Magnificent speechification: Grayson does it with style.

The bill calling for the much-needed extension of unemployment benefits has finally been passed by both houses of the federal legislature—the Senate passed it on Wednesday and the House got around to doing so yesterday. So I realize that, with respect to the political issue, this post is not exactly timely.

I wish, nevertheless, to share with my enlightened readers this absolute triumph of rhetoric/oratory that was delivered by Rep. Alan Grayson, Democrat of Orlando, Florida during the House 'debate' that preceded the bill's passage. Now, we've seen previous examples of Grayson's deadpan wit, his knack for using invective to tasteful and brilliant effect, and his panache and cogency as a debater on substantive issues.

And herewith, the House doth Grayson rock.

But so rousing is the perfect little specimen of succinct speechifying that Grayson brought to the floor last Wednesday that I went and transcribed the whole damn two-minute speech for you. Now you, my readers, can never credibly question my love and devotion to you. Enjoy:

My grandfather, in the 1930s, spent several years of his life, every single day, at the dump, looking for things there that he could sell. Looking for things that he could take to the market and sell, because there was no other way for him to survive the 1930s and the Great Depression.

There was no unemployment insurance back then. There was no state benefits back then. There was no help for the people who had [no] jobs. All they could do, like my grandfather—supporting a family of seven—was to go to the dump and desperately try to find something he could sell.

And that, my friends, is the America that the Republicans are trying to revive. The America of desperate straits and, for them, cheap labor. The America where people have nothing, hope for nothing and are desperate to live for the next day. That is what the Republicans are trying to resurrect—day after day, week after week, and now month after month.

I've got news for my Republican friends: every single person who's going to receive unemployment insurance under this bill is unemployed. Every single one of them doesn't have a job. And that's why they need this money.

Now, I know what the Republicans are thinking:

"Why don't they just sell some stock? If they're in really dire straits, maybe they could take some of their art collection and send it off to the auctioneer. And if they're in deep, deep trouble, maybe these unemployed could sell one of their yachts."

That's what the Republicans are thinking right now.

But that's not the life of ordinary people—the 99 percent of America that actually has to work for a living, that doesn't just clip coupons and live off of interest and dividends, like my Republican friends do.

That's why we need this bill to pass: because of the 99 percent of America that deals with reality everyday. The people who will lose their homes if this doesn't pass. The people who will be living in their cars if this doesn't pass. That's why we need this to pass.

And I will say this to Republicans who have blocked this bill now for months and kept food out of the mouths of children. I say to them now:

May God have mercy on your souls.

I yield back.

Thanks to PhuckPolitics.com for bringing this to my attention. That blog contains a link to a video of the speech, along with its blogger's exuberant commentary.

Let's stop acting surprised.

We're not really shocked, are we?, by instances of deceit, incompetence, greed and arrogance in the corridors of power?

Those of us who are convinced that civil liberties, free expression, free inquiry and democratic deliberation are the cornerstones of American society know quite well that lots of things are not as they should be. We know that, somehow, these essential principles and practices must be preserved, repaired and/or improved. We realize that we must continue to take these things seriously, remind one another of their importance and significance, and teach subsequent generations to preserve all that is best about the American project in republican self-governance.

We were, all of us, horrified by the self-righteous barbarity and callous disregard for the rule of law promoted, clandestinely (and then not-so-clandestinely), by former Vice President Cheney. We were dismayed to learn that various United States agencies had spied on American citizens, tortured prisoners of war (using methods borrowed from 1950s Communist China) and fabricated intelligence as a pretext for waging war. We thought the eleventh-hour first Bank Bailout, under Bush, was a bald-faced exercise in theft—that it revealed, to our dismay, the extent to which the American political system has become a fully owned subsidiary of powerful financial interests and an elite stratum of wealthy investors. And we thought that the second Bank Bailout, under Obama's watch, confirmed our suspicions about the current impotence of American democracy. To be sure, I'm not referring to its impotence in practice: we already knew all about that. No, what was confirmed was the impotence of American democracy as an idea.

So why do we act shocked when we encounter leaked footage of American soldiers in Afghanistan firing missiles at unarmed civilians? Why so surprised when Obama sells off—faster than Bush would even have dared—the American education system to a bunch of glorified loan sharks? Why are we taken off-guard when the Supreme Court overturns hundreds of centuries-old laws regulating the political spending of multinational corporations, on the basis of the notion—so argues the Court—that such laws restrict the (previously non-existent) Constitutional right of corporations to free speech?

I don't think that we are surprised by these things. I think that we are pretending to be surprised. I'm guessing that there are two (2) ways in which we pretend to be surprised, which coexist in varying degrees in any particular instance:

i. The first way in which we act surprised.
We want to be surprised by these things. Therefore, we either convince ourselves that we are surprised, or we act surprised in a semi-conscious attempt to simulate, for our own comfort, the feeling of being surprised. Or we act surprised out of sheer habit. In any of these cases—whatever our level of consciousness of our actions—we are motivated by a desire for comfort.

Why is the feeling of surprise comforting to us? Because surprise registers the phenomenon to which we are responding as something that is—as it were—beyond the pale. It's a psychological defense mechanism. We want so desperately to believe that everyone else values our Constitutional protections and civil liberties as much as we do. To us, this stuff is basic common sense, and it shatters our faith in humanity to recognize the truth: there are a substantial numbers of American citizens who would gladly give away their liberties in exchange for an illusory feeling of safety or security.

This brings us to:

ii. The second way in which we act surprised.
We hope that by expressing our outrage and shock in the face of the erosion of American civil liberties, we might be able to shock the aforementioned cadre of American citizens—a cadre that is in most other respects as heterogeneous as can be—out of its complacency and docility.

In other words, we like to believe that we are walking, talking George Orwells. That, if we talk frequently and loudly enough about how disgusted we are with our country's seemingly inexorable drift toward fear-mongering, surveillance state, that we will manage eventually to make them see the light!

The mistake we're making in this second instance is about as obvious as can be: do we really think that we can out-fear-monger the professional political-corporate-media fear-mongers?? I think this is a difficulty that faces those of us in the post-Baby Boom generations who believe that the only way in which our democracy can be repaired is through a reinvigorated civil discourse. At present, American political rhetoric is—like American political thought—beyond its moment of crisis. It is in a state of extreme fragmentation.

All I'm saying is, let's start admitting that we all know this. Let's stop acting surprised.

Politics & ideas? Economic self-interest & authoritarian populism.

The relation of politics to ideas has always been complicated. But the conceit of this post will be that there's something to be learned by exploring it.

Politics and ideas: the Right
For example: Ideas are, in an important sense, anathema to the climate within which the current American conservatism prevails. Nevertheless, it's important to remember that during the decades prior to the election of Barack Obama, ideas had a twofold significance in em the Republicans to seize/maintain and use political power.

To be sure, at least half of this significance was ancillary to how, why and for whom the so-called 'conservative movement' of the 1980s, 90s and 00s was built. The GOP seized/maintained power through the application of brainpower to such tactical/operational processes as propaganda, demographic analysis and the procurement and allocation of material resources. Simultaneously, the ideas developed by various big brains/think tank types connected to the 'movement' as to how best to use this power were every bit as oriented toward strategic considerations -- how to maintain power -- as toward articulating philosophical/political 'principles'.

For the most part, this coterie of ideologically warped eggheads agreed that this political power could best be put to use by dismantling government itself (see: Messrs. Gingrich, Norquist, Rove, Ambramoff, et al.).

This GOP ambition to dismantle government did not extend, naturellement, to such elements of the public-sector as military and "intelligence" infrastructure. Although, of course, 'outsourcing' these functions -- to mercenaries to fight our wars and to 'specialists' to torture our 'enemy combatants' -- is by now established practice, thanks to Messrs. Rumsfeld & Cheney, et al.

Politics and ideas: the Left
By contrast, no left/progressive politics can exist or have any hope of success without ideas.

To be sure, ideas don't do the trick in and of themselves, and the Right knows this. That's why it has tried, and not without success, to milk every last drop of potential from the 'left-leaning, soulless egghead/expert' cliché. (Although, for some time now, its effectiveness is showing definite signs of strain.)

