon that is so heterogeneous and multifarious, and rooted so deeply in our history and society as to resist evaluation in one direction or another, in and of itself, and
   
   
2. second, an extreme politics that enshrouds itself in a rhetoric that has been appropriated from the first, and then manhandled and distorted to accord with tactical or strategic ends.

I am an atheist, but I consider the notion of the 'inherent evil of religion' to be both inherently childish and itself always a cloaked political gesture, every bit as much as Religionism. I suppose I could distinguish my brand of atheism from that of Sam Harris by calling him an 'atheismist,' but I won't. You get my point. (Up.)

---

** This is a not-insignificant component of the process to bear in mind. Perception, that is. Kind of a slippery concept, I know, but sometimes we forget that we're not talking about the unmediated, abstract truth of these things, but rather, the truth of people's perceptions, which—in addition to being very difficult to determine—is frequently unconscious (that is, people don't always perceive the content of their own perceptions). That's one of the reasons why polls are frequently pure garbage. (Up.)

---

*** Notice that the trick that the Republicans have pulled off over the decades—in concert with the enormous interest group it serves, namely the military-industrial complex—is to eliminate any and all cognitive dissonance between (1) and (2), despite the fact that the 'bloated government' and 'proliferating, unaccountable government bureaucracy' that the GOP claims to so oppose are nowhere more strongly in evidence than in unfunded military spending. Remember that the Bush Administration deliberately left the deficit-spending on the Iraq War off of the books! (Up.)

Knowledge is authoritarian, even in a democracy.

No one, not even the opportunist hacks of the Texas State Board of Education, can fiat this fact away.

Previously, here at Crib From This, I argued that the so-called "Believers" sitting on the Texas State Board of Education are actually nihilists. This time, I wish to demonstrate that the Texas State Board of Education curriculum overhaul reveals the inherent limits to the habitual over-inflated conservative indictment of 'big government'.

A friend of mine, whose politics are a good deal more conservative than mine, nevertheless is in complete agreement with me that the decision recently handed down by the Texas State Board of Education is embarrassing, wrong, bad for education, bad for the study of history, and bad for the students in Texas—and potentially elsewhere—who are finding themselves shat upon by a gang of anti-intellectual, self-centered and neo-secessionist spoiled brats.

Forget the Gospel of Low Taxes. The conservatives of the Texas Board subscribe to a hyper-culturally conservative brand of Dixiecrat Republicanism that has been forcing increasing numbers of middle class Republicans to look askance at the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln that they thought they had known so well.

Interestingly, as one of those old-fashioned Libertarian-types—whose critique of federal government-overreach has to do with fairly subtle questions of commerce and jurisprudence, and not so much with a plot to take away his guns (especially because he doesn't have any guns)—my friend chalks the Texas folly up to of the the perils of centralized, majoritarian decree. In other words, he sees the disaster as issuing not so much from the fanaticism and ignorance of a gang of inbred would-be messiahs, but, rather, from the fact that Texas operates under a system in which a single school board has the power to make a mockery of an entire state's social studies curriculum with a snap of its Born-Again Christianist, Ayn Rand-praising fingers.* The old-fashioned GOP anti-'big government' critique.

I do have to give him credit for creativity. It is interesting to examine the connections between what Libertarians and old-fashioned economic conservatives of his type call 'Federalism' and what Alexis de Tocqueville described as the "tyranny of the majority." Tocqueville argued that, in order for the great American experiment of republican governance to be successful, the right of the minority to dissent must be protected at all costs:

Several particular circumstances combine to render the power of the majority in America not only preponderant, but irresistible. The moral authority of the majority is partly based upon the notion that there is more intelligence and wisdom in a number of men united than in a single individual, and that the number of the legislators is more important than their quality. The theory of equality is thus applied to the intellects of men; and human pride is thus assailed in its last retreat by a doctrine which the minority hesitate to admit, and to which they will but slowly assent. [...]

In my opinion, the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny. an individual or a party is wronged in the United States, to whom can he apply for redress? If to public opinion, public opinion constitutes the majority; if to the legislature, it represents the majority and implicitly obeys it; if to the executive power, it is appointed by the majority and serves as a passive tool in its hands. The public force consists of the majority under arms; the jury is the majority invested with the right of hearing judicial cases; and in certain states even the judges are elected by the majority. However iniquitous or absurd the measure of which you complain, you must submit to it as well as you can. [...]

I do not say that there is a frequent use of tyranny in America at the present day; but I maintain that there is no sure barrier against it, and that the causes which mitigate the government there are to be found in the circumstances and the manners of the country more than in its laws. (Democracy In America, Book I, Chapter 15)

And, come to think of it, has it not been along this general line of thinking that the premise of "state's rights" has been defended?—from John Calhoun's championing of "nullification," to the South's moral justifications for Secession, to present-day slogans about the "tyranny of big government" among the Republican rank-and-file?

It would seem that the actions of the Texas Board would support this sort of critique of centralized authority, albeit viewing Texas as a microcosm of the federal government. In a way, it does. However, in another sense, it serves to undermine this very critique—or at least it points to spheres of human activity to which this critique cannot be said to apply.

The problem, as I have found myself saying recently, is that knowledge is not democratically constituted. Knowledge is, in a sense (and shall ever be), authoritarian. And, whatever it is that the Texas School Board might want the world to be, there's simply not much that can be done about that.

We cannot approach knowledge itself, for example, in the same way in which we approach law. For example, even Justice Antonin Scalia knows that you can't be a "strict interpretationist" of history. (It's ephemeral enough as a legal philosophy...)

This is not to suggest that knowledge can be linked definitively, directly or uncritically to specific human beings or organizations, or even to any specific source. The academic disciplines, for instance, are not and don't pretend to be that kind of authority. Quite to the contrary, disciplines are themselves sites of contestation and debate.

When 'experts'—whether they work for an academic institution or for the WMD Committee of the Project For A New American Century—misrepresent themselves, or misrepresent the knowledge in their field, or provide insincere, incomplete or tendentious interpretations of this knowledge, they are—to precisely the extent to which they engage in this behavior—not experts, but merely posing as experts.

In effect, in having pushed the politicization of the curriculum this far, the majority of Texas Board of Education members have exposed themselves not as pie-in-the-sky Fundamentalist Christian-idealists, nor even as Fundamentalist Christian-ideologues. They are simply hacks—up to their earlobes in the toilsome wretchedness of aimless resentment.