Allow me to illustrate. One of the biggest and looniest lies that extreme-neoconservative shills like the neo-McCarthyite former/longtime Communist and Black Panther David Horowitz have tried to propagate is that notion that the American professoriat -- as with, of course, 'the mainstream media, the arts, and the employees of public libraries(!) -- is overwhelmingly left-wing in its orientation and that its aim is to indoctrinate defenseless undergraduates, the progeny of unsuspecting, good, decent, law-abiding American families.

Would that that were the case!

For one thing, it's self-evident that this notion is a big, stinking lie (and a febrile one, at that), so ludicrous that it doesn't even merit refutation. However, setting aside the fact that it is categorically untrue -- self-evidently, and empirically -- I believe that there is a more important point to be made as regards the internal logic of what the lie intends to imply. Namely, we might ask: Could the professoriat -- irrespective of the direction in which its politics trend -- really wield the kind of seismic influence over the nation's populace that Horowitz wants to believe it does?

The answer: To the extent to which the academy (and the same applies to the arts, or the press, or what have you) has provided a safe refuge to progressive/left -- even 'liberal' -- ideas over the past decades, then surely this fact has diminished the capacity of these ideas to engage people rather than the other way around. Academia is not called 'the ivory tower' primary in order to evoke architecture. To the extent to which the Left has been hiding out there, it has hampered the flourishing of left-wing ideas. It has probably prevented many good ideas even from entering the public sphere, to say nothing of capturing the public's political imagination.

(Think of things that once existed in the public sphere that have by now retreated for safe harbor in the academic sphere: poetry, visual art, Lacrosse, etc. Do these things appear to be enjoying widespread influence? Can you name more living poets than you can count on one hand? Thus: Academia is the place where once-vital ideas, practices and traditions go to die long, painful deaths.)

Resentment is not an idea
Now, of course, the corollary I have just proposed doubles as a straightforward description of why right-wing political hacks like Horowitz bother proffering these self-evidently idiotic assertions in the first place. When it comes to the Horowitzes of the world: It's not what they're saying, it's what they're talking about.

In other words, since Horowitz and Company are not men of ideas, but rather, merely corporately-funded propagandists for far-Right interests (who previously had been well-funded propagandists for the most militant and radical causes of the far-Left), it is most appropriate to assess their utterances on the basis of how these utterances function and not on the basis of what or how these utterances might 'mean'. Their meaning is their function.

As Crib From This has noted on previous occasions, the vast majority of the intellectual energies among the hired brains of the Reagan Revolution, of the Gingrich Revolution, of the Bush/Cheney Reign Of Terror, of Sarah Palin's Wardrobe and beyond have been expended in pursuit of tactical positioning, not -- as had been at least partly the case in its early years -- in the service of real ideas.

Authoritarian populism
This brings us to the issue that has prompted my little excursus: that of authoritarian populism.

A coinage -- I think -- of the sociologist and Marxist Stuart Hall, authoritarian populism refers to the now-familiar methods by which conservative political forces forge, nurture and/or manufacture political support -- and often sizable majorities -- by, in part, slyly embedding Rightist/ultra-capitalist/neoliberal ideology into the "common sense" of everyday life.

Hall's formulation draws from the thought of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who theorized that, in industrialized nations in the twentieth century, the dominant class established and maintained political control over the working class not only through the use and threatened use of conventional force, but through hegemony: the systems of socialization, the ingrained assumptions, the modes of valuation, etc. that imbue a society and serve to legitimate status quo power relations. Hegemony refers to the processes by which ideology does its real work.

Of particular relevance to Hall's thesis is that Gramsci's concept of hegemony might go part of the way toward explaining how exploited populations can be manipulated into voting against their own economic interests. (Follow this hyperlink for a decent primer on Gramsci and hegemony [with particular emphasis upon Gramsci's significance to educational theory].)

The age of Reagan and Thatcher
Hall's discussion of authoritarian populism emerged from a series of frenzied conversations conducted among leftists and liberals in the United Kingdom wherein Hall and his comrades watched in stunned horror as Margaret Thatcher's Tory Party rose to power in a seeming popular groundswell. To make matters worse, the Labour Party was starting to get routed and the once-steadfast support of the working class seemed to be slipping.

Soon afterward, Ronald Reagan ascended to the White House, with significant assistance from the Democratic Party's disillusioned, blue-collar base ("Reagan Democrats.")

Despite the parallel developments between the United Kingdom and her former upstart-colonies, it is important to remember that England's working class, in contrast to that of the United States, actually had a fairly strong tradition of a political consciousness. Whereas the relationship that had developed between the Democratic Party and American workers, beginning with FDR, had resembled a longstanding yet typical political transaction based upon mutual benefit, English workers were organized and had secured many welfare state protections through collective demand.

So: along came this woman Thatcher, who promised to undermine all of the reforms and protections that this class had fought so hard to obtain. And she swept into power in the midst of what was ostensibly a populist groundswell! How could this be?

Enter: authoritarian populism. Here's Hall's assessment of Thatcherism's populist flair, against which he juxtaposed the ineptitude of the Left's tactics, attitude and rhetoric. It's striking how similar his characterization is to those that emerged fairly recently within the American Left, particularly in the wake of the disastrous candidacy of John Kerry [boldface added by the present blogger]:

Horrendously, the Right has been far more successful in recent years than the Left in connecting with some of these popular movements and trends in civil society. Of course, they have connected with them in their own populist way. The intention of the radical Right, which has been most penetrative, has not been the conversion of masses to the religion of the market and unemployment. Rather, it has been the subtle capacity to identify the positive aspirations of people with the market and the restoration of the capitalist ethic, and to present this as a natural alliance. Thatcherism has been remarkably successful at moving the counters around so as to forge a connection between the popular aspiration for greater freedom from constraining powers and the market definition of freedom. It has created a chain of equivalences between the reaction against state bureaucracy, so deeply inscribed in the Fabian version of social democracy, and the quite different passion for self-sufficiency, self-help and rampant individualism. But, like all ideological and political interventions — which is what Thatcherism is — these connections are neither 'natural' nor necessary. They represent an attempt to inflect and expropriate and absorb what are often democratic currents into free market channels. We have suggested already how and why in the earlier period the market came to be a popular mass experience. The Right, after all, has no hang-ups about making money and stimulating the instinct for money making as the driving force of society. In simple terms, that is what the capitalist system is. So to address itself to isolating and developing the competitive side of that contradictory experience was an obvious and natural way for the radical Right to align itself with popular aspirations or, to put it another way, make itself populist. This is one feature of the wider phenomenon we have seen in this decade of the Right showing itself once again capable of recuperating itself, renewing itself, taking on the challenge of the social democratic consensus and eroding its basis, and learning once again to address the people in accents which seem to groove more naturally with life as they live and experience it. This is the naturalisation of the Right which has proven the real changed ground on which the Left in the 1980s has been forced to operate. It is part of the Right project to turn the tide on every front — in civil society and moral life as much as in economic habits and expectations. Its project, in short, is to become hegemonic, to address the common experience, to speak to and for 'the nation'.  [Stuart Hall, "The Culture Gap," originally published in Marxism Today, January 1984. Click here to access the entire article in .pdf format.]

Sound familiar?

Thomas Frank on American politics in the mid-00's
Although the parallel breaks down in some important respects, perhaps the most famous contemporary point of reference that comes to mind with respect to the relation between culture (and the "Culture Wars," a term that Hall at times used specifically in describing Thatcherism) and political "common sense" is Thomas Frank's influential What's the Matter with Kansas? (now also a film, directed by Laura Cohen and Joe Winston).

Here's an excerpt of Frank's book -- published in 2004 -- that recalls aspects of Hall's 1986 assessment of UK politics, but which then takes the conversation into new territory, elements of which I have rendered in boldface.

That our politics have been shifting rightward for more than thirty years is a generally acknowledged fact of American life. That this rightward movement has largely been accomplished by working-class voters whose lives have been materially worsened by the conservative policies they have supported is a less comfortable fact, one we have trouble talking about in a straightforward manner.

And yet the backlash is there, whenever we care to look, from the "hardhats" of the 1960s to the "Reagan Democrats" of the 1980s to today's mad-as-hell "red states." You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America – "going out of business" signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush.

I chose to observe the phenomenon by going back to my home state of Kansas, a place that has been particularly ill-served by the conservative policies of privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization, and that has reacted to its worsening situation by becoming more conservative still. Indeed, Kansas is today the site of a ferocious struggle within the Republican Party, a fight pitting affluent moderate Republicans against conservatives from the working-class districts and the downmarket churches. And it's hard not to feel some affection for the conservative faction, even as you deplore their political views. After all, these are the people that liberalism is supposed to speak to: the hard-luck farmers, the bitter factory workers, the outsiders, the disenfranchised, the disreputable.

Who is to blame for this landscape of distortion, of paranoia, and of good people led astray? Though Kansas voters have chosen self-destructive policies, it is just as clear to me that liberalism deserves a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon. Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Wichita and Shawnee, Kansas with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.

This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and – more important – the money of these coveted constituencies, "New Democrats" think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where's the soft money in that?

This is, in drastic miniature, the criminally stupid strategy that has dominated Democratic thinking off and on ever since the "New Politics" days of the early seventies. Over the years it has enjoyed a few successes, but, as political writer E. J. Dionne has pointed out, the larger result was that both parties have become "vehicles for upper-middle-class interests" and the old class-based language of the left quickly disappeared from the universe of the respectable. The Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters – their traditional base – the big brush-off, ousting their representatives from positions within the party and consigning their issues, with a laugh and a sneer, to the dustbin of history. A more ruinous strategy for Democrats would be difficult to invent. And the ruination just keeps on coming. However desperately they triangulate and accommodate, the losses keep mounting.

Curiously enough, though, Democrats of the DLC variety aren't worried. They seem to look forward to a day when their party really is what David Brooks and Ann Coulter claim it to be now: a coming-together of the rich and the self-righteous. While Republicans trick out their poisonous stereotype of the liberal elite, Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.

Now, here's the part with respect to which, in my opinion, Frank's prescience is being revealed before our eyes in the political events and Democratic electoral/political gains of Obama's 2009:

Such Democrats [Bill Clinton, the DLC, et al.] look at a situation like present-day Kansas where social conservatives war ferociously on moderate Republicans and they rub their hands with anticipation: Just look at how Ronald Reagan's "social issues" have come back to bite his party in the ass! If only the crazy Cons push a little bit more, these Democrats think, the Republican Party will alienate the wealthy suburban Mods for good, and we will be able to step in and carry places like super-affluent Mission Hills, Kansas, along with all the juicy boodle that its inhabitants are capable of throwing our way.

Has this very demographic shift not been cited as one of the chief components of Obama's victory? The Loony Right has stepped beyond the point of no return for many middle- to upper-middle-class suburbanites in the Northwest, the Midwest, the West and even in key portions of the South. So what's the problem, we might ask? Frank decries the long term prospects of and, to be sure, the very point of a Democratic Party that severs its ties with economic populism:

While I enjoy watching Republicans fight one another as much as the next guy, I don't think the Kansas story really gives true liberals any cause to cheer. Maybe someday the DLC dream will come to pass, with the Democrats having moved so far to the right that they are no different than old-fashioned moderate Republicans, and maybe then the affluent will finally come over to their side en masse. But along the way the things that liberalism once stood for – equality and economic security – will have been abandoned completely. Abandoned, let us remember, at the historical moment when we need them most.

Truer words have never been -- etc., etc. I mean, I'm with Frank on this: The lack of responsiveness on the part of either party to the needs of poor people -- from the victims of Katrina to the countless victims of predatory lending who are now being evicted from their homes -- is morally repellent. There is absolutely no doubt about the fact that Republican Party is chiefly to blame for this state of affairs. It is furthermore true that Obama has at least been addressing and acting to solve some of these problems -- far more so than it's possible to picture any Republican president doing.

Unfortunately, it's also true, as Frank has pointed out, that a sizable share of the blame for the dismantling of the few remaining traces of the welfare state, consumer protections, corporate/financial regulation in the wake of Reagan and Bush Sr. sits squarely on the shoulders of our former President William Jefferson Clinton.

The true lesson for liberals in the Kansas story is the utter and final repudiation of their historical decision to remake themselves as the other pro-business party. By all rights the people of Wichita and Shawnee should today be flocking to the party of Roosevelt, not deserting it. Culturally speaking, however, that option is simply not available to them anymore. Democrats no longer speak to the people on the losing end of a free-market system that is becoming more brutal and more arrogant by the day.

The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or anti-school-prayer; it's that by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the sneers of Hollywood whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns. We are in an environment where Republicans talk constantly about class – in a coded way, to be sure – but where Democrats are afraid to bring it up.

What Frank might have mentioned here -- and which he'd be sure to mention somehow were he revisiting these thoughts given the ratcheting-up of this species of GOP rhetoric in the hands such Fr. Coughlin-epigones as Glenn Beck -- is race, which can never be far removed from any serious discussion of socioeconomic class in America. From Nixon's "silent majority," to propagandists from Lee Atwater, to Karl Rove, the GOP has relied upon unspoken -- and, indeed, often subconscious -- racial animus in the cobbling together of its majorities, particularly with respect to its 'South Strategy'.

Of course, in a way, what Frank found so alarming about the radicalization of the Republican Party in Kansas was precisely that its activism began increasingly to resemble that of the fanatics of the Deep South. (Frank discusses this fascinating observation, with particular reference to the politics of abortion, in the film version of What's the Matter with Kansas?). Paradoxically, at precisely the moment at which the Southern Strategy stopped working -- i.e.: at the moment of Obama's resounding victory -- the Republicans are no longer even bothering to couch their race-baiting rhetoric in "coded" terminology. I wonder what Frank makes of that?

In the meantime, let's rejoin Frank for the conclusion of his lecture, in which he almost seems to have anticipated Obama, specifically with respect to his belief in the necessity of a political movement.  Of course, the only kind of movement politics that he argues will work effectively in the long run is one that is focused upon economic populism:

Democratic political strategy simply assumes that people know where their economic interest lies and that they will act on it by instinct. There is no need for any business-bumming class-war rhetoric on the part of candidates or party spokesmen, and there is certainly no need for a liberal to actually get his hands dirty fraternizing with the disgruntled. Let them look at the record and see for themselves: Democrats are slightly more generous with Social Security benefits, slightly stricter on environmental regulations, and do less union-busting than Republicans.

The gigantic error in all this is that people don't spontaneously understand their situation in the great sweep of things. Liberalism isn't a force of karmic nature that pushes back when the corporate world goes too far; it is a man-made contrivance as subject to setbacks and defeats as any other. Consider our social welfare apparatus, the system of taxes, regulations, and social insurance that is under sustained attack these days. Social Security, the FDA, and all the rest of it didn't just spring out of the ground fully formed in response to the obvious excesses of a laissez-faire system; they were the result of decades of movement-building, of bloody fights between strikers and state militias, of agitating, educating, and thankless organizing. More than forty years passed between the first glimmerings of a left-wing reform movement in the 1890s and the actual enactment of its reforms in the 1930s. In the meantime scores of the most rapacious species of robber baron went to their reward untaxed, unregulated, and unquestioned.

An even more telling demonstration of the importance of movements in framing people's perspectives can be found in the voting practices of union members. Take your average white male voter: in the 2000 election they chose George W. Bush by a considerable margin. Find white males who were union members, however, and they voted for Al Gore by a similar margin. The same difference is repeated whatever the demographic category: women, gun owners, retirees, and so on – when they are union members, their politics shift to the left. This is true even when the union members in question had little contact with union leaders. Just being in a union evidently changes the way a person looks at politics, inoculates them against the derangement of the backlash. Here, values matter almost least of all, while the economy, health care, and education are of paramount concern. Union voters are, in other words, the reverse image of the Brown-back conservative who cares nothing for economics but torments himself night and day with vague fears about "cultural decline."

Labor unions are on the wane today, as everyone knows, down to 9% of the private-sector workforce from a high-water mark of 38% in the 1950s. Their decline goes largely unchecked by a Democratic Party anxious to demonstrate its fealty to corporate America, and unmourned by a therapeutic left that never liked those Archie Bunker types in the first place. Among the broader population, accustomed to thinking of organizations as though they were consumer products, it is simply assumed that unions are declining because nobody wants to join them anymore, the same way the public has lost its taste for the music of the Bay City Rollers. And in the offices of the union-busting specialists and the Wall Street brokers and the retail executives, the news is understood the same way aristocrats across Europe greeted the defeat of Napoleon in 1815: as a monumental victory in a war to the death.