We bemused onlookers witness the superficiality of their understanding not only of history but of the political or ideological battles in which they believe themselves to be mired (to say nothing of the empty opportunism of their feigned interest n these subjects). They have taken caricatures of their 'opposition' with total earnestness. Moreover—and even more embarrassing than their threadbare understanding of history—is the sheer self-centeredness and self-entitlement with which they have seen fit to (mis-)interpret any and all 'inconvenient' political and educational tendencies that differ from their own.

Consider the following metaphor. In war, all factions of your opposition are united in at least one significant respect: they are all out to kill you and your fellow soldiers. For purposes of political propaganda and mobilization—the domain in which GOP-hireling Svengalis like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove so excelled—this war-style-worldview can yield some limited successes by fostering solidarity among differing factions within an alliance: the 'enemy' represents a hybrid of characteristics. It's a lowest-common-denominator enemy.

The effectiveness of this approach no longer holds, however, when you are making education policy, nor policy in any domain that deals with disciplines of knowledge and expertise. In this context, undertaking to right all the wrongs of your caricature/hybrid foe leads to disastrous consequences.

Foremost among them is that this foe does not exist.

In my next post, I shall conclude my discussion of the Texas State Board of Education's curriculum guidelines by taking up the questions: (i) Why should we even consider the board's bizarre actions to be "conservative"?, and (ii) When we tacitly accept the self-categorizations of these confused, theocratic would-be secessionists, aren't we letting them frame the debate?



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* The utter incompatibility of the pimple-faced-high-schooler's-simpleminded-version-of-Nietzsche pseudo-philosophy of Ayn Rand (who had zero use for god, religion and the like and said so frequently) with the tenets of Fundamentalist Christianity is an example of a phenomenon to which this post turns shortly: the caricatured/hybridized opponents that so often become invented in the course of forging such unlikely political alliances as the GOP cobbled together in the '80s, '90s and '00s. That is, before the GOP emerged, with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, as the party of Southern Secession. Ye Olde Abe Lincoln is a-spinnin'-in-his grave. Probably Ye Olde John Brown is, too. (Return to the main text.)

Why the so-called "Believers" on the Texas State Board of Education are actually Nihilists.

The neo-secessionist, racist and neo-McCarthyist antics of Texans have become so commonplace, that it's hard to muster up the energy to be outraged by anything them folk down there get up to. Nevertheless, I wish to argue that the recent actions of the Texas Board of Education, radically revising the state's prescribed curriculum for history and social studies textbooks, is a turn of events that we should find especially shocking.

Why is it such a big deal? First of all, there is the matter of the scale of the the decision's impact. Few of us know anything at all about the political economy of textbooks, and we are thus oblivious to the textbook publishing industry's vertical consolidation, which has ascended to heights that would have Gilded Age industrialists calling on the White House to 'Bust the damn trusts!', its systematic price-gouging of captive consumers, and its many other anti-competitive and crony-capitalistic practices.

The impact of the Board's action upon public school systems extends beyond the boarders of Texas itself, already containing a huge population, and into several other states. The reason for this is that Texas's particular system of centralized textbook-standardization (which in itself is more than a little reminiscent of Bolshevism) means that the state exercises tremendous influence over textbook content in many other states. The reason for this is that it's expedient economically for the textbook publishing oligopoly simply to produce a single, one-size-fits-all textbook for distribution to many states, as opposed to creating specific editions for specific localities. The only way in which publishers can accomplish this is by producing a single textbook that is written such that it happens to fulfill the guidelines of the Texas Board of Education. The state of California has a similar set-up and therefore exercises similar control.

So, that addresses the scale of the impact of this decision. Now, onto substantive reasons we should be shocked and outraged: for one, the shamelessness and hypocrisy of the alliance of Born-Again Christians, libertarians and "state's rights" types that assumed majority control of the Board. These right-wing ideologues got themselves elected to the Board with the explicit intention of appropriating the school history textbook as the terrain upon which they would declare 'cultural warfare'. The entire project was undertaken in nakedly ideological terms, and in a way that does not even pretend to comprehend the study of history and other social sciences. In fact, as Thomas Frank mentions in his excellent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, the members of the Board are openly resentful of historical expertise itself. (And any kind of expertise, for that matter!) As Frank points out, whatever the real or perceived 'ideological excesses' of past academic historians and textbook authors, nobody could reasonably doubt that those people were undertaking sincerely to produce curricula that did the best possible job of teaching social studies to public school students.

The Far-Right alliance's putative 'revision' has no rationale that has anything at all to do with history, education or students. The 'revision' reflects no coherent understanding of how textbooks work, how historical representations relate to historical facts. It takes textbooks to be nothing more than ideologically grounded statements and interpretations, strung together in a chronological sequence. Of course, its notions of what constitutes 'chronology' is skewed, in that its ideological preoccupations are entirely presentist, which is to say that even its political readings of what various narrative interpretations "mean" are based entirely in the politics of the present day, as opposed to the political frameworks as they were known and understood by historical agents at specific times.

It's funny that some of these Culture Warriors style themselves as "Believers", because their actions bespeak a worldview that is fundamentally nihilistic. The simple equation of curriculum with site of ideological struggle could not be less concerned with educating students -- the function that schools are supposed to perform. For members of the Board to act in the interest of carrying out their ideological struggle alone, means that the are literally not performing their prescribed duty in good faith: they are not fulfilling the only responsibilities that membership on the Board entails. Moreover, they can hardly be said to be acting in accord with their own ideological convictions, because their actions and rationale are motivated by a lack of belief, a lack of faith in public education.

How can you honestly claim to be acting honestly and in accord with your faith and convictions if you are sitting on a board overseeing an institution that you either

1. don't believe is equipped to serve its mission of educating children, but rather, is merely a platform for ideological struggle? or
   
   
2. -- as some members of the Board explicitly state -- wish to destroy the institution of public education?

Is this really a way of behaving that evinces faith in your beliefs and convictions? If you want to get rid of public education, is sitting on the Board of Education really the place in which to carry out this political mission with the honor and dignity that befits your cause and your supposed faith? Can you literally act in bad faith as a way of demonstrating your faith??

In response to the frequent, self-righteous accusations that the Fundamentalist Religionists are in the habit of flinging at we so-called "secularists," I ask:

Who the hyper-relativists now? Who are the nihilists now?

As our accidental poet used to say, make no mistake: the nihilists are on the Right.

To my #1 favorite political Web site: thanks for the (unrequited) love!

The time has come for me to address the small matter of the unheralded hiatus of Crib From This from its former pattern of experiencing updates on a somewhat frequent basis. Which specifically was...uh... at-least-bi-weekly (and five times a day during the months leading up to the presidential election!).

I shall shortly unleash upon an unsuspecting world a statement, of sorts, expounding the new and -- I hope -- more narrowly focused mission (intellectually, rhetorically, aesthetically, whateverly) to be pursued in the future incarnation of this blog.

And speaking of how out of touch I have been with this blogging crap, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my all-time, number-one (#1) favorite political Web site and blog PhuckPolitics.com -- formerly the one significant connection between this blog and the outside (cyber-) world -- for dropping Crib From This -- without ceremony and without fanfare -- from its list of links to featured blogs.

Were I in PhP's position, I would surely have done the same thing, probably....***adopts 'wounded-dog' facial expression***...

Let's face it. Given the rocky road that the present blog has traversed -- its fickle, fluctuating and comment-averse readership; its restiveness as regards politics and the sordidness of saying things within political frameworks; its contempt for the concept of typing one's opinions on the Internet generally; its frequently overlong sentences, paragraphs and articles; its pretentious, plodding and sententious syntax, betraying all of the vanity and narrowness of a petit bourgeois sensibility; its tendency to discuss contemporary political questions using the metaphors and wisdom lifted carelessly and out of context from whatever book the blogger happens to be reading at the time, like William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or The Thrill of It All: The Story of Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music or some half-comprehended essay by Friedrich Schiller -- it's a minor miracle that Crib From This survived as long as it did in its coveted position in PhuckPolitics.com's Hall of Credibility.

So, anyway, umm. In sum, this blog has been silent for a few months principally because I have been:

1. re-conceptualizing this blog's mission, to be explained in the aforementioned soon-to-be posted ...uh..post,
   
2. helping a friend with the writing, editing and designing of his interesting new Web site,
   
3. doing lots of stuff unrelated to blogging.

Crib From This will be back soon. And how, might you ask? With a vengeance, Good Sir.

(And -- we can only dream tearfully as of yet -- with enough élan to merit the blog's eventual re-inclusion -- parable-of-the-Prodigal-Son-like -- in the PhuckPolitics.com universe.)

Stay tuned, Gentlemen and Ladies, for the new Crib From This mission statement.

The Baffler is Back!

Being as completely distracted and off the ball as I have been lately as regards politics & journalism & news & culture & whatever, it has only just now come to my attention through a couple of different sources that The Baffler is back!!!

If you've never heard of this kick-ass, unpretentious political/cultural journal thingie and want to know why its revival is a really great thing, read here and especially here. In The Baffler's glory days, during the Clinton era, its editor Thomas Frank and his coterie of South Side Chicago smart-asses provided a sustained critique of a Democratic Party that had transformed itself into a fanatically pro-laissez faire force, a party that turned its back on economic populism, but nevertheless continued -- pathetically -- to compensate for completely selling out its base by signaling its supposed 'leftism' by adopting ludicrously 'tough' postures, which naturally fed right into  the hysterical"Culture Wars"-style paranoia propagated by the A.M. radio demagogues and Think-Tank-Neo-McCarthyists of the Far Right. Furthermore, Frank and Company poked fun at the appropriation by multi-national marketeers of 'oppositional' pop culture tropes and 'attitudes', from the Nirvana-like guitar-crunch sounded by ads selling luxury cars, to Burger King's strategy of hawking burgers and fries with the apothegm: "Sometimes You've Gotta Break the Rules."

The list of contributors to the first issue of The Baffler's "Volume 2" appears to be a bit heavy on academicians. It was not uncommon for the 90s version of the journal to include the occasional professor or Ivory Tower-type -- after all, Frank himself earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago. But in those days, the the lion's share of spineless bimbos putatively positioned on the 'Left', inside and outside of academe, were united -- for either ideological or pragmatic reasons -- in their support for the new and improved neoliberal, "Third Way"-style Democratic Party. Some of the most forceful opposition to Frank's brand of left-populism -- and especially the way in which Frank framed the "Culture Wars" issue -- issued from politically engaged academic-types who really should have known better. Among them, and someone who in most respects I quite like, is the literature and cultural-studies professor Michael Bérubé.

But anyway, I gather that The Baffler has returned in part because the arguments to which it has given voice regarding market fundamentalism -- and the political toxicity of the Democratic Party's continuing institutional (read: $) and ideological allegiance with it -- are now impossible for an intellectually honest person to ignore. The impotence of the Democratic Party, despite enjoying an unprecedented congressional majority, the incoherence of the party's ideological stance as regards big business interests, health care, social justice, and any number of issues, and the Obama Administration's inability and unwillingness to pursue real reforms against an appallingly oligarchic financial sector are the inevitable consequences of thirty-or-more years of cynical market fundamentalism. A fundamentalism against which there is no bulwark in this country -- no checks, no balances. Pretty grim. But at least somebody's pointing it out now.

See also Thomas Frank's great new piece in The Wall Street Journal about the Right-wing Christian Fundamentalists who have hijacked -- with SERIOUSLY SHOCKING results (NY Times) -- the content of the social studies textbooks to be manufactured and distributed throughout Texas and probably throughout many other states.

Succinct, thorough explanation of economic crisis & why Obama can't & won't reform the system.

If you want a succinct explanation of why the economy went south and why Obama's hands are tied to do anything about the outrageous unemployment levels in this country, I encourage you to watch this interview with Yves Smith, who is the brilliant, no-bullshit brains behind the blog Naked Capitalism.

The interview, which appeared on the Canada-based Business News Network, and which begins at about the 5:00 minute mark of the linked segment, also provides insight into the facilitating role performed by mainstream economists since as early as 1980, in inventing, espousing and legitimating the phony, casuistic, and rhetorically scientistic rationale for pursuing economic policies that precipitated the crisis.

She furthermore comes right out and says it: the Obama Administration can't and won't reform our broken financial system because it is beholden to Wall Street. According to Ms. Smith, Obama received more campaign funding from the financial services industry than any previous presidential candidate (adjusted for inflation, etc., presumably).

Obama's financial advisers are, as we all know, the same dudes who escalated the crisis in the first place. They also were among the 'experts' to give the guilty policies their gloss of scientism. But it doesn't really matter who they are, because no 'expert' -- no matter how glossy his gloss, no matter how dizzyingly rational-seeming and science-evoking his numbers and graphs -- can match the heft and gravitas of the thunderous basso profundo of the Almighty American Dollar.

Ms. Smith has written a book that looks interesting -- I mean, considering that it's economics and everything -- called, Econned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Damaged Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism. She's smart, and we like her here at Crib From This.

Politics = boring.

That is, when it's not being depressing [PhuckPolitics.com].