While leftists sit around congratulating themselves on their personal virtue, the right understands the central significance of movement-building, and they have taken to the task with admirable diligence. Cast your eyes over the vast and complex structure of conservative "movement culture," a phenomenon that has little left-wing counterpart anymore. There are foundations like the one operated by the Kochs in Wichita, channeling their millions into the political battle at the highest levels, subsidizing free-market economics departments and magazines and thinkers. Then there are the think tanks, the Institutes Hoover and American Enterprise, that send the money sluicing on into the pockets of the right-wing pundit corps, Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, and the rest, furnishing them with what they need to keep their books coming and their minds in fighting trim between media bouts. A brigade of lobbyists. A flock of magazines and newspapers. A publishing house or two. And, at the bottom, the committed grassroots organizers going door-to-door, organizing their neighbors, mortgaging their houses even, to push the gospel of the backlash.

And this movement speaks to those at society's bottom, addresses them on a daily basis. From the left they hear nothing, but from the Cons they get an explanation for it all. Even better, they get a plan for action, a scheme for world conquest with a wedge issue. And why shouldn't they get to dream their lurid dreams of politics-as-manipulation? They've had it done to them enough in reality.

Like Hall, the indexes by which Frank traces the Republican Party's wholesale capture of the populist mantle are cultural and rhetorical. But, unlike Hall, Frank is not a Marxist. Not even a socialist. He dreams of a return to the left-populism that was -- throughout the vast majority of US history -- the norm for prairie states, Great Plains states and Midwestern states. It's true that even over the past thirty years, the Midwest never really became a GOP stronghold, and furthermore, it wasn't all that long ago that Kansas had a reasonably strong Democratic Party (it can still be strong, on the local level).

So...
I suppose my point is that I think that Frank -- and to some extent Hall -- are correct about the folly of any so-called Left that disregards economic populism and that disregards the economic needs of ordinary people, even (or perhaps especially) the ones who have been brainwashed by the Right through any of its innumerable channels of influence.

We have to (1) find a way to establish a greater, more cohesive and more sincere Left/populist presence that can put pressure on leaders in the Democratic Party or support Left third party candidates, and (2) stop letting cultural differences and even large differences of opinion on some cultural issues get in the way of establishing meaningful political solidarity. You don't have to be someone's bestest buddy in order to vote alongside him if and to the extent to which your and his economic interests coincide.

"War Is Hell!":The perfecters of chest-beating and their epigones.

Let's revisit our discussion of David Brooks's editorial in yesterday's New York Times, which Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald places alongside numerous previous instances in which this neoconservative, who usually plays 'good-cop', metamorphoses into a "grizzled warrior." As Greenwald illustrates, yesterday's transformation finds the usually ostensibly mild-mannered Brooks

perform[ing] a chest-beating war dance over Afghanistan of the type he and his tough guy comrades perfected in the run-up to the Iraq War.  It's filled with self-glorifying "war-is-hell" neocon platitudes that make the speaker feel tough and strong.  No more hiding like cowards in our bases.  It's time to send "small groups of American men and women [] outside the wire in dangerous places."  Those opposing escalation are succumbing to the "illusion of the easy path."  Chomping on a cigar in his war room, he roars:  "all out or all in."  The central question: will we "surrender the place to the Taliban?," etc. etc.

Indeed, in his remarkable piece of propaganda Brooks's appraisal of the political and military situation is selective and slanted in its relationship with facts and irresponsible and, frankly, comical in its use of rhetoric. But, as I pointed out yesterday, what's truly sinister and galling is the piece's attempt to bend recent history to its own political ends. I mean, basically, it conflates statements of unambiguous fact with statements evincing a heterodox conception of political and military historiography. To call it heterodox is maybe too nice: It is nothing less than a neoconservative wet dream of blood-lust, self-righteousness, pedantry and calls to the cause of freedom and destiny!!!, pitting the United States (unambiguously good, honorable, honest, free, saintly) against...

Well, let's pause there. Against who, exactly? Who is it that we are fighting, and what is it that makes our enemies so damned evil, Dave Brooks?

Since 1979, we have been involved in a long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism. We’ve fought this ideology in many ways in many places, and we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve. But we should understand that the conflict is unavoidable and that when extremism pushes, it’s in our long-term interests to push back — and that eventually, if we do so, extremism will wither..*

We've been, for 30 years now!, engaged in a "long" conflict (i.e.: we're already knee-deep in this conflict, so giving up now would mean that the brave sacrifices of those who have gone before us will have been in vain!, a dishonor done to their memories!!!), a "complex" conflict (i.e.: a chess-like series of highly technical maneuvers, tactics, strategies, intelligence-gathering measures by way of "data-mining," spying, "harsh interrogations," computers and machines and all sorts of stealth, jargony technical and technological and academic and bookish stuff that you could never hope to understand in a million years, so just back off and leave it to us experts).

And the conflict has been with "Islamic extremism." But, wait, I thought it was a conflict with Al Quaeda? Or, wait: no!, it's a War On Terror, right? Or was it the Taliban in Afghanistan? Or was it in Pakistan? Or was it against Osama bin Laden? Or, wait: against Saddam Hussein? Or wait, what about Omar Kadafi? Or...uh...what about those mean-looking dudes in Iran? Hold on! I think I'm sensing a pattern here..... Don't tell me!

Okay: the idea of a "long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism" is so inexcusably hamfisted, willfully ignorant, so transparently calculated to render as ambiguous as possible the identity of our putative enemy, American aims in the putative conflict, its theater of action, and its putative moral authority, and moreover it's so classically, paradigmatically Orwellian (remember how the government kept switching the war enemy between Eurasia and Eastasia?: the point is that the more ambiguous the nature of the enemy/terms of conflict, the more potentially sinister, totalitarian and just plain dangerous it becomes for people like Brooks to issue absurd calls to arms in the name of empty, cynical and dishonest conceptions of quote-patriotism-unquote!!!).

I leave you with a side-by-side comparison of my own which I hope will illustrate in no uncertain terms why it's so very dangerous when asshole pseudo-intellectuals like David Brooks write like chest-thumping, fist-pounding neanderthals, particularly when they are saying War Is Hell, But We Americans Had Better Tough It Out To Preserve Our Honor And To Protect Our Way Of Live Against A Threat Posed By AN IDEOLOGY THAT'S INCOMPATIBLE WITH OUR OWN, This Is, If You're A Decent Honest Non-Terrorist American!!!!

Here's Brooks, giving it his best, really throwing the full strength of of his will into his appeal, the purity -- uncontaminated by 'foreign, un-American ideologies' -- of his thick-skinned, ideologically correct moral righteousness, his steadfast refusal to fall victim to the illusions of weaker men!!!!:

Always there is the illusion of the easy path. Always there is the illusion, which gripped Donald Rumsfeld and now grips many Democrats, that you can fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint, with cruise missiles, with special forces operations and unmanned drones. Always there is the illusion, deep in the bones of the Pentagon’s Old Guard, that you can fight a force like the Taliban by keeping your troops mostly in bases, and then sending them out in well-armored convoys to kill bad guys.

[...]

We have tried to fight the Afghan war the easy way, and it hasn’t worked. Switching now to the McChrystal strategy is a difficult choice, and President Obama is right to take his time. But Obama was also right a few months ago when he declared, “This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. ... This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

I can just hear the John Phillip Sousa march emanating from the speaker system of Brook's swanky corner office in The New York Times building. But the United States has not monopolized the use of careless bombast in attempts to justify not just warfare but ideological warfare, The same holds for ideological warfare in which the homeland's Weltanschauung or way of life or values or blood is cast as incompatible with another.

Who else was fond of saying, This planet ain't big enough for the both of us! and, It will take a long, possibly thousand-year struggle, but we must always be willing to attack in the most unrelenting and steadfast way, including the use of 'extraordinary measures, which will require a decisive break from the old, outdated philosophies, practices and values of the old, feeble-minded military hierarchy...?