Oh, and this picture of the Boredoms is in honor of politics being boring.

They (the Boredoms) are not boring, though; they're great (or at least they were last time I checked, which was not recently). Here's their myspace page.

Racist Tea Bagger issues domestic terrorist threat.

Terrorism is unacceptable, whatever the color of the terrorist's skin.

It's an important point for those of us who oppose violent extremism to make. Stand up for education, freedom of expression, civil liberties and civil discourse and denounce violence, chauvinism, willful ignorance and hate.

Happy New Year's. Or: in the words of the late John Lennon, "Just give me some truth."

We live in a time marked by corruption, double-speak, injustice, violence, superstition and the creeping specter of right-wing totalitarianism. None of this is anything that the human race hasn't faced or endured before. Still, several generations of middle- and working-class people in the United States have enjoyed comfortable existences. We have relied upon -- and participated wittingly or not in the production and reification of -- febrile illusions and convenient myths that blocked from our view various of the certitudes of human history, including: inequality, oppression, exploitation, and financial and militaristic power-jockeying.

But just because we've awoken to find the world around us -- internationally and domestically -- in tatters doesn't mean we have to stop enjoying life. Quite the opposite.

I see the project of political self-education as continuous with the project of being a human being. It's not easy, sometimes, to be a human being, and the very notion that it has ever been easy is a seductive (perhaps irresistibly so) fiction. Whatever our political orientations -- left or right -- each of us has an idealized notion of human life that necessarily draws its raw materials from the past. That this idealized picture never actually existed as such often gets lost somewhere in the course of our endless discussions about the meaning of life, liberty and property as the Founding Fathers meant it. We want to believe that their interpretations of these things were more-or-less like the ones we espouse today.

An obvious example of this phenomenon is Thomas Jefferson. Both the left and the right in this country are fond of claiming him as their own. After all, he was among the most eloquent architects of the United States as an Enlightenment project, poised precariously (if that's possible...) between the polarities of violent revolution and orderly, reasoned deliberation. To the far right, Jefferson was and remains the prophet of the Confederacy -- the defender of States' Rights and of Southern self-determination (read: slavery). To the far left, Jefferson is our founding Civil Libertarian, opponent of slavery (in theory...) and the instrumental force in banishing governmental intervention into our personal, intellectual, moral and religious lives.

The truth, of course, is that Jefferson -- especially taken over the course of his lifetime -- was a walking contradiction. For all of his brilliance, wisdom and passion, he was often inconsistent, self-contradictory, stubborn, tone deaf and even dumb.

I think I lost track of where I was going with all of this... Oh well. I guess I really just wanted to say that these ambiguities and contradictions are part of what make us human beings, and the better we become at understanding this about ourselves and one another, the more adept we will be at being and living amongst human beings. We live in a deeply conservative age in which power is horded by a very small number of people whose conceptions of political and economic justice, reason and freedom center upon one thing: the necessity of maintaining the status quo. In one sense, it has never been an easier time to articulate a critique of the status quo. The injustices perpetrated by crony-capitalist oligarchies -- and the degree to which our elected representatives are in the employ of these oligarchies -- has never been clearer for all to see. It's as though all one needs to do is point one's finger, like identifying a leak in one's bathroom plumbing.

Of course, the trouble is that pointing this out doesn't seem to accomplish all that much. Describing the problems fails to alert our fellow democratic citizens to the necessity of taking political action in order to redress these injustices. But we should take this not as a defeat but as a challenge. We're simply not articulating ourselves clearly enough. Or we're not talking to the right people. Or we're being arrogant, lazy and self-righteous (guilty as charged...). I guess what I'm trying to suggest here is not just that the pen is mightier than the sword, but also that the truth is more durable, valuable, penetrating and infectious than lies.

Sure, the far right (both the radical-laissez faire right and its cousin, the let's bomb everything all the time right) has got legions of oil-company-funded "think tanks" to come up with strategies and propaganda for various right-wing pet-projects, like wars, the privatization of public infrastructure and lowering taxes. They've got the guns, the money and the numbers.

The only thing that stands so much as a chance against so menacing a phalanx is the truth.

Eugene Robinson's case for passing the Senate bill.

An excerpt from yesterday's Rachel Maddow Show (a show I've seldom seen since I don't have cable [and I probably wouldn't watch these kinds of shows much if I did] but I must say that last night's episode was good television), in which The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson argues that passing this massively flawed bill is better than not passing anything. I agree with nearly every aspect of his analysis:

Glenn Greenwald: Don't kid yourself; this is the bill Obama wanted all along.

Although I have stated that, lousy as it is, I would prefer that the Senate bill pass -- and although I this is still my position -- I must confess that I have begun to feel increasingly icky about what the bill has lately become. So it goes.

It's an awfully difficult time not to be extremely frustrated by the seeming impotence of the Democratic Party as well as disappointed with Obama. I, for one, never lost sight of the fact that the president is a centrist and a pragmatist and that his attachment to various financial and corporate paymasters is inextricable. It's just that, somehow, I must not have remembered just how far right the putative "center" has become in our corporatist nation state. It's not pretty.

But, more than that, I think I had the feeling that Obama would be able to pull off his role -- precarious and self-contradictory though it may be by definition -- with a bit more...I don't know...panache? I mean, in moments at which he looks like a cynical, calculating servant of corporate interests, he really looks like a cynical, calculating servant of corporate interests. I'm led to wonder why that is. I think it's because of the kinds of posturing that Obama has to do in order to throw bones to the 'progressive' left wing base, while simultaneously keeping the insurance and pharmacological industries happy.

And, as regards this very posturing in application to the matter of a "public option," it looks as if Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald has got Obama's number:

[C]ontrary to Obama's occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it.  From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House -- hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama's campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN).  Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn't pass it.  The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party -- rather than the GOP -- will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse. As was painfully predictable all along, the final bill will not have any form of public option, nor will it include the wildly popular expansion of Medicare coverage.  Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this -- the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional "centrists."  Right.  The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives.  The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start -- the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry.

Greenwald praises Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold for pointing this out:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

"This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth," said Feingold. "I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect."

Seems convincing to me, and if it's true, it isn't all that surprising. But it's still dismaying to see how hamfistedly the Obama administration seems to be in dealing with this stuff. What a mess.....

As matters stand, I still think the bill in its present decimated form is better than no bill and here's why: In almost all of the complaints from the so-called 'progressive' left about this bill, I have not heard a single serious reference to the impact of this law upon poor people. Where are the anti-poverty advocates, and why shouldn't a serious discussion of the problems with his bill include a discussion of poverty? Almost all of the criticism has to do with middle-class concerns and middle-class problems.