I know who! A propagandist, political leader and military leader all rolled into one, who had the following to say to the German generals at a meeting in early March, 1941, before their glorious, hard-willed march into Russia and, as we all know, their eventual doom:

The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the the comprehension of you generals but...I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction. The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will be liquidated. German soldiers guilty of breaking international law...will be excused. Russia has not participated in the Hague Convention and therefore has no rights under it.  [Adolf Hitler, as quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich]

Phew! I don't need to point out all of the parallels explicitly, do I? And the last couple of quoted sentences provide illuminating comparisons with not only Brooks's article but with the justifications used by Bush and Cheney, et al. for their (once-) secret approval of the use of torture in various "national security"-related interrogations.

Finally, just to really make everyone even more sick to their stomachs, let us consider what one Heinrich Himmler had to say to his S.S. generals on October 4, 1943:

...I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among yourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly...

I mean...the extermination of the Jewish race....Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions caused by human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written...  [quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich]

Of course I'm not comparing Brooks to these two dudes. Like I said, I'd happily have a beer with Dave Brooks, should the opportunity arise. He's a decent fellow, etc.

I mean merely to illustrate that the coupling of elegant/pretentious ideological certitudes -- and grand abstract principles generally -- with windy, high-minded rhetoric and fist-pounding putatively patriotic fervor is dangerous. Especially when this combination is used to advocate long, violent, multi-front wars against an enemy whose identity is ambiguous, whose goals are completely abstract and easily doctored both in the framing of present and future debates but in rewriting our collective/cultural consciousness retrospectively. The latter is at the heart of any decent definition of Orwellian governance.

Last of all, don't let Brooks and his friends get away with convincing the American population that we must violate our own values, principles and ethics in order to stave off an enemy with which we are supposedly engaged in a never-ending existential conflict. That's the worst kind of bullying in the world: It doesn't make sense, it isn't an argument but a exercise in rhetorical and symbolic power, and we must fight back against it.

I know, I sound like Bono or something, but this stuff is just so unbelievably sleazy and unjust....

__________________

* All quoted passages that appear in bold typeface were chosen for emphasis by the present blogger.

Obama: the bargain, the moment of truth and health care.

I've been asked by one of our favorite readers if I might weigh in as to my thoughts on President Obama's health care speech of last Wednesday. Here's my long-winded (but I hope not pedantic or, uh, boring...) reply.

In approaching the health care address, as in approaching all things Obama-related, I divide my assessments into two distinct categories: (1) substantive and (2) operational.

By the first category, I mean, you know, the content: What does it say as a matter of pure policy?, etc., etc. By the second, I refer to the impact and significance that the speech would appear to have operationally, specifically with respect to its embeddedness within salient and underlying political contingencies and discourses.

Some background for my thinking:

Obama differs from other presidents of my lifetime in that he has, in fact, managed to surprise me by occasionally saying something so smart and incisive that it strikes me as something more than simply operational or tactical. In fact, I'm convinced that that's what made Obama appealing to people on the left in the first place: At his best, he offers us much-needed relief from the interminable Samuel Beckett-speak of 20th Century Presidential Personae -- cant that has been particularly excruciating over the course of the previous four presidencies.

Obama speaks and thinks in a way that makes sense to us: It's partly a generational/demographic thing, and it's partly a matter of sheer charisma. It's could even be bollocks: he's got them. (Bollocks are testicles, kiddies.) Not compared to Theodore Roosevelt, maybe, but compared to pretty much any president since JFK. Of course, considering the competition, that's maybe not saying a whole lot...

I remember during the presidential primaries or something, I was explaining to my friend what I thought was actually potentially fresh and worthwhile about Obama, and I phrased it this way:

If you're not going to go out there and actively work to usher in The Revolution, then Obama's your man. In other words: OK, if you want to vote for Kucinich, do it. if you want to vote for Nader, do it. (I did that once and have no regrets.) I applaud you. If you want to start a new, intelligent leftish political movement, then go for it. God knows, we could use something like that. These are worthwhile and commendable projects.

But, I continued, if not -- i.e., if you're going to participate in the political system, warts (of which there are many) and all -- then Obama represents the closest thing to a genuinely progressive force that the political system can in fact, in this moment and time, successfully produce. Vote for Obama, and you'll know that at least you're supporting without a doubt the best thing that our tattered, and bought-and-sold-many-times-over political system can deliver.

Obama was and is NOT Dennis Kucinich. He's not Ralph Nader, and he's not Jimmy Carter. That is part of the point of Obama being Obama: He's not a lost cause and doesn't represent lost causes. He's a winner. He's one of the Beautiful People, with all of the good and bad that comes along with that.

Obama can and does play ball with the big boys. He is and always has been a political realist, and he sold himself to us as a political realist. He beat the Clintons not just because he represented a superior political vision (which he did, by an infinitesimal degree of difference), but because he out-smarted the Clintons.

It wasn't just luck that turned John McCain's campaign into such a disaster: It was the Obama campaign's tactical superiority: Out-flanking your opponent, faking him out, making him sweat over -- and waste money in -- the wrong state at the wrong time, by deliberately sending misleading signals about your own campaign's concerns.

Within a day of the McCain campaign's having trotted out Sarah Palin (as I remarked on that occasion), it dawned upon me: the Republicans are throwing the election.

In retrospect, it seems clear to me that part of the reason this happened is because the Obama campaign forced them into retreating. And: prevailing rhetoric and received wisdom aside, the GOP is still in retreat, if not chaos.

The trouble is that Obama's victory meant -- and means -- that those of us on the left who brought him to office would have to come face-to-face with the limitations of our screwed up and corrupt system, limitations that we didn't really have to face up to in the same way when we were toiling under the tyranny of the Bush/Cheney cabal. With those guys, we could take out our frustration on the other side, for stealing elections. We could decry the stupidity and self-centeredness of the idiots who actually preferred those asshole to Gore or Kerry (not that we loved those guys either...), who at least could speak in complete sentences.

It seems perverse to put it this way, but in Bush/Cheney, we had on our hands a fine distraction that was from the real culprits of the demise of the United States: our nightmare of a de-funded public infrastructure, the menace of neoliberalism and public-private partnerships, a completely unregulated financial sector, masses of political and economic capital concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, the deterioration of the trustworthy news and information (not that we ever had much of that...), the calcification of class, status and racial divisions, a powerful neoconservative lobby, etc., etc., etc....

And so, entirely contrary to the conventional wisdom about Obama being a man who delivers pretty speeches, all form and no substance, for the first time in a long time we have a president who -- for better and, undoubtedly, for worse -- is something more than merely a symbol: He embodies the limited reach of the political left. Or, rather: Obama is the closest thing we have and can have to left-minded president.

And the ugly thing that nobody wants to face up to is that "the left" by this definition -- that is, the left, insofar as the left subsists in the realm of the possible -- is not very damn far left. It is to this phenomenon that I am referring with the titular "moment of truth."

It is this structural limitation that we see embodied in Obama. For a president is more than merely a man: he is a nexus of powerful political and financial interests. Just look at how people become president, what processes make it possible.

Presidents must, of necessity, be products of the status quo. Whether or not they are able (like the aforementioned Teddy Roosevelt and a few others), over the course of their tenure in the Oval Office, to become an active force in transcending or transforming the very status quo that produced them is a function of innumerable factors that lie outside of the control of a single man, and even outside of the control -- contrary to the view favored by conspiracy theorists -- of any single group of interested parties.

In any event, it is the left of -- appallingly -- Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, of Arne Duncan and the Clintons and Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. I mean, that's what passes for the left.

But people who get mad at Obama for this fact -- as we all do -- are wasting their energy, and they are pointing their finger at the wrong person. Obama is exactly what he said he was and exactly what we knew he would be. Even if we didn't know we knew it.

Sometimes it's not an easy thing to digest. Obama's not a hypocrite. To the extent that anyone has expected Obama's political program to be genuinely progressive, she has been kidding herself.