Doesn't this bill still help people who can't currently afford ANY health insurance, and shouldn't that be the main priority? Please, if anyone knows more about this angle, fill me in. Nobody seems to be talking about it.

Hyperlinks to items of interest.

• Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's "stonewalls and prevarications."
  
  
• Down With Tyranny's Ken ponders signs that prominent members of the House of Representatives -- including "corporate stooge" Steny Hoyer -- might be contemplating reversing the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (1933).
  
  
• Naked Capitalism's pseudonymous guest contributor George Washington on why the effort to "audit the Fed" (supported by 79% of the American population) is justified and why the Fed's protestations that this would constitute interference with its "independence" are "false."
  
  
• FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver on "Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate [Health Care] Bill."
  
  
• PhuckPolitics.com on why he opposes the Senate health care bill and why Joe Lieberman might be "doing the right thing for the wrong reasons."
  
  
• Thomas Frank in a very intelligent piece addressing why "Newsrooms Don't Need More Conservatives" and also laying out a general argument against treating "ideological diversity" as though it were the same as racial or socioeconomic diversity.
  

Big man, pig man / Ha ha, charade you are!

It's here, at long last. The Crib From This Photoshop Moment (although I didn't literally use Photoshop). I felt the need to present my critique of the US Chamber of Commerce in a manner that captures the rhetorical nuances and socio-critico-theoretical apparatus that are within my meager capabilities to bring to bear:

With grateful acknowledgments (...and apologies?) to George Orwell and Roger Waters.

Okay, this means war. Public Enemy #1: the elitist plutocrats of the US Chamber of Commerce.

At least the Dems -- in contrast to the members of the GOP -- in Congress aren't readily and openly whoring themselves out to the US Chamber of Commerce.

From AP News, by way of Yahoo! News:

WASHINGTON – A bipartisan coalition in the House voted late Thursday to make it easier for corporations to engage in complex derivatives trades without government restrictions, eroding the reach of proposed regulations to govern Wall Street.

Democratic attempts to toughen the legislation failed.

Though not major setbacks, the votes illustrated the difficulties facing House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank and the Obama administration as they seek to pass legislation aimed at preventing a recurrence of last year's Wall Street crisis.

Key votes loomed ahead, with a final vote on the sweeping legislation scheduled Friday.

Democrats hoped to fend off an amendment Friday that would eliminate the creation of an independent Consumer Finance Protection Agency. The agency is a central element of the Democrats' legislation and the Obama administration's proposed regulatory changes.

The amendment was offered by Rep. Walt Minnick, a conservative Democrat from Idaho, and seven other centrist Democrats. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been running national television ads against the creation of a consumer agency, said it would base its support for lawmakers in next year's elections, in part, on how they voted on the amendment.

"I think we're going to beat the Minnick amendment, but it's a real test," Frank, D-Mass., said Thursday. Creating a consumer agency is a top priority for consumer groups and for labor organizations such as the AFL-CIO.

Democratic leaders also were pushing changes that would add further restrictions on banks and financial institutions. One, vigorously opposed by banks, would let bankruptcy judges rewrite mortgages to lower homeowners' monthly payments.

A coalition of banking organizations on Thursday sent lawmakers a letter urging them to vote against the amendment. The House previously passed bankruptcy-mortgage legislation, but it failed in the Senate.

The legislation imposes new regulations on derivatives, aiming to prevent manipulation in and bring transparency to a $600 trillion global market. But an amendment by New York Democrat Scott Murphy, adopted 304-124 Thursday night, exempted businesses that trade in derivatives, not as financial speculators, but to hedge against market fluctuations such as currency rates or gasoline prices. The amendment also provided an exception for businesses that are not considered too big to be a risk to the financial system.

A Democratic effort to make more companies subject to derivatives regulation failed 279-150.

The Chamber of Commerce circulated a letter Thursday urging lawmakers to vote for the Murphy amendment and against the broader regulation. [...]

If ever there was an entity that is contemptuous of the basic, day-to-day existence of the ordinary, middle class American citizen and family in 2009 (and there was/is!), it is the US Chamber of Commerce. It is a truly despicable assemblage of liars and crooks, an organization of cigar-chomping Mr. Spacely-type Captains of Oligarchy.

Of course the US Chamber of Commerce is against the regulation and oversight! I mean, weren't excessive market regulation/oversight and rampant consumer protections the things that plunged us into this economic crisis in the first place?? Oh, wait.....

Anyway, what do you expect from an organization that opposes the prosecution of private contractors in Iraq who gang-raped American and Iraqi women?.

The history books of the future shall surely look back on this moment as the finest hour of laissez faire capitalism and its apologists.....

House 'Audit the Fed' bill persists, teeth intact.

From Politico:

The House Financial Services Committee has approved Rep. Ron Paul’s measure to drastically expand the government’s power to audit the Federal Reserve.

The measure, based on a Paul proposal that has attracted more than 300 co-sponsors, passed, 43-26, as an amendment to a financial reform bill. Florida Democrat and fellow Fed critic Alan Grayson co-sponsored the amendment with Paul and played a leading role drumming up support for it among committee members. The adoption of this amendment is an extraordinary victory for Paul, whose libertarian, anti-Fed leanings have often been dismissed by the political establishment.

[...]

The House Financial Services Committee will vote on approving the underlying bill after Thanksgiving recess.

This is precisely the kind of thing I'm talking about when I call for a tactical alliance of left and right in the interest of advancing populist measures.

True, I oppose the extreme laissez faire economic philosophy of Paul and the libertarian tendency. He favors a system with severe restrictions upon the regulation and oversight of markets. By contrast, I favor a social democratic model that protects ordinary people against the inescapable perils of market activity.

But so what? The fact is that left- and right-populism share the interest of instituting democratic checks against powerful, and currently insular and unaccountable, monetary policy-making agencies. As the poet said: in politics, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and it has always been this way. I don't have to want to play cribbage with someone in order to share some or many of his political interests.

Washington Times: Obama, "Sired by Kenyon father," lacks "blood impulse" for what America "is about."

The Washington Times has never been a serious newspaper. It was conceived as little more than a mouthpiece for the extreme right-wing ideology favored by its founder and owner, the singular Rev. Sun Myung Moon. The Korean jet-setting businessman/evangelical-cult cleric Moon helms the Unification Church -- you know: the Moonies.