And so, anyway, that brings us back to Wednesday's health care speech. Here's what I thought: Substantively, it contained the inevitable disappointments and a few very positive developments. On the disappointment side, it seemed pretty eager to chuck the so-called "public option," but that was all but sure to happen. And anyway, I'm not all that convinced it makes much of a difference, considering that the government already owns all sorts of stuff that it doesn't own "on paper," like the big banks and the auto industry. So, when it comes down to it, what difference does it make what it's "called"? Now, being the tenacious opponent of neoliberalism that I am, I reserve the right to change my mind on that one, if, let's say, all health care is going to end up being "left to the market to...urm...solve." But even were that the case it wouldn't be anything new: It describes precisely the horrible non- system that we have now. Other substantive disappointments include Obama's continued pandering to senior citizens -- although somewhat less shamelessly than on previous occasions -- and that inevitable fact that Obama had to make a point of declaring a policy of 'fiscal prudence', especially as regards the federal deficit, which was politically a necessary move, but is also as far as I'm concerned completely bogus (like all claims within the bogus field of economics).

Substantively speaking, the best -- or most encouraging -- thing about the speech in my opinion had to do with the fact that it went some way toward framing health insurance reform in moral terms, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the Alpha and Omega of the health care issue. But, hey, that's me.

More important was that the speech was, operationally speaking, a bit of a masterstroke, as far as I'm concerned. As I've mentioned in the past, I'm fairly certain that the whole right-wing circus show of last month -- a.k.a., neo-Nazis at town hall meetings -- was something that the Obama administration and the Dems generally not only welcomed but allowed to crest (and then some!).

In the grand scheme of things, this 'August strategy' has served Obama and the Dems well in that it has:

1. linked perceptions of any putative 'Republican position' on health care to the handiwork of the Southern Racist Right,
   
   
2. galvanized the Democratic base through its visceral, disgusted reaction to the aforementioned SRR, and
   
   
3. fostered the commonsense presumption among 'mainstream Americans' (read: the upper-middle class suburban people who voted Obama into office in the first place and on whose support his health care agenda turns) that opposition to any moderate-yet-ambitious (read: Obamian) reform measure is identified primarily with people who are 'outside the mainstream' (read: poor, uneducated white trash, with whom upper-middle class suburbanites do not wish to be identified [and who pay their high property taxes for this very reason!]).

Therefore, the reason I think Obama's speech was an operational masterstroke has a great deal to do with its timing. The right-wing cant had escalated marvelously. A healthcare reform opponent performed a Heil Hitler salute in response to an Israeli man's impassioned advocacy of reform. Banners displaying images of Barack Obama with a Hitler mustache superimposed upon his upper-lip. The (hilarious) Barney Frank thing. Anti-reform protesters wielding loaded firearms in the vicinity of the President of the United States.

It had all lingered just long enough at its vomit-inducing stage, and Obama, who has been holding back and eluding the spotlight -- "But, Mr. President: your poll numbers!" -- and at the perfect moment, does a commendable job of delivering what might stand as among the skilled rhetorician's most-impressive-yet feats of oratory:

That large-heartedness -- that concern and regard for the plight of others -- is not a partisan feeling. It's not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character -- our ability to stand in other people's shoes; a recognition that we are all in this together, and when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand; a belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.

This has always been the history of our progress. In 1935, when over half of our seniors could not support themselves and millions had seen their savings wiped away, there were those who argued that Social Security would lead to socialism, but the men and women of Congress stood fast, and we are all the better for it. In 1965, when some argued that Medicare represented a government takeover of health care, members of Congress -- Democrats and Republicans -- did not back down. They joined together so that all of us could enter our golden years with some basic peace of mind.

You see, our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem. They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter -- that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

That was true then. It remains true today. I understand how difficult this health care debate has been. I know that many in this country are deeply skeptical that government is looking out for them. I understand that the politically safe move would be to kick the can further down the road -- to defer reform one more year, or one more election, or one more term.

But that is not what the moment calls for. That's not what we came here to do. We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it. I still believe we can act even when it's hard. (Applause.) I still believe -- I still believe that we can act when it's hard. I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility, and gridlock with progress. I still believe we can do great things, and that here and now we will meet history's test.

Because that's who we are. That is our calling. That is our character. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

I'm just as cynical as the next man, but I must say, this is some quality stuff.

If nothing else, it makes the Fox News thugs look one-foot-tall.*


________________
* In addition, that is, to sounding -- and being -- dumb.

Analysis of Obama's health care address.

I've been laboring over a couple of posts that will probably never see the light of day because they're too meandering and/or abstruse (even by my usual standards). So that's why I haven't posted anything in a few days. Anyway. So,

Sean Quinn of FiveThirtyEight.com has written a cogent analysis of President Obama's Wednesday night address before a joint session of Congress on the subject of new health care legislation:

My initial reaction to reading and then watching President Obama’s speech last night was that it was a very strong speech, one even more effectively delivered than written. There were two notable “show, don’t tell” moments that I thought were particularly helpful on the President’s behalf.

First was the high-profile, notorious Joe Wilson moment, a serious breach of decorum (in the U.S.) that served to underscore the exact point Obama had been making: we’d like to have a substantive contribution from Republicans, not the lying – his word – histrionic nihilism we’ve been seeing. Cue Joe Wilson with lying histrionics. Well done, Joe. It pissed people off, made a money-bomb for his opponent Ron Miller, and was similar to the way Dems (although certainly not Republicans) reacted to Sarah Palin’s acid floor speech at the convention on Sept 2, 2008. We saw the few Republicans who were in field offices last year motivated by Palin’s presence on the ticket but not McCain’s; we also saw many more people showing up to Obama offices in part galvanized by opposition to her sneering speech (and overall Palinosity).

The second “show, don’t tell” moment was the one on the issue of tort reform that Republicans hold dear. When Obama mentioned this subject and suggested a practical approach that accounted for across-the-aisle concerns, Republicans cheered. Obama continued, engaged by their cheering, and within his body language and tone of voice it struck me that he seemed to have shifted into live negotiation rather than a one-way speech. Optically, it was a show of good faith that seemed to give truth to his offer of open-doorism. It was a visceral, good guy, higher ground moment.

Read the rest of Quinn's piece here.

And here's a decent reflection in Salon.com.

A heroic moment in conversation with the Deranged Right on health care.

Anecdote time.

Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, a longtime friend of Crib From This, recently found himself at one of his local watering holes, engaged in a political conversation with his

good friend who also happens to be rightist ideologue, who claimed that there was a provision in the Congressional/Obama Health Care reform proposal that allows for abortions of people up to fifteen years old. Whew!

Whew, indeed! But that's the kind of dissembling that is so incomprehensible that even the person who believes he believes it can't actually, at the end of the day, believe it.

I mean... Cause, how would that work, exactly? Kind of difficult to picture... That's what happens, Republicans, when you simply memorize talking points without actually thinking through what (or, for that matter, whether) they mean!!

But wait: It gets better! I give you, the Crib From This community, courtesy of Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, the Deranged Dixiecrat Right in its full glory:

Also, we were at a bar and a random drunk dude came to our table and my friend and he struck up a conversation and he happened to also be a rightist ideologue who predicted (with my friend) that Obama was leading the United States into the worst depression in history AND that we would have another Civil War within the next two years. Whew!

Yes, you read correctly. This man thinks that there's going to be another CIVIL WAR within the NEXT TWO YEARS! To which our correspondent, Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, responded, in the heroic moment to which our title refers:

When the guy brought up the Civil War thing, I said: "Yeah, if it happens, it will because of people like YOU."

YYYYEEEEESSSSS!!! And Gypsy Sun knocks one clean out of the park!!!

I think that I am not the only one for whom the Rightist rhetoric is increasingly alarming/disconcerting: Where does this venom and hatred come from? Why are so many people making themselves impossible to talk to? What's behind all this? Just incoherent hatred of taxes?

(Incoherent because Medicare, Medicaid & Social Security combined are currently by far the biggest national expense, and we are borrowing trillions of dollars from China to pay for it, instead of just taxing the Viagra-addled dicks off of those crusty old bastards!!! ["Greatest Generation," MY ASS!!!!?])

Just racism? Just propaganda about "socialism" and whatever? What the hell is behind this out-of-control turn that Rightist rhetoric has taken?

A few Right-wing apologists say: "These health care protests are no worse than the Left-wing protests during the lead up to the Iraq War!"

But that's a bit of a stretch, don't you think?