Still, despite its track record, I somehow wasn't quite prepared for overt and deep-seated racism on display in a Times editorial contributed yesterday by editor-in-chief emeritus Wesley Pruden (brought to my attention through Media Matters). Old Man Pruden begins by ranting hysterically -- you might say that he waxes impenetrable -- about Obama's current diplomatic visit to Asia. But just wait until you get to the final paragraph (if you can make it that far without becoming nauseous):

So far it's a memorable trip. He established a new precedent for how American presidents should pay obeisance to kings, emperors, monarchs, sovereigns and assorted other authentic man-made masters of the universe. He stopped just this side of the full grovel to the emperor of Japan, risking a painful genuflection if his forehead had hit the floor with a nasty bump, which it almost did. No president before him so abused custom, traditions, protocol (and the country he represents). Several Internet sites published a rogue's gallery showing how other national leaders - the prime ministers of Israel, India, Slovenia, South Korea, Russia and Dick Cheney among them - have greeted Emperor Akihito with a friendly handshake and an ever-so-slight but respectful nod (and sometimes not even that).

Now we know why Mr. Obama stunned everyone with an earlier similar bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, only the bow to the Japanese emperor was far more flamboyant, a sign of a really deep sense of inferiority. He was only practicing his bow in Riyadh. Sometimes rituals are learned with difficulty. It took Bill Clinton months to learn how to return a military salute worthy of a commander in chief; like any draft dodger, he kept poking a thumb in his eye until he finally got it. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, seems right at home now giving a wow of a bow. This is not the way an American president impresses evildoers that he's strong, tough and decisive, that America is not to be trifled with.

[...]

But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy '60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to "hope" for "change." It's no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of "the 57 states" is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.  [Emphasis added.]

What's truly disgusting about this Old Coot is that not only is he a racist, but there's something distinctly old-timey about his racism. Pruden is a species of racist from whom we haven't heard all of that much in this country since the days when a succession of United States Presidents had weird facial hair and wives were considered property and black people had only recently attained legal status of human beings and were frequently tarred and feathered. And shit: what fate do you suppose befell white women who were "attracted to men [of color]" in the Jim Crow South?

It would appear that I have just described the world to which the Cretinous Bigot Pruden pines for his everlasting return.* More accurately, it's the wold in which Pruden lives.**

***ADDENDUM***
A couple of things. First, sample other people's outrage over Pruden's editorial (it's never good to be outraged alone!) at the blog The Atlantic Wire, on the Web site of the Atlantic Monthly.

Second, having conducted some light spade-work, it appears that the editor-in-chief emeritus of The Washington Times and Arkansas native has been a longtime activist for neo-Confederate causes. Frankly, I'm somewhat stumped as to what those causes could be. But in the meantime, behold the following picture of Pruden saluting the Confederate Flag:

UPDATE: It's him all right. Will the South rise again? Not on Pruden's watch. Under his stewardship, the South probably can't even get a date.

(Although multiple credible-seeming sources cite it as such, I am still not 100% certain of the picture's legitimacy. I will remove it if I'm convinced that it's phony. Mind you, I'm not even saying I have cause to call its legitimacy into question. I'm just being careful 'cause I try always to be fair and accurate, even when it comes to bigoted dickheads...)

_________________________
* That's right. I said Cretinous Bigot.

** Oh, and Hawaii is a state, dick. Once upon a time, people like you spewed the same hot air about...uh...California.

Obama's memorial address at Fort Hood (& a brief excursus on how cable news isn't news).

Since I don't have cable and wouldn't watch cable news even if I could, I'm not familiar with exactly what idiotic statements from the Washington DC political mercenaries led Time magazine's David von Drehle to decry the idiotic framing and commentary with which "television culture" obscured the immediacy and impact of Obama's Fort Hood address.

While I'm certain that von Drehle is telling the truth, maybe it's time someone suggested to him just not watching cable news. It isn't -- after all -- news, is it?

I'm not bragging, by the way, about the fact that I don't watch cable news. I'm just saying: Cable news is a perfectly valid form of entertainment, of distraction from the headaches of quotidian reality, and I just happen to prefer other forms of distraction. Like playing my antique zithers and fucking.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, Obama's address was a truly exceptional and praiseworthy bit of speechifying. And it appears that lots of others -- like Slate's John Dickerson -- agree with me:

[...]

These men and women came from all parts of the country. Some had long careers in the military. Some had signed up to serve in the shadow of 9/11. Some had known intense combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some cared for those did. Their lives speak to the strength, the dignity and the decency of those who serve, and that is how they will be remembered.

That same spirit is embodied in the community here at Fort Hood, and in the many wounded who are still recovering. In those terrible minutes during the attack, soldiers made makeshift tourniquets out of their clothes. They braved gunfire to reach the wounded, and ferried them to safety in the backs of cars and a pick-up truck.

One young soldier, Amber Bahr, was so intent on helping others that she did not realize for some time that she, herself, had been shot in the back. Two police officers - Mark Todd and Kim Munley - saved countless lives by risking their own. One medic - Francisco de la Serna - treated both Officer Munley and the gunman who shot her.

It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know - no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice - in this world, and the next.

These are trying times for our country. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same extremists who killed nearly 3,000 Americans continue to endanger America, our allies, and innocent Afghans and Pakistanis. In Iraq, we are working to bring a war to a successful end, as there are still those who would deny the Iraqi people the future that Americans and Iraqis have sacrificed so much for.

As we face these challenges, the stories of those at Fort Hood reaffirm the core values that we are fighting for, and the strength that we must draw upon. Theirs are tales of American men and women answering an extraordinary call - the call to serve their comrades, their communities, and their country. In an age of selfishness, they embody responsibility. In an era of division, they call upon us to come together. In a time of cynicism, they remind us of who we are as Americans.

We are a nation that endures because of the courage of those who defend it. We saw that valor in those who braved bullets here at Fort Hood, just as surely as we see it in those who signed up knowing that they would serve in harm's way.

We are a nation of laws whose commitment to justice is so enduring that we would treat a gunman and give him due process, just as surely as we will see that he pays for his crimes.

We are a nation that guarantees the freedom to worship as one chooses. And instead of claiming God for our side, we remember Lincoln's words, and always pray to be on the side of God.

We are a nation that is dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal. We live that truth within our military, and see it in the varied backgrounds of those we lay to rest today. We defend that truth at home and abroad, and we know that Americans will always be found on the side of liberty and equality. That is who we are as a people.

[...]

SURMISE: The illusion of comfort as commodity.