Why is it a stretch? Because nobody took those war protesters seriously. Tell me I'm crazy, but that seems fairly obvious to me.... Was there any moment during the run-up to Iraq upon which you recall thinking: "Maybe we're not really going to go to war??!!!"

No. The Iraq War was a done deal, long before it was even mentioned to the American People, and we all knew that at the time. The Right-wing anti-health care astroturf campaign, by contrast, threatens to derail the entire debate.

But, I repeat: What the hell is behind the disturbing militarization of Rightist rhetoric?

Gypsy Sun and Rainbows weighs in:

Yeah, kind of brings us back to our Sarah Palin debate. Since this health care stuff began, I think I am beginning to understand your concern [about the Right's increasingly ominous and irresponsible rhetoric]. Death Panels? It's been debunked, but people still believe it. Same with Obama's birth certificate thing.

Right. What I personally find alarming is the sheer number of people who seem to be obsessed fanatically with these kinds of bizarre things.

Now, admittedly, I've never exactly met these people, but from what you and some others have said, it seems like a lot of the people saying this type of thing are people of whom you'd expect different -- more sober and less hysterical -- behavior.

Fortunately, unlike the health care nut jobs, I gather that the "birthers," as people seem to be calling them, are not exactly ever going to have the numbers to make anybody have to care about their bullshit, which I think makes it unquestionably a GOOD thing for the Democrats and for Obama: Even though all of the rhetoric and posturing is extremely unsettling, it definitely helps keep the Republican't Party* submerged in its present untrustworthy/uneducated/fanatic/non-mainstream cesspool.

By the way, although by no means do I wish to legitimize these so-called 'birthers', I would like to point out that there is so much evidence out there at present of Obama's having been born in Hawaii that it is almost unbelievable that anyone -- even mentally unbalanced people -- could actually continue to harbor doubts about this.

Specifically, in addition to all of the other evidence, there are numerous clippings from different Hawaii newspapers announcing Obama's birth!

Click here to see one of them. Ha ha ha!! Are there people who actually see stuff like this and STILL BELIEVE that he wasn't born in Hawaii??



___________________
* I just thought this up as I typed it. I'm sure I can't be the first. It's just too obvious.

Obama is right not to intervene in Iran protests.Why the GOP's demand for 'stronger' response is self-centered & opportunistic.

It is increasingly clear that Obama has been correct all along in refusing to weigh in 'more forcefully' on the Iranian protests in the wake of the rigged reëlection of Ahmadinejad. I find convincing the point of view that Obama has, in effect and by design, already weighed in, in the most consequential way possible, on the issues at play in the present Iranian situation. That is, with his Cairo speech, he emboldened in an unprecedented way the resolve of forces of resistance in Iran.

Obama's speech was successful specifically because he eschewed the self-centered, Cold War-style rhetoric favored by the administration of George W. Bush. The GOP's predilection for musty and mechanistic cant evinces a Cold War-era conception of what it means to be pro-democratic in one's interactions with the international world in that it perceives the line between a free Occident and a repressed Orient to divide exclusively competing military and economic alliances. In other words, it pays no attention to what freedom and democracy actually mean.

By contrast, Obama, in his Cairo speech, spoke to Iranians -- and to inhabitants of the Middle East broadly -- with respect for their capacity for self-governance. It should be no surprise that, upon a population as highly educated as that of substantial portions of Iran, Obama's direct, serious-minded and non-patronizing address should have exercised a galvanizing effect.



An individual going by the name math4barack formulates the connection between Obama's Cairo speech and the events in Iran (from the Daily Kos):

The Iranian Revolution. First and foremost, it must be emphasized that this is an internal revolution. It comes from the people, the people that live there. They deserve all the credit. They are the ones who are putting their lives on the line and they are the ones who are providing the images and video. Nevertheless, without President Obama (ie under President Bush or President McCain), this revolution would not have been successful. For, both President Bush and a President McCain would have made the protesters look like Western, American pupptets [sic] by speaking intemperately.

Back on June 15, a blogger called Kalash offered an analysis that appears to support this favorable reading of Obama's approach (by way of an item in Media Nation):

The election results remind us that the will of the people is not the deciding force in Iranian politics. All candidates were screened by the Supreme Council. The leading challenger was Mir Hossein Mousavi. He is now seen as a "reformist" but that is a relatively meaningless term. Afterall [sic], he was once considered a radical.

[...]

Mousavi withdrew from political life in 1989. His resurgence has been interesting to watch as supporetrs [sic] have flocked to him in defiance of the current government. But there was no reason to expect much to change in Iran if he had emerged victorious. He is no Barack Obama. He is one of the boys, otherwise he wouldn't have been allowed to run.

Whether or not Mousavi had the election stolen from him, it seems clear the ruling class has made a calculating move. Anti-American sentiment is one of the strongest cards those wretched clerics hold. By merely softening the tone Tehran hears from Washington, Obama has weakened their hand considerably. But re-instating Ahmadinejad ensures that US-Iranian relations will continue down a rocky road. What happens next is crucial. If Obama takes a firm position as a result of what's happening, the mullahs may emerge victorious.

That would be a real shame. The system of governance in Iran is terrible. There is no democracy to speak of. The people are ruled by despotic men of 'faith' who do nothing to advance their country's interests. Aside from keeping Iran in the headlines, Ahmadinejad has done nothing to improve his country's standing in the international community. It should come as no surprise that so many Iranians are opposed to him.

[...]

Hopefully what is happening right now is a homegrown phenomenon. Iran needs another revolution if it is to rid itself of the backwards theology pulling the strings. Mousavi is hardly the right person to lead such a movement, but what's important is that the people rise up. The process won't be easy. We may be witnessing the beginning of something huge… It won't happen overnight, but the "Islamic Republic"' is bound to fall one day or another.

The people of Iran deserve better than Ahmadinejad and the clerics who give him his orders. The current regime is a complete disaster, but the media tends [sic] to focus more on the less important issues. In other words, this is not about Israel. Iran's position on Zionism and the question of Palestine is a just one. The problem is the lack of civil freedoms and democracy, not nuclear weapons.

John McCain, whose latest stunt aimed at getting people to pay attention to him consisted last week of joining the GOP chorus clamoring for Obama to use "stronger rhetoric" against Iran has since expressed appreciation for Obama's more recent comments that stressed the United States' opposition to any infringement upon rights of protest and of fair political representation, as well as restating the exceedingly good point that to turn the United States into a foil for Iran would undermine and disrespect the very cause for which the protesters are fighting.

A close look at McCain's aforementioned comments -- made on the CBS program Face The Nation -- gives weight to the view that the Republican call for "stronger rhetoric" is both politically opportunistic and evidence of a worldview that is obsessed not with actual events in the world -- not with, for instance, the success of the Iranian protesters' plea for substantive democratic rights:

"America's position in the world is one of moral leadership," the senator said. "It's not about what takes place in the streets of Iran. It is about what takes place in America's conscience."

Not about what takes place in the streets of Iran, but about America. Go figure. Thanks for clarifying, Angry Johnny. That speaks volumes.

The declining political currency of outrage,Part II: Is the media literacy of younger generations obviating the culture wars?

This post proceeds from the spot at which Part I left off. Contrasting his persona and rhetoric with that of President-elect Obama, I characterized Former President Bill Clinton as follows:

Clinton demonized his enemies and inflated the scurrilousness of their charges and tactics, in effect shoring up support from 'his side', but simultaneously enraging and radicalizing his opposition. ... People sided with Clinton because he was needy of our attention and our love; he needed us to prop him up against the mean bullies who were out to get him.

Clinton's presidency coincided with eight years of particularly cacophonous culture-war waging: the far-Right devoted itself to fighting and re-fighting ad nauseum the same perceived 'social'-political battles that were seen to have sprouted during the oh-so-turbulent late 1960's and early 1970's. The battle lines were drawn not around the big issues of the period -- Vietnam, the Draft, the incendiary fretwork of Jerry Garcia -- but around some fairly slight stuff like whether or not the sexual mores portrayed in prime time television programming reflect those of everyday Joes in the Heartland. (A textbook opportunity for Heartland outrage, considering that any such television show enjoys high ratings specifically because millions of viewers in the Heartland tune in week after week, whether they're honest about it or not.) This has been the dominant cultural divide of the past thirty years; not coincidentally, it centers almost exclusively on the opinions, values and resentments of Baby Boomers, in relation to those of other Baby Boomers. The rest of us were mere spectators.