The advent of the current global economic crisis has brought some things into sharper focus, don't you think? One example of this is that as regards the United States and probably also in much of Western Europe, it is difficult to dispute that

• comfort is an illusion, that this illusion is a commodity, and that
  
  
• any commodity is itself an illusion, the purchase of which confers comfort upon its purchaser.

People want to believe that they are comfortable. It's much easier to encourage people to believe that they're comfortable than it is to convince them that they're not.

Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United States, staunch opponent of labor strikes and noted exponent of laissez faire governance is famous for having said:

The chief business of the American people is business.

Now, the fact is that Coolidge has gotten a bit of a bum rap, because this remark is actually taken from a lengthier piece of speechifying that argued that the generating of wealth and profits is virtuous and useful only insofar as it is applied to the funding of measures that further the public good (like education), and that when wealth is not so applied, it bespeaks nothing more than the selfishness of those who accumulate it.

This caveat notwithstanding, the mythologies concerning the assumed virtuousness of hard work, productivity and profit have been ubiquitous in America since the aphorisms of Benjamin Franklin (as noted specifically by the German sociologist Max Weber, who was the first thinker to expound the Protestant Ethic).

Whatever the origin of this 'ethic', the functions it has served have been manifold. Among the most obvious ones are the legitimation of America's pervasive socioeconomic stratification -- think, everything from the oeuvre of Horatio Alger to the ascent of Social Darwinism. This function of legitimation applies, by the way, both to those at the top of the ladder -- for whom the myth of meritocracy (or a kind of biological determinism, beyond the purview of man) is a bulwark against pangs of guilt about the socioeconomic disparities -- and those at the bottom of the ladder -- for whom the myth of meritocracy encourages them to chalk up their lot in life to their own faults (or those of their families and loved ones) of laziness, stupidity, drunkenness, insufficient religiosity, or just plain old everyday lack of industriousness.

But, let us return to our consideration of the advent of the present global economic crisis, with its various peculiarities, such as the specter of the declining wealth, access to social and cultural capital and education and economic opportunity available to wide swathes of the nation's population, including large parts of the middle class. This is accompanied by the likelihood of a continued sharp decline in upward social mobility, a trend totally unheard of among Baby Boomers and the generation of their parents.

It seems to me that in the bleak geopolitical and global-economic era upon which we are likely embarking, the so-called 'Protestant Ethic' and the corresponding myth of meritocracy perform a function whose salience will supplant those associated with mere legitimation.

This new function is a much more basic one: rootedness within a seemingly fixed structure of social relations. American/Western-capitalist human self-perception will come increasingly to depend for its sustenance upon its ability to perceive itself as being somehow embedded in a framework that provides some semblance -- even if it's chimerical -- of predictability.

In other words, people will -- and have already begun to -- pay huge amounts of treasure (whether it's in the form of cash or in the form of the human soul) for the illusion of comfort. As Crib From This has surmised in the past, the ability to see the world as it is turns not upon your intelligence -- and certainly not in the vulgar/scientistic sense of this overused word/concept -- but upon your bravery.

Most of us -- particularly in the West -- aren't brave.

These Times: Nobody ever believes anything anybody ever has to say about anything...

...and why should he (or she)?

As an illustration of the Samuel Beckett-esque times in which we live, take a look at this most recent post from the left-leaning economics blogger Yves Smith, in which she reveals that she -- in her capacity as one among a "small group of bloggers" -- was invited to participate in a pseudo-off-the-record discussion with "senior officials" of the Obama Treasury Department. Smith:

It wasn’t obvious what the objective of the meeting was (aside the obvious idea that if they were nice to us we might reciprocate. Unfortunately, some of us are not housebroken). I will give them credit for having the session be almost entirely a Q&A, not much in the way of presentation. One official made some remarks about the state of financial institutions; later another said a few things about regulatory reform. The funniest moment was when, right after the spiel on regulatory reform, Steve Waldman said, “I’ve read your bill and I think it’s terrible.” They did offer to go over it with him. It will be interesting to see if that happens.

Four of us [bloggers of various political orientations from the aforementioned "small group"] had a drink afterward and none of us felt that we learned anything (not that we expected to per se; if the ground rules are “not for attribution” in an official setting, we are certainly not going to be told anything new or juicy). But my feeling, and it seemed to be shared, was that we bloggers and the government officials kept talking past each other, in that one of us would ask a question, the reply would leave the questioner or someone in the audience unsatisfied, there might be a follow up question (either same person or someone interested), get another responsive-sounding but not really answer, and then another person would get the floor. The fact that the social convention of no individual hogging air time meant that no one could follow a particular line of inquiry very far.

My bottom line is that the people we met are very cognitively captured, assuming one can take their remarks at face value. Although they kept stressing all the things that had changed or they were planning to change, the polite pushback from pretty all [sic] the attendees was that what Treasury thought of as major progress was insufficient. It was instructive to observe that Tyler Cowen, who is on the other side of the ideological page from yours truly, had pretty much the same concerns as your humble blogger does.

[...]

Read the rest of this fascinating-if-frustrating post-meeting report at the blog Naked Capitalism.

LATE-BREAKING ADDENDUM:
It occurs to me that I nowhere explained what's "Samuel Beckett-esque" about our "times." Not sure that's really the correct characterization. Well, anyway, you have a lot of men (and some women) in suits talking back-and-forth, everyone politely waiting his turn, statements being made that take the form of answers and questions without always actually necessarily being answers and questions (or even maybe statements), and in the end it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Or something. (As it were.)

"Pro-sex feminism" as a paradigm for a left-populist moral consensus.

Girldrive
An article in the Chicago Reader discusses a new book that offers a fresh approach to understanding salient commonalities and contradictions in contemporary American feminism. Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism is a travelogue that compiles the testimony and experiences of feminists (not necessarily self-identified as such) across the 'lower 48' states of varying racial, cultural and socioeconomic profiles. Kind of an interesting idea in itself. But what interests me most about the project is the identity of one of its young co-authors and the overarching political project that is implicit in much of her work.

It should be said that the story of the book's creation -- at once inspiring and tragic -- is as complicated and worthy of attention as its content. I won't dwell on it here except to mention that what's tragic is that co-author Emma Bee Bernstein took her own life before the book was completed and that more can be learned about this by reading the article in the Reader.

Aronowitz: Nona Willis and father Stanley
The other co-author is Nona Willis Aronowitz, who is the daughter of two intellectuals, both of whom were prominent figures in the American Left in the 60s and 70s. For many years, I have admired the scholarship of her father, the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, particularly for his politically engaged work in the sociology of education and his pioneering inquiries into the sociology of the workplace.

Since, in my limited understanding, issues of economic disparities and social class have played so central a role in Aronowitz's scholarship (as opposed to stuff like identity politics), it was with some surprise that I discovered that he was married to the late Ellen Willis, the feminist writer and critic. Willis was opposed to the puritanical stances that sometimes emanate from feminist circles, and is associated with what has been called "pro-sex feminism."

Ellen Willis and "pro-sex feminism"
The meaning of "pro-sex feminism" can be discerned through the following quotation from an article that Willis contributed to the Village Voice in 1981 (titled "Lust Horizons: Is the Woman's Movement Pro-Sex?"):

While liberals appeared to be safely in power, feminists could perhaps afford the luxury of defining Larry Flynt or Roman Polanski as Enemy Number One. Now that we have to cope with Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms, a rethinking of priorities seems in order. [...]

My god, that observation was prescient. I bet feminists in 1981 could not in their wildest dreams have imagined the ascendancy of theocracy under Bush and Cheney; even today the courting of religionists is common practice among politicians of every political stripe. And despite the fact that "feminism" is no longer the salient assignation that it was in the early eighties, the din of anti-(hetero)sexuality/anti-sex rhetoric can still be detected in a percentage of feminism's present-day manifestations. Willis categorized the practitioners within the feminist tendency of what she called "sexual conservatism" into two groups: (1) the monogamists and (2) the separatists:

These apparently opposed perspectives meet on the common ground of sexual conservatism. The monogamists uphold the traditional wife's "official" values: emotional commitment is inseparable from a legal/moral obligation to permanence and fidelity; men are always trying to escape these duties; it's in our interest to make them shape up. The separatists tap into the underside of traditional femininity – the bitter, self-righteous fury that propels the indictment of men as lustful beasts ravaging their chaste victims. These are the two faces of feminine ideology in a patriarchal culture: they induce women to accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men's sexual freedom as a substitute for real power. [...]

I don't care who you are and what your attitude toward feminism is (if you're like me, you support feminism and might even be a feminist, but you basically almost never think about it and tend to devote more attention to certain sets of systemic injustices that are preventing human and political emancipation along lines of socioeconomic class, race and ethnicity), the above passage is really well written and thought-provoking and makes you wonder: why aren't people writing stuff like that these days? Is it partly because "alternative weeklies" like the Village Voice and the Chicago Reader are now owned by evil, corpora-financial interests?

A de facto feminism that is already out there, waiting to be described
Anyway, it's encouraging to see that Ellen Willis's corpus of feminist writings, including especially her "pro-sex" stance, have informed the work in the burgeoning career of her daughter. Nona Willis Aronowitz is still (very, for a journalist about whom I'm bothering so much as to blog) young, and the jury's still out on whether she'll become a writer of the talent and insight of her mother.

What's most encouraging is that she already understands the tidbit of wisdom that I believe to be indispensable to a future for the American Left: it must get the hell out of American's self-styled, middle class-bohemian echo chamber and start giving a voice to the people who are getting screwed worst of all in this country: poor people, both whites and minorities and both from the inner-city and the Great Plains. Nona Willis Aronowitz is spot-on when it comes to the necessity of this outreach. Behold the following quote from the Reader article:

[...] "Feminism, [says Aronowitz] for me, is women owning up to realities of sexism—but feminism as identity is less important than realizing those things and having gendered consciousness [sic].

[...] "Some of the most badass feminists we met were raised in conservative families or oppressive communities. I couldn't believe the urgency of women working in Fargo and Louisiana, the Bible Belt and Austin—they were way more passionate than a lot of women in big cities with big feminist communities."

These subjects—clinic defenders, Chicana activists, community organizers, and other women helping women on the ground—inspired Aronowitz and Bernstein to change their tack. The book's initial outline had been somewhat autobiographical, but as they put more miles between them and Chicago, they realized the stories that needed to be told weren't necessarily their own. "These women don't have a chance to be heard," says Aronowitz. "It started to feel urgent to let them speak for themselves."

Toward a Left-populism
What I find most compelling about Aronowitz's characterization of the project of her book is that it stands as a paradigm for precisely the program of left-populist thought and activism that stands the best chance preserving the foundations of civil liberties, self-governance and checks-and-balances enshrined in the Constitution.

To my mind, a Left that is premised upon a project of democratic emancipation cannot sustain itself -- and if not in the United States, with its vital republican constitution and traditions, then where? -- without being willing and able to take the form of a no-bullshit, intelligent Left-populism.

It is way too easy for the Left to fall into the same habits of the past thirty or forty (or more) years -- among them: defeatism, self-pity, pedantry, the fetishization of 'expertise', the fetishization of credentials, excessive intellectual and moral balkanization, regionalism, etc. --, but to pursue such a course would mean ceding all of our political autonomy (not just existing, but potential) to the reigning plutocracy (and a succession of future real- and potential-plutocratic [re-]configurations).

A Left-populist moral consensus cannot be prudish, because real people aren't prudish
We have to start, just as Aronowitz and Bernstein did, with the people who are already out there doing it. Furthermore, we need to bear in mind that a Left-populist moral consensus can only emerge around themes that that everyday people really do care about. Not an imagined version of morally upright, pious, unselfconscious 'everyday people': that's bullshit and pandering and a lie.

It's easy to know what people care about, because even if they don't always come out and say what it is, they do, inevitably and frequently, talk about it.

Here's a perfect example: sex. It's really easy to tell that human beings care about and think about sex because they talk about it all the time.

Karl Rove wanted everybody to think that there's this unimaginably enormous population of far-Right Christian religionists that constituted the largest and most monolithic voting block in the history of the universe. And for a long time, he succeeded. But, before long, everyone came to realize that it was actually a bunch of smoke-and-mirrors. And eventually, that becomes replaced with another bunch of smoke-and-mirrors -- the birther-movement, the tea-bagger movement, the neo-Nazi resurgence, etc., etc.

Maybe what I'm trying to say here is this: I'm as put-off by the smoke-and-mirrors shows as anyone else. But the response of the Left should not be to call for bans on smoke-and-mirrors shows, to denounce entire red-state populations on the basis of such spectacles, or to mount opposing smoke-and-mirrors production numbers!

It should be to call it what it is, to say: what a bunch of fucking loonies and point out how they are a playing perfectly into an ongoing succession of time-wasting distractions that muddy political discourses in our current landscape of consolidated media and micro-commerce. If a Left-populist movement puts real effort into doing precisely this, if it insists continually upon exploding mythologies rather than perpetuating them, it will make friends, not enemies out in the American countryside as well as deep in the American cityscape.

What say you?