The duration of Clinton's two terms was a period during which the far-Right sated its appetite for pandering to, fueling and masterminding the direction of a host of 'anti-elite' resentments. This masterminding of direction was accomplished not only in the service of galvanizing political support, but in making loads of money. Rush Limbaugh's barely occluded racism, anti-semitism and general bigotry were pilfered from Father Coughlin's bag o' tricks. But what's most shocking of all is the amount of money the fat douche has been able to make by yelling into a microphone at millions of other fat douches.*

William Jefferson Clinton was the perfect focal point for this good-old-boy outrage, in no small part because he already in fact was an outrageous figure, every bit as invested in dusting off and utilizing the codes, metaphors and assumptions of the 1960's culture wars as was Limbaugh. Clinton practiced the politics of division every bit as shrewdly as Karl Rove would do subsequently, especially when he managed to assemble the coalition that handed George W. Bush the second term that he unquestionably didn't deserve. Clinton knew how to rally his coalition to his side; he knew how to draw people in. His travails became ours.

Enter many of the tropes, habits and labels of contemporary campaigning in our heavily (basically: psychotically) mediated lives. Entertainment and news are difficult for the common man (of which there is one somewhere inside all of us, lest you think I'm being elitist [although, I guess I sort of am, but indulge me]) to distinguish from one another.

In Part I, we talked about a form of political theater that uses outrage as its jet fuel: taking umbrage. What a useful tool! We describe the media circus between the Clinton Administration and the Right in terms of lobbing accusations and insults back and forth. But the culture wars wouldn't have gotten under our skin were it simply about slamming the other guy. In contradistinction to the NBA, playing offense is itself not a good enough spectacle. I mean, attacks are exciting, but as they escalate, they become increasingly unmemorable. They blend together. After all, as outrageous as they might be, they're still just words. And if you're going to have a war of words, you may as well have it over policy issues, because words are going to bore people anyway. And debating policy issues is no good for national politics; it turns too many people off.

So it's not about offense but defense. The culture wars of the 1990's got under our skin because we identified with the participants. We took sides. We were divided up into two teams. We lived vicariously through personalities. Bill Clinton was a stand-in for you. He was on your side, advocating for you; honoring your memory and experience, and your belief in the unwavering moral imperatives that your experience taught you to hold dear. On the Right, there were a succession of demagogic good-old-boys to identify with, including politicians like Newt Gingrich and proliferating numbers of ideological profiteers who took a cue from Rush, and began yelling their outrage into microphones for some fast cash.

We observed in Part I that President-elect Barack Obama has a tremendous knack for staring-down and -- in effect -- minimizing ludicrous character attacks. This has the further effect of making the person who utters the attacks look like he is about two feet tall. It's an exhilarating part of Obama's appeal -- and one for which the Zeitgeist could not be more receptive -- that he is an adult. I would add that it is by striking this chord of responsible, intelligent (even cerebral), savvy and -- let's face it -- exceedingly cool adult-ness that Obama stands to unite the country. United in the very real sense that a majority of the country (by a mind-bendingly substantial margin) wants a leader with these very qualities.

I know what you're thinking. What's all this hippie bullshit about 'uniting the country'? You don't actually believe that stuff, do you? The answer is that I do believe it, but maybe not in the way that triggered your incredulity mechanism. What I mean is that when Obama speaks in a language that addresses rhetorically the entire nation, he is in effect -- and to precisely the extent to which his rhetoric is successful at performing this feat of unification -- uniting the country.

By contrast, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush -- both of them Baby Boomers -- were culture warriors, each of whom therefore (by definition) thrived on a rhetorical model that to a lesser or greater extent, pitted one population against another. It's possible that there'd have been no other way in which a Baby Boomer could govern (or, perhaps: no other way in which a Baby Boomer Democrat could govern and/or win an election). It's even more certain that both men are products of their time: that there's something about their personalities, certain (and contrasting) forms of Doublespeak, certain (and contrasting) forms of smugness that are in part generational timestamps. I guess the word would be immaturity.

Both Clinton and Bush are juvenile figures in exactly the sense that Obama is an adult figure. As we've discussed, as a candidate, Obama stared down the sophomoric slime-balling, whisper campaigns, race-baiting and neo-McCarthyist tactics of the McCain/Palin campaign, making their attacks them look like puny spit-balls, thrown by tiny, desperate and mediocre men. Which is exactly what they were. Both Bush and especially Clinton had talent for doing precisely the opposite: taking small problems and made them big. Each constituency identified with 'his struggle' because each constituency identified with its guy and what he 'stood for'.

Each president's constituency was united more or less by the common experience of having lived through the late 60's/early 70's cultural-political climate; a climate that was mediated in an unprecedented way and to an unprecedented extent. And that period of skyrocketing media- and advertising-saturation was distinguished by -- as much as anything else -- the magnification/amplification of small, inconsequential, abstruse and even fictitious phenomena. And, to an unprecedented extent, instantaneously! This was the period of Bush's and Clinton's halcyon youth. These phenomena are what the culture wars are all about: fashion, lifestyle, taste.

By the way, I'm not saying that this historical fact is good or bad; I'm just drawing our attention to it. I mean, an inarguable example of this explosion of commercial media is also something that is unarguably good: The Beatles, for instance. Its sudden popularity and huge influence hinged entirely on some hype and one appearance on one television show.

Media have changed. We docile consumers have too. Can you even imagine a 2008-equivalent to a phenomenon like The Beatles? Although, I suppose it was equally unimaginable in the early 1960's.

Obama grew up at a time during which people had already become acclimated to television and radio. He is a member of the post-Baby Boomer generations, in which all of us are, to a lesser or greater degree, habitually savvy media critics. Watch video footage some time of Tricky Dick Nixon. It's not -- I don't think -- merely the benefit of hindsight that makes him such an obvious phony. It's that we know instinctively how to read media; we're equipped with conceptual tools and interpretive devices that simply could not have been available to the vast majority of Boomers. Is it any surprise that so many people from that generation and older fell for George W. Bush's ludicrous I'm-from-Texas routine? Or that slime ball neocons were able to manufacture a groundswell of support for the Iraq War out of a combination of half-truths, Doublespeak, fear tactics and 'patriotism' talk?

Among all of the voters who participated in the presidential election of 2008, the only so-called demographic of which a majority supported John McCain was white people over the age of 65. The generations that fall under that heading are going to hold on tight and continue voting for the duration of old age. They're likely to become really really old, too. They have most of the money, they have huge numbers, and they represent myriad special interests to which elected leaders will continue to be beholden. Try as they might, they probably don't have the best interest of younger generations in mind.

The way to curtail their power is to continue making progress on what was started with the Obama's electoral and popular majority. How much do you want to bet that the divide will over time cease to be cultural and will become generational. That means that if we're smart, we can continue electing candidates cut from the same cloth as Obama. Candidates that resist and even condemn demagogy, that speak plainly, practically and in a manner that respects the electorate.

If the Republicans continue confining themselves to the backward, resentful, provincial niche they have carved out for themselves, the Democrats have a real opportunity for continued dominance. Now that we've seen that it can work, the new Democratic coalition can only become stronger. If the Republicans wise up and drop their weirdo social conservatism/pro-racism platform, it might save their party, but it would do so in a way that -- we can hope -- has a chance of pulling the country back from the dangerous precipice upon which it currently finds itself perched.

If voters continue to send a message that they won't fall for totalitarian, neo-McCarthyist, fear-mongering shenanigans, then politicians will respond by getting in line. We need to keep demanding that the Constitution be respected and not distorted, that the Bill of Rights is not negotiable in times of 'war', that we won't stand for declarations of war against vaguely defined enemies, with no discernible objectives. In other words, if younger generations hold firm to their media literacy, the message it sends to politicians is clear: don't fuck with us, Old Man. Don't fuck with our rights.

(Heh heh heh.... I think I just had to get that out of my system. Which is, after all, the point of having a blog.....Don't mind me....)


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* For the benefit of readers uninitiated to urban slang: the term "douche" is here used as an abbreviation for "douche-bag."